Life and Death are Wearing Me Out Read online

  My master turned and led me out through the southern gate, where yellowing bristlegrass atop the wall swayed in the wind. That was the local co-op’s first day, and the day I reached adulthood. “Donkey,” my master said, “today I’m going to have you shod to protect you from stones in the road and keep sharp objects from cutting your hooves. It’ll make you an adult, and I can put you to work.” Every donkey’s fate, I surmised. So I raised my head and brayed, Hee-haw, hee-haw— It was the first time I’d actually made the sound aloud, so loud and crisp my startled master beamed.

  The local blacksmith was a master at making shoes for horses and donkeys. He had a black face, a red nose, and beetle brows without a hair on them; there were no lashes above his red, puffy eyes, but three deep worry wrinkles across his forehead, repositories for coal ash. His apprentice’s face, as I could see, was pale under a mass of lines created by runnels of sweat. There was so much sweat running down the boy’s body, I worried that he was about to dry up. As for the blacksmith himself, his skin was so parched it looked like years of high heat had baked all the water out of it. The boy was operating a bellows with his left hand and wielding a pair of fire tongs with his right. He removed steel from the forge when it was white-hot, then he and the blacksmith hammered it into the desired shape, first with a sledge, then a finishing hammer. The bang-bang, clang-clang sound bouncing off the walls and the flying sparks had me spellbound.

  The pale, handsome boy should have been on the stage, winning over pretty girls with sweet talk and tender words of love, not hammering steel in a blacksmith shop. But I was impressed by his strength, watching as he wielded an eighteen-pound sledge that I’d thought only the bull-like blacksmith could manage with such ease; it was like an extension of the boy’s young body. The hot steel was like a lump of clay waiting to be turned into whatever the blacksmith and his apprentice desired. After hammering a pillow-sized clump of steel into a straw cutter, a farmer’s biggest hand tool, they stopped to rest. “Master Jin,” my master said to the blacksmith, “I’d like to enlist your services to make a set of shoes for my donkey.” The blacksmith took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose and his ears. His apprentice was gulping water out of a large, coarse china bowl. The water, it seemed, turned immediately to sweat, giving off a peculiar smell that was the essential odor of the handsome, innocent, hardworking boy’s being. “That’s some white-hoofed donkey,” the old blacksmith said with a sigh. Where I was standing, just outside the tent, not far from the road that led to the county town, I looked down and saw my snow-white hooves for the first time.

  The boy put down his bowl. “They’ve got two new hundred-horsepower East Is Red tractors over at the state-run farm, each one as powerful as a hundred horses. They attached a steel cable to a poplar tree so big it takes two people to wrap their arms around it, hooked it to one of those tractors, and it yanked the tree right out of the ground, roots and all. Those roots were half a block long.” “You know everything, don’t you!” the old blacksmith scolded the boy. Then he turned to my master. “Old Lan,” he said, “it may only be a donkey, but it looks like you’ve got a good one. Who knows, some high official might get tired of riding a fine horse one day and decide it’s time to ride a donkey. When that day comes, Lan Lian, donkey luck will be yours for the asking.” The boy smirked at that, then burst out laughing. He stopped laughing as abruptly as he’d started, as if the laughter and the expression that flashed onto his face and immediately vanished were private business. The old blacksmith was clearly shocked by the boy’s bizarre laughter. “Jin Bian,” he said after a moment, “do we have any horseshoes?” As if he’d been waiting for the question, Jin Bian replied, “We have a lot, but all for horses. We can put them into the forge, heat them up, and change them into donkey shoes.” And that is what they did. In the time it takes to smoke a pipe, they had turned four horseshoes into four donkey shoes. Then the boy moved a stool outside and put it on the ground behind me, so the old blacksmith could lift up my legs and trim my hooves with a pair of sharp shears. When he was finished, he stepped back to look me over. Again he sighed, this time with deep emotion. “This really is a fine donkey,” the blacksmith said. “It’s the best looking one I’ve ever seen!” “No matter how good-looking he is, he’s no match for one of those combines. The state-run farm imported a bright red one from the Soviet Union. It can harvest a row of wheat in the blink of an eye. It gobbles up the wheat stalks in front and shoots the kernels out the back. In five minutes you’ve got a bagful.” All this the boy said with breathless admiration. The old blacksmith sighed. “Jin Bian,” he said, “it sounds like I won’t be able to keep you here for long. But even if you leave tomorrow, today we’ve got to shoe this donkey.” Jin Bian came up alongside me and lifted one of my legs, hammer in hand and mouth full of nails. He fitted a shoe on my hoof with one hand and hammered it on with the other, two strokes per nail, never missing a beat. One down. All four shoes took him less than twenty minutes. When he finished, he threw down his hammer and walked back inside the tent. “Lan Lian,” the blacksmith said, “walk him a bit to see if there’s a limp.” So my master started me walking, from the supply and marketing co-op over to the butcher shop, where they were just then butchering a black pig. White knife in, red knife out, a terrifying sight. The butcher was wearing an emerald green old-style jacket, and the contrast with the red was eye-popping. We left the butcher shop and walked to the District Government Office, where we met with District Chief Chen and his bodyguard. The opening-day ceremony for the Ximen Village Farming Co-op must have ended. The district chief’s bicycle was broken; his guard was carrying it over his shoulder. One look from District Chief Chen and he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. How good-looking and powerful I must have been to catch his attention like that! I knew I was an intimidating donkey among donkeys; maybe Lord Yama had given me the finest donkey legs and the cream of donkey heads out of an obligation to Ximen Nao. “That’s a wonderful donkey,” I heard Chief Chen say. “His hooves look like they’re stepping in snow. He’d be perfect at the livestock work station as a stud.” I heard his bicycle-toting guard ask my master, “Are you Lan Lian from Ximen Village?” “Yes,” my master replied as he slapped me on the rump to get me moving faster. But Chief Chen stopped us and patted me on the back. I reared up. “He’s got a temper,” he said. “You’ll have to work on that. You can’t work with an animal that’s easily spooked. An animal like that is hard to train.” Then, in the tone of an old hand, he said, “Before I joined the revolution, I was a trader in donkeys. I’ve seen thousands of them, I know them like the palm of my hand, especially their temperament.” He laughed long and loud; my master laughed along with him, fatuously. “Lan Lian,” the chief said, “Hong Taiyue told me what happened, and I wasn’t happy with him. I told him that Lan Lian is one tough donkey, and you have to rub him with the grain. Don’t be impatient with him, or he might kick or bite you. I tell you, Lan Lian, you don’t have to join the co-op right away. See if you can compete with it. I know you were allotted eight acres of land, so see how much grain you harvest per acre next fall. Then check to see how much the co-op brings in. If you do better, you can keep working your land on your own. But if the co-op does better, you and I will have another talk.” “You said that,” my master said excitedly. “Don’t forget.” “Yes, I said it, you’ve got witnesses,” the district chief said, pointing to his bodyguard and the people who had gathered around us. My master led me back to the blacksmith shop, where he said, “He doesn’t limp at all. Every step was perfect. I’d never have believed that someone as young as your apprentice could do such an excellent job.” With a wry smile, the blacksmith shook his head, as if weighed down with concerns. Then I spotted the young blacksmith Jin Bian, a bedroll over his shoulder — the corners of a gray blanket sticking out from under a dog-skin wrapping — walking out of the shop. “Well, I’ll be leaving, Master,” he said. “Go ahead,” the old blacksmith replied sadly. “Go seek your glorious futu
re!”

  5

  Ximen Bai Stands Trial for Digging Up Treasure

  The Donkey Disrupts Proceedings and Jumps a Wall

  Now that I’d heard so many words of praise over my new shoes, I was in a fine mood, and my master was delighted with what the district chief had said. Master and donkey, Lan Lian and I, ran happily through the gold-washed autumn fields. Those were the best days of my donkey life. Yes, better to be a donkey everyone loves than a hopeless human. As your nominal brother Mo Yan wrote in the play The Black Donkey.

  Hooves felt light with four new shoes,

  Running down the road like the wind.

  Forgetting the half-baked previous life

  Ximen Donkey was happy and relaxed.

  He raised his head and shouted to the heavens,

  Hee-haw, hee-haw —

  When we reached the village, Lan Lian picked some tender grass and yellow wildflowers from the side of the road to weave into a floral wreath, which he draped over my neck behind my ears. There we met the daughter of the stonemason Han Shan, Han Huahua, and their family’s female donkey, which was carrying a pair of saddlebag baskets; one held a baby in a rabbit fur cap, the other held a white piglet. Lan Lian struck up a conversation with Huahua; I made eye contact with her donkey. The humans had their speech, we had our own ways to communicate. Ours was based on body odors, body language, and instinct. From their brief conversation, my master learned that Huahua, who had been married to someone in a distant village, had come back for her mother’s sixtieth birthday and was now returning home. The baby in the basket was her infant son; the piglet was a gift from her parents. Back then, live animals, like piglets or lambs or chicks, were the preferred gifts. Government awards were often horses or cows or long-haired rabbits. My master and Huahua had a special relationship, and I thought back to when I was still Ximen Nao, how Lan Lian would be out with his cattle and Huahua would be out with her sheep, and the two of them would play donkeys frolicking in the grass. Truth is, I wasn’t all that interested in what they were doing now. As a potent male donkey, my immediate concern was the female donkey with the saddlebag baskets that was standing right there in front of me. She was older than me, somewhere between five and seven, by all appearances, which I determined from the depth of the hollow in her forehead. Naturally, she could just as easily — maybe even more easily — guess my age. Don’t assume that I was the smartest donkey ever just because I was a reincarnation of Ximen Nao — for a time I entertained that very misconception — since she could have been a reincarnation of someone far more important. My coat was gray when I was born, but I was turning darker all the time. If I hadn’t been almost black at the time, my hooves wouldn’t have appeared so eye-popping white. She was a gray donkey, still quite svelte, with delicate features, perfect teeth, and when she brought her mouth up close to me, I got a whiff of aromatic bean cake and wheat bran from between her lips. Sexual emanations poured from her, and at the same time I sensed the heat of passion inside, a powerful desire for me to mount her. It was contagious: an overpowering urge to do just that rose in me.

  “Are they caught up in co-op fever where you are?” “With the same county chief leading the charge, there’s no way to avoid it,” Huahua said wistfully.

  I walked over behind the donkey, who might have been offering her hindquarters to me. The scent of passion was getting stronger. I breathed it in deeply, and it was like pouring strong liquor down my throat. I bared my teeth and closed both nostrils, in order to keep any foul odors from escaping. It was the sort of pose that pretty much melted her heart. At the same time, my black shaft reached out heroically and nudged itself up against my belly. This was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity, fleeting to boot; just as I was raising my front legs to consummate the deal, my eyes fell on the baby in the saddlebag basket, sound asleep, not to mention, of course, the squealing piglet. Now, if I were to rear up into the mounting position, my newly shod hooves could wipe out those two little lives. And if I did that, Ximen Donkey could pretty much count on spending eternity in hell, with no chance of rebirth as anything. As I pondered my dilemma, my master jerked on the reins, forcing my front hooves down onto the ground as Huahua shrieked in alarm and quickly led her donkey out of “danger.”

  “My father instructed me that since she’s in heat, I needed to be especially watchful. I forgot. In fact, he said to be sure and watch out for the donkey belonging to the Ximen Nao family. Can you imagine, even though Ximen Nao has been dead all these years, my father still thinks you’re his hired hand, and he refers to your donkey as Ximen Nao’s donkey.”

  “That’s better than thinking that it’s a reincarnation of Ximen Nao,” my master said with a laugh.

  I tell you, that shocked me. Did he know my secret? If he knew that his donkey was actually Ximen Nao reincarnated, would that work for or against me? The red ball in the sky was about to set; time for my master and Huahua to say good-bye.

  “We’ll talk again next time, Brother Lan,” she said. “My home’s fifteen li from here, so I’d better get going.”

  “So your donkey won’t make it back tonight, is that it?”

  Huahua smiled and said conspiratorially:

  “She’s a very clever donkey. After I feed and water her, all I have to do is remove her reins, and she’ll run home on her own. She does it every time.”

  “Why do you have to remove her reins?”

  “So no one can catch and take her away with them. The reins slow her down.”

  “Oh,” my master said as he stroked his chin. “Why don’t I see you home?”

  “Thanks,” she said, “but they’re putting on a play in the village tonight, so if you leave now you can see it.” Huahua turned and started off with her donkey, but stopped after a few steps, turned back, and said, “Brother Lan, my father said you shouldn’t be so stubborn, that you’d be better off throwing in your lot with everybody else.”

  My master shook his head but didn’t respond. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Let’s go, partner. I know what’s on your mind, and you nearly got me into a peck of trouble! What do you think, should I take you to the vet and get you fixed?”

  My heart nearly stopped and my scrotum constricted; I’d never been so scared in my life. Don’t do it, Master, I wanted to howl, but the words stuck in my throat and emerged as brays: Hee-haw, hee-haw —

  Now that we’d arrived in the village, my new shoes sang out crisply on the cobblestone road. Although I had something else on my mind, the image of her beautiful eyes and tender pink lips and the smell of her affectionate urine in my nose nearly drove me crazy. And yet my previous life as a human had made me an uncommon donkey. Misfortunes in the human world held a great attraction for me. I watched people rushing off to somewhere, and from what they spoke of along the way, I learned that a colored, glazed pottery urn filled with riches was on display in the Ximen estate compound, now the Village Government Office, headquarters of the co-op, and, of course, the home of my master Lan Lian and Huang Tong. The urn had been dug up by workers as they prepared an outdoor stage for the play. I immediately imagined the shady looks on the people’s faces when they looked upon riches being removed from the urn, and Ximen Nao’s memories resurfaced to dilute the amorous feelings of Ximen Donkey. I didn’t recall ever hiding any gold, silver, or jewelry in that place; we had hidden a thousand silver dollars in the animal pen as well as a trove of wealth in the walls of the house, but they had been found by the Poor Peasants Brigade in searches during the land reform movement. Poor Ximen Bai had suffered grievously over that.

  At first, Huang Tong, Yang Qi, and the others had locked up Ximen Bai, Yingchun, and Qiuxiang for observation and investigation, with Hong Taiyue in command. I was kept in a separate room, out of sight of the interrogations, but well within earshot. Out with it! Where did Ximen Nao hide your family’s riches? Out with it! I heard the crisp sounds of willow switches and clubs banging on tables. And I heard that slut Qiuxiang cry out: Village Chief, Group Le
ader, good uncles and brothers, I was born to poverty, I was fed husks and rotten vegetables in the Ximen household, they never treated me like a human being, I was raped by Ximen Nao, my legs held down by Ximen Bai and my arms by Yingchun, so Ximen Nao could fuck me! — That’s a damned lie! That was Yingchun shouting. The sound of beating, someone was pulling them apart. — Everything she’s saying, all lies! That was Ximen Bai weighing in. In their house I was lower than a dog, lower than a pig, uncles, elder brothers, I’m an oppressed woman, I’m just like you, I’m one of your class sisters, it’s you who’ve rescued me from a sea of bitterness, I owe you everything, I’d love nothing more than to scoop out Ximen Nao’s brains and hand them to you, nothing would make me happier than to gouge out his heart and liver for you to enjoy with your wine.... Just think, why would they tell me where they hid their gold and silver? You class brothers, you must understand what I’m telling you, Qiuxiang pleaded tearfully. Yingchun, on the other hand, neither cried nor made a scene. She stuck to her simple defense: All I concerned myself with was my chores and raising the children. I know nothing outside of that. She was right, those two did not know where the family wealth was hidden; that knowledge was shared only by Ximen Bai and me. A concubine is just that, not someone you can trust. Unlike a real wife. Ximen Bai kept her silence until she was forced to say something. The family is just an empty shell, she said, which people might have thought was filled with gold and silver, when in fact we couldn’t make ends meet. There was a little money for household expenditures, but he wouldn’t give it to me. I could picture her when she said that: She’d be staring daggers with her big, blank eyes, at Yingchun and Qiuxiang. I knew she despised Qiuxiang, but Yingchun had come with her as a maidservant, and when you break the bones, the tendons stay connected; it had been her idea for Yingchun to become my concubine so I could keep the family line going. And Yingchun had carried out her end of the bargain, producing a pair of twins, a boy and a girl. Bringing Qiuxiang into the house, on the other hand, had been a frivolous idea of mine. Success during good times can turn a man’s head; when a dog is happy with the way things are going, it raises its tail; when a man is happy with the way things are going, it’s his pecker that gets raised. To be sure, it was her seductive charms that got to me: she flirted with her eyes and won me over with her breasts. The temptation was simply too great for Ximen Nao, who was far from being a saint. Ximen Bai made it abundantly clear how she felt about this: You’re the head of the household, she said angrily, but one of these days that witch is going to be your undoing! So, when Qiuxiang said that Ximen Bai held her legs while Ximen Nao raped her, she was lying. Did Ximen Bai ever hit her? Yes. But she also hit Yingchun. Eventually, they let Yingchun and Qiuxiang go, and from where I was locked up, in a room with a window, I saw the two of them walk out of the main house. I wasn’t fooled by Qiuxiang’s disheveled hair or dirty face, because I could see the smug look in her eyes, which were rolling happily in their sockets. Clearly worried, Yingchun ran straight to the eastern rooms, where Jinlong and Baofeng were crying themselves hoarse. My darling son, my precious daughter! I whimpered silently, where did I go wrong, what heavenly principles did I violate to cause such suffering, not just to me, but to my wife and children? But then I reflected that every village had landlords who were struggled against, whose so-called crimes were exposed and criticized, who were swept out of their homes like garbage, and whose “dog heads” were beaten bloody, thousands and thousands of them, and I wondered, Was it possible that every one of them — of us — committed such evil acts that this was the treatment we deserved? It was our inexorable fate; earth and sky were spinning dizzily, the sun and moon trading places; there was no escape, and only the protection of Ximen Nao’s ancestors could keep his head on his shoulders. With the world in such a state, just staying alive was a result of sheer luck; asking for more would have been preposterous. But I couldn’t help worrying about Ximen Bai. If they wore her down to the point where she told them where our riches were hidden, not only would that not lessen my crimes, it would seal my doom. Ximen Bai, my loyal wife, you are a deep thinker, a woman of ideas, and you mustn’t lose sight of what’s important at this critical moment! The militiaman guarding my cell, Lan Lian, blocked my view out the window with his back, though I could hear the interrogation in the main house start up again. This time they really turned up the heat. The screams were deafening as willow switches, bamboo rods, and whips smacked against a table and thudded against Ximen Bai’s back. My dear wife’s shrieks broke my heart and shattered my nerves. — Out with it! Where did you hide your gold and silver? — We have no gold and silver. ... — Ah, Ximen Bai, you’re so stubborn it looks like you won’t open up till we start knocking you around. That sounded like Hong Taiyue, though not completely. Then silence. But only for a moment, before Ximen Bai’s howls erupted, and that made my hair stand on end. What were they doing to her? What could force such frightful howls out of a woman? — Are you going to tell us or not? If you don’t, you’ll get more of the same! — I’ll tell you . . . I’ll tell you . . . My heart felt like it had been rid of a stone. Go ahead, tell them. After all, a man can only die once. Better for me to die than for her to suffer on my account. Out with it, where did you hide it? — It’s hidden, it’s hidden in the Earth God Temple east of the village, in the God of War Temple north of the village, at Lotus Bay, in the belly of a cow. ... I don’t know where it’s hidden, because there isn’t any. During the first Land Reform campaign, we handed over everything we owned!—You’ve got your nerve, Ximen Bai, trying to make fools of us! — Let me go, I honestly don’t know anything. ... — Drag her outside! I heard a man in the main house threaten, someone who was probably sitting in the mahogany armchair I used to sit in. Next to that chair was an octagonal table on which I kept my writing brush, ink stick, ink slab, and paper; hanging from the wall behind the table was a longevity scroll. Behind the scroll was a hollow in which forty silver coins weighing fifty ounces, twenty gold ingots each weighing an ounce, and all of Ximen Bai’s jewelry were hidden. I saw two armed militiamen drag Ximen Bai out of the house; her hair was a mess, her clothes ripped and torn, and she was soaking wet. I couldn’t tell if what was dripping from her body was blood or sweat, but when I saw the shape she was in, I knew that Ximen Nao had not vainly kicked up a row in this world. I suddenly realized that the militiamen who came out with her were meant to be a firing squad. My arms had been tied behind me, so all I could do, like Su Qin carrying a sword on his back, was ram my head into the window frame and scream, Don’t execute her!