“Stay, stay,” I said silently. “Watch all of it before you start searching.”
Yu Lan was strumming the pi-pa chords, and tears filled my eyes when I heard the first lines of the most famous song in the civilized world, sung in a peasant accent so pure it practically reeked of mud and manure.
The voice was followed by the singer, and I actually began to cry when I saw the puppet. It was a rustic so close to the simple soil that he was barely one step up from a water buffalo. Every inflection, every slap of a sandal, every scratch at hair lice, every coarse gesture was so perfect that for a moment I could have sworn I was back in my beloved village, and homesickness swept over me like heavy surf. He carried the pig he was taking to market, and Fu-mo and Fu-ching were so stunned by this gift of the gods that they toppled over backward.
The incredibly complex plot of Hayseed Hong deals with the peasant’s efforts to regain his pig from the two crooks, and in the process Yen Shih would use every puppet he had. I was settling back happily to watch when Master Li jabbed my ribs.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The grand warden, curse him, had left his chair and collected his bodyguards and was striding toward us, and I could do nothing but bend over so Master Li could climb on my back, and then I had to move around the corner of the parapet and lose sight of the greatest of all puppet plays performed by the greatest of puppeteers. Life can be very unfair.
The grand warden and his search party pounded down corridors and through rooms and closets while we followed their progress on the balconies outside. The damn place had more chambers than an anthill and it was slow going, but we had to be absolutely sure that we would be undisturbed when we went for the cage. The maddening thing from my point of view was that we kept crossing balconies with views of the wagon below. I would see scraps of action, as when Fu-mo and Fu-ching bought Hayseed Hong’s prize pig with a rare priceless diamond from the frozen north (Hayseed Hong, from the south, had never before seen a piece of ice), and then I had to move, and when I again got a glimpse of the stage the country bumpkin was on his way home and had decided to take out his diamond and admire it.
“Sheeeeeee-ut! The son of a bitch done pissed in my pocket and run away!”
Then I had to move away again, missing the part where the crooks greet the returning peasant with drugged wine and make off with all his clothes, and I just got a glimpse of Hayseed Hong as he toppled through a window into the bedchamber of the wife of Magistrate Po.
“Help! I am assaulted by a naked fiend!”
Magistrate Po, at another window, was admiring the moon in suitably Neo-Confucian fashion.
“Will you be quiet, woman? The superior man does not perceive lewd sounds or indecent spectacles.”
Then I was out of sight and sound again, and around another tower, and then back to the glow of stage light.
“I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking!”
“Woman, I must have quiet! The ears of the superior man are undented by unpleasant sounds, just as his kidneys and liver are purged of laziness and negligence, falsehood and depravity.”
The grand warden had vanished, and I had to crawl through a window and tiptoe down hallways until we found him again. Then I had to race back and dive out to another balcony before his men could see us.
“I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking and who appears to be hung like a horse!”
“Silence, woman! The superior man listens only to the correct chants, accompanied by flute and zither, so that the splendor of his complete virtue shall make the four seasons revolve in harmony and establish the right order of all things.”
That was when one of those accidents that cause people to tie rocks around their necks and jump into wells occurred. The grand warden had disappeared again, and again I climbed through a window after him. When we spotted him he was just leading his men into the reception room, and Master Li grunted happily when he saw him open the door behind his thronelike chair and lead his men up the stairs. Now all we had to do was climb up outside his private quarters and wait for him to come in through the door that led from the central tower. Once he left we’d know he was through searching the areas we wanted. Master Li would have time to get that safe open, and if the cage wasn’t there we’d be almost sure to find it in the conference room in the tower. I climbed out a side window to a small parapet divided by a large clay drainpipe, and eased around the drainpipe and started toward another window, and I just managed to jump back into dark shadows beside the pipe when a soldier stuck his head out and leaned his elbows on the sill. He wasn’t looking in my direction, but I couldn’t move an inch so long as he stayed there.
“Of all the goddamn luck,” he growled.
“Why complain? It’s the kind of luck we always have, damn it to hell,” a second voice snarled, and another soldier stuck his head out beside the first.
“You’d think that once, just once, we’d get guard duty on the good side,” the first one said. “Can you imagine? Here we are looking at the moon, and what are the guys on duty on the other side looking at? Hayseed Hong, that’s what, and we can’t even hear it.”
“So what? We’ll hear about it, won’t we? Over and over, everybody saying it was the greatest goddamn thing ever.” The second soldier spat disgustedly, and then reached into his tunic. “Here. We deserve it.”
I groaned inwardly. He had a goatskin wine flask in his hand, and it was a fair-size one, and if they decided to keep on leaning on that windowsill in the moonlight…
They did, and there we stayed, and it seemed as though hours passed. The moon was moving in the wrong direction, and the shadow from the drainpipe was getting narrower and narrower, and when I looked down I found I couldn’t get my sandals out of a small streak of pearl-white light. A few more minutes and Master Li was going to be faced with a very hard decision, because the only sure way to deal with the soldiers if they saw us would be to kill them. Fortunately he didn’t have to do anything drastic. Relief made his voice tremble when they finally pitched the flask away and walked back through the room to the corridor.
“Let’s go,” he whispered. “If the safe has a simple lock we may still have time.”
I hurried as fast as I could, and when I got back around to the south side a gale of laughter nearly knocked me off the wall. Looking down, I could see the wagon clearly, and the stage, and I realized we’d arrived toward the end of the first half of the play. Hayseed Hong is quite long and is broken into two parts with an intermission to allow the puppeteer to rest. The end of part one may well be the most famous scene in theater, and there isn’t one line of dialogue even though it takes up a third of the first half.