The Garlic Ballads Read online

  Jinju sat up and dried her eyes with her sleeve. “What am I supposed to say to my parents?”

  “That’s easy. You just say, ‘Father, Mother, I don’t love Liu Shengli and I won’t marry him.’ “

  “You make it sound so easy. Why don’t you tell them?”

  “Don’t think I won’t,” he replied testily. “Tonight. And if your father and brothers don’t like it, we’ll settle it like men.”

  It was a cloudy evening, hot and muggy. Gao Ma wolfed down some leftover rice and walked out onto the sandbar behind his house, still feeling empty inside. The setting sun, like a halved watermelon, lent its red to the scattered clouds on the horizon and the tips of the acacia and willow trees. Since there wasn’t a breath of wind, chimney smoke rose like airy pillars, then disintegrated and merged with the residue of other pillars. Doubt crept in: Should he go to her house or not? What could he say when he got there? The dark, menacing faces of the Fang brothers floated before his eyes. So did Jinju’s tear-filled eyes. Finally he left the sandbar and headed south. A lane he had always felt was agonizingly long suddenly seemed amazingly short. He had barely started out, and already he was there. Why couldn’t it have been longer—much longer?

  As he stood in front of Jinju’s gate, he felt emptier than ever. Several times he raised his hand to knock, but each time he let it drop. At dusk the parakeets raised a maddening din in Gao Zhileng’s yard, as though taunting Gao Ma. The chestnut colt was galloping alongside the threshing floor, a newly attached bell around its neck clanging loudly and drawing loud whinnies from older horses off in the distance; the colt ran like an arrow in flight, trailing a string of peals behind it.

  Gao Ma clenched his teeth until he nearly saw stars, then pounded on the gate, which was opened by Fang Yixiang, the impetuous and slightly preposterous second son. “What do you want?” he asked with undisguised displeasure.

  Gao Ma smiled. “Just a friendly visit,” he said, sidestepping Fang Yixiang and walking into the yard. The family was eating dinner outside, surrounded in darkness that made it impossible to see what was on the table. Gao Ma’s courage began to desert him. “Just now having dinner?” he asked.

  Fourth Uncle merely snorted. “Yes,” Fourth Aunt said impassively. “And you?”

  Gao Ma said he had already eaten.

  Fourth Aunt roughly ordered Jinju to light the lantern.

  “What do we need a lantern for?” Fourth Uncle said abusively. “Afraid you’ll stuff the food up your nose?”

  But Jinju went inside and lit a lantern anyway, then brought it outside and placed it in the center of the table, where Gao Ma noticed a willow basket filled with flatcakes and a bowl of thick bean paste. Garlic was strewn about.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some?” Fourth Aunt asked.

  “I just ate,” Gao Ma replied, glancing at Jinju, who sat with her head down, neither eating nor drinking. Fang Yijun and Fang Yixiang, on the other hand, were loading up flatcakes with bean paste and garlic, then rolling them and stuffing them into their mouths with both hands until their cheeks bulged. As he noisily smoked his pipe, Fourth Uncle watched Gao Ma out of the corner of his eye.

  Fourth Aunt glared at Jinju. “Why don’t you eat instead of sitting there like a block of wood? Are you trying to become an immortal?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I know what’s going on in that sneaky mind of yours,” Fourth Uncle said, “and you can forget it.”

  Jinju glanced at Gao Ma before saying in a strong voice, “I wont do it—I wont marry Liu Shengli!”

  “Just what I’d expect from a slut like you!” Fourth Uncle cursed as he banged his pipe on the table.

  “Who do you want to marry?” Fourth Aunt asked her.

  “Gao Ma,” she said defiantly.

  Gao Ma stood up. “Fourth Uncle, Fourth Aunt, the Marriage Law stipulates—”

  “Beat the bastard up!” Fourth Uncle cut him off. “He can’t come into our home and act like this!”

  The two brothers tossed down the food in their hands, picked up their stools, and charged. “Using violence is against the law—it’s illegal!” Gao Ma protested as he tried to ward off the blows.

  “No one would blame us if we beat you to death!” Fang Yijun countered.

  “Gao Ma,” Jinju said tearfully, “get away from here!”

  His head was bleeding. “Go ahead, beat me if you want. I wont even report you. But you can’t stop Jinju and me!”

  From her seat across the table, Fourth Aunt picked up a rolling pin and struck Jinju a glancing blow on the forehead. “Doesn’t the word ‘shame’ mean anything to you? You’ll kill your own mother.”

  “Fuck your ancestors, Gao Ma!” Fourth Uncle growled. “I’d kill my daughter before I’d let her marry you!”

  Gao Ma wiped some blood off his eyebrows. “You can hit me all you want, Fourth Uncle,” he said. “But if you raise a finger against Jinju, I’ll report you to the authorities.” Fourth Uncle picked up his heavy bronze pipe and hit Jinju hard on the head. With a feeble “Oh” she crumpled to the ground.

  “Go report that!” Fourth Uncle said.

  As Gao Ma bent down to help her up, Fang Yixiang clubbed him with a stool.

  When Gao Ma regained consciousness, he was lying in the lane with a large shape standing over him. It was the chestnut colt. A few stars poked pitifully through the cloud cover. The parakeets in Gao Zhileng’s yard shrieked. By lifting one of his arms slowly, he touched the satiny neck of the colt, which nuzzled the back of his hand as its bell tinkled crisply.

  The day after the beating, Gao Ma went to the township government compound to see the deputy administrator, who, drunk as a lord, sat on a beat-up sofa, slurping tea. Instead of greeting Gao Ma, he glared at him bleary-eyed.

  “Deputy Yang,” Gao Ma said, “Fang Yunqiu is violating the Marriage Law by forcing his daughter to marry Liu Shengli. When she protested, he bloodied her head.”

  The deputy laid his glass on the table beside the sofa. “What’s she to you?” he asked snidely.

  “She’s the woman I’m going to marry,” Gao Ma said after hesitating for a moment.

  “As I hear it, she’s the woman Liu Shengli is going to marry.”

  “Against her will.”

  “That’s none of your business. I’ll look into the matter when she comes to see me, but not before.”

  “Her father won’t let her out of the house.”

  “Out, out, out!” The deputy waved him off as if shooing away a housefly “I’ve got better things to do than argue with you.”

  Before Gao Ma could protest, a hunched-over, middle-aged man walked into the room. His wan complexion contrasted sharply with his purple lips; he looked like a man at death’s door. Gao Ma stepped aside and watched him take a bottle of liquor and some canned fish out of a black imitation-leather bag and set them on the table. “Eighth Uncle,” he said, “what’s this I hear about an incident involving the Fang family?”

  Not deigning to respond to his nephew’s comment, the deputy got off his sofa and touched Gao Ma’s head. “What happened here?” he asked playfully.

  The skin around the wound grew taut, and shooting pains nearly made Gao Ma cry out. There was a ringing in his ears. In a shrill, tinny voice, he said, “I fell … banged my head.”

  “Because somebody hit you?” the deputy asked with a knowing smile.

  “No.”

  ‘ “The Fang boys are a couple of useless turds,” the deputy continued, no longer smiling. “If it had been me,” he said spitefully, “I’d have broken your damned legs and let you crawl home!”

  The deputy sprayed Gao Ma with spittle, which he wiped off with his sleeve as the man shoved him out the door and slammed it shut after him. Gao Ma hopped awkwardly on the cement steps, trying to keep his balance, so lightheaded he had to lean against the wall to keep the world from spinning. When the faintness finally eased up a bit, he gazed at the green gate; like the opening of a crack in a paste head, h
is consciousness returned slowly. Something warm and wet slithered into his nasal cavities, then continued down his face. He tried but couldn’t hold it back; whatever it was spurted out of his nostrils and entered his mouth. It had a salty, rank taste; and when he lowered his head, he watched the bright red liquid drip onto the pale cement steps.

  4.

  Gao Ma lay dazed on his kang, with no idea how long he had been there or how he had gotten home from the township compound; in fact, all he could recall was fresh blood dripping silently from his nose onto the steps.

  Little red pearl drops splashing like fragile cherries—shattering, splashing … The sight of those fracturing red pearls comforted Gao Ma. They linked into a string; all the heat in his body was concentrated in one spot, gushing out through his nostrils until a pool of blood formed on the steps. The tip of his tongue, already familiar with the cloying taste, touched his chilled lips, and another crack opened up in his brain; the chestnut colt stood in the township compound before the green gate, where yellow hollyhocks bloomed in lush abundance; it observed him with its moist, crystalline eyes. Gao Ma stumbled toward it and reached out to grab a branch covered with spiny hollyhocks. The suns rays blazed down, and he felt the heavy flowers dance on top of his head; he tried to look up, but the sunlight stung his eyes. He ripped a hollyhock leaf in half and wadded it into balls, which he stuffed up his nostrils. But the buildup of hot blood swelled his head, and as the salty taste spread through his mouth, he knew the blood was flowing down his throat. All human orifices are connected.

  Gao Ma wanted to smash the compound’s green gate but didn’t have the strength. He assumed that everyone in the township offices— officials, handymen, plumbers, people in charge of women’s affairs, family planners, tax collectors, news dispatchers, boozers, meat eaters, tea drinkers, smokers—more than fifty in all, had seen him get tossed out of the compound like a discarded weed or a whipped puppy. He tried to catch his breath as he wiped a bloody hand on the red letters carved into the government office’s white signboard.

  The young gateman, wearing a plaid shirt, kicked him from behind. “You bastard!” Plaid Shirt railed, although Gao Ma only heard a muffled noise. “Where do you think you’re wiping that dog blood of yours? Dumb bastard! Who said you could leave your dog blood here?”

  After he backed up a step or two to look at the red letters on the wooden signboard, the fires of rage burned in Gao Ma; he aimed a mouthful of bloody saliva at Plaid Shirt, who was agile, wiry—probably a martial-arts practitioner. He sprang out of the way and charged Gao Ma, who worked up another gob of bloody spit and aimed it at the man’s long, thin face.

  “What are you doing out there, Li Tie?” It was the voice of authority, coming from inside the government compound.

  Plaid Shirt lowered his arms compliantly.

  Gao Ma spat the bloody mess on the ground and walked off without a backward glance at the gatekeeper. With the blue horizon stretched out before him, he moved haltingly down the paved country road; the eyes of an old melon peddler gleamed like phosphorescent lights.

  Gao Ma slipped and fell into the gutter, and as he lay amid vines and tendrils, he gazed sadly at the gentle slope of the gutter. Certain he could not walk upright, he dropped to his knees to slink home on all fours, like a dog.

  It would be a long, arduous trip; his head, drooping of its own weight, felt as if it might fall off and roll into the gutter. Thorns pricked his hands, and his back felt as if it were being peppered by poison darts.

  After negotiating the slope of the gutter, he straightened up. The prickly pains in his back so tormented him that he turned to look behind him, where he saw Plaid Shirt walking up to the gateway with a bucket of water and a rag to clean the blood off the signboard. The roadside melon peddler had his back to Gao Ma, who still carried the image of the old man’s phosphorescent eyes. Even in his dazed state, he heard the shrill cry: “Melons—mushy melons.…”

  The sound stabbed at his heart; all he wanted was to go home and lie quietly on his kang, like a man dead to the world.

  Now someone was at the door. He tried to sit up, but his head was too heavy. Straining to open his eyes, he saw the wife of his neighbor, Yu Qiushui, watching him with pity in her eyes.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  He tried to open his mouth, but a rush of bitter liquid stopped up his throat and nose. “You were unconscious for three days,” she said. “You had us scared half to death. Even with your eyes closed you yelled, ‘Boys and girls, children on the wall!’ and The colt! The little colt!’ Big Brother Yu called the doctor, who gave you a couple of injections.”

  He strained to sit up, with the help of Big Brother Yu’s wife, who put his filthy comforter behind his back. One look at her face told him she knew everything.

  “Thank you, and thank Big Brother Yu.” Tears began to flow.

  “Crying wont help,” she consoled him. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking it could ever work between you and Jinju. For now just worry about getting better. I’m going to my folks’ house in a few days, and I’ll find you someone as good as Jinju.”

  “What about Jinju?” he asked anxiously.

  “They say her family beats her every day. When the Caos and the Lius heard the news, they rushed over to mediate. But as the saying goes, you can’t force a melon to be sweet. A happy life is not in Jinju’s future.”

  Suddenly agitated, Gao Ma struggled to climb down off the kang, but she stopped him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I have to go to Jinju.”

  “You have to go to your death, you mean. The Caos and Lius are there. If you showed your face, it would be a miracle if they didn’t kill you.”

  “I… I’ll kill them first!” he shouted shrilly, waving a fist in the air.

  “Dear little brother,” Yu’s wife said sternly, “use your head. Don’t think like that. All you’d get for your troubles is a bullet in the head.”

  Exhausted, he fell back on the kang, tears slipping down his grimy face and into his ears.

  “Who cares?” he sobbed. “I have nothing to live for.”

  “Come now. Don’t give up so easily. If you and Jinju have your hearts set on each other, no one can keep you apart forever. This is, after all, a new society, so sooner or later reason will prevail.”

  “Will you take a message to her?”

  “Not until things calm down a bit. Meanwhile, keep your temper in check and concentrate on getting well. Things will get better, don’t worry.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The townsfolk planted garlic for family fortune,

  Angering the covetous tyrants of hate,

  Who sent out hordes of tax collectors

  To oppress the masses, bewailing their fate….

  —from a ballad sung in May 1987 by Zhang Kou, the blind minstrel,

  on Blackstone Avenue in the county seat

  1.

  The policemen emerged from the acacia grove dejected and covered with dirt, holding steel-gray pistols in their hands and fanning themselves with their hats. The stammerer’s limp had disappeared, but his trousers were ripped from his encounter with the metal pot; the torn cloth flapped like a piece of dead skin as he walked. They circled the tree and stood in front of Gao Yang. Both men had crewcuts. The stammerer, whose hair was coal black, had a head as round as a volleyball, while that of the other man, whose hair was lighter, stuck out front and back, like a bongo drum.

  Gao Yang’s blind daughter tapped her way through the grove with the bamboo staff; he strained to watch her. When she reached the stand of trees behind Gao Ma’s house, she groped along, turning this way and that and wailing, “Daddy … Daddy … where’s my daddy … ?”

  “Damn it!” the stammering policeman complained. “What’s the idea of letting him get away like that?”

  “If you’d moved a little quicker, you might have gotten the cuff on his other wrist!” Drumhead shot back. “He couldn’t have gotten away with both hands cuffed
, could he?”

  “It’s this one’s fault,” the stammerer said as he put his hat back on. He reached out and touched Gao Yang’s scalp as though to rub it, then gave him a clout.

  “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” Xinghua sobbed as she bumped a tree with her staff; when she reached out to touch it, she banged her head on a branch. Her close-cropped hair was parted like a little boy’s … eyes black as coal… the waxen face of the undernourished, like a wilting stalk of garlic … naked from the waist up, dressed only in red underpants whose elastic was so far gone they hung loosely on her hips … red plastic sandals with broken laces … “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” The acacia grove, like a dense cloud, became a dark backdrop for her. Gao Yang yearned to shout to her, but his throat muscles were tied in knots, and no sound emerged. I’m not crying, I’m not crying …

  The policeman rapped him on the head again, but he didn’t feel it; he strained to get free and moaned, their noses detected the translucent, sticky sweat on his body—an eerie, nightmarish stench. It was the stink of suffering. They screwed up their noses, which were filled with the foul air, a dull expression spreading across their faces.

  “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?”

  All right, boys and girls, hold hands, sing, twirl around, see how easy it is, the teacher calls. Xinghua stands in the middle of the road, staff in hand, then gropes her way to the schoolyard gate, where she grasps the metal fence with one hand and her bamboo staff with the other, to listen to the boys and girls sing and dance with their teacher. Chrysanthemums bloom all over the schoolyard. He tries to drag her home, but she struggles to stay put. He screams at her angrily, he kicks her…. Daddy, Mommy, hold my hand, hurry, I want to sing and dance and twirl, see how easy it is! Xinghua cries yearningly.