Grandma and Granddad exchanged their love surrounded by the vitality of the sorghum field: two unbridled souls, refusing to knuckle under to worldly conventions, were fused together more closely than their ecstatic bodies. They ploughed the clouds and scattered rain in the field, adding a patina of lustrous red to the rich and varied history of Northeast Gaomi Township. My father was conceived with the essence of heaven and earth, the crystallisation of suffering and wild joy.
The braying donkey threaded its way into the sorghum field, and Grandma returned from the hazy kingdom of heaven to the cruel world of man. She sat up in a state of utter stupefaction, her face bathed in tears. ‘He really does have leprosy,’ she said. As Granddad knelt down, a sword appeared in his hand, as if by magic. He slipped it out of its scabbard; the two-foot blade was curved, like a leaf of chive. With a single swish, it sliced through two stalks of sorghum, the top halves thudding to the ground, leaving bubbles of dark-green liquid on the neat, slanted wounds.
‘Come back in three days, no matter what!’ Granddad said.
Grandma looked at him uncomprehendingly. He dressed while she tidied herself up, then put his sword away – where, she didn’t know. Granddad took her back to the roadside and vanished.
Three days later, the little donkey carried Grandma back, and when she entered the village she learned that the Shans, father and son, had been murdered and tossed into the inlet at the western edge of the village.
Grandma lies there soaking up the crisp warmth of the sorghum field. She is as light as a house swallow gracefully skimming the tips of the plants. The fleeting images begin slowing down: Shan Bianlang, Shan Tingxiu, Great-Granddad, Great-Grandma, Uncle Arhat… so many hostile, grateful, savage, sincere faces appear and disappear. She is writing the final page of her thirty-year history. Everything in her past is like a procession of sweet, fragrant fruit falling rapidly to the ground. As for her future, she can only dimly see a few holes of light, which are quickly extinguished. She is holding on to the fleeting present with all her might.
Grandma feels Father’s little paws stroking her. He calls out ‘Mom!’ timidly. All her hate and her love evaporate. She longs to raise her arm and stroke Father’s face, but it won’t do her bidding. Rising into the air, she sees a multicoloured ray of light streaming from above, and hears heaven’s solemn music, played by horns and woodwinds, large and small.
Grandma is exhausted: the handle of the present, the handle of the world of men, is slipping from her grasp. Is this death? Will I never again see this sky, this earth, this sorghum, this son, the lover who has led his troops into battle? The gunfire is so far away, beyond a thick curtain of mist. Douguan! Douguan! Come help your mom. Pull your mom back. Your mom doesn’t want to die. My heaven… you gave me a lover, you gave me a son, you gave me riches, you gave me thirty years of life as robust as red sorghum. Heaven, since you gave me all that, don’t take it back now. Forgive me, let me go! Have I sinned? Would it have been right to share my pillow with a leper and produce a misshapen, putrid monster to contaminate this beautiful world? What is chastity then? What is the correct path? What is goodness? What is evil? You never told me, so I had to decide on my own. I loved happiness, I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment. I’m not afraid of your eighteen levels of hell. I did what I had to do, I managed as I thought proper. I fear nothing. But I don’t want to die, I want to live. I want to see more of this world…
Grandma’s sincerity moves the heavens. Fresh drops of a crystalline moisture ooze from her dry eyes, which emit a strange light. Once again she sees Father’s golden face and two eyes that are so like Granddad’s. Her lips quiver, she calls Douguan’s name. ‘Mom,’ Father shouts excitedly, ‘you’re going to be okay! You’re not going to die. I’ve stopped the bleeding, it’s stopped! I’ll go get Dad, I’ll tell him to come. Mom, you can’t die, you have to wait for Dad!’
Father runs off, his retreating steps turning into a gentle monologue, then into the music from heaven that Grandma had heard a moment earlier. It is the music of the universe, and it emanates from the red sorghum. She gazes at the sorghum, and through the dimness of her vision the stalks turn crafty and surpassingly beautiful, grotesque, and bizarre. They begin to moan, to writhe, to shout, to entwine her; they are demonic one minute, intimate the next, and in her eyes they coil like snakes. But then they suddenly stretch out like spikes, and it is beyond her power to describe their brilliance. They are red and green, they are black and white, they are blue and green; they are laughing heartily, they are crying pitifully. Their tears are raindrops beating against the desolate sandbar of her heart.
The blue sky shines through the spaces between the sorghum stalks. It is so high, yet so low. Grandma feels as though heaven and earth, man, and the sorghum are intertwined, huddled beneath a gigantic canopy. White clouds dragging earthly shadows behind them brush leisurely against her face. A flock of white doves swoops down and perches on the stalks’ tips, where their cooing wakes Grandma, who quickly distinguishes their shapes. The doves’ red eyes, the size of sorghum seeds, are fixed on her. She smiles with genuine affection, and they return her smile. My darlings! she cries silently. I don’t want to leave you! The doves peck at the sorghum grains, their chests slowly expanding, their feathers fanning out like petals in the wind and rain.
A large flock of doves had once nested in the eaves of our home. In the fall, Grandma placed a large basin of clear water in the yard, and when the doves returned from the fields they perched neatly on the rim of the basin to spit the sorghum seeds from their crops into water in which their reflections shimmered. Then they swaggered around the yard. Doves! Driven from their nests by the storms of war, they grieve over Grandma’s imminent death.
Grandma’s eyes glaze over once again, as the doves take flight, soaring through the vast blue sky, filling it with the rhythmic flapping of their wings. She floats upward to join them, spreading her newly sprouted wings to glide weightlessly in the air above the black soil and sorghum stalks. She gazes longingly at the ruins of her village, at the meandering river, at the crisscrossing roads and paths, at the bullet holes in the sky, and at the doomed creatures beneath her. For the last time she smells the aroma of sorghum wine and the pungent odour of hot blood. A scene she never witnessed suddenly takes shape in her mind: caught in a hail of gunfire, hundreds of her fellow villagers, their clothes in rags, lie in the sorghum field, arms and legs writhing in a macabre dance…
The final thread linking her to mankind is about to part; all her melancholy and suffering, her anxieties and dejection settle onto the field below, striking the sorghum like hailstones and continuing down to the black soil to take root and give birth to bitter fruit for generations to come.
Grandma has completed her liberation. She flies off with the doves. Her shrinking thoughts, which might fit into a human fist, embrace only joy, contentment, warmth, comfort, and harmony. She is at peace. With genuine devotion she exclaims:
‘Heaven! My heaven…’
9
WHILE THE MACHINE guns continued to strafe the area, the trucks’ wheels began to creep up onto the stone bridge. Flying bullets kept Granddad and his troops pinned down. A few men stuck their heads above the dike, only to pay for their recklessness with their lives. Granddad’s chest swelled with rage. All the trucks were now on the bridge, raising the machine-gun-fire trajectory. ‘Men,’ he shouted, ‘attack!’ He pulled off three quick shots, downing two Japanese soldiers, whose bodies fell across the cab, their dark blood staining the hood. With the echo of his shots still in the air, a cacophonous burst of fire erupted from behind the dikes lining the road. Seven or eight more Japanese soldiers were cut down; two of them fell off the truck, arms and legs churning desperately as they burrowed into the black water on either side of the bridge. The Fang brothers’ cannon roared, spewing a torrent of flame from its muzzle. Steel pellets and balls tore into the second truck in line, with its load of sacks, sending plumes of smoke skyward. White rice streamed from countless holes.