Dream of Ding Village (10 page)

With an effort, Grandpa sat up in his bed. ‘Honestly, boy, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.’

‘Dad, there’s something you don’t know. The truth is, Tingting was engaged to someone else before she married me. His family lives in the same village as her mother. That’s the reason why I’m so worried.’

Grandpa peered up at his son but said nothing. In the darkness, he couldn’t see Uncle’s face, just a shadowy figure looming close to the door. He might just as well be looking at a charred pillar of wood.

After a while, Grandpa asked, ‘Did you take your medicine today?’

‘Don’t bother, Dad. I know there’s no cure for what I’ve got.’

‘Even so, there’s no harm in trying.’

‘Forget it. If the fever can’t be cured, it can’t be cured. I just hope I can manage to give it to Tingting, so she can’t get remarried after I’m gone. Then I’ll be able to rest in peace.’

Grandpa recoiled, too stunned to speak.

Uncle opened the door, pulling on his coat as he left, and stepped outside. In the empty schoolyard, pale moonlight covered the ground like a thin layer of ice. Uncle trod carefully, like a man crossing a frozen lake, trying not to break the glassy surface. After a few tentative steps, he stopped and glanced over at the two-storey schoolhouse to the west. The upstairs and downstairs classrooms had been turned into dormitories for the sick, each housing between five and eight adult men and women. The school was now a hospice for people with the fever.

But it was also home to a thief.

Inside the school, everyone was asleep. Uncle could hear people snoring, the sound echoing through the courtyard like a deep rumble travelling through pipes. As Uncle walked towards the darkened building, he thought he saw something, or someone, huddled in the shadows. It looked like the thief, bending down to leave the bag of rice he’d stolen. Uncle quickened his pace.

As he drew closer, he saw that it was a person squatting on the ground. Not just any person, but his cousin’s wife, Lingling, who had married into the village just six months earlier.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Me. Is that you, Ding Liang?’

‘Lingling? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?’

‘I wanted to find out which of your villagers was the thief. I wanted to see who stole my new silk jacket.’

Uncle laughed. ‘It seems that you and I think alike. I was hoping to get a look at the thief, too, and find out who stole your jacket.’ Uncle squatted on the ground next to Lingling, who moved over to make room for him. Crouched side by side in the shadows, they looked like two sacks of grain leaning against the wall of the building.

The moon cast its light on a stray cat that was chasing after a mouse in the far corner of the schoolyard. The two creatures scurried across the basketball court, their claws scrabbling on the sand-covered ground.

‘Lingling,’ Uncle said. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘I used to be afraid of everything,’ she answered. ‘I couldn’t even watch someone kill a chicken without my knees going weak. When I started selling blood, I got braver. Now that I know I’ve got this disease, nothing scares me any more.’

‘Why did you sell your blood in the first place?’

‘So I could buy a bottle of nice shampoo. There was a girl in our village who used a certain kind of shampoo that made her hair as smooth as silk. I wanted to try it, too, but it was expensive. The girl told me that she had paid for the shampoo by selling blood, so I decided to do the same.’

When Lingling had finished, Uncle stared up at the sky for a long time. It looked like a pool of deep blue water.

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said at last.

‘Why did
you
do it?’

‘My older brother was a bloodhead. I saw all these other people going to him to sell their blood, so finally I did, too.’

Lingling gazed at Uncle thoughtfully. ‘Everyone says your brother’s a cheat. They say he drew a pint and a half of blood for every pint he paid for.’

This made Uncle laugh. He flashed Lingling a smile and nudged her elbow.

‘Seeing that someone stole your jacket,’ he said, shifting away from the topic of blood, ‘have you thought about getting your own back by stealing from someone else?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘A person has to consider her reputation.’

‘If we’re going to die soon, why should we care about our reputation? You lived a respectable life, but when your husband heard you had the fever, he beat you, didn’t he? Not only did he stop caring, not only did he stop loving you, but he had to slap you around a bit before he kicked you out.’

Uncle was quiet for a moment. ‘If it were me,’ he continued, ‘I wouldn’t have told him in the first place. I’d have given him the fever. It would have served him right.’

Lingling stared at Uncle, scandalized. She shifted her body a little further away from his, as though he were a stranger to be avoided, or a thief she didn’t want to get too close to.

‘Did you pass the disease to your wife?’ she asked.

‘No, but I will, eventually.’

Uncle was squatting on the concrete, his back and head leaning against the brick wall. The cold from the bricks seeped through his padded coat and on to his skin. He suddenly felt a chill run down his spine, as if someone were pouring freezing water down his back. He lowered his head, and two streams of tears rolled down his cheeks.

Lingling could not see his tears, but she heard the rasp in his voice.

‘Do you hate your wife?’ she asked, lowering her head to look at him.

‘She was always good to me,’ Uncle answered, wiping away tears, ‘until she found out I was sick.’ Emboldened by the darkness, he turned to face his cousin’s wife. ‘I want to tell you something, Lingling, and I don’t care if you laugh at me.
I’m not embarrassed. Ever since I got sick, my wife won’t let me touch her. Can you believe that? I’m not even thirty years old, and my own wife won’t let me come near her.’

Lingling lowered her head again, as if she were trying to touch it on the ground. For a very long time, she did not speak. My uncle couldn’t see her face but she was blushing hotly, the blood burning in her cheeks. After what seemed like a long time – when her hot skin had regained its coolness – only then did Lingling dare to raise her head and look at Uncle.

‘It’s the same for all of us, Ding Liang,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not afraid to tell you, either … After my husband found out I was sick, he never touched me again. I was only twenty-four, and only married a few months. We were newlyweds.’

At long last, Lingling and my uncle turned to face each other.

They gazed into one another’s eyes, their faces very close.

Although the moon had already passed overhead, the schoolyard glowed like the frozen surface of a pond, like light reflected in a pane of glass. Even in the shadows where they were sitting, Lingling and Uncle could see each other’s faces clearly. They could see every little detail.

It occurred to Uncle that Lingling’s face was like an apple, a plump ripe apple ready for picking. The brown patches on her face were like markings on an apple, signs of the sweetness beneath the skin. Some people thought that apples with spots were more desirable, more full of flavour. Uncle gazed at Lingling hungrily. Breathing in the scent of her skin, he thought he could detect a faint whiff of the virginal – the clean, unsullied water of a mountain spring. But Lingling also had the tinge of a newlywed, like a dash of cold water added to a pot of water just as it is about to boil over.

Uncle cleared his throat and summoned his courage. ‘Lingling,’ he announced boldly. ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Ask me what?’

‘Oh, to hell with it,’ he blurted out. ‘You and I should be together.’

‘But … how can we?’ She sounded frightened.

‘Listen, both of us have been married, and both of us are going to die soon. If we want to be together, we should be. We ought to be able to do anything we please.’

Once again, Lingling seemed scandalized. She stared at my uncle in amazement, as if seeing him for the first time.

The night was getting colder. The temperature had dropped to freezing. Uncle’s face took on a bluish tinge; the brown spots on his face looked like pebbles buried in the frozen earth. Lingling gazed at him, and Uncle gazed back at her. In the end, unable to suffer the intensity of his desire, she had to turn away. Uncle’s eyes were like two dark caves that threatened to swallow her whole. Lingling lowered her head again.

‘Ding Liang,’ she spoke quietly, ‘I think you’ve forgotten that I’m married to your cousin.’

‘If he treated you well, the thought never would have crossed my mind,’ Uncle answered. ‘But your husband hasn’t been good to you, has he? He even beat you. No matter how badly my wife treated me, I never raised a hand to her.’

‘But for better or worse, you and my husband are family. He thinks of you as an older brother.’

‘Family, older brother, younger brother … what does any of that matter now? You and I are going to die soon.’

‘If anyone ever found out, they’d skin us alive.’

‘So let them. We’re not going to be alive much longer, anyway.’

‘I’m serious. If word got out, they’d kill us.’

‘Like I said, we’re all going to die soon. If people find out, at least you and I can die together.’

Lingling raised her head to look at Uncle. She gave him a searching look, as if she were trying to gauge whether or not he really was the person he said he was, a person who was going to die soon. His face, normally so pale in the daylight, looked different in the shadows, little more than a dark blur. The condensation from his breath was white against the darkness. When he spoke, it warmed her face like steam rising from a kettle.

‘When we’re dead,’ she said, ‘will we be buried together?’

‘I hope so,’ he answered.

‘My husband told me that even after he was dead, he didn’t want to be buried next to me.’

‘I hope they bury me next to you,’ Uncle said, moving his body closer.

He attempted an embrace, first taking hold of Lingling’s hand, then wrapping his arms around her. He held her as if she were a lost lamb that he’d found after years of searching. He held her tightly, as though fearing she might change her mind and try to run away again. Stroking his chest with her fingers, she allowed him to hold her.

The night was nearly over. Soon it would be light again, just another day. From across the plain came the sounds of morning stirring after a long night’s rest. This was the hour when snowdrifts, hidden in the shadows, hardened into ice. Snowflakes turned to hail, rattling through the sky like tiny grains of rice. They pattered on to the rooftops and covered the schoolyard, landing on Lingling and Uncle, as they sat huddled together, still wrapped in one another’s arms.

They sat like that for a long time. Then, without a word, they both stood up. They made their way silently to a small room next to the kitchen. It was a storage room used for food supplies and other odds and ends. Somehow, tacitly, it was the room they had decided on.

The room was warm, and they in turn filled the room with warmth.

There, in that storage room, they recaptured what it meant to be alive.

Ding Village basked in the warmth of a brilliant sun. In every direction, flowers had burst into bloom almost overnight, sweeping into the village like a tide. Luxuriant blossoms lined every street, filled every courtyard, carpeted the fields outside
the village gates. Even the dried-up channel marking the ancient path of the Yellow River was a profusion of flowers: chrysanthemums, plum blossoms, peonies, roses, wild orchids, winter jasmine, dandelions, dog-tails and several kinds of flowering grasses usually only found on mountaintops. There were shades of red and yellow, purple and pink, orange and lavender and white; purplish-red and reddish-purple, greenish-blue and bluish-green, aqua tinged with jade. There were flowers of every shape and colour, strange varieties you couldn’t begin to name – some as big as serving bowls, others small as buttons. They grew from the walls and roofs of pigsties, over chicken coops and cow pens, their pungent scent wafting through the streets, washing over Ding Village like a flood, a perfumed tide
…

Unable to fathom how hundreds of flowers could have bloomed so suddenly, Grandpa prowled the streets suspiciously, looking for signs. As he crossed the village from east to west, he noticed that the faces of the villagers – elders, adults and children alike – were all smiling. They bustled back and forth along the flower-lined streets, some balancing cloth-covered wicker baskets swinging from bamboo shoulder poles, others lugging sacks tied with rope and bulging with mysterious contents. Even tiny boys and girls of no more than a few years old seemed to be carrying heavy bundles. When Grandpa tried to ask what they were doing, no one stopped to answer him. Everyone appeared to be in a terrible hurry, rushing to and from their homes, not walking so much as running, racing from place to place
.

Grandpa began to follow a group of villagers, trailing them through flower-filled streets. It wasn’t until he reached the west end of the village that he saw what all the fuss was about: the surrounding fields were quite literally awash with flowers, a vast sea of them, an endless expanse of petals rippling in the breeze. It was magnificent. Even the sky above seemed tinged with their colours: blushing, feminine pinks and faintly erotic yellows. The villagers clustered in groups, hard at work in their families’ fields. The men wielded pickaxes, and seemed to
be digging up the soil around the roots of flowering plants and trees. It was as if they were rushing to break the soil and get their crops of sweet potatoes or peanuts planted before the winter set in
.

Grandpa also caught sight of Li Sanren, the former mayor of Ding Village, out in his family’s field. Usually so sombre and silent, he was smiling broadly as he worked alongside the other villagers. His forehead was covered in perspiration, his backside jutting out as he dug his shovel into the ground. Every so often, he would bend over, pick up a flowering plant he had unearthed and shake clods of dirt from its roots before tossing it aside and moving on to the next one. After he had uprooted and shaken a few dozen, he would squat down next to his wife and children to gather the clods of dirt from the ground and toss them into two wicker baskets. When the baskets were full, he covered them with bed sheets, lifted them on a shoulder pole and headed for home. Staggering under the weight of those baskets, Li Sanren seemed in danger of falling, but he soldiered on, forcing himself to keep walking
…