Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (72 page)

One of Mo Yan’s classmates from his writers workshop days was directing a TV drama about the bandit annihilation campaign by the People’s Liberation Army. One of the characters was nicknamed Lan Lian, or Blue Face, a bandit who cut down humans as if they were blades of grass but was a devoted, filial son to his mother. Mo Yan introduced me to his friend as a means for me to earn a bit of extra money The director had a full beard, a pate as bald as Shakespeare’s, and a nose as crooked as Dante’s. As soon as he saw me, he slapped his thigh and said, I’ll be damned! We won’t have to worry about makeup!

We were picked up by Ximen Jinlong’s Cadillac to be driven back to Ximen Village. The red-faced driver refused to let me get in, so your son scowled at him and said:

“You think this is a dog, is that it? Well, he’s an apostle who loved my grandmother more than any member of the family!”

We’d barely left the county town when snow began to fall, tiny flakes like salt crystals. The ground was blanketed with white by the time we reached the village, and we heard a distant relative who’d come to mourn Grandma’s passing shout tearfully:

“Heaven and earth are weeping for you, Great-Aunt. Your goodness has moved the world!”

Like a soloist in a choir, his wails were contagious; I could hear Ximen Baofeng’s hoarse crying, Ximen Jinlong’s majestic wailing, and Wu Qiuxiang’s melodic weeping.

As soon as they stepped out of the car, Huzhu and Hezuo buried their faces in their hands and began to cry. Your son and Ximen Huan held their mothers up by their arms. In anguish I walked along behind them. My eldest dog brother had died by then, but doddering old Dog Two, who was lying at the base of the wall, greeted me with a low whimper; I was too upset to return the greeting. Streams of cold air seemed to crawl up my legs and into my body, where they turned my innards into ice, I was trembling, my limbs were stiff as boards, and my reactions were hopelessly dulled. I knew I’d gotten very old.

Your mother was already in her coffin; the lid lay off to the side. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. Jinlong and Baofeng were kneeling at opposite ends of the coffin. Her hair was uncombed. His eyes were red and puffy; the front of his shirt was tear-stained. Huzhu and Hezuo threw themselves onto the coffin, pounded the sides, and cried bitterly.

“Mother, oh, Mother, why did you have to leave before we came home? Mother, it was you who held us up, now we have nothing! How can any of us go on living?” Your wife’s lament.

“Mother, oh, Mother, you suffered all your life, how could you leave just when you could finally enjoy life?” Huzhu’s lament.

Their tears wetted your mother’s funeral clothes and the yellow paper covering her face. It almost seemed as if the paper had been wetted by tears from the dead.

Your son and Ximen Huan knelt by their mothers’ sides; one’s face was dark as iron, the other’s white as snow.

Xu Xuerong and his wife were in charge of the funeral arrangements. With a shriek of alarm, Mrs. Xu pulled Huzhu and Hezuo’s faces away from the coffin.

“Oh, no, all you mourners, you mustn’t shed tears on her body. If she carries tears from the living, she may be stuck in a life and death cycle. ...”

Master Xu took a look around.

“Are all the close relatives here?”

No response.

“I ask you, are all the close relatives here?”

The distant relatives exchanged glances, but no one responded.

A distant cousin pointed to the west-side room and said softly:

“Go ask the old gentleman.”

I followed Master Xu over to the west-side room, where your father was sitting against the wall weaving a pot cover with dry sorghum stalks and hemp. A kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lit up that little section of the room. His face was a blur, except for his eyes, from which two bright lights shone. He was sitting on a stool, holding a nearly completed pot lid between his knees. A rustling sound emerged as he wove the hemp around the sorghum stalks.

“Sir,” Master Xu said, “did you send a letter to Jiefang? If he can get here in the next little while, I think—”

“Close the coffin!” your father said. “Raising a dog is better than raising a son!”

When she heard I was going to be in a TV show, Chunmiao said she wanted to be in it too. So we went to Mo Yan, who went to the director, who, when he saw Chunmiao, said she could play the part of Blue Face’s younger sister. The series was planned for thirty episodes, with ten stand-alone stories, each dealing with a bandit annihilation campaign. The director gave us a summary of what we’d be doing: After the gang led by the bandit Blue Face has been dispersed, he flees into the mountains alone. Knowing his reputation as a filial son, the PLA convinces his sister and mother to fake the mother’s death and sends his sister into the mountains to pass on the news. Blue Face comes down from the mountains in his mourning garments and goes straight to his mother’s bier, where PLA soldiers, who are staked out among the mourners, rush up and pin him to the floor. At that moment, his mother sits up in her coffin and says, Son, the PLA always treats its prisoners humanely, so please surrender to them. . . . “Got it?” the director asked us. “Got it,” we said.

Before sealing the coffin, Mistress Xu lifted the yellow paper covering your mother’s face and said:

“Filial mourners, take one last look. But please control yourselves and do not let tears fall on her face.”

Your mother’s face was puffy and jaundiced-looking, almost as if a thin layer of gold powder had been applied. Her eyes were open a crack, enough to release a pair of cold gleams, as if to scold everyone who looked upon her dead face.

“Mother, why have you left me to live as an orphan? . . .” Ximen Jinlong was wailing so bitterly a pair of cousins had to come up and pull him back from the coffin.

“Mother, my dear mother, take me with you. . . .” Baofeng banged her head against the side of the coffin, producing dull thuds. People dragged her away. Ma Gaige, his hair prematurely gray, wrapped his arm around his mother to keep her from throwing herself on the coffin.

Your wife gripped the edge of the coffin and wept, open-mouthed, until her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell backward. Several of the mourners rushed up and dragged her off to the side, where some of them rubbed the skin between her thumb and forefinger and others pinched the spot beneath her nose to revive her. Slowly she regained consciousness.

Master Xu signaled for the carpenters to come inside with their tools. They carefully picked up the lid and placed it over the body of a woman who had died with her eyes still slightly open. As the nails were pounded in, the chorus of wails reached another crescendo.

Over the next two days, Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo sat on grass mats watching over the coffin from opposite ends, day and night. Lan Kaifang and Ximen Huan sat on stools at the head of the coffin facing each other and burning spirit money in an earthenware platter; at the other end, two thick red candles burned in front of your mother’s spirit tablet, the smoke merging solemnly with paper ash floating in the air.

A steady stream of mourners passed by Master Xu, who meticulously recorded every gift of spirit money, which quickly piled up beneath the apricot tree. It was such a cold day that he had to blow on the tip of his pen to keep the ink flowing. A layer of frost covered his beard; ice formed on the branches of the tree, turning it silver.

Under the director’s guidance, we assumed the moods of our characters. I had to keep reminding myself that I was not Lan Jiefang, but the ruthless bandit Blue Face, a man who had planted a bomb in his stove to explode in his wife’s face when she lit the stove to cook breakfast, and who had cut the tongue out of a boy who had called him by my nickname, Blue Face. I was grief-stricken over the death of my mother, but had to control my tears and bury my sorrow in my heart. My tears were too precious to let them flow like water from a tap. But at the sight of Chunmiao in mourning attire, her face dirtied, my personal grief overwhelmed the part I was playing; my emotions supplanted his. So I tried again, but the director still was not satisfied. Mo Yan was on the set that day, and the director went over and said something to him. I heard Mo Yan reply, “You’re taking this too seriously, Baldy He. If you don’t help me here, you and I are no longer friends.” Then Mo Yan took us aside and said, “What’s wrong with you? Do you have overactive tear glands or what? Chunmiao can cry if she wants, but all you need to do is shed a few tears. It’s not your mother who’s died, it’s the bandit’s. Three episodes, at three thousand RMB apiece for you and two thousand for Chunmiao. That’s enough for you two to live on nicely. Here’s the trick: do not mix this woman in the coffin up with your own mother, who’s back home wearing silks and satins and eating fine food. All you have to do is imagine the coffin filled with fifteen thousand RMB!”

Forty sedans drove into Ximen Village on the day of the interment, even though the road was covered with snow, which their exhaust pipes turned black. They parked across from the Ximen family compound, where the third son of the Sun family, a red armband over his sleeve, directed traffic. The drivers stayed in their cars and kept their engines running, creating a blanket of white mist.

All the late-arriving mourners were people of means and power, most of them officials in the county; a few were Ximen Jinlong’s friends from other counties. Villagers braved the cold to stand outside the gate waiting for the clamor that would accompany the emergence of the coffin. Over those several days everyone seemed to forget about me, so I just hung around with Dog Two, strolling here and there. Your son fed me twice: once he tossed me a steamed bun, the other time he tossed me some frozen chicken wings. I ate the bun, but not the wings. Sad events from the past as Ximen Nao kept rising up from deep in my memory. Forgetting sometimes that I was in my fourth reincarnation, I felt myself to be the head of this household, a man whose wife had just died; at other times I understood that the yin and the yang were different worlds, and that the affairs of the human world were unrelated to me, a dog.

Most of the people out to watch the procession were elderly, or were snot-nosed little children; the younger men and women were working in town. The oldsters told the children all about how Ximen Nao had seen his own mother off in a four-inch-thick cypress coffin carried by twenty-four strong men. The funeral streamers and wreaths had stood in an unbroken line on both sides of the street, and every fifty paces a tent had been thrown up to accommodate roadside sacrifices of whole pigs, watermelons, oversize steamed buns ... I didn’t stick around to hear any more. Those were memories too painful to recall. I was now a dog only, one who did not have many more years in him. The officials who had decided to attend the interment were all wearing black overcoats with black scarves. Some — the bald or balding — were sporting black marten caps. Those without caps had full heads of hair. The snow covering their heads beautifully matched the white paper flowers in their lapels.

At noon a Red Flag sedan, followed by a black Audi, drove up to the Ximen compound. Ximen Jinlong, in mourning attire, rushed out to greet the new arrival. The driver opened the door, and out stepped Pang Kangmei in a black wool overcoat. Her face looked even fairer than usual, owing to the contrast with her coat. Deep wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes were new since the last time I’d seen her. A man, probably her secretary, pinned a white funeral flower to her coat. Though she cut an imposing figure, a look of deep sadness filled her eyes, undetectable by most people. She held out her hand, encased in a black glove, and greeted Jinlong, who took her hand in his. Her comment was pregnant with hidden meaning:

“Keep your grief under control, be calm, don’t lose your cool!”

Jinlong, looking equally solemn, nodded.

The good girl Pang Fenghuang followed Kangmei out of the car. Already taller than her mother, she was not only beautiful but fashionable, with a white down jacket over blue jeans and a pair of white lambskin loafers. She wore a white wool-knit cap on her head and no makeup — she didn’t need to.

“This is your uncle Ximen,” Kangmei said to her daughter.

“How do you do, Uncle?” Fenghuang said reluctantly.

“I want you to go up to Grandma’s coffin and kowtow,” Kangmei said with deep emotion. “She helped raise you.”

I imagined that there were fifteen thousand RMB in the coffin, spread all around, not tied in bundles, ready to fly out when the lid was removed. It worked. I strode into the yard, holding Chunmiao by the arm; I could feel her stumbling along behind me, like a child being dragged along against her will. I burst into the room, where I was immediately confronted by a mahogany coffin whose lid was standing against the wall, waiting to be placed on top — after my arrival. A dozen or so people were standing around the coffin, some in mourning attire, some in street clothes. I knew that most of them were PLA in disguise, and that in a moment they were going to pin me to the floor. I saw Blue Face’s mother lying in the coffin, her face covered by a sheet of yellow paper. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. I fell to my knees in front of the coffin.

“Mother,” I wailed, “your unfilial son has come too late . . .”

Your mother’s coffin finally emerged through the gateway, accompanied by the mournful wails of those who survived her and funeral music provided by a renowned peasant musician’s troupe. Excitement spread among the bystanders, who had waited a long time for this moment. The musicians were preceded by two men carrying long bamboo poles to clear the way ahead. White mourning cloth hung from the ends of the poles, like antisparrow poles. They were followed by ten or fifteen boys carrying funeral banners, for which they would be richly rewarded, reason enough for them to beam happily. Behind this youthful honor guard came two men who covered the procession route with spirit money Next came a four-man purple canopy protecting your mother’s spirit tablet, on which, in ancient script, was written: “Wife of Ximen Nao, Surnamed Bai, called Yingchun.” Everyone who saw this tablet knew that Ximen Jinlong had established his mother’s lineage as the deceased spouse not of Lan Lian but of his biological father, Ximen Nao, and not as concubine but as legal wife. This, of course, was highly unconventional, for a remarried woman was normally not entitled to interment near her original husband’s family graves. But Jinlong broke with this tradition. Then came your mother’s mahogany casket, followed by the direct descendants of the deceased, all walking with willow lamentation canes. Your son, Ximen Huan, and Ma Gaige had simply thrown a white funeral sackcloth over their street clothes and wrapped their heads in white fabric. Each supported his grieving mother, all shedding silent tears. Jinlong trailed his lamentation cane behind him, stopping frequently to go down on his knees and wail, shedding red tears. Baofeng’s voice was raspy, all but inaudible. Her eyes were glassy and her mouth hung open, but there were no tears or sounds. Your son, with his lean frame, had to support the entire weight of your wife, requiring the assistance of some of the other mourners. She wasn’t walking to the cemetery, she was being carried along. Huzhu’s loose black hair caught everyone’s attention. Normally worn in a braid and encased in a black net, now, in accordance with funeral protocol, she let it fall loosely around her shoulders, like a black cataract spreading out on the ground, muddying the tips. A distant niece of the deceased, who had her wits about her, trotted ahead, scooped up Huzhu’s hair, and laid it across her bent elbow. Many of the bystanders were whispering comments regarding Huzhu’s miraculous hair. Someone said, Ximen Jinlong lives amid a cloud of beautiful women, but he won’t ask his wife for a divorce. Why? Because the life he lives has been bestowed upon him by his wife. It is her miraculous hair that has brought him wealth and prosperity.