Jintong was given the job of walking the oxen at night to keep them from lying down and reopening the wounds. It was murky at dusk, and at the farm’s eastern irrigation ditch, he led the animals into a stand of willows, where he tied them to trees. Five nights in a row he had walked them, until his legs felt weighted down with lead. As he sat leaning against one of the trees, his eyelids grew heavy, and he was about to fall asleep when the soul-stirring, sweet and fresh aroma of freshly baked and still warm buns assailed his nose. His eyes snapped open. What he saw was the cook, Pockface Zhang, walking backward with a steamed bun on a skewer, waving it in the air like bait. And that’s exactly what it was. Some three or four feet away, Qiao Qisha, the flowrer of the medical school, was following him, her eyes fixed greedily on the bun. Weak light from the setting sun haloed her puffy face, as if coating it with the blood of a dog. She walked with difficulty, gasping for breath and reaching out with her hand. More than once she nearly touched it, but Pockface Zhang pulled it back each time, grinning maliciously. She whimpered like an abused puppy. But whenever her frustration nearly forced her away, the fragrance of the bun brought her back, as if in a trance. Qiao Qisha, who, at a time when everyone was given six ounces of grain a day, could still refuse to inseminate a rabbit with sheep’s sperm, had lost her faith in politics and science, now that the ration had dwindled to one ounce a day; animal instinct drove her toward the steamed bun, and it didn’t matter who was holding it. She followed it deep into the stand of willows. That morning, Jintong had spent his rest period helping Chen San cut hay, for which he’d received three ounces of dry bean cakes. That had given him enough self-control to resist the temptation to join the bun parade. Evidence would later show that during the famine of 1960, Zhang traded food for sex with nearly every female rightist at the farm. Qiao Qisha was the last stronghold he breached. The youngest, most beautiful, and most obstinate woman among the rightists turned out to be no harder to conquer than any of the others. In the blood-red rays of the dying sun, Jintong watched the rape of his seventh sister.
What was a waterlogged catastrophe for the farm was a wonderful time for the willows. Red aerial roots sprouted on their black trunks, like the antennae of an ocean creature, which bled when they were broken off. The great canopies were like enraged madwomen, their hair flying. Tender, supple, watery leaves, normally a soft yellow, now pink in color, sprouted on all the limbs. Jintong had the feeling that both the branches and the leaves must be truly delectable, and while the episode ran its course in front of him, his mouth was stuffed with willow twigs and leaves.
Finally, Pockface Zhang tossed the bun to the ground. Qiao Qisha rushed up and grabbed it, stuffing it into her mouth before she even straightened up. Pockface Zhang moved behind her, lifted her skirt, pulled her filthy red panties down to her ankles, and skillfully lifted out one leg. After parting her legs, he took out his organ, unaffected by the famine of 1960, and stuck it in. Like a dog stealing food, she forced herself to tolerate the painful posterior attack as she gobbled down the food, continuing to swallow even when it was gone. The pain in her crotch was nothing compared to the pleasure the food brought. And so, while Pockface Zhang was madly pumping from behind, making her body rock, she never stopped attacking her food. Tears wet her eyes, a biological reaction from choking on the bun, totally devoid of emotion. Maybe, once she’d finished swallowing the food, she became aware of the pain in her backside, because when she straightened up, she turned to look behind her. The dry bun had gone down hard, stretching her throat, so she thrust out her neck like a duck. Pockface Zhang was still inside her, so he wrapped his arm around her waist and, with the other hand, took a flattened bun out of his pocket and tossed it on the ground in front of her. She stepped forward and bent down again, with him still attached, one hand on her hip, the other pushing down on her shoulder. This time, as she ate the bun, she allowed him unconditional freedom to proceed as he wished, with no interference.
Jintong chewed ferociously on the willow twigs and leaves, a delicacy that somehow had gone unnoticed. At first they were sweet, but when he ate them later, that sweetness was soon replaced by a puckery bitterness that made it impossible to swallow. There was a reason people didn’t eat them. He kept chewing as his eyes filled with tears. Through the haze of his tears he saw that the drama in front of him had played itself out and that Pockface Zhang had left the scene, leaving Qiao Qisha standing there looking around as if she didn’t know where she was. Then she too walked off, her head banging against low-hanging willow branches.
With his arms around one of the trees, Jintong rested his weary head against the bark.
The long spring season was nearly over; the millet was ripe, a sign that the days of hunger were coming to an end. In order to make sure the workers had the strength to bring in the millet harvest, the authorities sent a load of bean cakes to the farm, enough for everyone to get four ounces. But just as Huo Lina had died from eating mushrooms, Qiao Qisha’s system would not be able to handle all the extra food, and she too would die.
She stood in the line of people waiting for their ration, which was distributed by Pockface Zhang and one of the cooks. Holding a rice container, she was in line directly ahead of Jintong. He saw Pockface Zhang wink at her when he handed over her ration, but she was too captivated by the fragrance of the food to make much of it. Fights broke out over minor disparities in the distribution, and Jintong had the vague and painful feeling that Qisha would get more than she was entitled to. Orders had come down that four ounces were to last two days, but everyone took their ration home and consumed every last crumb immediately. That night there was a constant stream of people running over to the well for water. The food in their stomachs swelled, and Jintong enjoyed the all-but-forgotten pleasure of feeling full. He belched and farted constantly, the smell of bean cakes emerging from both ends. There was a line at the toilet the next morning; the bean cakes had wrought havoc on the systems of people who had gone hungry for too long.
No one knew just how much Qiao Qisha had eaten, no one but Pockface Zhang, who wasn’t talking. And Jintong had no desire to soil the reputation of his seventh sister. He’d noticed that her belly poked out like a water vat. Sooner or later, he was thinking, every one of them would die from starvation or overeating anyway, so why worry about it?
The cause of her death was clear, so no investigation was called for. And since the body would not keep long in the late-summer heat, the order came down to bury her at once. There was no coffin and, of course, no ceremony. A few of the female rightists planned to dress her in the nicest clothes she owned, but the sight of her grotesquely distended belly and the foul bubbly foam on her lips drove them back in disgust. So some of the male rightists scrounged up a tattered piece of canvas once used by the tractor unit, wrapped her up in it and fastened the ends with wire, then loaded her onto the back of a cart and carried her over to a grassy spot near the war relic scrapyard, where they dug a hole and buried her next to Huo Lina and in front of the skeleton of Long Qingping, all but the skull, which had been taken away by the medical examiner.