“Then make it thin,” Commissar Jiang said.
Holding the bowl up to her mouth, First Sister took a sip. “You did add sugar,” she said. “Commissar Jiang, why don’t you have a bowl. Your throat must be dry after all that talk.”
Commissar Jiang reached up and pinched his throat. “Indeed it is. Fill up a bowl for me, Old Zhang. Thin.”
With the bowl in his hands, Commissar Jiang discussed the qualities of mung beans with First Sister. He told her that in his hometown there was a sandy variety that softened as soon as the water boiled, whereas the local beans didn’t even begin to soften for a couple of hours. Once they’d exhausted the subject of mung beans, they moved on to soybeans. You’d have thought they were bean experts; after they’d discussed nearly all varieties of beans, and Commissar Jiang had started in on peanuts, First Sister threw her bowl to the floor and spat out savagely, “What sort of trap are you setting, Jiang?”
“Mrs. Sha,” he said, “don’t overreact. Let’s go, what do you say? We’ve kept Commander Sha waiting long enough.”
“Where is he?” First Sister asked derisively.
“A place you remember only too well, of course,” Jiang replied.
There were more sentries at our gate than at the church.
One group was stationed at the door to the east wing, under the command of the mute, Speechless Sun. He was sitting on a log beside the wall, playing with his sword. The Bird Fairy was perched in the crotch of the peach tree, holding a cucumber and nibbling it with her front teeth.
“Go on in,” Commissar Jiang said to First Sister. “Try to talk some sense into him. We’re hoping he’ll abandon the dark and walk into the light.”
The moment First Sister entered the east wing, she let out a shriek.
We ran in after her. Sha Yueliang was hanging from the rafters. He was wearing a green wool uniform and a pair of shiny, knee-length leather boots. I remembered him as being of average height; but hanging there, he struck me as being exceptionally tall.
9
I climbed down off the kang and threw myself into Mother’s lap before my eyes were even fully opened. Savagely, I pulled up her blouse, grabbed the mound of her breast with both hands, and took her nipple between my lips. Something spicy filled my mouth, and tears filled my eyes. I spat out the nipple and looked up, puzzled and a bit put out. Mother patted me on the head and smiled apologetically. “Jintong,” she said, “you’re seven years old, almost a grown man. It’s time to stop the breast-feeding.” Before the echo of her words had died out, I heard a peal of crisp, bell-like laughter from Eighth Sister, Shangguan Yunii.
A curtain of darkness lowered before my eyes. I looked heavenward just before I fell to the floor. Suddenly forlorn, I noticed that Mother’s breasts, their nipples covered with a peppery coating, looked like a pair of red-eyed doves arching into the sky. In order to wean me, Mother had tried smearing her nipples with the juice of raw ginger, liquified garlic, smelly fish oil, even a bit of rancid chicken droppings. This time she’d used pepper oil. Each time she’d tried to wean me in the past, she’d relented when I fell to the floor as if struck dead. This time I lay on the floor, waiting for her to go in and wash her nipples, as she always had in the past. Scenes from the scary dream I’d had during the night unfolded before my eyes: Mother had sliced off one of her breasts and tossed it to the floor. “Go ahead, suck it!” she’d said. “Suck it!” A black cat had run up, snatched it in its mouth, and run off with it.
Mother picked me up off the floor and sat me down hard next to the dining table. She wore a grave expression. “Say what you like, but this time I’m going to wean you!” she said firmly. “Do you plan to suck until you reduce me to a piece of dry kindling, is that it, Jintong?”
The young Sima, Sha Zaohua, and my eighth sister, Yunii, were sitting around the table eating noodles. They turned toward me with looks of scorn. Shangguan Lü was sitting on a pile of cinders beside the stove, sneering at me. Her windblown skin was like coarse, flaky toilet paper. Young Sima lifted a long, squirmy noodle out of the bowl with his chopsticks and held it up in the air, trying to dazzle me. Then, like a worm, the noodle squirmed into his mouth – disgusting!
Mother put a bowl of steaming noodles down on the table and handed me a pair of chopsticks. “Here, eat,” she said. “Try some noodles your sixth sister made.”
Sixth Sister, who was feeding Shangguan Lü beside the stove, turned and gave me a hostile look. “Still breast-feeding,” she said, “at your age. You’re hopeless!”
I flung the bowl of noodles at her.
She jumped up, covered with squirmy noodles. “Mother,” she growled, “see how you’ve spoiled him!” Mother smacked the back of my head.
I ran over and threw myself against Sixth Sister, clawing at her breasts. I could hear them cry out in protest, like baby chicks being bitten by rats. She doubled over in pain, but I held on for dear life. Her long, thin face turned yellow. “Mother,” she cried out, “look at him, Mother!”
Mother attacked my head. “You swine!” she cursed. “You dirty little swine!”
I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I had a splitting headache. Young Sima was still playing with his noodles, unconcerned about what was going on around him. Sha Zaohua looked up from behind her bowl, noodles stuck to her face, and gazed timidly at me. But I couldn’t help feeling that there was respect in her eyes. Sixth Sister, her breasts hurting, sat in the doorway weeping. Shangguan Lü was staring malignantly at me. My mother, seemingly ready to burst from anger, was studying the mess of noodles on the floor. “You little bastard! You think these noodles come easy?” She scooped up a handful of the noodles – no, what she scooped up was a nest of squirmy worms – then pinched my nose shut, forcing me to open my mouth, and crammed the worms inside. “Eat those, every last one of them! You’ve sucked the marrow out of my bones, you little monster!” I threw it all up, broke free from her grasp, and ran out into the yard.
Shangguan Laidi was out there, still wearing the ill-fitting black coat she hadn’t taken off in four years, bent at the waist as she honed the edge of a knife on a whetting stone. She flashed me a friendly smile. But then her expression changed. “This time I’ll kill him for sure,” she said, grinding her teeth. “His time has come. I’ve got this knife sharper than the north wind, and cooler, and I’m going to make sure he understands that murderers pay with their lives.”
I was in no mood to pay her any attention, since everyone assumed she’d gone off her rocker. But I knew she was just faking madness, I just didn’t know why. That time in the west wing, where she was staying, she sat high up on top of the millstone, her legs, covered by the black robe, hanging straight down. She told me what it was like being part of Sha Yueliang’s marauding band, how she’d lived like royalty, and all the strange and wonderful things she’d seen. She’d owned a box that could sing and a glass that could bring distant objects right up under her nose. At the time I thought that was all crazy talk, but it wasn’t long before I saw one of those boxes that could sing. Shangguan Pandi had brought one home with her. During her stay with the demolition battalion, she’d lived a life of ease and comfort, and had gotten fat in the process, like a pregnant mare. She carefully placed the object, with its brass morning glory, on the kang and said proudly: “Come over here, all of you. This will open your eyes!” She removed the red cloth covering and revealed the box’s secret. First she cranked a handle round and round, and then she said, with a mysterious smile, “Listen, this is what a foreigner sounds like when he laughs.” The sound that came out of the box at that moment nearly frightened us out of our wits. The foreigner’s laughter sounded like the crying of ghosts in tales we’d heard. “Get that thing out of here!” Mother demanded. “Right this minute! I don’t want any box of ghosts in this house!” “Mother,” Shangguan Pandi said, “that brain of yours is too old-fashioned. This is a gramophone, not a box of ghosts.” From out in the yard, Laidi said, “The needle’s worn out. It needs a new one.”