“Mother, talk all you want, but it won’t do any good,” Jintong said. “I saw her again. She had stuck a plaster over the bullet hole in her temple and was holding a piece of paper with her and my names on it. She said she’d gotten our marriage certificate and was waiting for me to marry her.”
“Dear daughter,” Mother said through her tears to the empty space before her. “Dear daughter, you did not deserve to die, I know that, and you’re like my very own daughter. Jintong spent fifteen years in prison over you, and his debt has been paid in full. So I beg you to show some mercy and forgive him. That way this lonely old woman will have someone to look after her. You’re a sensible girl. As the saying goes, life and death are different roads, and you must take one or the other. Forgive him, dear daughter. This blind old woman begs you on her knees…”
As his mother prayed, Jintong saw Long Qingping’s naked body in the sunlit window, her ironlike breasts covered with rust. She opened her legs wantonly, and out came a clump of round, white mushrooms. But when he looked closer, he saw that it was a cluster of rounded infant heads, not mushrooms, and that they were all joined together. Each tiny head had a complete face and was covered with downy yellow hair: tall noses, blue eyes, paper-thin earlobes, like the skin of beans soaked in water. All the infants were crying out to him, the sound soft and weak, but clear as a bell. Daddy! Daddy! The sound struck terror in his heart, so he closed his eyes. The infants broke free and rushed toward him, landing on his face and body, where they tugged at his ears, stuck their fingers in his nose, and clawed at his eyes, all the while calling out Daddy. He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter, but that did not block out the sight of Long Qingping scraping her rusty breasts with sandpaper, the sound grating on his ears. She stared at him with a mixture of melancholy and rage, still scraping her breasts until they looked as if they’d been turned on a lathe, shiny and brand-new, emitting a cold glint that gathered around the nipples and, like freezing rays, bore straight into his heart. He shrieked, and passed out cold.
When he regained consciousness, he saw a candle burning on the windowsill and an oil lamp hanging on the wall. Gradually, the tortured face of Parrot Han materialized in the flickering light. “What happened, Little Uncle?” The voice seemed to come from far away, and he tried to answer, but couldn’t make his lips move. Wearily, he shut his eyes to block out the candlelight.
“Take my word for it,” he heard Parrot say. “He’s not going to die. Not long ago, I read a fortune-telling book. Little Uncle has the face of someone for whom wealth and good fortune await, someone who will live a long life.”
“Parrot,” Mother said, “I’ve never begged for anything in my life, but now I’m begging you.”
“Grandma, when you talk like that you might as well be cursing me.”
“You know lots of people, so I’m asking you to get a cart and take your uncle to the county hospital.”
“There’s no need for that, Grandma. Our town facilities enjoy big-city standards. Local doctors outshine those at the county hospital. Since Dr. Leng has already seen him, there’s no need to go anywhere else. He graduated at the top of his class at the Union Medical College and studied abroad. If he says there’s no cure, then there’s no cure.”
With a look of dejection, Mother said, “Parrot, we don’t need your fine words. You’d better go. If you’re late getting home, you’ll have to answer to that wife of yours.”
“Sooner or later I’m going to be free of those shackles. Here, Grandma, take this twenty yuan and buy something Little Uncle would like to eat.”
“Keep your money,” she said. “Now go. There’s nothing your Little Uncle wants to eat.”
“Maybe he doesn’t, but you need to eat. Raising me to manhood took a lot out of you, Grandma. We suffered under government oppression and were so poor we barely got by. After they took Little Uncle away, you put me on your back and went out begging, knocking on doors all over Northeast Gaomi. Thoughts of what you had to do cut into my heart like a dagger and I can’t help but weep. We were the lowest of the low. If not, I’d never have married that shrew. Don’t you agree, Grandma? But those hellish days are about to come to an end. I’ve requested a loan for my Eastern Bird Sanctuary, and the mayor has approved it. If this works out, I have my cousin, Lu Shengli, to thank. She’s manager of the Dalan Bank of Industry and Commerce. She’s young and talented, and what she says goes. Grandma, don’t worry, I’ll go talk to her. If she won’t help us with Little Uncle’s illness, who will? She’s another family member you raised to adulthood. Yes, I’ll go talk to her. She’s made quite a name for herself. She has a car and a driver, and she eats like a queen: two-legged pigeons, four-legged turtles, eight-legged crabs, curvy prawns, prickly sea cucumbers, poisonous scorpions, and nonpoisonous crocodile eggs. That cousin of mine can no longer be bothered by duck and chicken and pork and dog meat. I know it may sound bad, but the gold necklace around her neck is as thick as a dog leash. She wears platinum and diamond rings on her fingers and a jade bracelet on her wrist. Her eyeglasses have gold frames and natural crystal lenses, she wears Italian designer fashions and French perfume whose fragrance will stay with you the rest of your life
“Parrot, take your money and go!” Mother cut in. “And don’t go talk to her. The Shangguan family doesn’t rate a rich relative like that.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Grandma. I could take Little Uncle to the hospital in a cart, but getting anything done these days depends on contacts. The difference in treatment between a patient I bring in and one my cousin brings in is night and day.”
“That’s the way it’s always been,” Mother said. “Whether your uncle lives or dies is in the hands of fate. If luck is with him, he’s bound to live. If not, even if the magical doctors Hua Tuo and Bian Que came back to Earth, they couldn’t save him. Now go on, and don’t upset me.”
Parrot had more to say, but Mother angrily banged the tip of her cane on the floor and said, “Parrot, please do as I say. Take your money and go!”
Parrot left. Jintong, still in a sort of half-sleep, heard Mother outside the house wailing. A night wind rustled the dry grass on the pagoda. A bit later, he heard her busying herself at the stove, sending the odor of herbal medicine into his room. It seemed to him as if his brain had shrunk down to a mere sliver, and the medicinal odor squeezed its way into that sliver, as if through a sieve. Ah, that sweet taste is cogongrass, the bitter taste is soul-returning grass, the sour taste is clover, the salty taste is dandelion, the spicy taste is Siberian cockle-bur. Sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and spicy, all five tastes, plus purslane, pinellia tuber and Chinese lobelia, mulberry bark, peony skin, and dried peach. Apparently, Mother had gotten nearly every herbal medicine available in Northeast Gaomi and was cooking it all in a big pot. The combined odor, with its mixture of life and of soil, poured into his brain as if from a powerful faucet, washing away the filth and slowly opening up his mind. He thought about the lush green grass outside, the flower-covered open fields, and cranes that roamed the marshland. A cluster of golden wild chrysanthemums summoned pollen-laden bees to them. He heard the heavy breathing of the land and the sound of seeds dropping to the ground.
Mother came in and bathed him with cotton soaked in the herbal mixture. She could see he was embarrassed. “Son,” she said, “you could live to be a hundred, but in my eyes you’ll always be a little boy.” She cleaned him from head to toe, even the dirty spaces between his toes. Evening winds entered the room as the smell of the herbal concoction grew heavier. He’d never felt more refreshed or cleaner than at that moment. He heard Mother sobbing and muttering out behind the house, alongside a wall of empty liquor bottles. He began to sleep and, for the first time, was not startled awake by a nightmare. He slept till dawn. When he opened his eyes in the morning, his nose filled with the smell of fresh milk. But it was different from the mother’s milk and goat’s milk he’d lived on before, and he tried to determine the source: the feeling he’d experienced years earlier, when, as the Snow Prince, he’d blessed all those women by caressing their breasts, flooded into his mind. The greatest sense of longing came from the last breast he’d caressed that day, the one belonging to the proprietor of the sesame oil shop, Old Jin, the woman with only one breast.