Dream of Ding Village (12 page)

‘But you’re not even fifty. You’re too young to retire.’

‘If I do make a comeback, Ding Hui, I hope you’ll be my second-in-charge.’

‘I already told the county governor and the director of education that if you don’t come out of retirement and take command, they could beat me to death and I still wouldn’t accept the post.’

‘How much blood have you taken?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s almost full.’

Soon the bag was full to bursting. When Uncle took it down from the tree, it jiggled like a distended hot-water bottle.

From the shadowy field rose the thick, sweet stench of blood. A smell like freshly picked red berries boiling in a pot of water. After uncle had removed the needle from the crook of Li Sanren’s arm and begun packing up his equipment, my father handed the former mayor a crisp 100-yuan note.

‘Do you need change?’ Li Sanren asked.

‘Well, the price of plasma is down,’ answered Dad. ‘It’s only eighty yuan per bag now.’

‘Then I’ll give you twenty back.’

‘No, Mr Mayor,’ Dad said, grasping him by the hand, ‘please don’t insult me. It’s just a few yuan. Even if it were fifty yuan, I still couldn’t take it.’

Li Sanren sheepishly accepted the money. His face was unnaturally pale. His pallor, and the beads of sweat pouring down his face, made him look like a wax figure that had been left out in the rain. He tried to stand up and walk back to his field, but before he had taken more than a few steps, he began to sway and had to squat down on the ground, leaning on the handle of his pickaxe.

‘Ding Hui!’ he cried. ‘I’m feeling dizzy. It’s like everything is spinning.’

‘I didn’t make you sell your blood,’ Dad chided. ‘But you insisted. Want us to turn you upside down and get your blood flowing again?’

‘Might as well try,’ Li Sanren agreed.

He lay back down on the ground and allowed Dad and Uncle to grasp his legs and lift him into the air until he was hanging upside down. They let him dangle there for a while, gently shaking his legs to get the blood moving towards his head, as though he were a pair of just-washed trousers they were trying to shake the excess water from.

When they had finished shaking him, they lowered him to the ground. ‘Feeling any better?’

Li Sanren stood up slowly, took a few steps and smiled. ‘Much better. When you’ve lived through everything I have, there’s nothing scary about selling a little blood.’

Dad and Uncle got into their three-wheeled cart and began pedalling away.

Still unsteady on his feet and leaning on his pickaxe for support, Li Sanren headed back to his field to continue his work. Watching him, Dad and Uncle were worried he might collapse again, but fortunately he didn’t. When he reached the centre of his field, Li Sanren turned back and shouted, ‘Don’t forget, Ding Hui! If I become mayor again, I want you as my second-in-command!’

Dad and Uncle turned to smile at him and continued on their way. When they reached the entrance to the village, they noticed that there seemed to be a lot of villagers lying about in the sunshine, on every small slope or bit of slanted ground. They had their feet elevated and heads pointed downhill, as was their practice when they’d just given blood and felt dizzy. Other villagers had taken wooden doors from their courtyards and propped them up on two differently sized stools, to form a slanted platform on which they could recline. Some of the younger men stood on their heads with their heels resting against walls, a pastime known as ‘irrigating the brain’. Dad and Uncle realized that while they had been away collecting blood in another village, a different crew of bloodheads had come to Ding Village to poach their customers. They stopped in the street and stared around them. Dad was too shocked to speak; Uncle too angry not to.

‘You motherfuckers!’ Uncle shouted. ‘You fucking motherfuckers!’

It wasn’t clear who he was cursing, the villagers or the bloodheads.

Li Sanren was not yet fifty when he started selling his blood. Once he started selling, there was no going back. In the blood trade, there were beginnings but no endings. By the time Li Sanren realized he had the fever, he was nearly sixty. Because
of his age, the disease seemed to hit him harder than it did anyone else, leaving him too weak to speak. It was an ending, of sorts. It was an ending to all his years of hoping that he might become mayor again. After ten years, Ding Village still had no local cadre, and the higher-ups had never bothered to appoint a new mayor.

Li Sanren had aged rapidly. Nearing sixty, he looked more like a man in his seventies. It seemed likely that he would die soon, perhaps even in a matter of months. His illness had reached a critical stage. He walked slowly, painfully, as if his feet were weighted down with boulders. ‘I don’t see why you can’t live in the school like all the others,’ his wife complained, ‘instead of staying home and making me wait on you all day long.’ And so the former mayor moved into the school to live with the other sick villagers. After that, he rarely ever spoke. He spent his days alone, taking slow solitary walks in the schoolyard, watching but never interacting with the others. Each night, he climbed into the bed he’d made in a corner of the classroom and went to sleep. It was as if he spent every day waiting to die. But on this particular day, the sun had come out, and it was dazzling …

Ding Village was alive with flowers, blanketing the earth with colour and filling the sky with their perfume. The villagers waded through this sea of flowers, some digging in the ground with spades and shovels, others carrying loads on their shoulders or backs. Too winded by their exertions to speak, they worked steadily and silently; faces glistening with sweat and wreathed in smiles, they bustled here and there, back and forth. From his position at the entrance to the village, Grandpa could see Li Sanren emerging from the fields, carrying two baskets on a bamboo shoulder pole. Because the baskets were draped with sheets, Grandpa could not see what was in them, but judging from the way they sagged towards the ground, the contents must have been incredibly heavy. With every step he took, the shoulder pole creaked and groaned under the weight of those baskets. Now that his
illness was full-blown, Li Sanren certainly didn’t have much longer to live, but he seemed happy somehow, his face beaming as he shouldered his heavy burden. As he drew nearer, Grandpa rushed up and asked what he was carrying, but like the other villagers, Li Sanren smiled and said nothing. He paused for a moment to shift the weight of the pole to his other shoulder, then brushed past grandpa and continued on his way. He seemed to be heading home. Just then, Li Sanren’s five- or six-year-old grandson appeared out of nowhere, clutching a large bundle – it seemed to be something wrapped in clothing – in his arms. Shouting ‘Grandpa! Grandpa!’ as he ran, the little boy tried to catch up with Li Sanren. As he passed my grandfather, the little boy tripped over a winter-jasmine bush that had sprung up in the middle of the road, and went tumbling head over heels. The bundle flew from his arms, its contents falling into the road with much clinking and clanging. Turning to see what had caused such a racket, my grandfather froze in amazement. Joyous amazement. Never in his life could he have imagined what was contained in that bundle: there were glittering gold bars, shiny gold coins, and golden nuggets the size of plump peanuts. Beneath the surface of the flower-filled plain, there was gold growing in the soil. It had been there all along. Sitting in the middle of the road and staring at the gold that had slipped from his grasp, Li Sanren’s little grandson began to cry. Thinking that he ought to help the boy, Grandpa walked over and stretched out his arm
…
and in that moment …

The dream ended. Grandpa was awake.

It was Li Sanren, standing beside his bed, who had woken him.

Grandpa realized he must have been asleep. At least, it seemed like he had been asleep. He had a hazy recollection of Li
Sanren tiptoeing into his room and standing beside his bed for a while, before whispering, ‘Shuiyang … Ding Shuiyang?’ That was what had woken him.

Grandpa noticed that his arm was lying on top of his quilt, rather than tucked warmly underneath. It was the same outstretched arm he had offered to Li Sanren’s little grandson. He could remember the scene vividly, he could still see it … he could see …

… a vast expanse of flowers on the plain, a sea of flowers covering Ding Village, the surrounding fields and the distant riverbed where once the Yellow River flowed. A rainbow of sparkling colours, and underneath, the glitter of gold
…
gold bricks, gold tiles, gold bars, gold nuggets, gold lumps and bits of gold as tiny and as numerous as grains of wheat or sand
…
Grandpa shut his eyes, trying to picture the flowers and the gold that grew beneath them, hoping to recapture the scene
…

But the scene had faded. It was gone.

Hearing his name being whispered again, Grandpa rolled over in bed with a smile, ready to tell Li Sanren about the dream he had been having. But as soon as he saw the stricken look on Li Sanren’s face, the words died on his lips.

‘Sanren, what’s happened?’ Grandpa asked, sitting up in his bed.

‘That goddamned thief …’ Li Sanren’s voice was choked with anger. ‘He has no respect for anything. There’s nothing that bastard won’t steal.’

‘What have you lost?’

‘The one thing I couldn’t afford to lose.’

‘What on earth did you lose?’ Grandpa asked impatiently, throwing on his clothes. ‘Honestly, Sanren, when you were the mayor, no one could out-talk you. These days, you can’t even form a coherent sentence.’

Li Sanren searched Grandpa’s face. After a moment of hesitation, he spoke. ‘I might as well tell you the truth, Shuiyang. After I left office, I kept the official seal of the village
party committee. I thought that since the village didn’t have a mayor or a party secretary, I ought to hold on to it for safekeeping. All these years, I’ve never let it out of my sight. Last night before I went to sleep, I hid the seal and a bit of cash under my pillow. When I woke up this morning, they were gone.

‘I don’t care about the cash,’ Li Sanren continued earnestly. ‘But I can’t afford to lose that seal. I’ve got to get it back, no matter what. It hasn’t left my sight in ten years, but when I looked this morning, it was gone.’

The sky was growing light, filling the room with pale sunshine. Noticing that Uncle had not returned, and that his bed had not been slept in, Grandpa’s face darkened into a scowl. For a moment, he seemed to forget all about the stolen seal. Then, catching sight of Li Sanren’s shrunken, emaciated body and desperate expression, Grandpa asked: ‘How much money is missing?’

‘I don’t care about the money, but I have to get that seal back.’

‘How much did you lose?’ Grandpa insisted.

‘Like I said, the money doesn’t matter. But I have to find the seal.’

Grandpa stared at Li Sanren. He’d never seen him like this before, so agitated. After a moment, Grandpa asked quietly: ‘How do you suggest we find it?’

‘Search the school.’ Li Sanren’s voice was cold. ‘Shuiyang, you’ve been a teacher all your life, and you always taught your students not to steal. Now you’ve invited all these sick villagers to live in the school, and they’re thieving right under your nose.’

Without replying, Grandpa left the room. Li Sanren followed him out into the courtyard.

Already, the eastern horizon was a pool of golden light …
a sea of golden flowers, covering the earth and sky, linking every plot and every field
…
flowers piled as high as mountain ranges, stretching into the distance
…
flowers tumbling into the schoolyard, drowning the school in petals
…

The two-storey schoolhouse was quiet. All the residents were still asleep. On early winter mornings like this, it was warmer to stay huddled under the blankets.

Outside in the schoolyard, a magpie was singing from high in the branches of the paulownia tree. The magpie’s song was said to be a good omen, the herald of a joyous event. It could only mean that something wonderful had happened in the schoolyard: someone in the school must have cause to celebrate.

Hanging from a low branch of the tree was a square of sheet metal, a makeshift gong that functioned as a school bell. Removing a metal bar from a fork in the tree, Grandpa struck it against the gong, setting off a loud clanging. It was the signal for all the residents to assemble immediately in the schoolyard.

The metal sheet, long unused, was corroded with rust. As Grandpa struck it with the steel bar, flakes of rust fell from its surface. Since students had stopped coming to class, the ‘school bell’ had been out of use, reduced to an ornament, much like the flagpole that rose from a cement platform on the east side of the schoolyard. In the past, every school day had begun with the requisite flag-raising ceremony. Now the flagpole stood empty, a forgotten relic of days gone by.

But now, once more, the school was filled with a familiar sound: the clanging and banging of a gong echoing through the schoolyard like musket fire.

Residents wrapped in coats began appearing at the second-storey windows. ‘What’s going on?’ they shouted.

In the same tone of voice that he had used during his days as the village mayor, Li Sanren shouted back. ‘Assembly! Everyone gather in the yard for assembly!’

‘Did you catch the thief?’ someone asked.

‘Come down for assembly,’ Li Sanren hollered back, ‘and you’ll find out!’

Villagers began to emerge from the schoolhouse, some rubbing the sleep from their eyes, others pulling on or buttoning up clothes. They streamed into the schoolyard, filling the assembly ground between the paulownia tree and the basket-ball
court. Uncle and Lingling were there, too. In the confusion, no one had seen them slip out of the storeroom and blend in with the crowd. Both were still adjusting their clothing, their faces glowing with such radiance that, if you didn’t know better, you’d never guess they were sick. They stood some distance apart, like two people who barely knew each other (and certainly hadn’t just spent the night together).