First we took apart the mortar in the side room and carried the parts into the yard. Then, after leaning a ladder against the eaves of the westside room, I climbed onto the roof. The roof tiles on the neighbourhood houses glinted in the moonlight. I could see the river flowing behind the village, the open fields in front and the fires burning in the wild. I couldn't have asked for a more opportune moment. Why wait? I asked my companions to tie each part with a rope, and tie it well, so that I could then haul it up onto the roof. I removed a pair of white gloves from the tube, put them on and then swiftly reassembled the weapon; before long, my very own mortar crouched on the roof, gleaming in the moonlight, like a bride emerged from her bath and waiting for her new husband. Pointed into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, the tube seemed to suck up the moonbeams. Several playful weasels climbed up beside me, scurried across to the mortar and began to scratch at it. They were so cute that I didn't stop them. Had it been anyone else I'd have thrown them off without a second thought. Then the boy led the mule up to the foot of the ladder and the old couple unloaded the cases, moving with precision and confidence. Even one shell dropped to the floor would have meant disaster. Each case was tied with rope; I hauled them up, one at a time, and then laid them out on the roof. That done, the old couple and the little boy climbed up to join me. The woman was gasping for breath by then. She suffered from an inflamed windpipe, and I knew she needed to eat a turnip to feel better. If only we had one. ‘We'll take care of that,’ one of the weasels said. Before long, eight little creatures scrambled up the ladder, chanting a rhythmic hi-ho, carrying a turnip two feet long and with a high water content. The old man rushed up to lift it from the weasels’ shoulders and hand it to his wife. Then he thanked them profusely, a manifestation of the common man's simple manners. The old woman broke the turnip in half over her knee, laid the bottom half beside her, took a crisp bite out of the top and then began to chew, suffusing the moonbeams with the smell of turnip.
‘Fire a round!’ she said. ‘Eating a turnip dipped in gunpowder smoke will cure me. Sixty years ago, when my son was born, five Japanese soldiers shot a mortar in our yard, sending gunpowder smoke in through the window and into my throat, damaging my windpipe. I've had asthma ever since, and my son was so badly shaken by the explosions and choked by the smoke that it weakened his constitution and killed him.’
‘The five men who did that got the death they deserved,’ continued the old man. ‘They killed our little cow, then chopped up and burnt our furniture to make a fire to roast it in. But it was only partially cooked, and they all died of salmonella poisoning. So we hid the mortar in the woodpile and the seven cases in a hollow between the walls. Then we escaped up Southern Mountain with our son's body. Later, people came looking for us, calling us heroes for poisoning the meat of our cow and killing five of those devils. We weren't heroes—those devils had had us shaking in our boots. And we certainly hadn't poisoned the meat. The sight of them writhing on the ground had brought us no pleasure at all. In fact, my wife, who was still ill, had boiled a pot of mung-bean soup for them. Usually that's a good cure for poison but theirs ran too deep in their bodies and they could not be saved. Years later, another man showed up and insisted we admit to killing them. A militiaman, he'd stabbed an enemy officer in the back with a muck rake while he took a shit. He'd then taken the man's pistol, twenty bullets, a leather belt, a wool uniform, a pocket watch, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and a gold Parker pen, and turned it all over to his unit. For that he'd received a second-class merit award plus a medal he wore pinned to his chest and refused to take off. He told us to turn over the mortar and the shells but we refused. We knew that one day we'd meet up with a boy who'd fall in love with it and who'd continue the work we'd begun at the cost of our son's life. A few years back we sold the mortar to you as scrap because we knew you'd treasure it. Dealing in scrap was only a pretext for us. Our greatest desire has been to help you fire these forty-one shells, avenging what you lost and establishing your honoured name. Don't ask what brought us here. We'll tell you what you need to know, nothing more. And now, son, it's time.’
The little boy handed the old man a shell that had been polished to a high gloss. I began to cry, and waves of heat washed over my heart. Bitter hatred and loving kindness sent hot blood racing through my veins, and only by firing the mortar could I release what bubbled inside me. So I dried my eyes and composed myself, then straddled the mortar and, instinctively estimating the distance, took aim at the western wing of Lao Lan's house, about five hundred yards ahead of us. Lao Lan and three township officials were playing mah-jongg on a Ming Dynasty table worth at least two hundred thousand RMB. One was a woman with a large, doughy face, thread-thin eyebrows and blood-red lips—an altogether disgusting sight. Let Lao Lan take her with him. Where? The Western Heaven! I took the shell from the old man, placed it into the tube and gently let go. The tube swallowed the shell, the shell slid into the tube. The first sound was soft, muted—the sound of the ignited shell touching the base of the tube. Then a detonation that nearly shattered my eardrums drove the weasels scurrying in fright. The shell tore like a siren across the sky, blazing a tail through the moonbeams, and then landed exactly where it wanted. First, a bright blue light, then a deafening POW!
Lao Lan emerged from the cloud of gunpowder smoke, shook off the dust and sneered. He'd survived unscathed.
I adjusted the tube until it was aimed at Yao Qi's living room, where he and Lao Lan were sitting on a leather sofa, engaged in a whispered conversation about something shameful. Good—Yao Qi, you and Lao Lan can go meet the King of the Underworld together. I took a shell from the old man and let go. It screamed out of the tube, flew across the sky, tore through the moonbeams and then hit the roof of its target with a POW! Shrapnel flew in all directions, some into the walls and some up into the ceiling. One pea-sized sliver hit Yao Qi in the gums and he screamed in pain.
‘You'll never get me with one of those,’ sneered Lao Lan.
I took aim at Fan Zhaoxia's beauty salon and accepted another shell from the old man. That the first two had missed their target was a bit disheartening but I had thirty-nine to go. Sooner or later one of them would rip him to pieces. I dropped the shell down the tube. It flew out like an imp with a song on its lips. Lao Lan was sitting back in the barber's chair, his eyes closed, and Fan Zhaoxia was giving him a shave. His skin was so smooth you could wipe it with a silk rag and not produce a sound. But Fan kept shaving. Shaving. People talk about the pleasure of a good shave. This was obviously a very good shave, for Lao Lan was snoring. Over the years, he'd got into the habit of napping in the barber's chair. He suffered from insomnia; and when he did finally sleep he was visited by dreams that kept him from a deep sleep; the buzz of a mosquito was all it took to startle him awake. Sleep never comes easily to people with a guilty conscience—it's a sort of divine retribution. The mortar shell tore through the shop's ceiling and landed giddily on the terrazzo floor in the middle of a pile of prickly hair before disintegrating with an angry POW! A piece the size of a horse's tooth struck the mirror in front of the barber's chair; another, the size of a soybean, hit Fan Zhaoxia in the wrist. She dropped her razor and fell to her knees with a cry of alarm. The razor lay, cracked, beside her.