 | | "I'm not drunk.
It's just that my heart is broken.
But why are you,
little rapeseed flowers,
weeping too?
If you are brokenhearted,
I'll join you in a glass . . ."
|
She lay there as though she was on a bed of yellow brocade.
|
She picked some rapeseed and flicked it against her breasts and sang:
|
| | "One glass after another . . .
one glass after another . . ."
|
The intoxicating effect of the wine hit her and she felt dizzy.
|
A man who looked like a peasant with a hoe over his shoulder was standing there.
|
She flicked her braided hair back and set her Red Guard armband straight.
|
He didn't seem to understand.
|
". . . but what are you doing in our mountains?"
|
"Revolution, rebellion, struggle, link-ups."
|
"No . . . but I've been cut off from my company."
|
"It's getting dark. Stay here."
|
She went back to the village with him.
|
The village was called Eight Mile Ravine and consisted of about twenty families scattered through the hills. Before Liberation it had been a Revolutionary Base. Later, in particular after the communes, Party cadres virtually never came here. There was no electricity and someone went to the commune once a week to collect the papers.
|
That night she stayed at his place and asked him:
|
"How come all the women in the village are deaf, mute or crippled?"
|
"You don't understand," he said as he rolled himself a cigarette. "We're so poor here and the weather's so badsand storms in the summer, snow in the winterand we survive just eating gruel made out of dried sweet potatoes, that no decent-looking girl would ever come here."
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