“Twenty years of war and for what? To be thrown back into the gutters of society again?”
“I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!”
“I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out.
“Fair?” The man laughed bitterly.
“Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!”
“If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.”
Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny.
“Aren’t these your countrymen?” a man said, turning on Wen. “Isn’t this your crime?”
“My crime,” Wen said.
The man slapped him. “Is this your crime?”
“I admit it. I accept,” he cried.
Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved. Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed. Torches were lit and others demanded yet more killing. She saw Wen dragged forward. Her husband begged for mercy. The gun moved away from him, came back, moved away, came back. Her daughter was crying, struggling to free herself from the stranger’s rigid arms. “Ba!” she screamed. “Ba!” Er Ge was shot in the chest and then in the face. Three more men were shot. One would not die and had to be beaten. Swirl felt herself losing consciousness. A deep silence seemed to come at her from every side.
“It’s over,” someone said. She lifted her face and searched the darkness. A woman was hovering over her. It was the wife of the deputy village head, a girl who sometimes came to sit with Swirl in the village school and share a few stories of the city, learn a few songs. “Go home,” the girl whispered. “Tomorrow your house will be taken over by the peasants’ association, but there are some empty shelters up on the hillside. They’ll bring you there. They won’t leave you without a roof over your head. They are better than the landlords of the past.”
The girl’s voice faded and her form merged into the shadows. Zhuli was pulling at Swirl’s arms now, the child was filthy. When she finally looked up, she saw Wen crouched over the bodies of his two uncles, trying unsuccessfully to lift Da Ge’s body into his twisted arms.
—
But all this would not be told to Big Mother Knife until much later. Swirl would not speak and neither would Wen. At the time, Big Mother did not fully comprehend that struggle sessions and denunciation meetings still continued. No one else had been executed. Instead Swirl saw that those who had lifted shovels, who had landed blows or pulled the triggers of the pistols, appeared ill at ease. When they met Wen on the village roads, they stared at him, afraid, as if it was Wen who had killed a man. And if he had not done it with his own two hands, then surely, without him, no violence would have been necessary. At this altitude, the fog was unrelenting. A person could hardly see his own shadow anymore.
On the fourth night of her stay, Big Mother lay awake. This entire mud hut, she thought, was smaller than the pantry in Wen the Dreamer’s former house. The straw roof, of poor quality, needed to be replaced, it sounded like an ancestor shivering in the wind. She closed her eyes and a fragment of the famous poem that she had recited at Swirl’s wedding came back to her:
The marriage of a girl, away from her parents
Is the launching of a little boat on a great river.
You were very young when your mother died
Which made me the more tender of you.
Your elder sister has looked out for you,
And now you are both crying and cannot part,
Yet it is right that you should go on….
The words came from an earlier version of this country, another dream. On the kang, Little Zhuli dug her heels into Big Mother’s back as if to say, “There isn’t enough heat to go around! Keep me warm, old lady, or go your own way.” How could such a puny creature take up so much space? Fed up, Big Mother climbed out of bed. The little devil grunted in satisfaction, expanding into the warmth she had left behind.
Big Mother found her shoes. She shook them out ferociously. When she was satisfied no prickly creatures had nested there, she slipped them on. Overtop a second sweater, she buttoned her padded coat, pulled down her woollen hat and went out.
The winter air was not so terrible as she had feared. Big Mother pointed her good eye right then left, taking stock of her position. The moon was muffled by clouds and so she trusted the compass inside her own head, walking downhill until the trees fell away and she was surrounded by snow-draped land. A fallen branch sat on the crisp whiteness. She picked it up.
“But why am I awake,” she asked herself, “and on whom will I use this weapon?”
Her heart, which earlier had been thumping, quieted. When she reached the elegant house, Big Mother did not hesitate. She lifted her stick, strode confidently through the gateless entrance and climbed the first staircase.
Bit by bit, her good eye adjusted to the pall. Here and there she could make out clumps of rubble but not a whiff of furniture.
This morning, she had asked Swirl, innocuously, if the item she wished to retrieve was difficult to reach. “Yes and no,” Swirl had said. “Do you remember the steps in the east wing that go up to the alcove?” Instead of ascending all the way, her sister told her, the stairs served as a ladder to reach a high shelf, a very long, narrow ledge. “On the far side, there’s a little opening below the roof. It’s a headache to get to it, a person could slip and break their neck. The peasants’ association will surely look in easier places first.” Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick, she paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:
When the mind is exalted,
the body is lightened
and feels as if it could float in the wind.
This city is famed as a centre of letters;
and all you writers coming here
prove that the name of a great land
is made by better things than wealth.
She ascended.
The ledge, when she reached it, was indeed narrow, barely half a foot across and stretching far along the wall. The wraiths, however, had done her a favour because the shelf, stripped clean, was clear of obstacles.
Unwieldy as a pigeon, cursing the thick coat she wore, she stepped out onto the shelf. “I refuse,” she told herself, “to end up a bag of bones on the floor for my sister to carry away.” Big Mother inched along the ledge. She could feel her feet sweating inside her shoes. She cursed the God of Literature for not telling her to bring along Flying Bear. Her smallest son could be counted on to do stupid things like this. At last, the shelf ended. She groped blindly for the hiding place but could not find it. As she reached out once more, she lost her footing. Her hip jutted out, she flailed wildly for a handhold but grasped only air. One foot kicked out. Big Mother flung herself desperately to the right. She collided with the wall, her right hand shot wide and then, just as her thoughts slowed and she knew she was done for, her fingers caught on an opening. Big Mother held on for dear life, her fingers squeezing so hard she could feel the small bones scraping together. The room straightened. She was still standing, one leg up in the air.