Dream of Ding Village (24 page)

Grandpa noticed a cobweb in one corner of the room. Usually my mother swept out cobwebs as soon as they appeared, but this one had fanned out from a corner of the ceiling to the top of the refrigerator. That one cobweb made the house seem different from before. For Grandpa, it was a sign that something had changed. Then he spied several large
wooden trunks in a corner behind the door. He realized as soon as he saw them. His son really was moving away.

Grandpa couldn’t take his eyes off the wooden trunks.

‘I might as well tell you,’ said my dad, taking a drag of his cigarette, ‘we’re getting ready to move.’

Grandpa turned to stare. ‘Move where?’

Dad shifted his gaze uncomfortably. ‘First to the county capital. Then, when I’ve saved a little more money, to Kaifeng.’

‘Is it true you’re vice-chairman of the county task force on HIV and AIDS?’ Grandpa asked.

My dad looked pleased. ‘Oh, so you’ve heard?’

‘And is it true that you’ve been selling coffins in Ming Village and Old Riverton the last few days?’

Surprised, my dad removed the cigarette dangling from his mouth. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Never mind where I heard it. I’m asking you if it’s true.’

My dad’s expression hardened. He stared at Grandpa and said nothing.

‘Did you or didn’t you sell two truckloads of eighty coffins in Ming Village?’ Grandpa pressed. ‘And three truckloads of a hundred and ten coffins in Old Riverton?’

Astonishment was now thick upon my dad’s face, like a layer of dried mud that could crumble at any moment. His features had frozen into a look of shock, an expression that might never thaw. Father and sons sat stiffly, three points of a triangle. The sound of my mother making noodles in the kitchen drifted through the courtyard and into the house. The soft thud of dough sounded like someone thumping a beefy hand on the wall behind them. My dad abruptly stubbed out his cigarette, grinding the long stub beneath his shoe until all that was left were shards of tobacco and confetti bits of paper. He glanced at my uncle, then turned to Grandpa, moving his gaze from Grandpa’s face to his head of white hair.

‘Dad,’ he said. ‘Now that you know everything you need to, there’s no use talking about it any more. I just want to say one thing: no matter how badly you treat me, you’ll always
be my father and I’ll always be your son. But there’s no way I can let my family go on living in this village. I’ve talked it over with my wife, and we’ve decided to give the house and everything in it to Liang. All we’re taking are our clothes. I know Liang hasn’t got much time left, but I think his wife will come back to him if she knows he’s got the house and the furniture. I can’t believe she’d pass up a chance to inherit all the family property. As for you …’ He paused. ‘You can move with us to the city if you like, or you can stay here and look after Liang. When he’s gone, you can join us in the city and I’ll support you in your old age.’

That was all Dad had to say.

My uncle’s face was wet with tears of gratitude.

Grandpa lay tossing and turning in his bed. Try as he might, he couldn’t sleep. Since he’d left our family’s house earlier that day, his mind had been overwhelmed by thoughts of my dad selling coffins and planning to move his wife and son out of the village. Just thinking about his son trading in coffins made Grandpa wish he’d killed his first-born when he’d had the chance.
Better that he were dead
was the thought that kept Grandpa awake, and made his head ache. He suddenly remembered how feuding families on the plain would bury sticks outside their enemies’ houses as a curse. They’d take a twig from a willow or peach tree, sharpen one end and carve on it the name of the person they wished to die. Then, after smashing it against their enemy’s door or the wall of their house, they’d bury it deep in the ground as a curse against that person. Even if they knew that the person wouldn’t actually die, they still went through the motions. It might result in an early death, or an accident in which the cursed individual would break an arm or a leg, or lose a finger or toe.

Grandpa got out of bed, turned on the light and searched around until he found a willow twig. He whittled one end to
a sharp point, wrote on a piece of paper
My son Ding Hui deserves to die
, and wrapped the paper around the twig. Under cover of darkness, he snuck into the village and buried the twig behind our house.

After returning to his rooms, Grandpa quickly undressed, got back into bed and fell fast asleep.

Despite Grandpa’s willow-twig curse, my dad remained alive and well.

Zhao Dequan, however, was knocking on death’s door. He wouldn’t last the spring, the season when all living things prospered. Normally, if you had a serious illness, some life-threatening condition, all you had to do was make it through the cruel winter months and into spring. If you could hold out until then, you’d get a new lease of life, and maybe live to see another year.

But there wasn’t much hope for Zhao Dequan. The day he’d carried the old blackboard with the heavy elm frame from the school into the village, he’d had to stop many times along the road to rest. When he’d reached the village, he’d got a lot of teasing questions from the villagers: ‘Hey, Dequan, what’s with the blackboard? You teaching classes now?’ Some of them, like Grandpa, had been opposed to the sick removing the items from the school. ‘Who’d have thought when all you sick people moved into the school, you’d start divvying up public property?’ ‘Good heavens, you’re even taking the blackboards?’

Unable to answer these questions, Zhao Dequan increased his pace and hurried from the west end to the east end of the village without once stopping to rest. He turned into a narrow lane, entered his front gate, propped the blackboard up against a wall and collapsed right there in the middle of the courtyard.

Before Zhao Dequan got sick, he could easily lift 200lbs – a load of stones, say, or several sacks of rice – and carry it for miles without getting winded. But now, carrying a blackboard that couldn’t have weighed more than 100lbs, probably a lot less, for several hundred yards across the village, he was
exhausted. Drenched in sweat, wheezing like the wind through cracks, he lay paralysed on the ground, unable to get back up.

‘Why on earth would you carry a blackboard all the way home?’ asked his wife.

‘Because they gave it to me … to make my coffin,’ Zhao Dequan gasped, his face deathly pale. He tried to say something more, but his throat seemed to be blocked: he could hardly breathe, much less speak. As he coughed and gasped and tried to spit something up, his face flushed beet red. The spots on his face seemed to bulge from his skin, dark purple lumps in a blaze of red. His wife rushed over in alarm and began thumping him on the back. Zhao Dequan managed to spit something out, a ball of phlegm mixed with blood, before keeling over on the ground.

Zhao Dequan had carried his blackboard all the way home, but he would never again return to the school.

Several days later, his wife went to the school to speak to Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin. ‘Chairman Jia. Chairman Ding. When my husband first came to this school, he was able to walk and move around without any trouble. Now he’s lying in bed at home, breathing his last! You know the poor man is dying … why on earth would you give him a big heavy blackboard, when everyone else got desks and chairs? I’ve been in this village a long time, and I’ve seen other men beat and curse their women. But in all the years we’ve been married, my husband never raised a hand to me, never spoke an unkind word. Now he’s dying, and I don’t even have a coffin to bury him in. He sold his blood to support his family, and to build a nice house for me and the kids … the least we can do is make sure he has a decent coffin.’

Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin told Zhao’s wife that she was free to go through the school and take any items she fancied, provided they could be used to make a coffin. Later, as they led her through the empty rooms and deserted classrooms, she saw that the school had been picked clean. All the desks and chairs were missing. The blackboards and blackboard stands, teachers’ beds, footlockers and storage chests were all gone.
Even the mirrors had been stripped of their frames. The teachers’ quarters were empty. Ransacked. The floor was strewn with old exam papers, homework books and tattered socks. The classrooms, too, were bare, littered with scraps of paper, dust and broken bits of chalk. Other than the personal belongings of the residents and the bags of food in the kitchen, there was nothing left in the school.

They’d given everything away. They’d robbed the place clean.

The metal basketball frame stood desolate in the schoolyard, its wooden backboard missing. The residents now used it for drying their laundry. As the sun dipped towards the west, Zhao Dequan’s wife and the two chairmen stood forlorn in the schoolyard, trying to decide what to do. They had completed their tour of the school and come up empty-handed.

‘I’ll give you my chair, if you like,’ Ding Yuejin offered.

‘Forget it,’ said Jia Genzhu. ‘Let’s go and talk to that hound Ding Hui, and see if he’ll give her a coffin.’

Accompanied by a posse of other sick villagers, they paid a visit to my dad.

The scene at my family’s front gate was not a friendly one. The crowd buzzed with anger, accusations and hearsay about my dad selling coffins in other villages. They shouted that they knew he’d been selling coffins that were meant for them, coffins that the government had provided free for people dying of the fever. My dad let them shout and argue and work themselves into a frenzy, while he said nothing. Finally, Jia Genzhu raised his voice: ‘Would everyone shut up!’

As the villagers fell silent, Jia Genzhu pulled Ding Yuejin to the front of the crowd. ‘We’re the ones who helped you get those government coffins in the first place,’ Jia Genzhu told my dad. ‘So just answer us this: is it true you’ve been selling them?’

‘Yeah,’ Dad answered. ‘So what?’

‘Who have you been selling them to?’

‘To whoever wants them. If you want coffins, I’ll sell you some, too.’

Dad disappeared into the house and emerged with a brown paper envelope, from which he produced a small booklet identifying him as ‘Comrade Ding Hui, vice-chairman of the Wei county task force on HIV and AIDS.’ He then pulled out a sheaf of documents, all written on government letterhead and bearing official-looking red seals. There were letters from the party committees of Wei county and Henan province, as well as from various departments of city, county and provincial government. One document was titled ‘An Urgent Memo Regarding the Prevention of Dissemination of Information Regarding “Fever Villages” (or “AIDS villages”)’. It bore the large red seals of the provincial governor and the party committee of Henan province. Another, certified by the Henan Provincial Task Force on HIV and AIDS, read: ‘A Notice Regarding Funeral Arrangements and Subsidized Low-Price Coffins for Fever Patients’. The city and county documents, marked with the seals of the city and county task forces on HIV and AIDS, were mainly memos about memos, notices about notices, all sent down from higher levels of government.

After my dad had showed the documents to Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin, he asked: ‘Are you the co-chairmen of the Ding Village task force on HIV and AIDS?’

The two men stared at my dad and said nothing.

Taking their silence as an affirmative, my dad smiled and said: ‘Well, I’m the vice-chairman of the county task force, which means I’m in charge of coffin sales and government subsidies for fever patients in this whole county. I’m the one who approved your request for ten pounds of grain, ten pounds of rice and a cash subsidy for everyone in Ding Village with the fever … Didn’t you see my signature on the form?

‘Now,’ my dad continued. ‘The regulations say that these government-subsidized coffins can’t be sold for less than two hundred yuan each, but seeing as we’re all from Ding Village, I think I can pull a few strings and get you coffins for only a hundred and eighty each. If you submit your requests right now, I’ll have someone deliver the coffins tomorrow.’

As the sun sank in the west, a red glow settled over the village. The sweet scent of spring drifted in from the fields and dissipated through the village streets. Standing on the top step of his doorway like a political leader atop a rostrum, my dad scanned the crowd of villagers and addressed them in a loud voice:

‘These coffins are not very cheap, actually. It would cost about the same to make your own. If they were such a great bargain, don’t you think I’d have told you about it earlier?

‘Honestly, I wouldn’t sell one to my own brother, not if he asked. The wood is not even dry yet … In a couple of days, these coffins are going to start showing cracks as wide as your finger.

‘You’d be better off buying wood and building a coffin yourself. Then you could make whatever kind you wanted.

‘We’re all friends and neighbours here … There’s no need to get all worked up, or turn this into some kind of confrontation. Because if it comes to that …’, pointing at Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin: ‘You two might be in charge of the village task force, but I’m the guy in charge of the county … and who do you think wins? Who has the final say? If this turned into a fight or got ugly, one word from me and the higher-ups would have the police and public security here so fast it would make your head spin. But nobody wants that, am I right? What kind of a neighbour would I be – what kind of a
person
would I be – to do something like that?’

After that, nothing more was said.

After that, there was nothing more
to be
said.

The crowd of villagers dispersed and began heading back to the school. The setting sun hung red and heavy in the sky, like a ball of glowing red-vermilion ink. Like lead. It slowly sank towards the horizon, dragged to earth under its own leaden weight. The western border of the central plain appeared to be a swathe of fire; you could almost hear the flames, popping and crackling like a wildfire raging through a grove of cypress trees.