“Mrs. Sha,” Fifth Sister said sarcastically, “you needn’t show off around us. You’re a damned slut!” she added said hatefully. “They should have had you shot, and would have if not for me.”
“I could have killed him, and would have if you hadn’t stopped me!” First Sister said. “I want you all to look at her. Does she look like some young virgin to you? That Jiang fellow nibbled on those big breasts of hers until they looked like a pair of dried turnips.”
“Dogshit turncoat! Female turncoat!” Instinctively, Fifth Sister protected her sagging breasts with her arms, as she kept the curses coming: “Stinking wife of a dogshit turncoat!”
“Get out of here, both of you!” Mother said, spitting mad. “Go out and die somewhere, and don’t let me see you again!”
The episode instilled in me respect for Shangguan Laidi. She was relaxing in the donkey trough, which had been lined with straw, and said to me in a friendly voice, “You little idiot!” “I’m no idiot!” I defended myself. “But I think you are.” She abruptly lifted up her black coat, raised her legs high, and said in a muffled voice, “Look here!”
A ray of sunlight lit up her thighs, her belly, and her breasts, like a sow’s teats.
“Come here.” I saw a smile on her face at the far end of the trough. “Come here and suckle on me. Mother let my daughter suckle on her, so I’ll let you suckle on me, and that way no one owes anyone anything.”
I nervously walked up to the trough, where she was now arched like a leaping carp. She reached out and grabbed my shoulders and covered my head with the lower half of her black coat. My world turned dark. And in that darkness I began to grope, curious and tense, mysterious and enthralling. “Here, over here.” Her voice sounded far away. “Little idiot.” She stuffed one of her nipples into my mouth. “Start sucking, you little whelp. You’re not a true Shangguan. You’re a little hybrid bastard.” The bitter-tasting dirt on her nipple melted in my mouth. Her underarm sweat nearly smothered me. I felt I was suffocating, but she held my head in her hands and pushed her body up against mine, as if trying to cram every last bit of her large, hard breast into my mouth. When I reached the point where I could no longer stand it, I bit down on her nipple. Jumping to her feet, she sent me sliding down her body and out from under the coat, to lie huddled at her feet, waiting for the kick I knew was coming. Tears coursed down her dark, gaunt cheeks. Her breasts heaved beneath the black coat, and brought forth gorgeous feathers, until they looked like a pair of birds that had just mated.
Regretting what I’d done, I reached out to touch the back of her hand with my finger. She lifted her hand and rubbed it against my neck. “Good little brother,” she said softly, “don’t tell anybody what happened today.”
I nodded, and meant it.
“I’m going to share a secret with you,” she said. “My husband came to me in a dream and said he’s not dead. His soul has attached itself to the body of a blond, light-skinned man.”
My imagination ran wild over my secret encounter with Laidi as I walked down the lane, where a squad of five demolition soldiers had run out like madmen. A veil of ecstasy covered their faces. One of them, a fat man, shoved me. “Hey, little fellow, the Jap devils have surrendered! Run on home and tell your mother that Japan has surrendered. The War of Resistance is over!”
Out on the street I saw crowds of soldiers whooping and hollering and jumping around, a group of puzzled civilians among them. It was 1945; the Jap devils had surrendered, and I had been denied the breast. Laidi had given me hers, but she’d had no milk, and her nipple had been covered by a layer of cold, odorific grime; just thinking about that brought feelings of despair. My third brother-in-law, the mute, ran out from the northern entrance to the lane carrying the Bird Fairy. Mother had kicked him and the other soldiers in his unit out of our house after the death of Sha Yueliang. So he put them up in his own house, and the Bird Fairy had gone with him. But though they moved away, the Bird Fairy’s shameless cries often emerged late at night from the mute’s house and meandered all the way to our ears. Now he was carrying her toward us. She lay in his arms with her swollen belly, dressed in a white coat that looked to have been tailored from the same pattern as Laidi’s black coat; only the color was different. Seeing the Bird Fairy’s coat reminded me of Laidi’s coat, which in turn reminded me of Laidi’s breasts, and they reminded me of the Bird Fairy’s breasts. Among Shangguan women, the Bird Fairy’s breasts had to be considered top of the line. They were delicate, lovely, perky, with slightly upturned nipples as nimble as the mouth of a hedgehog. Does saying that the Bird Fairy’s breasts were top of the line mean that Laidi’s were not? I can only give a vague response. Since the moment I was conscious of what was going on around me, I’d discovered that the range of beauty in breasts is wide; while one should never lightly say that a particular pair is ugly, one can easily say that a pair of breasts is beautiful. Hedgehogs are beautiful sometimes; so are baby pigs.
The mute put the Bird Fairy down in front of me. “Ah-ao, ah-ao!” He waved his massive fist, which was the size of a horse hoof, under my nose, but in a friendly way. I understood him: his “Ah-ao, ah-ao!” grunts meant the same as “The Jap devils have surrendered!” He took off down the street like a bull.
The Bird Fairy cocked her head and looked at me. Her belly was terrifyingly big, like that of a gigantic spider. “What are you, a turtledove or a wild goose?” she chirped. Maybe she was asking me, and maybe she wasn’t. “My bird flew away. My bird, it flew away!” There was a look of panic on her face. I pointed to the street. She stuck her arms out straight, pawed at the ground with her bare feet, and, with a chirp, took off running toward the street. She was moving fast. How could such a huge belly not slow her down? If not for that belly, she probably could have taken wing. She ran into the crowd on the street like a powerful ostrich.
Fifth Sister came running home; she too was pregnant, and her bulging breasts had leaked into her gray uniform. In contrast to the Bird Fairy, she was a clumsy runner. The Bird Fairy flapped her arms when she ran; Fifth Sister supported her belly when she ran. Fifth Sister was gasping for breath, like a mare that’s pulled a wagon up a hill. Pandi had the fullest figure of all the Shangguan daughters, and she was also the tallest. Her breasts were fierce and intimidating; as if filled with gas, they went peng-peng when thumped. First Sister’s face was covered by a black veil; she was wearing her black coat. In the dark of night, she climbed into the Sima compound from a nearby ditch and followed the smell of sweat to a brightly lit room. The flagstones in the yard were slippery, covered by green moss. Her heart was in her throat and about to beat its way out through her mouth. The hand in which she carried the knife cramped up, and she had a fishy taste in her mouth. She peered through the crack in a latticed door, and what she saw nearly made her soul take flight and her heart stop: a large white candle, wax dripping down its sides, shone brightly and sent fleshy shadows dancing on the walls. Scattered on the stone floor were Shangguan Pandi and Commissar Jiang’s clothes; a coarse wool sock was lying alongside the apricot yellow toilet. Pandi, naked as the day she was born, was sprawled atop the dark, gaunt body of Jiang Liren. First Sister burst into the room. But she hesitated as she looked down at her sister’s raised buttocks and the indentation at the base of her backbone, glistening with sweat. Her enemy, the man she wanted to kill, was protected. Raising her knife, she screamed, “I’m going to kill you two, I’m going to kill you!” Pandi rolled over and off the bed, while Jiang Liren grabbed the blanket and rushed First Sister, knocking her to the ground. Ripping the veil off her face, he laughed. “I thought it might be you!”