Seeing the cruel determination in her lover’s eyes, she touched the scab on his forehead with her fingertips. “Does it still hurt?” she asked tenderly.
“It hurts here.” He grabbed her hand and placed it over his heart.
She rested her head on his chest. “You’ve suffered because of me. My brothers are heartless wolves.”
“You don’t have to talk about them like that,” Gao Ma objected magnanimously. “Life’s not easy for them, either.
“Remember that day last year?” he continued expressively. “You know, when I was helping you in the field and told you I was going to get some fresh batteries for my cassette recorder so you could listen to it? Well, I finally did it. Here, listen to this.” He took the cassette recorder out of his bundle, pushed the play button, and the scratchy sound of a woman’s voice came spilling out: “Moonlight on the fifteenth cascading down on my old home and on frontier passes / In the silent night he longs for someone, and so do I.”
“It’s a new tape by Dong Wenhua,” Gao Ma said. “She’s in the army, the Shenyang Military District. Short, chubby, real cute.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Only on TV,” he admitted. “Sun Baojia has a new color set. His family planted six acres of garlic this year and sold it for over five thousand yuan. If we weren’t in such a fix, I’d stay home and make a killing on garlic, since this county is going to let us plant even more acreage next year.”
He plugged the earphones into the recorder, cutting out the speaker, to Jinju’s bewilderment. Then he placed the earphones over her head. “It sounds better this way,” he said loudly.
She watched him take an envelope filled with ten-yuan bills out of his bundle.
“I sold off everything I could. My neighbor Yu Qiushui promised to watch my house Maybe we can come back after a few years in the Northeast.”
She was listening to the woman’s loud singing through the headphones: “Ali Baba, hai! Ali Baba, hai! Ali Baba is a happy young man!”
CHAPTER 7
The mid-month moon isn’t round till the sixteenth-
After that the erosion begins.
Everyone is happy when the garlic is sold,
But their hearts boil over when it is not….
– from a ballad sung by Zhang Kou to garlic farmers
1.
Gao Yang was put into a large makeshift lockup in the county station house. At first he didn’t know where he was, but the double-paneled red gate had stuck in his mind, for it was the same gate he had passed when he came to town to sell his garlic; he remembered the ditch that served as a sort of moat. The water, filthy to begin with, was a floating home for clumps of half-dead grasses. There was plenty of activity all over town, except at this spot. The polluted water in the ditch was a spawning ground for tiny red insects; the second time he came to town to sell his garlic, he had seen an old white-clad man catching with mosquito netting attached to the end of a long bamboo pole. Someone said he used them as food for goldfish.
The police removed his handcuffs, and once his hands were free, even the two ugly purple welts girding his wrists did not lessen his tearful gratitude. A comrade policeman hung the cuffs on his belt and gave Gao Yang a shove. “Inside!” he said gruffly, pointing to a cot near the window. “That’s yours,” he said. “From now on you’re Inmate Number Nine.”
One of his cellmates-a young fellow-jumped down off his cot and clapped his hands. “Welcome, comrade-in-arms. Welcome.” The metal door clanged shut. The young fellow made drumrolls with his mouth and, in the cramped space, began twirling and prancing about. Gao Yang watched him nervously. His head had been shaved, but it had so many little dents that tufts of dark hair the razor missed gave his scalp an ugly, mottled look. As the young fellow twirled around the makeshift cell, Gao Yang’s view of him alternated between a pale, gaunt face and a mole-spotted back. He was so skeletal he didn’t seem to have any hips at all, and when he pranced around the cell he looked like one of those paper figures that turn somersaults when you squeeze the sticks they’re tied between.
Someone outside banged the door with a hard object, then shouted. Almost immediately a somber, angular face appeared in the window high on the door. “Number Seven, what the hell are you up to?” the face thundered.
The young fellow stopped dancing, rolled his not-quite-white eyes, and looked at the face in the window. “Nothing, Officer.”
“Then why are you hopping around?” the angular face asked sternly. “And why are you shouting?” Gao Yang saw the glinting blade of a bayonet.
“I’m exercising.”
“Who said you could exercise in here, you dumb prick?”
“Aha!” The young inmate blurted out as he walked up to the door. “So, as an officer, you enjoy calling people names, is that it? Chairman Mao’s instructions say; ‘Don’t beat people, and don’t call them names!’ I want to see the man in charge. We’ll find out if you can talk to me like that!”
The guard-the so-called officer-banged the bars of the window with his rifle butt. “Hold your tongue, or I’ll get the turnkey to cuff you!”
The young inmate turned and ran back to his cot, holding his head in his hands and begging shamelessly. Officer, good Uncle, I’ve stopped, see, I’m sorry, please!”
“Shitty little prick!” the face grumbled as it disappeared from the window. Gao Yang heard the staccato sound of boots retreating down the corridor, which seemed endless. When Gao Yang was brought here in the police van, he was taken down the long corridor, past one steel door after another, one small window after another, behind which a parade of ashen faces appeared; they looked like white-paper cutouts, which he could have crumbled merely by blowing on them.
He dimly recalled watching two comrade policemen lift the horse-faced young man down off the van, the white tunic still wrapped around his head. A stretcher arrived then, if he wasn’t mistaken, and the young man was carried away on it. He tried to imagine what happened to him after that, but those thoughts just confused him, so he gave up.
It was a murky cell, with gray flooring, gray walls, and gray cots; even the eating bowls were gray. The last few rays of light from the setting sun filtered in through ‘ the barred window, turning portions of the gray wall a reddish purple. All that was visible through the window was a blue derrick, outfitted with a glass cage that shimmered in the sunlight. A flock of doves, wings painted a golden red, swept past the cage, their mournful cries making Gao Yang tremble with fear. They flew out of sight, then changed course and returned, accompanied by the same cries.
A hunched-over old man walked up to the disoriented Gao Yang and touched him with a quaking finger. “Smoke… a smoke… new man… got a smoke?” he squeaked.
Gao Yang, barefoot and barechested, was wearing only a pair of baggy shorts, and his skin crawled when the old man’s sticky, rank-smelling hand touched it. Somehow he kept from screaming. Rebuffed, the old man shuffled off angrily and curled up on his cot.
“What’re you in for, my man?” a voice across from Gao Yang asked offhandedly.
Gao Yang couldn’t make out the man’s features in the murky darkness, but instinct told him that he was middle-aged. He was sitting on the concrete floor and resting his large head against a gray cot. “I…” Gao Yang was reluctant to answer. “I’m not sure.”
“Are you saying you were framed?” the man said with hostility.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Gao Yang defended himself.
“Don’t lie to me!” the man snapped, pointing menacingly with a pudgy black finger. “You can’t fool me-you’re in for rape.”
“Not me,” Gao Yang protested bashfully. “I’ve got a wife and kids. How could I do something despicable like that?”