‘What can be smashed—’ chanted half...
‘Must be smashed!’ answered the other. Over and over.
I recognised the leader, from the winter before the Great Famine. He was a dunce at school, who rarely moved a muscle except to do occasional bricklaying work. Now he swaggered up to my Tea Shack like the Lord of Creation. ‘We are the Red Guard! We are here in the name of the Revolutionary Committee!’ He yelled as if hoping to knock me over by the power of volume.
‘I know exactly who you are, Brain.’ ‘Brain’ was his Village nickname, because he didn’t have any. ‘When you were a little boy your mother used to bring you to my cousin’s house. I cleaned your arse when you shat yourself.’
I thought these children were like bears: if you show fear they attack. If you act as if they’re not really there, they carry on up the path.
Brain slapped me across my face!
It stung, my eyes watered, and my nose felt caved-in, but it wasn’t the pain that shocked me — it was the thought of an elder being slapped by a youth! It ran against the laws of nature!
‘Don’t call me that again,’ he said, casually. ‘I really don’t like it.’ He turned round. ‘Lieutenants! Find the hoard that this capitalist roader has leeched out of the masses! Start looking in the upstairs room. Mind you search thoroughly! She’s a devious old leech!’
‘What?’ I touched my nose and my fingers came away scarlet.
Boots thumped up the stairs. Banging, ripping, laughing, smashing, spintering.
‘Help yourself,’ Brain told the other Red Guards, pointing to my kitchen. ‘This saggy corpse stole it from you in the first place, remember. Destroy that religious relic first, though. Smash it to atoms!’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort—’
Another blow felled me, and Brain stood on my face, pushing my head down into the mud. He stamped on my windpipe. I thought he was trying to kill me. I could feel the imprint of his boot. ‘Just you wait until I tell your mother and father about this.’ I barely recognised my voice, it sounded so strangled and weak.
Brain tossed his head back and barked a short laugh. ‘You’re going to report me to my mummy and daddy? I’m pissing my pants at the prospect. Let me tell you what Mao says about your parents: “Your mother may love you, your father may love you, but Chairman Mao loves you more!”’
I heard Lord Buddha being smashed.
‘You’re going to be in trouble when the real communists hear about this!’
‘Those revisionists are being liquidated. The Village Party Females have been found guilty of whoring with a Trotskyite splinter group.’ He dug his big toe into my navel, and looked down at me from the dimness. A spoonful of saliva splashed onto the bridge of my nose. ‘Whoring, a subject you’re no stranger to, I’ve heard.’
I was still strong enough to feel anger. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Spreading your thighs for that feudalist! The Warlord’s Son! Runs in the family, no doubt! We know all about your mongrel whelp sucking the imperialists’ cocks in Hong Kong! Conspiring to overthrow our glorious revolution! Don’t look so shocked! The villagers were falling over each other to denounce class traitors! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how good it felt to have a man up you!’ He bent down to whisper in my ear. ‘Maybe you need a little reminder?’ He squeezed my breast. ‘That hairy pouch between your legs still has a splash of oil in it, has it? Maybe—’
‘We found her money, General!’
That probably saved me. The Red Guard certainly wouldn’t. He stood up again, and opened my strongbox. In the background the destruction of my Tea Shack was continuing. The youths were stripping my Tea Shack of food like locusts.
‘I’m appropriating your stolen goods in the name of the People’s Republic of China. Do you wish to lodge an appeal with the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal?’
He knelt on my shoulder blades and peered into my face. My face was still pressed sidewards into the dirt, but I stared straight back. I could see right up his nose.
‘I’ll take that as a “no”. And what is this? Speak of the devil? Your suckling runt, unless I’m very much mistaken.’ He twirled the photograph of my daughter between finger and thumb. Brain clicked open his lighter and watched for my reaction as he fed a corner to the flame. Not my daughter! The lily in her hair! Grief was rattling in me, but I suffered in silence. I wasn’t going to give Brain the pleasure of a single tear. He flicked my blackening treasure away before it burnt his fingers.
‘We’re all done here, General,’ a girl said. A girl!
Brain freed my windpipe at last. ‘Yeah. We should be pushing on. There are more dangerous enemies of the revolution than this abomination higher up the mountain.’
I leant against my Tree and looked at the wreckage of my Tea Shack.
‘The world’s gone mad,’ I said. ‘Again.’
‘And it will right itself,’ said my Tree. ‘Again. Don’t grieve too much. It was only a photograph. You will see her before you die.’
Something in the wreckage gave way, and the roof thumped down.
‘I live here quietly, minding my own business. I don’t bother anybody. Why are men forever marching up the path to destroy my Tea Shack? Why do events have this life of their own?’
‘That,’ answered my Tree, ‘is a very good question.’
I was one of the lucky ones. The following day I went down the path to the Village to borrow supplies. The monastery had been looted and smashed, and many of the monks shot where they knelt in the meditation hall. In the courtyard of the moon gate I saw a hundred monks kneeling around a bonfire. They were burning the scrolls from the library, stored since the days Lord Buddha and his disciples wandered the Valley. The monks’ ankles were tied to their stretched-back heads. They were shouting ‘Long Live Mao Tse Dong Thought! Long Live Mao Tse Dong Thought!’ over and over. Gangs of Red Guard patrolled the rows, and stoned any monk who flagged. Outside the school the teachers were tied to the camphor tree. Around their necks hung signs: ‘The more books you read, the more stupid you become.’
Posters of Mao were everywhere. I counted fifty before I gave up counting.
My cousin was in her kitchen. Her face was as blank as the wall.
‘What happened to your tapestries?’
‘Tapestries are dangerous and bourgeois. I had to burn them in the front yard before the neighbours denounced me.’
‘Why is everybody carrying a red book around with them? Is it to ward off evil?’
‘It’s Mao’s red book. Everyone has to own one. It’s the law.’
‘How could one bald lard-blob control all of China like this? It’s—’
‘Don’t let anyone hear you say such things! They’ll stone you! Sit down, Cousin. I suppose the Red Guard dropped by on their way up to burn the temples at the summit? You must drink some rice wine. Here you are. One cup. Drink it all down, now. I’ve got some bad news. Your remaining relatives in Leshan have gone.’
‘Where? To Hong Kong?’
‘To Correction Camps. Your daughter’s presents aroused their neighbours’ envy. The whole household has been denounced as class traitors.’
‘What’s a Correction Camp? Do people survive?’
My cousin sighed and waved her hands. ‘Nobody knows...’ No more words.
Three sharp knocks and my cousin cringed like a mantrap had snapped on her gut.
‘It’s only me, Mother!’
My cousin lifted the latch, and my nephew came in, nodding a greeting at me. ‘I came back from a Self-Criticism Meeting in the market-place. The cow farmer got denounced by the butcher.’
‘What for?’
‘Who cares? Any crap will do! Truth is, the butcher owed him money. This is a handy way to wipe clean the slate. That’s nothing, though. Three villages down the Valley a tinker got his knob cut off, just because his grandfather served with the Kuomintang against the Japanese.’