‘Yes.’
‘When he says yes he means no, Commander,’ Wang’s wife had explained. ‘Japanese planes bombed our three sons into pulp.’
Wang Wenyi was not cut out to be a soldier. His reactions were slow, and he couldn’t tell his right from his left. During marching drills on the parade ground, he was hit by Adjutant Ren more times than you could count. His wife had an idea: he would carry a sorghum stem in his right hand, so when he heard a right-turn command he’d turn in that direction. Since he had no weapon, Grandma gave him our fowling piece.
When the women reached the bank of the twisting Black Water River they headed south, without stopping to enjoy the chrysanthemums on the bank or the dense thickets of blood-red sorghum beyond it. Wang Wenyi’s wife had lived a life of suffering, Grandma one of privilege. Grandma was drenched with sweat, Wang Wenyi’s wife was as dry as a bone.
Father had since returned to the bridgehead, where he reported to Commander Yu that the fistcakes would be there soon. Commander Yu patted him on the head for a job well done. Most of the soldiers lay around the sorghum field, soaking up the sun. Growing fidgety with impatience, Father strolled over to the field west of the road to see what Mute and his troops were up to. Mute was still honing his knife, so Father stopped in front of him, his hand resting on the Browning at his belt, a victor’s smile on his face. Mute looked up and grinned broadly.
Father presumed that the four linked rakes blocking the road, their teeth pointing skyward, must have reached the limits of their patience. The stone bridge spanning the river looked like an invalid just beginning his recovery. Father walked up to the dike and sat down, looking first east, then west, then to the river flowing beneath him, and finally to some wild ducks. The river was beautiful, owing to its profusion of living plants and tiny whitecaps, each filled with mystery. He spotted piles of white bones resting in thickets of reeds, and remembered our two big black mules.
In the spring, throngs of rabbits run wild in the fields. Grandma rides her mule, rifle in hand, as she hunts rabbits, with Father sitting behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist. Frightened by the mule, the rabbits fall easy prey to Grandma’s shots. She invariably returns home with a string of rabbits around the mule’s neck. A steel pellet once lodged between two of her back teeth when she was eating wild rabbit, and no amount of prying could dislodge it.
Father watched a column of dark red ants transport mud pebbles across the dike. When he laid a clod of earth in their way, they strained to climb over it instead of skirting it. He picked it up and heaved it into the river, where it broke the surface without a sound. Now that the sun was overhead, a fishy smell drifted over on the hot air. Bright glimmers of light flashed everywhere and made the area sizzle. It seemed to Father that the space between heaven and earth was filled with the red dust of sorghum and the fragrance of sorghum wine. He stretched out on the dike, face up, and in that moment his heart leaped into his throat; later on he realised that patience is always rewarded, and that the consequences of his waiting were perfectly common, ordinary, casual, and natural. For he had spotted four strange dark-green, beetlelike objects crawling noiselessly towards him on the highway that cut through the sorghum fields.
‘Trucks,’ he muttered ambiguously. He was ignored.
‘Jap trucks!’ He scrambled to his feet, panic-stricken, and stared at the trucks streaking towards him like meteors, trailing long dark tails and preceded by crackling, swaying incandescent rays of light.
‘Here come the trucks!’ His words were a sword that decapitated the men with a single stroke. A dull silence settled over the sorghum field.
‘Men,’ Commander Yu roared joyfully, ‘they’re here after all. Get ready. And don’t fire until I give the order.’
On the west side of the road Mute jumped to his feet and slapped himself on the hip. Dozens of guerrillas crouched on the slope, weapons ready. They could hear the roar of the engines. Father lay at Commander Yu’s side, gripping the heavy Browning so tightly that his wrist was soon hot and tingly, his palm sticky with sweat. The fleshy place between his thumb and forefinger twitched once, and was soon racked with spasms. In amazement, he watched the almond-sized spot jump rhythmically, like a chick trying to break out of its egg. He wanted to stop it, but was squeezing so tightly his arm began to tremble. Commander Yu laid his hand on Father’s back, and the twitch stopped. He switched the Browning to his left hand, but the muscles of his right hand were so cramped it seemed forever before he could straighten his fingers.
The fast-approaching trucks were getting larger and larger, the eyes in front, as large as horse hooves, sweeping the area with their white rays. Their revving engines sounded like the wind before a downpour. Having never actually seen a truck before, Father assumed that these strange creatures survived on grass or some sort of fodder, and that they drank water or blood. They moved faster than our two strong, spindly-legged mules; the moon-shaped tiers spun so fast they sent clouds of yellow dust soaring into the air. As they neared the stone bridge, the lead truck slowed down, allowing the clouds of dust to catch up and settle over the hood, obsuring the twenty or more khaki-clad men in the bed, shiny steel pots on their heads. Father subsequently learned that these pots were called ‘helmets’. (In 1958, during the backyard-furnace campaign of the Great Leap Forward, when our wok was confiscated, my elder brother swiped a helmet from a pile of metal and brought it home to use as a cookpot. Father watched in fascination as the helmet changed colour in the smoke and fire.)
The two trucks in the middle were stacked with small mountains of white sacks; the one bringing up the rear, like the one in front, was loaded with twenty or more Japanese soldiers.
They had nearly reached the dike, and their tyres, spinning more slowly now, appeared swollen and awkward. The square nose of the lead truck reminded Father of the head of an enormous locust. As the yellow dust began to settle, loud farts created a dark-blue mist at the rear.
Father scrunched his head down as a chill the likes of which he’d never known worked its way up from his feet to his belly. He shifted his buttocks back and forth to keep from wetting his pants. ‘Don’t move, you little shit!’ Commander Yu complained sternly.
Feeling as though his bladder were about to burst, Father got permission to crawl down and pee.
Once he had retreated into the sorghum field he released a mighty stream the colour of red sorghum, which stung the head of his pecker as it gushed forth. Enormously relieved when he had finished, he glanced casually at the guerrillas’ faces, whose expressions made them appear as malevolent and scary as temple icons. Wang Wenyi’s tongue poked out between his lips; his staring eyeballs seemed frozen, like a lizard’s.
The trucks, huge beasts on the prowl, held their breath as they crept forward. Something aromatic struck Father’s nostrils. Just then Grandma, in her sweat-stained red silk jacket, and the panting wife of Wang Wenyi appeared on the dike of the meandering Black Water River.
Grandma with her baskets of fistcakes and Wang Wenyi’s wife with her pails of mung-bean soup gazed at the miserable stone bridge across the Black Water River, feeling very much at ease. Grandma turned to Wang’s wife and said with relief, ‘We made it, Sister-in-Law.’ Ever since her marriage, Grandma had lived a life of ease and comfort and the carrying pole, with its heavy load of fistcakes, dug deeply into her delicate shoulder, leaving a dark-purple bruise that would accompany her as she departed this world and travelled to the kingdom of heaven. The bruise would be the glorious symbol of a heroic figure from the war of resistance.
Father was the first to see her. While the others were following the slow progress of the trucks with unblinking eyes, some secret force told him to look to the west, where he spotted her floating towards them like a gorgeous red butterfly. ‘Mom -’