That night, after the smoke and sparks from the other houses had died out, our buildings were still burning, sending skyward green-tinged tongues of flame and the intoxicating aroma of strong wine, released in an instant after all those years. Blue roof tiles, deformed by the intense heat, turned scarlet, then leaped into the air through a wall of flames that illuminated Granddad’s hair, which had turned three-quarters grey in the space of a week. A roof came crashing down, momentarily blotting out the flames, which then roared out of the rubble, stronger than ever. The loud crash nearly crushed the breath out of Father and Granddad.
Our house, which had sheltered the father and son of the Shan family as they grew rich, then had sheltered Granddad after his murderous deed, then had sheltered Grandma, Granddad, Father, Uncle Arhat, and all the men who worked for them, a sanctuary for their kindnesses and their grievances, had now completed its historical mission. I hated that sanctuary: though it had sheltered decent emotions, it had also sheltered heinous crimes. Father, when you were hiding in the burrow we dug for you in the floor of my home back in 1957, you recalled those days of your past in the unrelenting darkness. On no fewer than 365 occasions, in your mind you saw the roof of your house crash down amid the flames, and wondered what was going through the mind of your father, my granddad. So my fantasies were chasing yours while yours were chasing Granddad’s.
As he watched the roof collapse, Granddad became as angry as he’d been the day he abandoned Grandma and moved to another village to be with his new love, Passion. He had learned then that Grandma had shamelessly taken up with Black Eye, the leader of an organisation called the Iron Society, and at the time he wasn’t sure what filled his heart – loathing or love, pain or anger. When he later returned to Grandma’s arms, his feelings for her were so confused he couldn’t sort them out. In the beginning, his emotional warfare scarred only his own heart, and Grandma’s scarred only her own. Finally, they hurt each other. Only when Grandma smiled up at him as she lay dead in the sorghum field did he realise the grievous punishment life had meted out to him. He loved my father as a magpie loves the last remaining egg in its nest. But by then it was too late, for fate, cold and calculating, had sentenced him to a cruel end that was waiting for him down the road.
‘Dad, our house is gone…’ Father said.
Granddad rubbed Father’s head as he stared at the ruins of his home, then took Father’s hand and began stumbling aimlessly down the road under the waning light of the flames and the waxing light of the moon.
At the head of the village they heard an old man’s voice: ‘Is that you, Number Three? Why didn’t you bring the oxcart?’
The sound of that voice gave Granddad and Father such a warm feeling they forgot how tired they were and rushed over to see who it was.
A hunched-over elderly man rose to greet them, carefully sizing up Granddad with his ancient eyes, nearly touching his face. Granddad didn’t like his watchful look and was repulsed by the greedy stench that came from his mouth.
‘You’re not my Number Three,’ the old man said unhappily, his head wobbling as he sat down on a pile of loot. There were trunks, cupboards, dining tables, farm tools, harnesses, ripped comforters, cooking pots, earthenware bowls. He was sitting on a small mountain of stuff and guarding it as a wolf guards its kill. Behind him, two calves, three goats, and a mule were tied to a willow tree.
‘You old dog!’ Granddad growled through clenched teeth. ‘Get the hell out of here!’
The old man rose up on his haunches and said amiably, ‘Ah, my brother, let’s not be envious. I risked my life to drag this stuff out of the flames!’
‘I’ll fuck your living mother! Climb down from there!’ Granddad lashed out angrily.
‘You have no right to talk to me like that. I didn’t do anything to you. You’re the one who’s asking for trouble. What gives you the right to curse me like that?’ he complained.
‘Curse you? I’ll goddamn kill you! We’re not in a desperate struggle with Japan just so you can go on a looting binge! You bastard, you old bastard! Douguan, where’s your gun?’
‘It’s under the horse’s belly,’ Father said.
Granddad jumped up onto the mountain of stuff and, with a single kick, sent the old man sprawling onto the ground. He rose to his knees and begged, ‘Spare me, Eighth Route Master, spare me!’
‘I’m not with the Eighth Route Army,’ Granddad said, ‘or the Ninth Route. I’m Yu Zhan’ao the bandit!’
‘Spare me, Commander Yu, spare me! What good would it do to let all this stuff burn? I’m not the only “potato picker” from the village. Those thieves got all the good stuff. I’m too old and too slow, and all I could find was this junk.’
Granddad picked up a wooden table and threw it at the old man’s bald head. He screamed and held his bleeding scalp as he rolled in the dirt. Granddad reached down and picked him up by his collar. Looking straight into those tortured eyes, he said, ‘Our hero, the “potato picker”, then raised his fist and drove it with a loud crack into the old man’s face, sending him crumpling to the ground, face up. Granddad walked up and kicked him in the face, hard.
3
MOTHER AND MY three-year-old little uncle already had spent a day and a night hiding in the dry well. The morning before, she had gone to the working well with two earthenware jugs over her shoulder. No sooner had she bent over to see her face in the water than she heard the clang of a gong from the village wall and the shouts of the night watchman, Old Man Wu: ‘The Japs are here, they’ve surrounded the village!’ She was so frightened she dropped the jugs and carrying pole into the well, spun on her heel, and ran home. But before she got there she met her parents, my maternal grandfather and grandmother; he was armed with a musket, his wife was carrying her son and a cloth-wrapped parcel.
Ever since the battle at the Black Water River, the villagers had been preparing for the calamity they expected to come any day. Only three or four families had gone into hiding; the others, though frightened, were reluctant to give up their broken-down homes, their wells – bitter and sweet – and their quilts, no matter how thin and tattered they might have been. During the week of the lull, Granddad had taken Father into the country town to buy bullets, driven by a desire to settle accounts with Pocky Leng. It never occurred to him that the Japanese bloodbath would inundate his own village.
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Zhang Ruolu the Elder – he with one large eye and one small, he with the extraordinary bearing, he the intellectual who had studied in a private school, he who had played such a vital role in the burial of the martyred warriors – mobilised all able-bodied residents to reinforce the village wall and repair the gates, and appointed night watchmen to bang gongs and shout warnings at the first sighting of enemy troops. The villagers, male and female, young and old, took turns manning the wall. Mother told me that the voice of Ruolu the Elder was loud and crisp, almost metallic. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘a people united in spirit can move Mount Tai. Only if we’re united in spirit can we keep the Japs out of our village!’
As he was speaking, a shot rang out from the farmland beyond the village, and an elderly watchman’s head exploded; he rocked back and forth, then tumbled off the wall, sending the villagers scurrying for cover. Ruolu the Elder, dressed in tight pants and shirt, stood in the middle of the road and shouted, ‘Fellow villagers, calm down! Mount the wall as we planned! Don’t be afraid to die. Those who fear death will find it, those who don’t will live on! Our lives are all that stand between the Japs and our village!’
Mother watched the men run to the wall and throw themselves down on their bellies. My maternal grandmother, whose knees were knocking, was frozen to the spot. ‘Beauty’s dad,’ she shouted tearfully, ‘what about the children?’ My maternal grandfather ran back to her, rifle in hand, and lashed out, ‘What are you wailing about? Now that it’s come to this, it makes no difference whether we live or die!’ She didn’t dare utter a sound, but the tears kept flowing. He turned to look at the village wall, which hadn’t yet come under fire, grabbed Mother with one hand and her brother with the other, and ran with them to the vegetable garden behind the house, where there was an old abandoned well, its rickety windlass still in place. He looked down into the well and said, ‘Since there’s no water, we’ll hide the children here for the time being. We can come back for them after we’ve driven the Japs off.’ Grandmother stood like a block of wood and bowed to his wishes.