He could hear a dog softly whimpering somewhere in the village, whining in its sleep, perhaps. He looked out at the moonlit yellow soil surrounding the village, which suddenly seemed to him like a placid sheet of water. If only it were water—this year was the fifth consecutive year of drought, and they had had to carry water to the fields to irrigate them.
His gaze drifted into the distance, landing on the fields on the mountain, which looked in the moonlight like the footprints of a giant. Small, scattered plots were the only way to farm that rocky mountain, covered as it was with vines and brush. The terrain was too rough for agricultural equipment—even oxen would have had no good footing—so people were obliged to do all the labor by hand.
Last year, a manufacturer of agricultural machines had visited to sell a kind of miniature walking tractor, small enough to work those meager fields. It wasn’t a bad little machine, but the villagers weren’t having it. How much grain could those tiny plots produce? Planting them was detailed work, more like sewing than sowing, and a crop that could feed a man for a year was considered a success. In a year of drought, as it was, those fields might not even produce enough to recoup the cost of planting. A five-thousand-yuan tractor, and on top of that, diesel fuel at more than two yuan a liter—outsiders just didn’t understand the difficulties of life in these mountains.
A few small silhouettes walked past the window. They formed a circle on a ridge between two fields and squatted down, inscrutable. He knew these were his students—as long as they were nearby, he could detect their presence even without seeing them. This intuition had developed in him over a lifetime, and it was particularly keen now that his life was drawing to a close.
He could even recognize the children in the moonlight. Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua were there. Those two were originally from the village and didn’t have to live at school; nevertheless, he had taken them in.
Liu Baozhu’s father had paid the dowry for a bride from Sichuan ten years before, and she had come and given birth to Baozhu. Five years after that, when Baozhu had grown a bit, his father began to neglect his wife, the small bit of closeness they’d had slipping away, and eventually she left him and returned to her family in Sichuan.
After that, Baozhu’s father lost his way. He began gambling, just like the old bachelors of the village, and before long he had lost everything but four walls and a bed. Then he began drinking. Every night, he sold roasted sweet potatoes for eighty fen a kilogram and drank himself useless with the money. Useless and angry: he hit his son every day, and twice a week he hit him hard. One night the month before, he’d nearly beaten his son to death with a sweet potato skewer.
Guo Cuihua’s home life was even worse. Her father had found a bride for himself through decent channels, a rare thing here, and he was proud. But good things seldom last, and right after the wedding, it became apparent that Cuihua’s mother was unwell. No one could tell at the wedding—she’d likely been given a drug to calm her. Why would a respectable woman come to a village like this in the first place, so poor that even the birds wouldn’t shit as they flew over? Nevertheless, Cuihua was born and grew up, and her mother got sicker and sicker. She attacked people with cooking knives in the daytime, and at night she would try to burn the house down. She spent most of her time laughing to herself like a ghoul, with a sound that would set your hair on end.
The rest of the children were from other villages, the closest of which was at least ten miles away on mountain roads, so they had to live at school. In a crude village school like this, they would spend the whole term there. The students brought their own bedding, and each hauled a sack of wheat or rice from home, which they cooked themselves on the school’s big stove. As night fell in the winter, the children would gather around the stove and watch the cooking grain bubble and purl in the pot, their faces lit by straw-orange flames. It was the most tender sight he’d ever seen. He would take it with him into the next world.
On the ridge outside the window, within the ring of children, little stars of fire began to shine, bright in the moonlit night. They were burning incense and paper, and their faces were lit red in the firelight against the silver-gray night. He was reminded of the sight of the children by the stove. Another scene emerged from the pool of his memory. The electricity had gone out at school (due perhaps to a faulty circuit, or, as happened more often, a lack of funds) while he was teaching an evening class. He held a candle in his hand to illuminate the blackboard. “Can you see it?” he’d asked, and the children answered, as they always did, “Not yet!” It really was hard to read the blackboard with so little light, but they had a lot of material to cover, so night class was the only option. He lit a second candle and held them both up. “It’s still too dark!” yelled the children, so he lit a third candle. It was still too dark to read the board, but the children stopped yelling. They knew their teacher wouldn’t light another candle no matter how much they yelled. He couldn’t afford to. He looked down at their faces flickering in the candlelight, those kids, who had fought off darkness with every fiber of their beings.
The children and firelight, the children and firelight. It was always the children and firelight, always the children at night, in the firelight. The image was forever embedded in his mind, though he never understood what it meant.
He knew the children were burning incense and paper for him, as they had done so many times before, but this time he didn’t have the strength to criticize them for being superstitious. He had spent his whole life trying to ignite the flame of science and culture in the children’s hearts, but he knew that, compared to the fog of ignorance and superstition that enshrouded this remote mountain village, it was a feeble flame indeed, like the flame of his candles in the classroom that night. Six months earlier, a few villagers had come to the school to scavenge rafters from the roof of the already-dilapidated dorm, with which they meant to renovate the temple at the entrance to the village. He asked where the children would sleep if the dorm had no roof, and they said they could sleep in the classroom.
“In the classroom? The wind blows right through the walls. How can the children sleep there in the winter?”
“Who cares? They’re not from here.”
He picked up a pole and fought them fiercely, and he wound up with two broken ribs. A kind villager propped him up and walked with him all the way to the nearest town hospital, fifteen miles or more on mountain roads.
While assessing his injuries, the doctor had discovered that he had esophageal cancer. There was a high incidence of this sort of cancer in the region, so it wasn’t a rare diagnosis. The doctor congratulated him on his good fortune—he had come while the cancer was still in an early stage, before it had started to metastasize. It was curable with surgery; in fact, esophageal cancer was one of the types of cancer against which surgery was most effective. His broken ribs might well have saved his life.
After, he had gone to the province’s main city, which had an oncology hospital, and asked a doctor there how much such a surgery would cost. The doctor told him that, considering his situation, he could stay in the hospital’s welfare ward, and that his other expenses could also be reduced commensurately. The final amount wouldn’t be too much—around twenty thousand yuan. Recalling that his patient came from such a remote place, the doctor proceeded to explain the details of hospitalization and surgery.
He listened silently and suddenly asked: “If I don’t get the surgery, how long do I have?”