Red Sorghum

1

THE GLORIOUS HISTORY of man is filled with legends of dogs and memories of dogs: despicable dogs, respectable dogs, fearful dogs, pitiful dogs. When Granddad and Father wavered at one of life’s crossroads, hundreds of dogs under the leadership of the three from our family — Blackie, Green, and Red — clawed out pale paths in the earth near the sorghum field south of our village, where the massacre of our people had occurred. By that time, our dogs were nearly fifteen years old, a time of youth for humans, but an advanced age for dogs, an age of confidence.

That massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 decimated our village and turned hundreds of dogs into homeless strays. Drawn to the stench of human blood and gore, they were easy targets for Granddad and Father, who lay in wait at the bridgehead over the Black Water River. Granddad’s pistol barked loudly as it emitted puffs of scalding smoke, its barrel turning dark red under the autumn moon, which was as white and cold as frost. Father’s intense longing for Grandma during lulls in his pitched battle with the crazed, corpse-eating dogs makes me feel lost when I think of it, lost like a homeless stray.

In the aftermath of the slaughter of the townspeople, the sorghum field was covered by pristine moonlight, bleak, quiet, and still. Fires roared in the village, the tongues of flame frantically licking the low sky and snapping like flags in a strong wind. Only three hours earlier, Japanese soldiers and their Chinese puppet troops had cut a swath through the village and torched the houses before leaving through the northern gate. Now Granddad’s right arm, wounded a week before, was festering and oozing pus, hanging useless like a piece of dead meat. As Father helped him bandage the wound, Granddad threw his over-heated pistol onto the moist black earth of the sorghum field, where it sizzled. Once his wound was tended, he sat down and listened to the snorts and whinnies of Japanese warhorses and the whirlwind of pounding hooves galloping out of the village to form up ranks. The sounds were swallowed up by the field, along with the brays of pack mules and the footsteps of exhausted soldiers.

Father stood beside the seated figure of Granddad, and strained to get a fix on the hoofbeats of the horses. Earlier that afternoon, the Japanese cavalry, tormented by Granddad’s and Father’s sniper fire, had abandoned their assault on the village’s stubborn defences to rake through the sorghum field. Father had nearly died of fright when a huge, fiery-red beast bore down on him until all he could see was a hoof as big as a plate coming straight at his head, the arc of the horseshoe flashing like lightning. He screamed for his dad, then covered his head and hunkered down among the sorghum stalks. A muddle of foul-smelling sweat and urine splashed down as the horse passed over him, a stench he didn’t think he’d ever be able to wash off.

He remembered Grandma, seven days earlier, as she lay face up, with sorghum seeds and grains scattered over her face. Her pearly-white teeth shone between blood-drained lips, ornamented by the diamondlike grains.

The charging horse turned with difficulty and headed back, stalks of sorghum struggling bitterly against its rump, some bending and breaking, others snapping back into place. They shivered in the autumn winds like victims of malaria. Father saw the flared nostrils and fleshy lips of the panting warhorse; bloody froth sprayed from between its gleaming white teeth and dripped from its greedy lower lip. Clouds of white dust from the agitated sorghum stung its watery eyes. Seated atop the sleek warhorse was an awesome young Japanese cavalryman whose head, encased in a little square cap, barely cleared the tops of the stalks around him. The ears of grain whipped, pushed, and pricked him mercilessly, even mocked him. He squinted his eyes with loathing and repugnance for the stalks that were raising welts on his handsome face. Father watched him attack the sorghum ears with his sword, lopping some off so cleanly they fell silently, their headless stumps deathly still, while others protested noisily as they hung by threads.

Father saw the Japanese cavalryman rear his horse up and begin another charge, his sword raised high. He picked up his useless Browning pistol, which earlier had both sinned against him and distinguished itself in battle, and hurled it at the oncoming horse, striking it squarely on the forehead with a dull thud. The animal raised its head as its front legs buckled; its lips kissed the black earth, and its neck twisted to the side so it could pillow its head on the ground. The rider, thrown from the saddle, must have broken his arm in the fall, because Father saw the sword drop from his hand and heard a loud crack. A fragment of bone ripped through the sleeve of his uniform, and the limp arm began to twitch as though it had a will of its own. What was at first a clean wound showing nothing more than a gleaming white piece of bone, gruesome and deathlike, soon began to spurt fresh red blood, alternating between gushes and a slow ooze, droplets shining like so many strings of bright cherries. One of the cavalryman’s legs was pinned beneath the horse’s belly, the other was draped over its head, the two forming a large obtuse angle. Father never dreamed that a mighty warhorse and its rider could be brought down so easily.

Just then Granddad crept out from among the sorghum stalks and called out softly: ‘Douguan.’

Father got uneasily to his feet and looked at Granddad.

The Japanese cavalry troops were making another whirlwind pass from deep in the sorghum field, filling the air with a mixture of sounds, from the dull thud of hooves on the spongy black earth to the crisp snapping of sorghum stalks.

Granddad wrapped his arms around Father and pressed him to the ground as the horses’ broad chests and powerful hooves passed over them; groaning clods of dark earth flew in their wake, sorghum stalks swayed reluctantly behind them, and golden-red grains were scattered all over the ground, filling the deep prints of horseshoes in the soil.

The sorghum gradually stopped swaying in the wake of the cavalry charge, so Granddad stood up. Father didn’t realise how forcefully Granddad had pushed him to the ground until he noticed the deep imprints of his knees in the dark soil.

The Japanese cavalryman wasn’t dead. Shocked into consciousness by excruciating pain, he rested his good arm on the ground and awkwardly shifted the leg resting on the horse’s head back into a riding position. The slightest movement of the dislocated leg, which no longer seemed to belong to him, made him groan in agony. Father watched sweat drip from his forehead and run down his face through the grime of mud and gunpowder residue, exposing streaks of ghostly-pale skin. The horse hadn’t died, either. Its neck was writhing like a python, its eyes fixed on the sky and sun of the unfamiliar Northeast Gaomi Township. Its rider rested for a minute before straining to free his other leg.

Granddad walked up and yanked the leg free, then lifted him up by the scruff of his neck; his legs were so rubbery the entire weight of his body was supported by Granddad’s grip. As soon as Granddad let go, he crumpled to the ground like a clay doll dunked in water. Granddad picked up the glinting sword and swung it in two arcs — one down and one up — lopping off the heads of a couple of dozen sorghum stalks, whose dry stumps stood erect in the soil.

Then he stuck the point of the sword up under the man’s handsome, straight, pale nose and said in a controlled voice, ‘Where’s your arrogance now, you Jap bastard?’

The cavalryman’s shiny black eyes were blinking a mile a minute as a stream of gibberish poured from his mouth. Father knew he was pleading for his life as he reached into his shirt pocket with his trembling good hand and pulled out a clear plastic wallet, which he handed to Granddad as he muttered: ‘Jiligulu, minluwala…’

Father walked up to get a closer look at the plastic wallet, which held a colour photograph of a lovely young woman holding a pudgy infant in her milky-white arms. Peaceful smiles adorned their faces.

‘Is this your wife?’ Granddad asked him.

The man jabbered brokenly.

‘Is this your son?’ Granddad asked him.

Father stuck his head up so close he could see the woman’s sweet smile and the disarmingly innocent look of her child.

‘So you think this is all it takes to win me over, you bastard!’ Granddad tossed the wallet into the air, where it sailed like a butterfly in the sunlight before settling slowly, carrying the sun’s rays back with it. He jerked the sword out from under the man’s nose and swung it disdainfully at the falling object; the blade glinted coldly in the sunlight as the wallet twitched in the air and fell in two pieces at their feet.

Father was immersed in darkness as a cold shudder racked his body. Streaks of red and green flashed before his tightly shut eyes. Heartbroken, he couldn’t bear to open his eyes and see what he knew were the dismembered figures of the lovely woman and her innocent baby.

The Japanese cavalryman dragged his pain-racked body over to Father, where he grabbed the two halves of the plastic wallet. Blood dripped from the tips of his yellow fingers. As he clumsily tried to fit the two halves of his wife and son together with his usable hand, his dry, chapped lips quivered, his teeth chattered, and broken fragments of words emerged: ‘Aya… wa… tu… lu… he… cha… hai… min…’

Two streaks of glistening tears carved a path down his gaunt, grimy cheeks. He held the photograph up to his lips and kissed it, a gurgling sound rising from his throat.

‘You goddamn bastard, so you can cry, too? Since you know all about kissing your wife and child, why go around murdering burs? You think that if you squeeze out a few drops of stinking piss I won’t kill you?’ Granddad screamed as he raised the glinting blade of the Japanese sword over his head.

‘Dad —’ Father screamed, grabbing Granddad’s arm with both hands. ‘Dad, don’t kill him!’

Granddad’s arm shook in Father’s grasp. With teary, pity-filled eyes, Father pleaded with Granddad, whose heart had been hardened so much that killing had become commonplace.

As Granddad lowered his head, the wind carried a barrage of earthshaking thuds from Japanese mortars and the crackle of machine-gun fire raking the ranks of village defenders. From deep in the sorghum field they heard the shrill whinnies of Japanese horses and the heavy pounding of their hooves on the dark soil. Granddad shook his arm violently, tossing Father aside.

‘You little shit, what the hell’s got into you?’ he lashed out. ‘Who are those tears for? For your mother? For Uncle Arhat? For Uncle Mute and all the others? Or maybe it’s for this no-good son of a bitch! Whose pistol brought him down? Wasn’t he trying to trample you and slice you in two with his sword? Dry your tears, son, then kill him with his own sword!’

Father backed up, tears streaming down his face.

‘Come here!’

‘No — Dad — I can’t —’

‘Fucking coward!’

Granddad kicked Father, took a step backward, and raised the sword over his head.

Father saw a glinting arc of steel, then darkness. A liquid ripping sound blotted out the thuds of Japanese mortars, pounding Father’s eardrums and tying his guts into knots. When his vision returned, the handsome young Japanese cavalryman lay on the ground sliced in half. The blade had entered his left shoulder and exited on the right, beneath his ribs. His multicoloured innards writhed and quivered, emitting a steamy, powerful stench. Father felt his own intestines twist and leap into his chest. A torrent of green liquid erupted from his mouth. He turned and ran.

Although Father didn’t have the nerve to look at the Japanese cavalryman’s staring eyes beneath those long lashes, he couldn’t escape the image of the body lying there sliced in two. With one stroke of the sword, Granddad seemed to have cut everything in two. Even himself. The grotesque illusion of a blood-soaked sword glinting in the sky suddenly flashed in front of Father’s eyes, slicing people in two, as if cleaving melons: Granddad, Grandma, Uncle Arhat, the Japanese cavalryman and his wife and child, Uncle Mute, Big Liu, the Fang brothers, Consumptive Four, Adjutant Ren, everyone.

Granddad threw the sword to the ground and took off after Father, who was running blindly through the sorghum. More Japanese cavalry troops bore down on them; mortar shells shrieked through the sky above the sorghum field and exploded among the men stubbornly defending their village with shotguns and homemade cannons.

Granddad caught up with Father, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and shook him hard. ‘Douguan! Douguan! You little bastard! Have you gone crazy? What do you want, to crawl into a hole somewhere and die?’

Father clawed at Granddad’s powerful hands and shrieked, ‘Dad! Dad! Dad! Take me home. Take me home! I don’t want to fight any more. I don’t want to fight! I saw Mom! I saw Master! I saw Uncle!’

Granddad slapped him hard across the mouth. Father’s neck snapped to the side and went limp from the force of the blow. His head rolled against his chest; a bloody froth oozed from the corner of his mouth.

2

WHEN THE JAPANESE troops withdrew, the full moon, thin as a paper cutout, rose in the sky above the tips of the sorghum stalks, which had undergone such suffering. Grain fell sporadically like glistening tears. A sweet odour grew heavy in the air; the dark soil of the southern edge of our village had been thoroughly soaked by human blood. Lights from fires in the village curled like foxtails, as occasional pops, like the crackling of dry wood, momentarily filled the air with a charred odour that merged with the stifling stench of blood.

The wound on Granddad’s arm had turned worse, the scabs cracking and releasing a rotting, oozing mixture of dark blood and white pus. He told Father to squeeze the area around the wound. Fearfully, Father placed his icy fingers on the discoloured skin around the suppurating wound and squeezed, forcing out a string of air bubbles that released the putrid smell of pickled vegetables. Granddad picked up a piece of yellow spirit currency that had been weighted down by a clod of earth at the head of a nearby gravesite and told Father to smear some of the salty white powder from the sorghum stalks on it. Then he removed the head of a cartridge with his teeth and poured the greenish gunpowder onto the paper, mixed it with the white sorghum powder, and took a pinch with his fingers to daub on the open wound.

‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘shall I mix some soil into it?’

Granddad thought for a moment. ‘Sure, why not?’

Father bent down and picked up a clod of dark earth near the roots of a sorghum stalk, crumbled it in his fingers, and spread it on the paper. After Granddad mixed the three substances together and covered the wound with them, paper and all, Father wrapped a filthy strip of bandage cloth around it and tied it tight.

‘Does that make it feel better, Dad?’

Granddad moved his arm back and forth. ‘Much better, Douguan. An elixir like this will work on any wound, no matter how serious.’

‘Dad, if we’d had something like that for Mother, she wouldn’t have died, would she?’

‘No, she wouldn’t have….’ Granddad’s face clouded.

‘Dad, wouldn’t it’ve been great if you’d told me about this before? Mother was bleeding so much I kept packing earth on the wounds, but that only stopped it for a while. If I’d known to add some white sorghum powder and gunpowder, everything would have been fine….’

All the while Father was rambling, Granddad was loading his pistol. Japanese mortar fire raised puffs of hot yellow smoke all up and down the village wall.

Since Father’s Browning pistol lay under the belly of the fallen horse, during the final battle of the afternoon he used a Japanese rifle nearly as tall as he was; Granddad used his German automatic, firing it so rapidly it spent its youth and was ready for the trash heap. Although battle fires still lit up the sky above the village, an aura of peace and quiet had settled over the sorghum fields.

Father followed Granddad, dragging his rifle behind him as they circled the site of the massacre. The blood-soaked earth had the consistency of liquid clay under the weight of their footsteps; bodies of the dead merged with the wreckage of sorghum stalks. Moonlight danced on pools of blood, and hideous scenes of dismemberment swept away the final moments of Father’s youth. Tortured moans emerged from the field of sorghum, and here and there among the bodies some movement appeared. Father was burning to ask Granddad to save those fellow villagers who were still alive, but when he saw the pale, expressionless look on his father’s bronze face, the words stuck in his throat.

During the most critical moments, Father was always slightly more alert than Granddad, perhaps because he concentrated on surface phenomena; superficial thought seems ideally suited to guerrilla fighting. At that moment, Granddad looked benumbed; his thoughts were riveted on a single point, which might have been a twisted face, or a shattered rifle, or a single spent bullet. He was blind to all other sights, deaf to all other sounds. This problem — or characteristic — of his would grow more pronounced over the coming decade. He returned to China from the mountains of Hokkaido with an unfathomable depth in his eyes, gazing at things as though he could will them to combust spontaneously.

Father never achieved this degree of philosophical depth. In 1957, after untold hardships, when he finally emerged from the burrow Mother had dug for him, his eyes had the same look as in his youth: lively, perplexed, capricious. He never did figure out the relationship between men and politics or society or war, even though he had been spun so violently on the wheel of battle. He was forever trying to squeeze the light of his nature through the chinks in his body armour.

Granddad and Father circled the site of the massacre a dozen times, until Father said tearfully, ‘Dad… I can’t walk any more….’

Granddad’s robot movements stopped; taking Father’s hand, he backed up ten paces and sat down on a patch of solid, dry earth. The cheerless and lonely sorghum field was highlighted by the crackle of fires in the village. Weak golden flames danced fitfully beneath the silvery moonlight. After sitting there for a moment, Granddad fell backward like a capsized wall, and Father laid his head on Granddad’s belly, where he fell into a hazy sleep. He could feel Granddad’s feverish hand stroking his head, which sent his thoughts back nearly a dozen years, to when he was suckling at Grandma’s breast.

He was four at the time, and growing tired of the yellowed nipple that was always thrust into his mouth. Having begun to hate its sour hardness, he gazed up into the look of rapture in Grandma’s face with a murderous glint in his eyes and bit down as hard as he could. He felt the contraction in Grandma’s breast as her body jerked backward. Trickles of a sweet liquid warmed the corners of his mouth, until Grandma gave him a swat on the bottom and pushed him away. He fell to the ground, his eyes on the drops of fresh red blood dripping from the tip of Grandma’s pendulous breast. He whimpered, but his eyes were dry. Grandma, on the other hand, was crying bitterly, her shoulders heaving, her face bathed in tears. She lashed out at him, calling him a wolf cub, as mean as his wolf of a father.

Later on he learned that that was the year Granddad, who loved Grandma dearly, had fallen in love with the hired girl, Passion, who had grown into a bright-eyed young woman. At the moment when Father bit Grandma, Granddad, who had grown tired of her jealousy, was living with Passion in a house he’d bought in a neighbouring village. Everyone said that this second grandma of mine was no economy lantern, and that Grandma was afraid of her, but this is something I’ll clear up later. Second Grandma eventually had a girl by Granddad. In 1938, Japanese soldiers murdered this young aunt of mine with a bayonet, then gang-raped Second Grandma — this, too, I’ll clear up later.

Granddad and Father were exhausted. The wound throbbed in Granddad’s arm, which seemed to be on fire. Father’s feet had swollen until his cloth shoes nearly split their seams, and he fantasised about the exquisite pleasure of airing the rotting skin of his feet in the moonlight. But he didn’t have the strength to sit up and take off his shoes. Instead, he rolled over and rested his head on Granddad’s hard stomach so he could look up into the starry night and let the moon’s rays light up his face. He could hear the murmuring flow of the Black Water River and see black clouds gather in the sky above him. He remembered Uncle Arhat’s saying once that, when the Milky Way lay horizontally across the sky, autumn rains would fall. He had only really seen autumn water once in his life.

The sorghum was ready for harvest when the Black Water River rose and burst its banks, flooding both the fields and the village. The stalks strained to keep their heads above water; rats and snakes scurried and slithered up them to escape drowning. Father had gone with Uncle Arhat to the wall, which the villagers were reinforcing, and gazed uneasily at the yellow water rushing towards him. The villagers made rafts from kindling and paddled out to the fields to hack off the ears of grain, which were already sprouting new green buds. Bundles of soaked deep-red and emerald-green ears of sorghum weighted down the rafts so much it’s a wonder they didn’t sink. The dark, gaunt men, barefoot and bare-chested, wearing conical straw hats, stood with their legs akimbo on the rafts, poling with all their strength as they rocked from side to side.

The water in the village was knee-high, covering the legs of livestock, whose waste floated on the surface. In the dying rays of the autumn sun, the water shone like liquefied metal; tips of sorghum stalks too far away to be harvested formed a canopy of golden red just above the rippling surface, over which flocks of wild geese flew. Father could see a bright, broad body of water flowing slowly through the densest patch of red sorghum, in sharp contrast to the muddy, stagnant water around him; it was, he knew, the Black Water River. On one of the rafts lay a silver-bellied, green-backed grass carp, a long, thin sorghum stalk stuck through its gills. The farmer proudly held it up to show the people on the wall; it was nearly half as tall as he was. Blood oozed from its gills, and its mouth was open as it looked at my father with dull, sorrowful eyes.

Father was thinking about how Uncle Arhat had bought a fish from a farmer once, and how Grandma had scraped the scales from its belly, then made soup out of it; just thinking about that delicious soup gave him an appetite. He sat up. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘aren’t you hungry? I am. Can you find me something to eat? I’m starving….’

Granddad sat up and fished around in his belt until he found a bullet, which he inserted into the cylinder; then he snapped it shut, sending the bullet into the chamber. He pulled the trigger, and there was a loud crack. ‘Douguan,’ he said, ‘let’s go find your mother….’

‘No, Dad,’ Father replied in a high-pitched, frightened voice, ‘Mother’s dead. But we’re still alive, and I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.’

Father pulled Granddad to his feet. ‘Where?’ Granddad mumbled. ‘Where can we go?’ So Father led him by the hand into the sorghum field, where they walked in a crooked line, as though their objective was the moon, hanging high and icy in the sky.

A growl emerged from the field of corpses. Granddad and Father stopped in their tracks and turned to see a dozen pairs of green eyes, like will-o’-the-wisps, and several indigo shadows tumbling on the ground. Granddad took out his pistol and fired at two of the green eyes; the howl of a dying dog accompanied the extinguishing of those eyes. Granddad fired seven shots in all, and several wounded dogs writhed in agony among the corpses. While he was emptying his pistol into the pack, the uninjured dogs fled into the sorghum field, out of range, where they howled furiously at the two humans.

The last couple of bullets from Granddad’s pistol had travelled only thirty paces or so before thudding to the ground. Father watched them tumble in the moonlight, so slowly he could have reached out and caught them. And the once crisp crack of the pistol sounded more like the phlegmatic cough of a doddering old man. A tortured, sympathetic expression spread across Granddad’s face as he looked down at the weapon in his hand.

‘Out of bullets, Dad?’

The five hundred bullets they’d brought back from town in the goat’s belly had been used up in a matter of hours. The pistol had aged overnight, and Granddad came to the painful realisation that it was no longer capable of carrying out his wishes; time for them to part ways.

Holding the gun out in front of him, he carefully studied the muted reflection of the moonlight on the barrel, then loosened his grip and let the gun fall heavily to the ground.

The green-eyed dogs returned to the corpses, timidly at first. But their eyes quickly disappeared, and the moonlight was reflected off rolling waves of bluish fur; Granddad and Father could hear the sounds of dogs tearing human bodies with their fangs.

‘Let’s go into the village, Dad,’ Father said.

Granddad wavered for a moment, so Father tugged on him, and they fell into step.

By then most of the fires in the village had gone out, leaving red-hot cinders that gave off an acrid heat amid the crumbling walls and shattered buildings. Hot winds whirled above the village roads. The murky air was stifling. Roofs of houses, their supports burned out beneath them, had collapsed in mountains of smoke, dust, and cinders. Bodies were strewn atop the village wall and on the roads. A page in the history of our village had been turned. At one time the site had been a wasteland covered with brambles, underbrush, and reeds, a paradise for foxes and wild rabbits. Then a few huts appeared, and it became a haven for escaped murderers, drunks, gamblers, who built homes, cultivated the land, and turned it into a paradise for humans, forcing out the foxes and wild rabbits, who set up howls of protest on the eve of their departure. Now the village lay in ruins; man had created it, and man had destroyed it. It was now a sorrowful paradise, a monument to both grief and joy, built upon ruins. In 1960, when the dark cloud of famine settled over the Shandong Peninsula, even though I was only four years old I could dimly sense that Northeast Gaomi Township had never been anything but a pile of ruins, and that its people had never been able to rid their hearts of the shattered buildings, nor would they ever be able to.

That night, after the smoke and sparks from the other houses had died out, our buildings were still burning, sending skyward green-tinged tongues of flame and the intoxicating aroma of strong wine, released in an instant after all those years. Blue roof tiles, deformed by the intense heat, turned scarlet, then leaped into the air through a wall of flames that illuminated Granddad’s hair, which had turned three-quarters grey in the space of a week. A roof came crashing down, momentarily blotting out the flames, which then roared out of the rubble, stronger than ever. The loud crash nearly crushed the breath out of Father and Granddad.

Our house, which had sheltered the father and son of the Shan family as they grew rich, then had sheltered Granddad after his murderous deed, then had sheltered Grandma, Granddad, Father, Uncle Arhat, and all the men who worked for them, a sanctuary for their kindnesses and their grievances, had now completed its historical mission. I hated that sanctuary: though it had sheltered decent emotions, it had also sheltered heinous crimes. Father, when you were hiding in the burrow we dug for you in the floor of my home back in 1957, you recalled those days of your past in the unrelenting darkness. On no fewer than 365 occasions, in your mind you saw the roof of your house crash down amid the flames, and wondered what was going through the mind of your father, my granddad. So my fantasies were chasing yours while yours were chasing Granddad’s.

As he watched the roof collapse, Granddad became as angry as he’d been the day he abandoned Grandma and moved to another village to be with his new love, Passion. He had learned then that Grandma had shamelessly taken up with Black Eye, the leader of an organisation called the Iron Society, and at the time he wasn’t sure what filled his heart — loathing or love, pain or anger. When he later returned to Grandma’s arms, his feelings for her were so confused he couldn’t sort them out. In the beginning, his emotional warfare scarred only his own heart, and Grandma’s scarred only her own. Finally, they hurt each other. Only when Grandma smiled up at him as she lay dead in the sorghum field did he realise the grievous punishment life had meted out to him. He loved my father as a magpie loves the last remaining egg in its nest. But by then it was too late, for fate, cold and calculating, had sentenced him to a cruel end that was waiting for him down the road.

‘Dad, our house is gone….’ Father said.

Granddad rubbed Father’s head as he stared at the ruins of his home, then took Father’s hand and began stumbling aimlessly down the road under the waning light of the flames and the waxing light of the moon.

At the head of the village they heard an old man’s voice: ‘Is that you, Number Three? Why didn’t you bring the oxcart?’

The sound of that voice gave Granddad and Father such a warm feeling they forgot how tired they were and rushed over to see who it was.

A hunched-over elderly man rose to greet them, carefully sizing up Granddad with his ancient eyes, nearly touching his face. Granddad didn’t like his watchful look and was repulsed by the greedy stench that came from his mouth.

‘You’re not my Number Three,’ the old man said unhappily, his head wobbling as he sat down on a pile of loot. There were trunks, cupboards, dining tables, farm tools, harnesses, ripped comforters, cooking pots, earthenware bowls. He was sitting on a small mountain of stuff and guarding it as a wolf guards its kill. Behind him, two calves, three goats, and a mule were tied to a willow tree.

‘You old dog!’ Granddad growled through clenched teeth. ‘Get the hell out of here!’

The old man rose up on his haunches and said amiably, ‘Ah, my brother, let’s not be envious. I risked my life to drag this stuff out of the flames!’

‘I’ll fuck your living mother! Climb down from there!’ Granddad lashed out angrily.

‘You have no right to talk to me like that. I didn’t do anything to you. You’re the one who’s asking for trouble. What gives you the right to curse me like that?’ he complained.

‘Curse you? I’ll goddamn kill you! We’re not in a desperate struggle with Japan just so you can go on a looting binge! You bastard, you old bastard! Douguan, where’s your gun?’

‘It’s under the horse’s belly,’ Father said.

Granddad jumped up onto the mountain of stuff and, with a single kick, sent the old man sprawling onto the ground. He rose to his knees and begged, ‘Spare me, Eighth Route Master, spare me!’

‘I’m not with the Eighth Route Army,’ Granddad said, ‘or the Ninth Route. I’m Yu Zhan’ao the bandit!’

‘Spare me, Commander Yu, spare me! What good would it do to let all this stuff burn? I’m not the only “potato picker” from the village. Those thieves got all the good stuff. I’m too old and too slow, and all I could find was this junk.’

Granddad picked up a wooden table and threw it at the old man’s bald head. He screamed and held his bleeding scalp as he rolled in the dirt. Granddad reached down and picked him up by his collar. Looking straight into those tortured eyes, he said, ‘Our hero, the “potato picker”, then raised his fist and drove it with a loud crack into the old man’s face, sending him crumpling to the ground, face up. Granddad walked up and kicked him in the face, hard.

3

MOTHER AND MY three-year-old little uncle already had spent a day and a night hiding in the dry well. The morning before, she had gone to the working well with two earthenware jugs over her shoulder. No sooner had she bent over to see her face in the water than she heard the clang of a gong from the village wall and the shouts of the night watchman, Old Man Wu: ‘The Japs are here, they’ve surrounded the village!’ She was so frightened she dropped the jugs and carrying pole into the well, spun on her heel, and ran home. But before she got there she met her parents, my maternal grandfather and grandmother; he was armed with a musket, his wife was carrying her son and a cloth-wrapped parcel.

Ever since the battle at the Black Water River, the villagers had been preparing for the calamity they expected to come any day. Only three or four families had gone into hiding; the others, though frightened, were reluctant to give up their broken-down homes, their wells — bitter and sweet — and their quilts, no matter how thin and tattered they might have been. During the week of the lull, Granddad had taken Father into the country town to buy bullets, driven by a desire to settle accounts with Pocky Leng. It never occurred to him that the Japanese bloodbath would inundate his own village.

On the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Zhang Ruolu the Elder — he with one large eye and one small, he with the extraordinary bearing, he the intellectual who had studied in a private school, he who had played such a vital role in the burial of the martyred warriors — mobilised all able-bodied residents to reinforce the village wall and repair the gates, and appointed night watchmen to bang gongs and shout warnings at the first sighting of enemy troops. The villagers, male and female, young and old, took turns manning the wall. Mother told me that the voice of Ruolu the Elder was loud and crisp, almost metallic. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘a people united in spirit can move Mount Tai. Only if we’re united in spirit can we keep the Japs out of our village!’

As he was speaking, a shot rang out from the farmland beyond the village, and an elderly watchman’s head exploded; he rocked back and forth, then tumbled off the wall, sending the villagers scurrying for cover. Ruolu the Elder, dressed in tight pants and shirt, stood in the middle of the road and shouted, ‘Fellow villagers, calm down! Mount the wall as we planned! Don’t be afraid to die. Those who fear death will find it, those who don’t will live on! Our lives are all that stand between the Japs and our village!’

Mother watched the men run to the wall and throw themselves down on their bellies. My maternal grandmother, whose knees were knocking, was frozen to the spot. ‘Beauty’s dad,’ she shouted tearfully, ‘what about the children?’ My maternal grandfather ran back to her, rifle in hand, and lashed out, ‘What are you wailing about? Now that it’s come to this, it makes no difference whether we live or die!’ She didn’t dare utter a sound, but the tears kept flowing. He turned to look at the village wall, which hadn’t yet come under fire, grabbed Mother with one hand and her brother with the other, and ran with them to the vegetable garden behind the house, where there was an old abandoned well, its rickety windlass still in place. He looked down into the well and said, ‘Since there’s no water, we’ll hide the children here for the time being. We can come back for them after we’ve driven the Japs off.’ Grandmother stood like a block of wood and bowed to his wishes.

Grandfather took the loose end of rope from the windlass and tied it around my mother’s waist, just as a shriek split the sky above them and a howling black object crashed into the neighbour’s pigsty. There was an ear-splitting explosion, and everything seemed to disintegrate as a column of smoke rose from the sty; pieces of shrapnel, patches of dung, and chunks of pig flew in all directions. A stumpy leg fell right in front of Mother, the white tendons all curled inward like river leeches. It was the first mortar explosion my fifteen-year-old mother had ever heard. The surviving pigs squealed frantically and came dashing out of the sty; Mother and my little uncle were crying hysterically.

‘They’re firing mortars!’ Grandfather announced. ‘Beauty, you’re fifteen now, so you’ll have to take care of your brother down in the well. I’ll come back for you after the Japs are gone.’ As another mortar shell exploded in the village, he cranked the windlass and lowered Mother into the well. When her feet touched the broken bricks and crumbling clay at the bottom, she looked up at the ray of light far above her, barely able to make out Grandfather’s face. ‘Untie the rope,’ she heard him yell. After doing as she was told, she watched the rope rise jerkily up the well. She could hear her parents arguing, the exploding Jap mortar shells, and finally the sound of her mother crying. Grandfather’s face reappeared in the ray of light. ‘Beauty,’ he shouted, ‘here comes your brother. Make sure you catch him.’

Mother observed the wailing descent of my three-year-old uncle, his arms and legs flailing. The rotting piece of rope quivered in the air; the windlass protested with long-drawn-out creaks. Grandmother leaned into the well opening until nearly all the upper half of her body was in view; sobbing uncontrollably, she called out my uncle’s name: ‘Harmony, my little Harmony…’ Mother watched Grandmother’s glistening tears fall like crystal beads to the bottom of the well. The rope played out as Little Uncle’s feet touched the bottom, where he tearfully implored his mother, ‘Ma, pull me up, I don’t, I don’t want to be down here, I want to stay with you, Ma, Ma.’

Grandmother reached out for the rope and strained to pull it back up. ‘Harmony, my darling baby, my precious son…’

Then Mother saw Grandfather grab Grandmother’s hand, which had a death grip on the rope. Grandfather shoved her hard, and Mother saw her fall sideways. The rope snapped taut, and Little Uncle flew into Mother’s arms.

‘You fucking woman!’ Grandfather screamed. ‘Do you want them up here so they can die with the rest of us? Get over to the wall, and be quick about it! No one’ll get out alive if the Japs enter the village!’

‘Beauty — Harmony — Beauty — Harmony —’ But Grandmother’s shouts seemed so far away. Another mortar shell exploded; earth fell on them. They didn’t hear Grandmother’s voice any more after the explosion. Above them only a single ray of light and the old windlass.

Little Uncle was still crying as Mother untied the rope from around his waist. ‘Good little Harmony,’ she said to comfort him. ‘Don’t cry, baby brother. The Japs’ll come if you keep crying. If they hear a kid crying they’ll come with their red eyes and green fingernails….’

That stopped him. He looked up at her with his tiny, round black eyes, and threw his pudgy little arms around her neck. More and more mortar explosions lit up the sky, joined now by machine-gun and rifle fire. Pop pop pop, a pause, then pop pop pop. Mother looked skyward, listening carefully for movement around the well. She heard the distant shouts of Ruolu the Elder and the screams of the villagers. The well was cold and damp. A chunk of the side fell off, exposing pale earth and the roots of a tree. The bricks were covered with a layer of dark-green moss. Little Uncle stirred in her arms and began to sob again. ‘Sis,’ he said, ‘I want my mama, I want to go back up….’

‘Harmony, good Little Brother… Mom went with Dad to fight the Japs. They’ll come get us as soon as they’ve driven them off….’ Mother, who was trying to comfort her baby brother, started to sob, too. They hugged each other tightly as their sobs and tears merged.

Dawn was breaking, as Mother could tell from the pale light above her. Somehow they’d got through the long night. An eerie, frightening silence hung over the well. She looked up and saw a ray of red light illuminate the walls far above her. The sun was up. She listened carefully, but the village seemed as still as the well, although every once in a while she thought she heard what sounded like a peal of thunder rolling across the sky. She wondered if her parents would come to take them out of the well on this new day, back to the world of light and air, a world where there were no banded snakes or skinny toads. The events of the previous day seemed so far away that she felt as though she’d spent half her lifetime at the bottom of the well. Dad, she was thinking, Mom. If you don’t come, Brother and I surely will die down here. She resented her parents for casting their own children into the well and simply vanishing, not caring whether they were dead or alive. The next time she saw them, she’d make a huge scene to release the bellyfull of grievances she’d already stored up. How could she have known that, as she was being carried away by these hateful thoughts, her mother — my maternal grandmother — had been blown to pieces by a Japanese mortar shell, and her father — my maternal grandfather — had exposed himself to enemy gunfire on the wall, only to have half of his head blown away by a bullet that seemed to have eyes?

Mother prayed silently: Dad! Mom! Come back, hurry! I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, and Brother’s sick. You’ll kill your own children if you don’t come fast!

She heard the faint sounds of a gong from the village wall, or maybe it was from somewhere else, then a distant shout: ‘Is there anybody here — is there anybody left — the Japs are gone — Commander Yu’s here —’

Mother picked Little Uncle up in her arms and got to her feet. ‘Here!’ she shouted hoarsely. ‘Here we are — we’re down in the well — save us, hurry —’ She reached up and began to shake the rope hanging from the windlass, keeping at it for nearly an hour. Gradually her arms grew slack, and her brother fell to the ground with a weak groan. Then silence. She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down, until she was sitting on the cold broken bricks, drained and totally dejected.

Little Uncle climbed into her lap and said calmly, ‘Sis… I want my mama….’

A powerful sadness overcame Mother as she wrapped her arms around Little Uncle. ‘Harmony,’ she said, ‘Mom and Dad don’t want us any more. You and I are going to die here in this well….’

He was burning up with fever, and hugging him was like holding a charcoal brazier. ‘Sis, I’m thirsty….’

Mother’s gaze fell on a puddle of filthy green water in a corner of the well. A scrawny toad sat in the middle of the pool, its back covered with ugly bean-sized warts, the yellowish skin beneath its mouth popping in and out, its bulging eyes glaring at her. She shuddered, her skin crawled, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Her mouth was parched, too, but she’d rather have died of thirst than drink that nasty toad-water.

Since the previous morning, not a minute had passed when Mother wasn’t in the grip of terror and panic: terror caused by the sounds of gunfire in and around the village, panic over her baby brother’s struggle to survive. At fifteen, she was still a frail child, and it was a strain to have to carry her pudgy little brother all the time, especially when he was constantly squirming and making the pitiful sounds of a dying kitten. She spanked him once, and the little bastard responded by sinking his teeth into her.

Now that he was feverish, Little Uncle drifted in and out of consciousness and lay limp in the arms of my mother, who sat on a piece of broken brick until her buttocks were painfully sore, then totally numb. The gunfire, dense one minute and scattered the next, never completely stopped. Sunlight crept slowly over the western wall, then the eastern wall, as darkness spread inside. Mother knew she’d spent a whole day in the well, and that any time now her parents would be coming back. She stroked her baby brother’s scalding face; his breath burned her fingers. She laid her hand over his rapidly beating heart and could hear a wheeze in his chest. At that moment it occurred to her that he might very well die, and she shuddered. But she forced the thought out of her mind. Any minute now, she thought, to keep her spirits up, any minute now. It’s getting dark outside, and even the swallows have gone home to roost, which means that Mom and Dad will be here soon.

The light on the walls turned dark yellow, then deep red. A cricket hidden in one of the cracks began to chirp; mosquitoes warmed up their engines and took off into the air. Just then Mother heard the sound of a mortar barrage from somewhere near the village wall, and what sounded like human and animal screams from the northern end of the village. This was followed by blasts from a machine gun in the southern end. When the gunfire ended, sounds of shouting men and galloping horses swept into the village like a tidal wave. Utter chaos. Pounding of hooves and tramping boots around the opening of the well. Gulugulu — loud Japanese voices. Little Uncle began to whimper, but Mother clapped her hand over his mouth and held her breath. His face twisted violently under her hand, and she could feel the thumping of her own heart.

As the sun’s rays died out, Mother looked up at the red sky. Fires crackled all around, sending hot ashes over the opening of the well; mixed with the sound of licking flames were the cries of children, the screams of women, and the bleating of goats, or maybe it was the tearful lowing of cows. Even from the bottom of the well, she could smell the stench of burning.

She had no idea how long she’d shuddered over the fires raging above her, since she’d lost all sense of time, but she could tell from the tiny slice of darkening sky that the fires were dying out. At first she heard an occasional burst of gunfire and the sound of a roof collapsing. But after a while there was nothing but silence, plus a few dim stars that appeared in the circle of sky above.

Mother fell asleep, and awoke chilled. By now her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and when she looked up at the pale-blue sky and the gentle rays of the morning sun reflected off the walls, she felt giddy. Her clothes were soggy from the dampness; the cold air touched her bones. She hugged her little brother tightly. Even though his fever seemed to have abated during the night, he was still much hotter than she. So Mother soaked up Little Uncle’s warmth, while he was cooled by her; during their time together at the bottom of the well, they achieved true life-sustaining symbiosis. Mother, who did not know that her parents were dead, expected to see their faces and to hear their familiar voices at any time; had she known, she might not have survived those days and nights in the well.

When I look back upon my family’s history, I find that the lives of all the key members have at some point been linked inextricably with some sort of dark, dank cave or hole, beginning with Mother. Granddad later outdid all the others, setting a record among civilised people of his generation for living in a cave. Finally, Father would produce an epilogue that, in political terms, would be anything but glorious, but when viewed from the human angle must be considered splendid. When the time came, he would wave his sole remaining arm towards the red clouds of dawn and come running on the wind to Mother, Elder Brother, Elder Sister, and me.

Mother was freezing on the outside but burning up inside. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the previous morning. A searing thirst had tormented her since the night before, when the village was engulfed in flames; then, in the middle of the night, an overwhelming hunger reached its peak. As dawn was about to break, her guts seemed to twist into knots, until all she could feel was the gnawing pain in her belly. But now the mere thought of food nauseated her; it was the thirst she found unbearable. Her lungs felt dry and chapped, each breath producing the rustling sound of withered sorghum leaves.

Once again Little Uncle said meekly through blistered lips, ‘Sis… I’m thirsty….’ Mother didn’t have the heart to look into his small, wizened face, and there were no words to console him. The promises she’d made throughout the day and night had come to nothing. No sound, not even the bark of a dog, emerged from the village. That was when it occurred to her that her parents might be dead or might have been captured by the Japs. Her eyes stung, but she had no more tears to shed — the wretched state of her baby brother had forced her to grow up.

Momentarily forgetting her suffering, she laid him down on the brick floor and stood up to survey the walls around her. They were damp, of course, and the luxuriant appearance of moss briefly gave her new hope; but it offered no relief for their thirst, and it wasn’t edible. She squatted down and picked up a brick, then another. They were very heavy, as though water was stored up inside them. A red centipede crawled out of the hollow where the bricks had been, and Mother jumped away, not daring to pick up any more. Nor did she dare sit down, for something horrible had occurred the morning before that made her realise she was now a woman.

Years later, Mother told my wife that her first menstrual period had come while she was down in that dark, dank well, and when my wife told me, the two of us felt enormous compassion for the fifteen-year-old girl who would later give birth to me.

Mother had no choice but to pin her final scrap of hope on that puddle of filthy water in which the toad was soaking, no matter how much its hideous features frightened or disgusted her. Nothing had changed from the day before: the toad hadn’t moved, its sombre eyes still glaring at her with hostility, its warty skin still making her skin crawl. Her new-found courage quickly evaporated. Poison darts emanating from the toad’s eyes prickled her all over. She averted her eyes, but that didn’t blot out the terrifying image of the toad.

Mother turned to look at her dying brother, and as she did so, her eye caught a tiny clump of milky-white mushrooms growing beneath two bricks. Her heart racing with excitement, she slid the bricks away and picked some of the mushrooms. Her innards twisted into knots as she gazed at the food in her hand. She shoved a mushroom into her mouth and swallowed it whole. It tasted so good that her hunger pangs returned in a flash. She put another in her mouth. Little Uncle moaned softly, but Mother consoled herself with the thought that she should try them first, in case they were toadstools. That’s right, isn’t it? Of course it is. She put one into Little Uncle’s mouth, but his jaws didn’t move; he just looked at her through tiny slits. ‘Harmony, eat it. I found it for you. Eat it.’ She held up another and waved it under his nose. His jaws twitched, as though he were chewing, so she fed him another one. But he coughed and spat them both out. By then his lips were so chapped they bled. He lay on the brick floor, close to death.

Mother swallowed a dozen or so little mushrooms, and her intestines, which had gone into hibernation, suddenly came to life, writhing painfully and making a huge racket. She was sweating more than she had at any time since being lowered into the well; it would be the last time. Sweat drenched her clothes; her armpits and the backs of her knees were wet and sticky. The chilled air seemed to penetrate the marrow of her bones, and she slumped unaware to the floor and lay beside her baby brother. At noon on her second day in the well, Mother fell into a swoon.

When she woke up, dusk was falling. She saw reddish-purple rays of light on the eastern wall as the sun sank in the west. The ancient windlass was bathed in the sunset, giving her the contradictory sensations of seeing remote antiquity and the approach of doomsday at the same time. The ringing in her ears, which hardly ever stopped, was now joined by the sound of footsteps out there, but she couldn’t tell if it was real or an illusion. She no longer had the strength to cry out, and was so thirsty her chest seemed to be baking in a fire. Even the act of breathing brought excruciating pain. Little Uncle was already beyond suffering, beyond joy; he lay on the brick floor, a pile of withered yellow skin. When Mother looked down into his glazed eyes, everything turned dark in front of her: the black shroud of death was settling over the dry well.

The second night at the bottom of the well seemed to fly by; Mother passed it in a semiwakeful state. Several times she dreamed she’d sprouted wings and was circling ever upward towards the opening of the well. But the shaft seemed endless, and no matter how far she flew she never drew any closer to the opening. She tried flapping her wings faster, but the elongation of the shaft kept pace with her. Once during the night she awoke briefly to feel her brother’s cold body beside her. Unable to bear the thought that he was dead, she tried to convince herself that she must be hot and feverish. A curved ray of moonlight fell on the puddle of greenish water, illuminating the toad like a precious gem bobbing in a sea of emeralds. At that moment Mother imagined that she and the sacred amphibian had reached an understanding: it would give up as much of its water as she needed, for which she would fling it out of the well, like a stone, if that was what it wanted. Tomorrow, she thought, if I hear footsteps tomorrow, I’ll hurl pieces of brick out of the well, even if it’s Japanese soldiers or Chinese puppet troops passing by. She needed to let people know there was somebody down there.

When dawn broke again, Mother had learned everything there was to know about the bottom of the well. Taking advantage of her early-morning energy level, she scraped off a layer of green moss and stuffed it into her mouth. It didn’t taste bad, maybe a little pungent. The problem was her throat, which was so dry it wouldn’t function properly, and the chewed moss came right back up when she tried to swallow it. Her gaze returned to the puddle of water and the toad, which maintained its venomous glare. Finding it more than she could bear, she turned her head and cried angry, fearful tears.

At around noon, she was certain she heard footsteps and human voices. Overjoyed, she rose unsteadily to her feet and shouted at the top of her lungs; but no sound emerged. Though she grabbed a piece of brick, she was able to lift it no higher than her waist before it slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground. Her last gasp. Hearing the footsteps and voices disappear in the distance, she sat crestfallen beside the body of her brother, and as she looked into his face she acknowledged the fact that he was dead. She laid her hand on his cold face, revulsion welling up in her chest. Death had separated them. The glare in his sightless eyes belonged to a different world.

She spent that night in a state of absolute terror, for she believed she had seen a snake as thick as the handle of a sickle. It was black with little yellow spots down the centre of its back. Its head was flat, like a spatula, its neck ringed by a yellow band. The cold, gloomy atmosphere of the well originated in this snake’s body. Several times she thought she could feel it wrapping itself around her, its flicking tongue aiming red darts at her and exhaling blasts of cold air.

Eventually, she did in fact spot the clumsy, slow-moving snake in a hole in the wall above the toad, only its hideous head sticking out. Covering her eyes with her hands, she backed up as far as she could. Gone were all thoughts of trying to drink the dirty water, now guarded by a venomous snake above and a toad below.

4

FATHER, WANG GUANG (male, fifteen, short and skinny, dark face), Dezhi (male, fourteen, tall and skinny, yellow complexion, rheumy eyes), Guo Yang (male, over forty, crippled, walked on crutches), Blind Eye (real name and age unknown, never without his battered three-string zither), the woman Liu (over forty, big and tall, ulcerated legs) — the six survivors of the massacre — stared blankly at Granddad, all except Blind Eye, of course. They were standing on the village wall, the early-morning sun reflecting off their faces. Both sides of the wall were strewn with the bodies of courageous defenders and frenzied attackers. The muddy water of the ditch beyond the wall soaked the bloated corpses of several eviscerated Japanese warhorses. Everywhere there were shattered walls and ruined dikes, and white smoke curling into the sky. The sorghum fields beyond the village were trampled and destroyed. Incineration and blood were the pervasive smells of the morning; red and black the colours; grief and solemnity the moods.

Granddad’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair seemed to have turned completely white, his back was hunched, and his large, swollen hands rested uneasily on his knees.

‘Fellow villagers…’ His voice was hoarse and gravelly. ‘I brought death and destruction down on the entire village….’

They began to sob, and crystalline tears welled up even in Blind Eye’s hollow sockets.

‘What now, Commander Yu?’ Guo Yang asked through blackened teeth as he got to his feet with the aid of crutches.

‘Will the Japs be back, Commander Yu?’ Wang Guang asked.

‘Are you going to help us get away from here, Commander Yu?’ the sobbing woman Liu asked.

‘Get away?’ Blind Eye said. ‘To where? The rest of you can run if you want to, but if I’m going to die it’ll be right here.’

He sat down, hugged his battered zither to his chest, and began to pluck it, his mouth twisting, his cheeks twitching, his head swaying.

‘Fellow villagers, we can’t run away,’ Granddad said. ‘Not after so many men have died. The Japs’ll be back, so, while there’s time, gather up the weapons and ammunition from the bodies. We’ll take the Japs on until either the fish die or the net breaks!’

They fanned out in the field, stripping the bodies of weapons and ammunition, making trip after trip with their booty to the village side of the wall. Guo Yang, on his crutches, and the woman Liu, with her ulcerated legs, worked the nearby corpses, while Blind Eye sat beside the growing pile of weapons and ammunition, cocking his ear to pick up any sounds, like a good sentry.

At midmorning they assembled at the wall to watch Granddad take an inventory of the arsenal. Since the battle had lasted till dark, the Japs had been unable to make a final sweep of the battlefield, much to Granddad’s advantage.

They had picked up seventeen Japanese ‘38’ repeater rifles and thirty-four leather pouches, with a total of 1,007 copper-jacketed cartridges. There were twenty-four Chinese copies of the Czech ‘79’ rifle and twenty-four bandoliers with 412 cartridges. They brought back fifty-seven Japanese petal-shaped muskmelon grenades and forty-three Chinese grenades with wooden handles. There was also a Japanese ‘tortoiseshell’ pistol with thirty-nine cartridges, one Luger and seven bullets, nine Japanese sabres, and seven carbines with over two hundred rounds of ammo.

The inventory completed, Granddad asked Guo Yang for his pipe, which he lit and began puffing as he sat on the wall.

‘Dad, can we form our own army?’ Father asked.

Granddad looked at the pile of weapons and kept silent. When he’d finished his pipe he said, ‘It’s time to choose, my sons, one weapon apiece.’

He picked up the pistol in the tortoiseshell holster and fastened it around his waist. He also picked out a ‘38’ repeater rifle with a fixed bayonet. Father grabbed the Luger. Wang Guang and Dezhi each chose a Japanese carbine.

‘Give the Luger to Uncle Guo,’ Granddad said.

Stung by the order, Father grumbled.

‘I want you to use a carbine,’ Granddad said. ‘A gun like that’s no good in battle.’

‘I’ll take a carbine, too,’ Guo Yang said. ‘Give the Luger to Blind Eye.’

‘Make us something to eat,’ Granddad said to the woman Liu. ‘The Japs’ll be back soon.’

Father picked up a ‘38’ repeater rifle and noisily worked the bolt back and forth.

‘Be careful,’ Granddad cautioned him. ‘It might go off.’

‘I know. Don’t worry.’

‘They’re coming, Commander,’ Blind Eye said softly. ‘I hear them.’

‘Get down,’ Granddad ordered. ‘Hurry!’

They crouched down among the white wax reeds on the inside slope of the wall, keeping their eyes riveted on the sorghum field beyond the ditch. All except Blind Eye, who was still sitting alongside the pile of weapons, rocking his head as he plucked his zither.

‘You get down here, too!’ Granddad ordered him.

Blind Eye’s face twitched painfully and his lips quivered. The same tune emerged over and over from his battered zither, like raindrops in a tin bucket.

What appeared on the other side of the ditch was not human figures, but hundreds of dogs emerging from the sorghum field and rushing headlong toward the scattered corpses, hugging the ground. Fur of every imaginable colour pulsated in the sunlight. Leading the pack were the three dogs from our family.

My father, always one to squirm, was getting impatient. He aimed at the pack of dogs and fired. The bullet whizzed over their heads and tore into the sorghum stalks.

Wang Guang and Dezhi, holding real rifles for the first time in their lives, aimed at the swaying sorghum and fired. Their bullets either tore aimlessly through the sky or smacked wildly into the ground.

‘Hold your fire!’ Granddad barked angrily. ‘This ammo isn’t for you kids to play with!’ He kicked Father’s upturned rump.

The movement deep in the sorghum field gradually subsided, and a mighty shout rent the air: ‘Hold your fire — whose troops are you —’

‘Your old ancestors’ troops!’ Granddad shouted back. ‘You damned yellow-skinned dogs!’

He aimed his ‘38’ and fired a round in the direction of the shout.

‘Comrades — we’re the Jiao-Gao regiment — anti-Japanese troops!’ the man in the sorghum field yelled. ‘Tell me, whose troops are you?’

‘Damn them!’ Granddad cursed. ‘All they know how to do is shout!’

The eighty soldiers of the Jiao-Gao regiment emerged from the sorghum field in a crouch. Their uniforms were in tatters, their faces sallow; they looked like wild animals terrified by the sight of guns. For the most part they were unarmed, except for a couple of wooden-handled grenades hanging at their belts. The squad up front carried old Hanyang rifles; a few of the others had muskets.

The previous afternoon, Father had seen this group of men hiding deep in the sorghum field and sniping at the Japs who were attacking the village.

The troops made their way up to the wall, where a tall fellow, apparently an officer, said, ‘Squad One up to the hill for sentry duty! The rest of you can take a break.’

As the Jiao-Gao soldiers broke ranks and sat on the wall, a handsome young man stepped forward, took a piece of yellow paper from his knapsack, and began teaching the men a song: ‘The wind is howling’ — he began — ‘The wind is the wind is the wind is the wind is howling’ — the troops followed — ‘watch me, sing together — The horses are neighing — The Yellow River is roaring the Yellow River is roaring the Yellow River is roaring the Yellow River is roaring — In Henan and Hebei the sorghum is ripe the sorghum is ripe — The fighting spirit of heroes in the green curtain is high the fighting spirit of anti-Japanese resistance heroes in the green curtain is high — Raise your muskets and cannon your muskets and cannon wield your sabres and your spears your sabres and your spears defend your homes defend North China defend the country —’

Oh, how Father envied the youthful expressions on the weathered faces of the Jiao-Gao soldiers, and as he listened to them sing, his throat began to itch. All of a sudden he recalled the handsome young Adjutant Ren and the way he’d led the singing.

He, Wang Guang, and Dezhi picked up their rifles and walked up to enjoy the singing of the Jiao-Gao soldiers, who envied them their new Japanese ‘38’ rifles and carbines.

The man in command of the Jiao-Gao regiment was named Jiang. He had such small feet they called him Little Foot Jiang. He walked up to Granddad, a boy of sixteen or seventeen at his side. He had a pistol stuck in his belt and was wearing a khaki cap with two black buttons. His teeth were pearly white. In heavily accented Beijing dialect, he said, ‘Commander Yu, you’re a hero! We witnessed your battle with the Japs yesterday!’

He stuck out his hand, but Granddad just gave him a cold stare and snorted contemptuously.

The embarrassed Commander Jiang pulled back his hand, smiled, and continued: ‘I’ve been asked by the special committee of the Binhai area to talk to you. They’re so impressed with your fervent nationalism and heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in this great war of national survival that they have ordered me to propose that we join forces in a coordinated move to resist the Japanese….’

‘Horseshit!’ Granddad interrupted him. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. Join forces, you say? Where were you when we fought the Jap armoured troops? Where were you when they surrounded the village? My troops were wiped out, their blood forming a river across the land, and you come here talking about joining forces!’

He angrily kicked the yellow casing of a spent cartridge into the ditch. Blind Eye was still plucking his zither, the sound of raindrops in a tin bucket.

Jiang would not be put off, no matter how awkward Granddad’s harangue made him feel. ‘Commander Yu, please don’t disappoint us. And don’t underestimate our strength.’

‘Let’s open the skylight and let the sun shine in,’ Granddad said. ‘Just what do you have in mind?’

‘We want you to join the Jiao-Gao regiment.’

‘In other words, take orders from you,’ Granddad sneered.

‘You, sir, can be part of the regimental leadership.’

‘My title?’

‘Deputy regiment commander!’

‘Taking orders from you?’

‘We all take orders from the Binhai-area special committee.’

‘I don’t take orders from anybody!’

‘Commander Yu, as the saying goes, “A great man understands the times, a smart bird chooses the tree where it roosts, and a clever man chooses the leader he’ll follow.” Don’t pass up this chance!’

‘Are you finished?’

Jiang laughed openly. ‘Commander Yu,’ he said, ‘you’re no fool. Look at my troops. They’re hot-blooded young men, but empty-handed for the most part. The weapons and ammo you’ve got here…’

‘Don’t even think it!’

‘We just want to borrow some. We’ll give them back as soon as you’ve formed your own army.’

‘Pah! Do you think Yu Zhan’ao’s a three-year-old child?’

‘Don’t get me wrong, Commander Yu. Where the fate of the nation is concerned, all people share responsibility. In this war of resistance against Japan, you contribute what you can — men for some, weapons for others. It would be a national disgrace to let those weapons and all that ammo lie there unused.’

‘I’ve heard enough! Don’t expect me to piss in your bottle. If you had any balls, you’d find your weapons in the hands of the Japanese!’

‘We fought them yesterday!’

‘And how many strings of firecrackers did you set off?’ Granddad asked sarcastically.

‘Not firecrackers — bullets and hand grenades. And we lost six of our comrades. We deserve at least half the weapons!’

‘I lost all my men at the bridgehead over the Black Water River, for one ancient machine gun!’

‘It was Pocky Leng’s troops who took everything else!’

‘And I suppose the eyes of Little Foot Jiang’s troops don’t light up just as bright when they see weapons? Well, this is one man you’re not going to sucker!’

‘I advise you to be careful, Commander Yu,’ Jiang warned Granddad. ‘My patience has limits.’

‘Are you threatening me?’ Granddad asked stiffly, resting his hand on the butt of his pistol.

Commander Jiang’s look of anger quickly gave way to a smile. ‘You’ve got me all wrong, Commander Yu. We’d never steal food from a friend’s bowl. Just because we can’t make a deal doesn’t mean we’re not on the same side.’

He turned to his troops and said, ‘Clean up the battlefield. Bury our fellow villagers, and don’t forget to pick up all the spent cartridge casings.’

The troops fanned out across the battlefield to search for cartridge casings. While they were burying the bodies, a battle between crazed dogs and the surviving humans resulted in the dismemberment of many of the corpses.

‘We’re in a terrible fix, Commander Yu,’ Jiang said. ‘We have no weapons or ammunition, and five out of every ten casings we take back to the munitions plant for recasting come out as duds. We’re caught between Pocky Leng, who squeezes us, and the puppet troops, who slaughter us, so you have to give us some of the weapons you’ve got here. Don’t treat the Jiao-Gao regiment with contempt.’

Granddad looked at the troops carrying the dead back and forth near the sorghum field and said, ‘You can have the sabres, and the “79” carbines, and the wooden-handled grenades.’

Jiang grabbed Granddad’s hand and exclaimed, ‘Commander Yu, you’re a true friend…. We make our own wooden-handled grenades, so how about this: you keep the grenades and give us some “38” rifles instead.’

‘No,’ Granddad said tersely.

‘Just five.’

‘No!’

‘Three, then. How’s that? Just three.’

‘I said no!’

‘Okay, two. You can part with at least two, can’t you?’

‘Shit!’ Granddad grumbled. ‘You’re like a damned livestock auctioneer.’

‘Squad One, get over here to pick up the weapons.’

‘Not so fast,’ Granddad said. ‘Stand over there.’

He personally handed out the twenty-four Czech ‘79’ rifles and the canvas cartridge belts, then hesitated for a moment before tossing in a ‘38’ repeater rifle.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘And we keep the sabres.’

‘Commander Yu,’ Jiang complained, ‘you agreed to give us two “38” rifles.’

‘If I hear another word from you,’ Granddad said testily, ‘you won’t even get one!’

‘Okay,’ Jiang said, throwing his hands up in front of him. ‘Don’t get mad!’

The Jiao-Gao soldiers who were given weapons grinned from ear to ear. One or two members of the burial detail stumbled upon additional weapons, and they also picked up the automatic pistol Granddad had tossed away and Father’s discarded Browning. Their pockets bulged with spent cartridge casings.

‘Comrades,’ Jiang said, ‘hurry up and get those bodies buried. We have to withdraw before the Japs come back for their dead.’

As the Jiao-Gao regiment was falling in beside the wall, a couple of dozen bicycles came flying down the road from the eastern tip of the village. Wheels glistened, spokes flashed. Commander Jiang barked out an order and the soldiers hit the ground, as the riders pedalled unsteadily up to Granddad.

It was Detachment Leader Leng’s mobile platoon, a crack group of riders armed with pistols. Dressed in neat grey uniforms, with leggings and cloth shoes, they were quite a sight. Pocky Leng was known as a first-rate cyclist who could ride on a single railway track for a mile and a half. Commander Jiang shouted another order, and the Jiao-Gao troops emerged from their hiding places among the trees, quickly forming up ranks behind Granddad.

Detachment Leader Leng’s soldiers dismounted and walked their bicycles the rest of the way along the top of the wall. Leng emerged from the crowd, surrounded by bodyguards.

The mere sight of Pocky Leng was enough to make Granddad reach for his pistol.

‘Take it easy, Commander Yu,’ Jiang cautioned him, ‘take it easy.’

The gloved Detachment Leader Leng, smiling broadly, came up and shook hands with Jiang without taking off his glove. Jiang smiled as he reached inside his pants and brought out a fat, light-brown louse, which he flipped into the ditch.

‘Your esteemed unit is still in the thick of things, I see,’ Detachment Leader Leng said to him.

‘We’ve been fighting since yesterday afternoon,’ Jiang said.

‘Ending in a brilliant victory, I assume?’

‘In cooperation with Commander Yu, we killed twenty-six Japanese and thirty-six puppet soldiers, plus four warhorses. Where were the crack guerrilla troops and fierce leaders of your esteemed unit yesterday?’

‘We were harassing the town of Pingdu and forcing the Japs to retreat in panic. You could call that the classic “Encircle the Wei to rescue the Zhao” ploy, wouldn’t you say, Commander Jiang?’

‘Fuck your old lady, Pocky Leng!’ Granddad growled. ‘Feast your eyes on the Zhaos you rescued! All the villagers are right here.’

He pointed to the blind and crippled men on the wall.

The pale marks on Pocky Leng’s face reddened. ‘Yesterday afternoon my troops fought at Pingdu till they were bathed in blood, suffering enormous losses. My conscience is clear.’

‘Since you and your esteemed troops knew the enemy had surrounded the village, why didn’t you come to the rescue?’ Jiang asked. ‘Why pass up a fight in your own backyard, and travel a hundred li just to harass the town of Pingdu? These aren’t motorcycles your esteemed troops are riding, you know. And even if you were so anxious for some action you had to go off to harass Pingdu, the enemy troops you routed should still be in retreat. But you, Commander, look fit and relaxed, not a speck of dirt on you. I wonder how you set about commanding this great battle.’

Leng turned red all the way to the roots of his ears. ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Jiang! I know why you’re here, and you know why I’m here.’

‘Detachment Leader Leng,’ Jiang said, ‘as I see it, you went about yesterday’s battle at Pingdu all wrong. Now, if I’d been in command of your esteemed unit, instead of coming to break the encirclement of the village I’d have spread the men out in an ambush in the cemetery, using the gravestones as cover. Then I’d have set up the eight machine guns you captured after the ambush at the Black Water River and fired on the Japs when they came down the road. Since they and their horses would be exhausted after fighting all day, and low on ammo in unfamiliar surroundings in the dark, they’d be sitting ducks. They couldn’t possibly get away. That way you’d have performed a great service for the people and made heroes of your soldiers. Your glory would have been added to that of the ambush at the Black Water River, and you’d have a brilliant reputation! What a shame, Detachment Leader Leng, that you missed your chance. Instead of making heroes of your soldiers and serving the people, here you are, trying to gain some little advantage from orphans and widows. Although I’m normally immune to shame, what you have done shames me!’

All the red-faced Leng could do was stammer: ‘Jiang… look down on me…. Wait till I fight a major battle, then you’ll see….’

‘When that day comes, we’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with you!’

‘I don’t need your help! I can fight my own battles!’

‘You have my undying admiration!’ Jiang said.

Detachment Leader Leng mounted his bicycle and was about to ride off when Granddad stepped up and grabbed the front of his shirt. ‘When this war with Japan is over, Leng,’ he said with murder in his eyes, ‘you and I have some unfinished business!’

‘You don’t scare me!’ Leng snarled.

Pushing down hard on his pedal, he rode off, followed by his two dozen troops, like a pack of dogs chasing a rabbit.

‘Commander Yu,’ Jiang said, ‘the Jiao-Gao regiment will always be your devoted ally.’

He thrust his hand out to Granddad, who reached out awkwardly and shook it. Tough though it was, Granddad could also feel its warmth.

5

THE TIME: FORTY-SIX years later. The place: the spot where Granddad, Father, and Mother had fought a heroic battle against a pack of dogs led by the three from our family — Blackie, Red, and Green. On one stormy night lightning split open a mass grave where Communists, Nationalists, commoners, Japanese, and puppet troops were buried — a site called All-Souls Grave — spreading rotting bones over a ten-yard area, where they were washed clean by the rain and turned a sombre white. I was home on summer holiday at the time, and when I heard that All-Souls Grave had opened up I rushed over to see for myself, our blue-coated little dog following hard on my heels. It was still drizzling, and the dog darted in front of me, his paws splashing loudly in the muddy puddles. It wasn’t long before we were in the midst of bones that had been sent flying with explosive force, and Blue ran up to sniff them, quickly shaking his head to show that they didn’t interest him.

People stood fearfully around the exposed graveyard. I squeezed in among them until I could see the skeletons at the bottom of the pit, piles of bones exposed to the sun for the first time in all those years. I doubt that even the provincial party secretary could have told which of them belonged to Communists, which to Nationalists, which to Japanese soldiers, which to puppet soldiers, and which to civilians. The skulls all had the exact same shape, and all had been thrown into the same heap. The scattered raindrops beat a desolate rhythm on the white bones, forceful and fiendish. Skeletons lay on their backs, nearly submerged in the icy water, like fermenting sorghum wine that had been stored up for years.

The villagers picked up the bones that had been scattered around the area and tossed them back in. A momentary dizziness came over me, and when it passed I took another look, discovering the skulls of dozens of dogs mixed in with the human heads in the grave. The bottom of the pit was a shallow blur of white, a sort of code revealing that the history of dogs and the history of men are intertwined. I helped pick up the scattered bones, but put on a pair of white gloves just to be on the safe side. Noticing the hateful stares of the villagers, I quickly took them off and stuffed them into my pants pockets, then walked down the bone-strewn road all the way to the edge of the sorghum field, a good hundred yards away.

There in the short green grass, still dripping with water, lay the curved dome of a human skull. The flat, broad forehead showed that it hadn’t belonged to any ordinary person. I picked it up with three fingers and had started running back with it when I spotted another muted gleam of white in the grass not far away. This one was a long, narrow skull with several sharp teeth still in its opened mouth; I knew it was one I didn’t have to pick up, for it belonged to the same species as the little blue-coated friend tagging along behind me. Maybe it had been a wolf. All I knew for sure was that it had been blown over here by the explosive force, for the specks of dirt on its freshly cleaned surface proved it had lain in the mass grave for decades. I picked it up anyway. The villagers were tossing bones stolidly into the grave, some cracking and splitting when they hit. I tossed in the fragment of the human skull. But when it came to the large canine skull I hesitated. ‘Toss it in,’ an old man said; ‘the dogs back then were as good as humans.’ So I tossed it into the open pit. Once All-Souls Grave had been filled in, it looked just as it had before the lightning hit. In order to calm the frightened souls of the dead, Mother burned a stack of yellow spirit money at the head of the grave.

After helping fill in the pit, I stayed with her to look down at this resting place of a thousand bodies, and kowtowed three times.

‘It’s been forty-six years,’ Mother said. ‘I was fifteen then.’

6

I WAS FIFTEEN then. When the Japanese surrounded the village, your maternal grandfather and grandmother lowered me and your young uncle into a dry well. We never saw them again. Later on I learned they were killed that very morning.

I don’t know how many days I hunkered down inside that well. Your uncle died there, and his body began to stink. The toad and yellow-banded snake stared at me until I nearly died of fright. I was sure I’d die down in that well. But finally your father and your granddad came along.

Granddad wrapped the fifteen ‘38’ rifles in oil paper and tied them with rope, then carried them to the edge of the well. ‘Douguan, look around and make sure nobody can see us.’

Granddad knew that Detachment Leader Leng and the Jiao-Gao soldiers still had their hearts set on these guns. The night before, when he and the others were asleep in a tent at the foot of the village wall, Blind Eye, who was keeping guard, heard something bump up against a wax tree on the downward slope. Then he detected the soft sound of footsteps coming towards the tent; he could tell there were two people, one brave, the other not so brave. He could hear them breathing. Raising his rifle, he shouted, ‘Halt right there!’ The men threw themselves to the ground in panic and began crawling backward. Getting a fix on the direction, Blind Eye aimed and pulled the trigger Bang! He heard the men roll down the slope and dart in among the stand of wax trees. He aimed and fired again. Someone yelled. Granddad and the others, awakened by the gunfire, ran up, weapons in hand, just in time to see two dark figures dart across the ditch and vanish into the sorghum field.

‘There’s nobody around, Dad,’ my father said.

‘Remember this well,’ Granddad said.

‘I will. It belongs to Beauty’s family.’

‘If I die,’ Granddad said, ‘come get these guns and use them as a bartering chip to join up with the Jiao-Gao regiment. They’re at least better than Detachment Leader Leng’s troops.’

‘Let’s not join up with anyone,’ Father said. ‘Let’s recruit our own army. We still have a machine gun.’

Granddad snorted with a wry smile. ‘It’s not as easy as you think, son,’ he said. ‘I’m worn out.’

After Father uncoiled the rope from the rickety windlass, Granddad tied it around the bundle of guns.

‘Are you sure the well is dry?’ Granddad asked.

‘I’m sure Wang Guang and I played hide-and-seek here once.’ Father bent over to peer into the well, where he saw the outlines of two bodies in the dark recesses.

‘Dad, there’s somebody down there!’ he screamed.

They knelt on the step at the mouth of the well and strained to see who it was.

‘It’s Beauty!’ Father said.

‘Take a good look. Is she alive?’

‘I think I can see her breathing — there’s a snake coiled beside her — and her baby brother Harmony’s there, too….’ Father’s words echoed off the walls of the well.

‘Are you afraid to go down there?’

‘I’ll go down, Dad. Beauty’s my best friend!’

‘Watch out for that snake.’

‘Snakes don’t scare me.’

Granddad untied the well rope from the bundle of guns and secured it around Father’s waist, then lowered him slowly into the well, keeping the weight on the windlass.

‘Be careful,’ Father heard Granddad say from the top of the well as his foot touched a protruding brick and he stepped down on the floor. The black snake with the colourful band raised its head menacingly and flicked out its forked tongue, hissing at Father. During his days of fishing and crabbing at the Black Water River, Father had learned how to deal with snakes, and he and Uncle Arhat had eaten one, baked in dry cow dung. Arhat told him that snake meat is a cure for leprosy; after eating it, they had both felt hot all over.

Now Father stood at the bottom of the well without moving, and, the instant the snake lowered its head, he reached down, grabbed it by the tail, and shook it with all his might until he heard its bones crack. Then he grabbed it just behind the head and twisted it hard. ‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘stand clear!’

Granddad backed away from the mouth of the well as the half-dead snake came flying out. Granddad’s skin crawled. ‘That little imp’s got the nerves of a thief!’

Father helped Beauty sit up and shouted in her ear, ‘Beauty! Beauty! It’s me, Douguan. I’m here to save you!’

Father tied the rope around Beauty’s waist. Granddad carefully turned the windlass and hauled Mother out of the well. Then he brought up the body of my young uncle.

‘Dad, send the guns down!’ Father said.

‘Stand clear.’

The windlass creaked as the bundle of guns was lowered into the well. Then Father untied the rope and put it around his waist.

‘Pull me up, Dad,’ he said.

‘Is the rope secure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make sure it’s tight. This is no time to be careless.’

‘It’s good and tight, Dad.’

‘Did you tie a square knot?’

‘What’s wrong with you, Dad? It was me who tied the rope around Beauty, wasn’t it?’

Father and Granddad looked down at Beauty as she lay on the ground. Her skin was stretched taut over her cheekbones, her eyes were sunken, her gums protruded, and her hair was a tangled mess. Her baby brother’s fingernails had turned blue.

7

MOTHER’S HEALTH IMPROVED under the loving care of the lame woman Liu. She and Father had been good friends, but after her rescue from the well they were like brother and sister. Then Granddad came down with a serious case of typhoid fever, and at times he seemed on the brink of death. Once, as he lay there semiconscious, he hallucinated that he smelled the sweet fragrance of sorghum porridge, so Father and the others quickly picked some sorghum, and the woman Liu cooked it in front of Granddad until it was soft and pasty. After he ate a bowlful, the capillaries in his nose burst and released a torrent of thick, dark blood. His appetite returned then, and he was on the mend. By mid-October, he was able to hobble out into the garden to soak up the warm rays of the late-autumn sun.

I heard that at the time a clash between the troops of Pocky Leng and Little Foot Jiang occurred near Wang Gan Aqueduct, with heavy casualties on both sides. But Granddad was far too sick to worry about that — or anything else, for that matter.

Father and the others threw up a few temporary shelters in the village, then scavenged the junk piles for the odds and ends they would need to harvest enough sorghum to get them through the winter and the spring. Autumn rains had fallen steadily since the end of August, turning the dark earth into a sea of mud. Half of the rain-soaked stalks lay rotting on the ground, where the fallen seeds had taken root and were already beginning to germinate. Tender green stalks crowded their way through the spaces between the blue-grey and dark-red patches of decay, and the ears of sorghum swayed in the air or dragged along the ground like bushy, matted foxtails. Steel-grey rainclouds, heavy with water, scurried across the sky, and cold, hard raindrops thudded into the stalks. Flocks of crows struggled to stay aloft on wings weighted down with moisture. During those foggy days, sunlight was as precious as gold.

Father, who ruled the roost after Granddad fell ill, led Wang Guang, Dezhi, Guo Yang (whom we called Gimpy), Blind Eye, and Beauty over to the marshland, where they fought the corpse-eating dogs with rifles. The ensuing battles would turn Father into a marksman.

Every once in a while, Granddad asked him weakly, ‘What are you doing, son?’

With a murderous frown creasing his brow, Father would say, ‘We’re killing the dogs, Dad!’

‘Let it lie,’ Granddad would say.

‘I can’t,’ Father would reply. ‘We can’t let them feed on people’s bodies.’

Nearly a thousand corpses had piled up in the marshland, all laid out by the Jiao-Gao soldiers, who lacked the time to give them a proper burial. The few spadefuls of dirt that had been tossed haphazardly over the corpses were washed away by the autumn rains. The bloated corpses produced an exceptional stench that brought crows and mad dogs scurrying over to rip open the abdomens, which intensified the reek of death.

When the dog pack was at full strength, they were probably six hundred in all, made up primarily of village dogs whose masters lay rotting in the marshland. The remainder, those that came and went in a frenzy, were dogs from neighbouring villages that had homes to return to. They were led by our family’s three dogs: Red, Green, and Blackie.

The hunters split up into three teams: Father and Mother, Wang Guang and Dezhi, Gimpy and Blind Eye. They dug trenches in the marshland and took up positions to watch the paths that had been scratched out by the dogs. Father cradled his rifle; Mother held her carbine. ‘Douguan, why can’t I hit what I’m shooting at?’ she asked.

‘You’re too eager. If you take careful aim and squeeze the trigger, you can’t miss.’

Father and Mother were watching the path in the southeast corner of the field, a two-foot-wide white scar in the earth. The troops emerging onto this path were led by our dog Red, whose thick coat shone after his rich diet of human corpses. His legs had grown firm and muscular from all the exercise, and the battles with humans had put a keen edge on his intelligence.

The fog-shrouded paths were quiet when the sun’s red rays began to light up the sky. The canine forces had dwindled after a month of seesaw battles, so that the dogs lying among the corpses probably numbered a hundred, and a couple of hundred others had deserted. Their combined forces now, in the neighbourhood of 230, tended to run in packs, and since Father and the others were becoming better marksmen all the time, the dogs always left behind at least a dozen corpses after each frenzied attack.

They were waiting for the dogs’ first sortie of the day, like people anticipating the arrival of food on the table. Noticing the rustling of distant stalks of sorghum, Father said softly, ‘Get ready, here they come.’ Mother silently released the safety catch on her rifle and laid her cheek against the rain-soaked stock. The rustling movement flowed to the edge of the marshland like an ocean wave, and Father could hear the panting dogs. He knew that hundreds of greedy canine eyes were fixed on the broken and severed limbs in the marshland, that the dogs’ red tongues were licking the putrid remnants caught in the corners of their mouths, and that their stomachs, filled with green bile, were growling.

As though on command, more than two hundred of them broke out of the sorghum field, barking madly. The fur on their necks stood straight up; bright coats glistened in the fog. Wang Guang and Gimpy opened fire as the dogs ripped the flesh from the corpses with single-minded ferocity. The wounded dogs yelped in pain, while those that had been spared continued to tear frantically at their prey.

Father took aim at the head of a clumsy black dog and pulled the trigger. The dog yelped as the bullet shattered its ear. Then Father saw the head of a spotted white dog explode and the animal crumple to the ground, a piece of dark intestine still in its mouth. It never made a sound. ‘Beauty, you hit it!’ he shouted.

‘Was it me?’ she squealed excitedly to Father, who had lined Red up in his sights. Hugging the ground as he ran, he streaked from one patch of stalks to another. Father pulled the trigger and the bullet whizzed past Red, barely missing his back. He picked up a woman’s bloated leg in his razor-sharp teeth and began to eat, each powerful bite making a loud crunch as the bone shattered. Mother fired; her bullet struck the dark earth in front of Red and spattered his face with mud. He shook his head violently, then picked up the pale leg and ran off. Wang Guang and Dezhi wounded several dogs, whose blood smeared the corpses and whose whimpers struck terror into the hunters’ hearts.

When the pack retreated, the hunters closed up ranks so they could clean their weapons. Since they were running low on ammunition, Father reminded them to make every bullet count, emphasising the importance of eliminating the leaders of the pack. ‘They’re as slippery as loaches,’ Wang Guang said. ‘They always slink away before I can reload.’

Dezhi blinked his rheumy eyes and said, ‘Douguan, how about a sneak attack?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they have to go somewhere to rest,’ Dezhi said, ‘and I’ll bet it’s near the Black Water River. After stuffing their bellies, they probably go there for the water.’

‘He’s got a point,’ Gimpy agreed.

‘Then let’s go,’ Father said.

‘Not so fast,’ Dezhi cautioned. ‘Let’s go back and get some grenades. We’ll blow ’em up.’

Father, Mother, Wang Guang, and Dezhi split up to follow two separate paths made by the dogs in the muddy earth, which had turned springy from all the claws that had passed over it. The paths led straight to the Black Water River, where Father and Mother could hear the roar of water and the sounds of the dogs. The paths converged as they neared the riverbank to form a broad single path.

That’s where Father and Mother met up with Wang Guang and Dezhi. And that’s where they spotted more than two hundred dogs spread out over the weed-covered riverbank; most were crouching, although some were gnawing at shiny clods of black earth stuck between their toes. A few stood at the water’s edge, raising their legs to piss into the river, while others were drinking. Now that their bellies were full, they circled the area, passing dark-brown canine farts. The weeds were nearly covered with reddish or white dogshit, and the odour of the turds and farts was different from any Father and the others had ever smelled. It was easy to spot the three leaders, even though they were spread out among the others.

‘Shall we toss them now, Douguan?’ Wang Guang asked.

‘Get ready,’ Father said. ‘We’ll lob them together.’

They were each holding two petal-shaped muskmelon hand grenades. After pulling the pins, they banged the grenades together. ‘Now!’ Father yelled, and eight arching missiles landed amid the dogs, who first watched with curiosity as the black oblong objects fell from the sky, then instinctively crouched down. Father marvelled at the incredible intelligence of the three dogs from our family, who cunningly flattened out on the ground just before the eight superior Japanese grenades exploded, almost at the same instant, the frightful blast spraying dark shrapnel in all directions. A dozen or more dogs were blown to bits, at least twenty others gravely wounded. Dog blood and dog meat sailed into the air above the river and splattered on the surface like hailstones. White eels, blood eaters, swarmed to the spot, squealing as they fought over the dog meat and dog blood. The pitiful whimpering of the wounded dogs was terrifying. Those that had escaped injury scattered, some dashing wildly down the riverbank, others leaping into the Black Water River to swim frantically to the opposite bank.

Father wished he hadn’t left his rifle behind, for some of the dogs, blinded by the blast, were running in circles on the riverbank, whimpering in panic, their faces covered with blood. It was a pitiful, exhilarating sight. Our three dogs swam across the river, followed by about thirty others, and clambered up onto the opposite bank with their tails between their legs, their wet fur stuck to their skin; they, too, were a sorry sight, but once they reached solid ground, they shook themselves violently, sending beads of water flying from their tails, their bellies, and their chins. Red glared hatefully at Father and barked, as though accusing him and his friends of violating a tacit agreement by invading their bivouac area and using new, cruelly undoglike weapons.

‘Lob some across the river!’ Father said.

They picked up more grenades and heaved them with all their might towards the opposite bank. When the dogs saw the black objects arching above the water, they raised an imploring howl, as though calling for their mothers and fathers, then leaped and rolled down the riverbank, making a quick dash to the sorghum field on the southern bank. Father and the others weren’t strong enough to reach the bank with their grenades, which landed harmlessly in the river and sent up four columns of silvery water. The surface roiled for a moment, as a school of fat white eels floated belly up.

The dogs stayed away from the sight of the massacre for two days following the sneak attack, a time during which canine and human forces maintained strict vigilance as they made battle preparations.

Father and his friends, recognising the enormous power of the grenades, held a strategy session to find ways of putting them to even better use. When Wang Guang returned from a reconnaissance mission to the riverbank, he brought news that all that remained were a few canine corpses, a blanket of fur and dogshit, and an overpowering stench. Not a single living dog — which meant they’d moved to another bivouac area.

According to Dezhi, since the leaders of the routed dog pack had been spared, it would only be a matter of time before they closed up ranks and returned to fight over the corpses. Their counterattack was bound to be particularly ferocious, since the survivors now had rich battle experience.

The final suggestion was made by Mother, who recommended arming the wooden-handled grenades and burying them along the paths. Her suggestion met with unanimous approval, so they split up into groups to bury forty-three of the grenades beneath the three paths. Of the fifty-seven muskmelon grenades they’d started with, twelve had been used during the attack on the Black Water River shoal, so there were forty-five left — fifteen for each group.

Cracks developed in the unity of the canine forces over the two days as a result of casualties and desertion, which depleted their number to 120 or so. The three original brigades were reformed into a single unified force of crack troops. Since their bivouac area had been overrun by those four bastards with their strange, exploding dung-beetles, they were forced to move three li downriver to a spot on the southern bank just east of the stone bridge.

It was to be a morning of great significance. The dogs, itching for a fight, snarled and snapped at one another as they made their way to the new bivouac area, sneaking an occasional glance at their leaders, who were calmly sizing each other up. Once they reached a spot east of the bridge, they formed a circle on the shoal, sat back on their haunches, and howled at the overcast sky. Blackie and Green were twitching noticeably, causing the fur on their backs to ripple like ocean waves. Months of vagabond lives and feasting on rotting meat had awakened primal memories anaesthetised over aeons of domestication. A hatred of humans — those two-legged creatures that walked erect — seethed in their hearts, and eating human flesh held greater significance than just filling their growling bellies; more important was the vague sensation that they were exacting terrible revenge upon those rulers who had enslaved them and forced them into the demeaning existence of living off scraps. The only ones capable of translating these primitive impulses into high theory, however, were the three dogs from our family. That was why they enjoyed the support of the pack dogs, although that alone would have been insufficient; their size and strength, their quickness, and their willingness to martyr themselves by attacking with unparalleled ferocity all made them natural leaders. Now, though, they had begun to fight among themselves for sole dominion over the pack.

One of the battles occurred when a dog in Green’s brigade, an impudent male with thick lips, bulging eyes, and a coat of bluish fur, took liberties with a pretty spotted-faced female who was one of Red’s favourites. Infuriated, Red charged the motley male and knocked him into the river. After climbing out and shaking the water off his fur, Thick Lips launched into an angry tirade, which earned him the jeers of the other dogs.

Green barked loudly at Red to defend the honour of his brigade, but Red ignored him and knocked the motley cur back into the river. As he swam back to shore, his nostrils skimming the surface, he looked like a huge river rat. The spotted-faced female stood beside Red, wagging her tail.

Green barked contemptuously at Red, who returned the insult.

Blackie placed himself between his two companions of earlier days, like a peacemaker.

Now that the dog pack was reassembled at a new bivouac area, they busied themselves drinking water and licking their wounds as the ancient rays of the sun danced on the surface of the gently flowing Black Water River. A wild rabbit raised its head on the embankment; scared witless by what it saw, it quietly slipped away.

In the warm mid-autumn sun, an atmosphere of lethargy settled over the dog pack. The three leaders formed a seated triangle, eyes drooping as though reliving the past.

Red had led a peaceful life as a distillery watchdog. The two old yellows were still alive then, and even though there were occasional disputes among the five dogs, they were, for the most part, one big, happy family. He was the runt of the group, and once, when he developed a case of scabies, the other dogs drove him away. So he went straight to the eastern compound to roll around in the sorghum chaff, and his skin cleared up. But he returned more antisocial than when he’d left, and was disgusted by how Blackie and Green fawned over the strong and bullied the weak, and by their smarmy tail-wagging.

Red sensed that the violent upheaval of the pack was a power struggle, and since the conflicts had been shifted onto the three leaders, the other dogs grew relatively peaceful. But the mangy cur, who hadn’t mended his ways despite repeated warnings, was now trying to stir up trouble among the other dogs in the pack.

The flash point was reached when an old bitch with a torn ear walked up to Blackie and put her wet, icy nose up against his, then turned and wagged her tail at him. Blackie got to his feet and began cavorting with his new paramour, while Red and Green looked on. Red quietly crouched down and glanced over at Green, who sprang instantly and pinned the amorous Blackie to the beach.

The dog pack stood as one to watch the fang-to-fang battle erupting in front of them.

Green, enjoying the element of surprise, quickly gained the advantage by burying his teeth in Blackie’s neck and shaking him violently. The green fur on his neck stood straight up as a thunderous roar burst from his throat.

Blackie, whose head was spinning from the attack, jerked backward to free his neck from his attacker’s jaws, losing a chunk of flesh the size of a man’s palm. He stood up shakily, racked by spasms of pain and crazed with anger. He was seething over the perversely undoglike sneak attack by Green. Blackie barked furiously, lowered his head, and threw himself on Green, aiming straight for his chest, into which he sank his teeth, peeling away a huge flap of skin. Green immediately went for Blackie’s wounded neck, but this time, not content with merely biting, he was actually devouring the torn flesh.

Red got slowly to his feet and looked icily at Green and Blackie. Blackie’s neck was nearly broken. He raised his head, but it drooped back down. He raised it again, and again it drooped. Blood gushed from the wound. He was clearly finished. Green arrogantly bared his fangs and barked triumphantly. Then he turned, and was eyeball to eyeball with the long, cruelly mocking face of Red. Green shuddered. Without warning, Red pounced on Green, using his favourite trick to flip the wounded dog over on his back, and before Green could scramble to his feet, Red had buried his teeth into his chest and was pulling on the ripped flap of skin. With a powerful jerk of his head, he prised the skin loose, exposing the raw flesh beneath it. As Green struggled to his feet, the loose flap of skin hung down between his legs and brushed the ground. His whimper signalled the knowledge that it was all over for him. Red walked up and drove his shoulder into his barely standing victim, sending him tumbling to the ground, and before he could struggle to his feet, he was swarmed over by a dense pack of dogs, whose fangs quickly turned him into a bloody pulp.

Now that Red had defeated his most powerful opponent, his tail shot up as he roared at the battered and bloodied Blackie, who barked pitifully, his tail tucked between his legs. He looked up at Red with despairing eyes, silently begging for mercy. But the other dogs, eager to bring the battle to an end, rushed forward, forcing Blackie to make a suicidal leap into the river. His head bobbed into sight once or twice before he sank beneath the surface. A few gurgling bubbles rose from the depths.

The dogs formed a circle around Red, bared their teeth, and let forth celebratory howls at the bleached sun hanging in the sky on this rare clear day.

The sudden disappearance of the dog pack made Father and the others nervous and introduced chaos into their lives. A heavy autumn rain struck all living things with a monotonous sound. The hunters had lost the stimulus of battling the mad dogs and had turned into addicts in need of a fix: their noses ran, they yawned, they nodded off.

On the morning of the fourth day after the disappearance of the dog pack, Father and the others lazily took up their positions at the edge of the marshland, watching the swirling mist and smelling the stench of the land.

By then Gimpy had handed over his rifle and disappeared to a distant village to help his cousin run an eatery. Since Blind Eye could not function alone, he stayed back in the tent, company for my ailing granddad. That left only Father, Mother, Wang Guang, and Dezhi.

‘Douguan,’ Mother said, ‘the dogs won’t come back. They’re scared of the grenades.’ She gazed wistfully at the three dog paths, shrouded in mystery, more eager than the others to have the dogs return. All her intelligence had telescoped into the forty-three wooden-handled grenades buried in the paths.

‘Wang Guang,’ Father ordered, ‘make another reconnaissance!’

‘I just made one yesterday. There was a fight east of the bridge. Green’s dead. They must have split up,’ Wang Guang complained. ‘I say, instead of wasting our time here, we should go join up with the Jiao-Gao forces.’

‘No,’ Father insisted, ‘they’ll be back. They’re not going to pass up a feast like this.’

‘There are corpses everywhere these days,’ Wang Guang argued. ‘Those dogs aren’t stupid enough to come looking for a meal of exploding hand grenades.’

‘It’s the number of corpses here,’ Father said. ‘They can’t bear to leave them.’

‘If we’re going to join up with anybody, let’s make it Pocky Leng’s troops. Those grey uniforms and leather belts are really impressive.’

‘Look over there!’ Mother said.

They crouched and watched the dog path where Mother was pointing. The sorghum stalks, pelted by sheets of glistening raindrops, were trembling. Everywhere you looked there were tightly woven clumps of delicate yellow shoots and seedlings that had sprouted out of season. The air reeked with the odour of young seedlings, rotting sorghum, decaying corpses, and dogshit. The world facing Father and the others was filled with terror, filth, and evil.

‘Here they come!’ Father said, betraying his excitement.

The sorghum canopy rustled. The grenades hadn’t gone off.

‘Douguan,’ Mother said anxiously, ‘something’s wrong!’

‘Don’t panic,’ he said, ‘they’ll set them off any minute.’

‘Why not scatter them with our rifles?’ Dezhi asked.

Too impatient to wait, Mother fired off a round, causing a momentary confusion in the sorghum field, which was immediately engulfed by exploding grenades. Severed sorghum stalks and dog limbs flew into the sky; the painful whimpers of wounded dogs hung in the air. More explosions sent shrapnel and debris whistling over the heads of Father and his friends.

Finally, a couple of dozen dogs emerged from the three paths, only to be met by gunfire that sent them scurrying back into the protection of the sorghum. More explosions.

Mother leaped into the air and clapped her hands.

She and her friends were unaware of the changes in the canine forces. The shrewd Red, now undisputed leader, had led his troops dozens of li away for a thorough reorganisation, and this latest attack demonstrated a grasp of military strategy with which even humans, given all their intelligence, could have found no fault. His enemy consisted of a few strange yet canny youngsters, including one who seemed vaguely familiar. Not until he’d disposed of those little bastards would his pack be free to enjoy the feast set out in the marshland. So he sent a pointy-eared mongrel to lead half the dogs in a frontal charge from which there would be no retreat. Meanwhile, he led sixty others in a flanking manoeuvre to the rear of the marshland, from where they could launch a surprise attack and tear those little bastards, who had blood on their hands, to pieces. Just before setting out, Red, whose tail curled into the air, had brushed his cold nose up against the similarly cold noses of each of his troops, then had gnawed at the dried-mud clods stuck to his claws. The others had done the same.

He had completed his flanking manoeuvre, and had his eyes on those wildly gesturing little people, when he heard the explosions of the hand grenades. The sound struck terror in his heart and, as he immediately observed, threw his troops into a panic. The dogs were terrified, and he knew that if he shrank back now his army would be routed. So he bared his fangs and let loose a blood-curdling cry to the confused troops behind him. Then he turned and charged into Father’s encampment, his troops on his tail, like a sleek, colourful, ground-hugging cloud.

‘Dogs behind us!’ Father shouted in alarm as he swung his rifle around and blew away one of the attackers without taking aim. The dog, a big brown beast, thudded to the ground, then was trampled as the rest of the animals charged.

Wang Guang and Dezhi were firing as fast as they could, but for every dog that fell, several moved up to take its place. The dogs’ misanthropy had now climaxed; their teeth glinted and their eyes shone like ripe red cherries. Wang Guang threw down his weapon, turned, and ran into the marshland, where he was immediately surrounded by a dozen dogs. In an instant the little fellow simply vanished. The animals, used to feeding on human beings, had become true wild beasts, quick and skilful in their craft. They tore chunks out of Wang Guang and were soon gnawing on his brittle bones.

Father, Mother, and Dezhi stood back to back, so terrified they were shaking like leaves. Mother wet her pants. What began as a calm attack during which they picked off the dogs from a distance evaporated when Red’s troops surrounded them. They kept firing, killing and wounding dogs until their ammunition was exhausted. Father’s bayonet, which glinted menacingly in the sun, posed a serious threat to the dogs; but Mother’s and Dezhi’s carbines had no bayonets, so the circling dogs concentrated on them. Three backs were nearly fused together. They could feel one another shaking in fright. ‘Douguan,’ Mother murmured, ‘Douguan…’

‘Don’t be scared,’ Father demanded. ‘Scream as loud as you can. Try to get my dad to come to our rescue.’

Seeing that Father was in charge, Red glared contemptuously at the bayonet out of the corner of his eye.

‘Dad — help, save us!’ Father screamed.

‘Uncle — hurry!’ Mother cried at the top of her lungs.

A few of the dogs tried to mount an assault but were beaten back. Mother rammed the barrel of her rifle into a charging dog’s mouth, knocking out two of its teeth. Another one recklessly charged Father, whose bayonet sliced open its face. While his troops charged and fell back, Red crouched on the perimeter, his eyes riveted on Father.

The standoff continued for about as long as it takes to smoke a couple of pipefuls. Father’s legs were getting rubbery, and he could barely lift his arms. He screamed again for Granddad to come and save them. Mother was pressed so tightly to him that he felt as though his back were up against a wall.

‘Douguan,’ whispered Dezhi, ‘I’ll draw them away so you two can escape.’

‘No!’ Father said emphatically.

‘Here I go!’

He burst out of the encampment and ran like the wind towards the sorghum field, with dozens of dogs on his heels. They quickly caught him and began tearing him to shreds. But Father didn’t dare watch Dezhi’s agonies, for Red continued to stare at him without blinking.

Two Japanese grenades exploded in the sorghum field where Dezhi had fled. Bent by the concussion, the stalks emitted a sigh that made the skin on Father’s cheeks crawl. First the sounds of broken canine bodies crashing to the ground, then the pitiful wails of dogs wounded in the blasts frightened the ones circling Father and Mother. They backed off, giving Mother the chance she needed to take out a muskmelon grenade and lob it into their midst. They watched the scary black object arch toward them, then let out a howl before scattering in panic. But the grenade fell harmlessly to the ground — she had forgotten to pull the pin. All the dogs fled, all except Red. When he saw Father turn to look at Mother, he sprang like lightning; the silvery rays of the sun struck this leader of dogs, his body forming a beautiful arc in the sky. Instinctively Father fell back, as Red’s claws slashed across his face.

The initial assault had failed, although a piece of skin the size of Father’s mouth had been ripped from his cheek, which was immediately covered with sticky blood. Red charged again, and this time Father raised his rifle to ward him off. Forcing the barrel of the rifle upward with his front paws, Red lowered his head to avoid the bayonet and lunged at Father’s chest. Father spotted the clump of white fur on Red’s belly and aimed a kick, just as Mother fell forward and knocked him flat on his back. Spotting his opportunity, Red fell on Father and shrewdly sank his teeth in his crotch at the very moment that Mother brought the butt of her rifle crashing down on his bony skull. Momentarily stunned, he backed up a few steps, then sprang forward in another attack. He was maybe three feet in the air when his head suddenly slumped forward as a shot rang out. One of his eyes was smashed. Father and Mother looked up to see a spindly, hunched-over, white-haired old man, holding a scorched-looking wooden staff in his left hand and a smoking Japanese pistol in his right — it was Granddad.

He took a few faltering steps forward and cracked Red over the head with his staff. ‘Rebel bastard!’ he cursed. Red’s heart was still beating, his lungs were still heaving, his powerful hind legs were scratching two deep furrows in the black earth. His rich, beautiful red fur blazed like a million tongues of flame.

8

THE BITE HAD been absorbed with less than full force, possibly because Father was wearing two pairs of pants, but the results were bad enough: the dog’s teeth had ripped open one side of his scrotum, leaving an elliptical testicle the size of a quail’s egg hanging by a thin, nearly transparent thread. When Granddad moved him, the little red thing dropped into the crotch of his pants. Granddad cupped it in the palm of his hand. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, bent over the way he was. His large, rough hand shook as though the thing were burning a hole in it. ‘Uncle,’ Mother asked him, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

She was watching the muscles in his face twitch painfully, and noticed that his pale skin seemed covered with a yellow cast; despair filled his eyes.

‘It’s all over…. Everything ended in that instant…’ Granddad mumbled in a voice that quavered like an old, old man’s.

He took out his pistol and shouted, ‘You’ve ruined me! Dog!’

He aimed the weapon at Red, who was still panting faintly, and pumped several shots into him.

Father struggled to his feet, rivulets of fresh, warm blood coursing down the inside of his thigh. He didn’t seem to be in much pain. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘we won.’

‘Uncle, hurry up and take care of Douguan’s wound!’ Mother said.

Father looked at the testicle cupped in Granddad’s hand and asked with a note of astonishment, ‘Dad, is that mine? Is it?’ A wave of nausea hit him. He fainted.

Granddad threw down his staff, tore off two clean sorghum leaves and gently wrapped the thing up, then handed it to Mother. ‘Beauty,’ he said, ‘hold it carefully. I’m taking him to Dr Zhang Xinyi.’ He bent over, picked Father up, and then hobbled off down the road. Dogs wounded by the exploding grenades in the marshland whimpered pitifully.

Dr Zhang Xinyi, a man in his fifties, parted his hair right down the middle, something you seldom saw in the countryside. He wore a long, dark-blue gown, and had a pale face atop a frame so thin he seemed incapable of withstanding even the slightest breeze.

By the time Granddad had carried Father to the doctor, his back was bent almost double and his face had a ghostly pallor.

‘Is that you, Commander Yu? You certainly look different,’ Dr Zhang said.

‘Name your price, Doctor.’

Father had been laid out on the wooden-plank bed. ‘Is this your son, Commander?’ Dr Zhang asked him.

Granddad nodded.

‘The one who killed the Japanese general at the Black Water River bridge?’

‘I only have one son!’

‘I’ll do the best I can!’ Dr Zhang took some tweezers, a pair of scissors, a bottle of sorghum wine, and a vial of iodine out of his instrument bag, then bent over to examine the injury on Father’s face.

‘Take a look down there first, please, Doctor,’ Granddad said sombrely. Then he turned to Mother and took the sorghum leaves in which the testicle was wrapped out of her hands. He placed it on the wooden cabinet beside the bed. The leaves spread open.

Dr Zhang picked up the messy thing with his tweezers. His long, nicotine-stained fingers shook as he stammered, ‘Commander Yu… not that I’m unwilling to do my best, but your son’s wound… My skills are not great, and I haven’t the proper medication…. You must see someone more talented than I, Commander….’

Granddad bent over and stuck his face right up into Dr Zhang’s, his rheumy eyes boring into the man. ‘Where can I find someone more talented?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Tell me, where can I go? Should I take him to the Japanese?’

‘Commander,’ Zhang Xinyi defended himself, ‘that’s not what your humble servant meant…. Your esteemed son is injured in a critical place, and the slightest slip could bring an end to your glorious line….’

‘I brought him here,’ Granddad said, ‘because I have faith in you. Do what you can.’

‘Since Commander Yu says so,’ Zhang Xinyi said, gritting his teeth, ‘I’ll do it.’

He soaked a cotton ball in the wine and cleaned the wound. The pain brought Father to. He tried to slide off the bed, but Granddad climbed up and held him down.

‘Commander Yu,’ Zhang Xinyi said, ‘we’ll have to strap him down.’

‘Douguan!’ Granddad said. ‘You’re my son, and I expect you to tough it out. Bite down hard!’

‘But, Dad,’ Father groaned, ‘it hurts….’

‘Tough it out!’ Granddad said sternly. ‘Think about Uncle Arhat!’

Father didn’t dare argue. Sweat covered his forehead.

Zhang Xinyi took out a needle and sterilised it in the wine before threading it. Then he began stitching the torn scrotum closed.

‘Sew that back inside!’ Granddad said.

Zhang Xinyi looked at the testicle lying in the open sorghum leaves on the wooden cabinet and said with embarrassment, ‘Commander Yu… it won’t do any good….’

‘Is it your intention to bring the Yu line to an end?’ Granddad asked glumly.

Large beads of sweat glistened on Dr Zhang’s gaunt face. ‘Commander Yu… think about it…. Connecting blood vessels were severed. If I put it back in, it would still be dead.’

‘Sew the blood vessels together.’

‘Commander Yu, nobody in the world can reconnect blood vessels….’

‘Then… is that the end of it?’

‘That’s hard to say, Commander Yu. He might still be all right. The other one’s just fine. Maybe he’ll be all right with just one….’

‘You think so?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Damn it to hell!’ Granddad swore sorrowfully. ‘Bad things always happen to me!’

After the wound down below had been taken care of, Father’s face was attended to. Dr Zhang’s sweat-soaked clothing stuck to his back as he sat on a stool and panted breathlessly.

‘How much, Dr Zhang?’

‘Don’t worry about a fee, Commander Yu. As long as your esteemed son gets better, I consider myself lucky,’ he said weakly.

‘Dr Zhang, I, Yu Zhan’ao, am strapped at the moment. But someday I’ll thank you properly.’

He picked up Father and carried him out of Dr Zhang’s house.

Granddad looked down attentively at my father, who lay semiconscious in the shack, his face covered with gauze, with only his shifting eyes exposed. Dr Zhang had dropped by once to change his dressings. ‘Commander Yu,’ he said, ‘there’s no infection, and that’s a good sign.’

‘Tell me,’ said Granddad, ‘didn’t you say he’d be all right with just one?’

‘Commander, we can’t worry about that yet. Your esteemed son was bitten by a mad dog, and we’re lucky he’s still alive.’

‘He might as well be dead if that thing’s useless.’ Observing the murderous look in Granddad’s eyes, Dr Zhang mumbled something obsequious and slinked away.

Granddad picked up his gun and walked over to the marshland to sort out his chaotic thoughts. Mournful signs of autumn were all around: the ground was covered with frost, and there were sharp, icy brambles on the soggy marshland floor. Granddad was sick and very weak, his son was hovering between life and death, the family was broken up, some gone and some dead, the people were suffering, Wang Guang and Dezhi were dead, Gimpy had gone far away, the ulcer on the woman Liu’s leg was still oozing pus and blood, Blind Eye did nothing all day long but sit, the girl Beauty was too young to know anything, he was being pulled by the Jiao-Gao troops and squeezed by Pocky Leng’s troops, the Japanese saw him as their mortal enemy. He climbed to the top of a rise in the marshland to gaze out over the scattered, broken remains of human bodies and sorghum stalks, utterly disheartened. What had he got from decades of fighting and vying over women? Only the desolate scene in front of him.

The autumn of 1939 was one of the most difficult periods in Granddad’s life: his troops had been wiped out, his beloved wife had been killed, his son had been severely wounded, his home and the land around it had been torched, his body was racked with illness; war had destroyed nearly everything he owned. His eyes roamed over the corpses of men and dogs, a skein of threads getting more and more tangled wherever he looked, until it became a blur. Several times he drew his pistol, thinking of saying goodbye to this lousy, fucking world. But a powerful desire for revenge won out over cowardice. He hated the Japanese, he hated the troops of Pocky Leng and of Jiao-Gao.

On this very spot, the Jiao-Gao forces had taken over twenty rifles from him, then vanished without a trace. There was no sign that they’d engaged the Japanese; he had heard only that they’d clashed with the troops of Pocky Leng. And Granddad suspected that it was the Jiao-Gao forces who had stolen the fifteen rifles he and Father had hidden in the dry well.

The woman Liu, who still had a pretty face even in her forties, came to the edge of the marshland to find Granddad, trying to comfort him with affectionate gazes at his silver hair. She touched his arm with her large, rough hand and said, ‘You shouldn’t be sitting here thinking like that. Let’s go back. As the ancients said, “Heaven never seals off all the exits.” You should concentrate on getting your health back by eating and drinking and breathing as much and as hard as you can….’

Her words touched him. He looked up at her kind face and tears began to fill his eyes. ‘Sister-in-law,’ he moaned.

She stroked his bent back. ‘Just look,’ she said, ‘a man barely forty reduced to this by his suffering.’

She supported him as they walked back together. He looked at her lame leg and asked with concern, ‘Is it any better?’

‘The ulcer has healed, but it’s thinner than the other one.’

‘It’ll fill out later.’

‘I don’t think Douguan’s injury is as serious as it looks.’

‘What do you think, will he be all right with only one?’

‘I think so. Single-stalk garlic is always the hottest.’

‘You really think so?’

‘My younger brother-in-law was born with only one, and look how many kids he’s got.’

Late at night, Granddad rested his weary head in the warmth of the woman Liu’s bosom as she stroked his bony frame with her large hands. ‘Can you do it again?’ she whispered. ‘Do you still have the strength? Don’t despair. Doesn’t it make you feel better to do it to me…?’

Granddad smelled the slightly sour, slightly sweet odour of the woman Liu’s breath and fell fast asleep.

Mother could not rid her mind of the picture of Dr Zhang picking up that purplish, flattened ball with his tweezers. He had examined it carefully before tossing it into a dish filled with dirty cotton balls and pieces of skin and dead flesh. Yesterday it had been Douguan’s jewel; today it lay in a dish of filthy debris. Mother, who was fifteen and had begun to understand a thing or two, felt both bashful and frightened. While she was taking care of Father, she kept staring at his gauze-wrapped penis; her heart fluttered, her cheeks burned, she blushed deep red.

Then she learned that the woman Liu was sleeping with Granddad.

‘Beauty,’ the woman Liu said to her, ‘you’re fifteen now, and no longer a child. Try playing with Douguan’s penis; if it gets hard, he’s your man.’

Mother was so embarrassed she nearly cried.

Father’s stitches were removed.

Mother slipped into the shack where Father was sleeping and tiptoed up to his kang, her cheeks burning. She knelt beside him and carefully pulled down his pants. In the light streaming into the room she looked at his injured, grotesque penis. The head, wild and proud, had an air of defiance. Timidly she held it in her sweaty hand and felt it gradually get warmer and thicker. It began to throb, just like her heart. Father woke up and squinted at her. ‘Beauty, what are you doing?’

Mother shrieked in alarm, jumped to her feet, and ran out, bumping smack into Granddad in the doorway.

Granddad grabbed her by the shoulders and demanded, ‘What’s wrong, Beauty?’

Mother burst out crying, wrenched free of Granddad’s grip, and ran away.

Granddad rushed into the shack, then rushed out again like a man crazed and ran straight to the woman Liu. He grabbed her breasts and squeezed them tightly. ‘Single-stalk garlic is the hottest!’ he said almost incoherently. ‘Single-stalk garlic is the hottest!’

Granddad fired three shots in the air, then brought his hands together in front of his chest and screamed: ‘Heaven has eyes!’

9

GRANDDAD TAPPED THE wall with his knuckles. Sunlight streaming in through the window reflected off the Gaomi statuette on the highly polished kang table. The window was covered by paper that Grandma had cut into strange, ingenious designs. In five days everything in the place would be reduced to ashes in a terrible battle. It was the tenth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939. Granddad had just returned from the highway, his arm in a sling and reeking of gasoline. He and Father had buried the Japanese machine gun with the twisted barrel and were searching the house for the money Grandma had hidden.

When the wall produced a hollow sound, Granddad smashed a hole in it with the butt of his pistol, then reached in and pulled out a red cloth packet. He shook it. It jingled. He poured its contents out onto the kang — fifty silver dollars.

Pocketing the silver dollars, he said, ‘Let’s go, son.’

‘Go where, Dad?’

‘Into town to buy bullets. It’s time to settle scores with Pocky Leng.’

The sun had nearly set when they reached the northern outskirts of the city. Snaking darkly through the sorghum fields, a black locomotive chugged along the tracks of the Jiao-Ping — Jinan railway line, belching puffs of dark smoke above the sorghum tips. Sunlight reflecting off the tracks nearly blinded them. The loud shriek of the whistle terrified Father, who squeezed Granddad’s hand.

Granddad led Father to a large grave mound, in front of which stood a white tombstone twice as tall as a man. The chiselled words had been rubbed so smooth they were barely discernible, and the area was surrounded by trees so thick it would have taken at least two people to wrap their arms around any one of them. The black canopy of leaves rustled even when there was no wind, and the grave itself was walled off, like a black island, by stalks of blood-red sorghum.

Granddad dug a little hole in front of the tombstone and tossed his pistol in. Father also threw his Browning in the hole.

After crossing the tracks, they looked up at the high gateway in the city wall, over which flew a Japanese flag, its rising sun and spokelike rays catching the red rays of the setting sun. Sentries stood on both sides of the gate, a Japanese to the left and a Chinese to the right. While the Chinese soldier questioned and searched locals entering town, his Japanese counterpart stood watching, his rifle ready.

Now that they’d crossed the tracks, Granddad hoisted Father up onto his back and whispered, ‘Pretend you’ve got a bellyache. Groan a little.’

Father groaned. ‘Like that, Dad?’

‘Put a little more feeling into it.’

They fell into a line of people heading into the city. ‘What village are you from?’ the Chinese soldier asked haughtily. ‘What’s your business in town?’

‘Fish Beach, north of town,’ Granddad answered meekly. ‘My son has cholera. I’m taking him to see Dr Wu.’

Father was so wrapped up in the conversation between Granddad and the sentry he forgot to groan. But he screamed in pain when Granddad pinched him hard on the thigh.

The sentry waved them past.

‘You little bastard!’ Granddad cursed angrily when they were safely out of earshot. ‘Why didn’t you groan?’

‘That pinch hurt, Dad, it hurt a lot!’

Granddad led Father down a narrow cinder-paved street towards the train station. The sun’s rays were dying out; the air was foul. Father saw that two blockhouses had been built alongside the run-down train station. Two Japanese soldiers with leashed police dogs marched back and forth. Dozens of civilians squatted or stood beyond the railing waiting for a train, and a Chinese in a black uniform was positioned on the platform, red lantern in hand, as an eastbound train sounded its whistle. The ground shook, and the police dogs barked at the coming train. A little old woman hobbled back and forth in front of the waiting passengers, hawking cigarettes and melon seeds. The train chugged into the station and ground its wheels to a halt. There were, Father saw, more than twenty cars behind the locomotive — ten boxcars, followed by ten or more flatcars filled with cargo covered carelessly by green tarpaulins. Japs standing on the train called out to their comrades on the platform.

Father heard a sudden crack of gunfire from the sorghum field north of the tracks and saw a tall Jap soldier on one of the flatcars sway momentarily, then tumble headlong to the ground. The howl of a wolf sounded from one of the blockhouses, and the people, those disembarking and those waiting to board the train, scattered. The police dogs barked furiously; the machine guns on top of the blockhouses began spraying the area to the north. The train started up amid the confusion, belching puffs of black smoke and sending a shower of ashes onto the platform.

Granddad grabbed Father’s hand and dragged him quickly down a dark lane. He pushed open a half-closed gate and walked into a tiny courtyard, where a small red paper lantern hung from the eave of the house. A woman stood in the doorway, her face so heavily powdered you couldn’t tell her age. She was grinning broadly through painted lips; her teeth glistened. Black hair was piled up on her head, and she wore a silk flower behind her ear.

‘My dear elder brother!’ she called out with affected sweetness. ‘Now that you’re a commander, you don’t give a second thought to your little sister.’ She threw her arms around Granddad’s neck like a little girl.

‘Don’t do that,’ he complained. ‘Not in front of my son. I can’t waste time with you today! Are you still playing games with Fifth Brother?’

The woman stormed over to the gate and shut it, then took down the lantern and walked inside. ‘Fifth Brother was caught and beaten by the garrison command,’ she said with a pout.

‘Isn’t Song Shun of the garrison command his sworn brother?’

‘Do you really think you can trust fair-weather friends like that? After what happened at Qingdao, I’ve been sitting on the razor’s edge.’

‘Fifth Brother would never give you away. He proved that when he was grilled by Nine Dreams Cao.’

‘What are you doing here? They say you fought some Japanese armoured troops.’

‘It was a fiasco! I’m going to murder that motherfucking Pocky Leng!’

‘Don’t mess with that slippery toad. He’s too much for you.’

Granddad took the silver dollars out of his pocket and tossed them down on the table. ‘I want five hundred red-jacketed bullets.’

‘Red-jacketed, blue-jacketed, I got rid of them all when Fifth Brother was arrested. I can’t make bullets out of thin air.’

‘Don’t give me that! Here’s fifty dollars. Tell me, have I, Yu Zhan’ao, ever treated you wrong?’

‘My dear elder brother,’ the woman said, ‘what kind of talk is that? Don’t treat your little sister like a stranger.’

‘Then don’t get me mad!’ threatened Granddad.

‘You’ll never get out of town.’

‘That’s my problem, not yours. I want five hundred large cartridges and fifty small ones.’

The woman walked out into the yard to see if anyone was around, then returned to the house, opened a secret door in the wall, and took out a box of shells that shone like gold.

Granddad picked up a sack and stuffed bullets inside, then tied it around his waist. ‘Let’s go!’ he said.

The woman stopped him. ‘How do you plan to get away?’

‘By crawling across the tracks near the train station.’

‘No good,’ she said. ‘There are blockhouses there, with searchlights, dogs, and guards.’

‘We’ll give it a try,’ Granddad said mockingly. ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll be back.’

Granddad and Father made their way down the dark lane towards the train station and hid alongside the wall of a blacksmith shop; from here they had a clear view of the brightly lit platform and the sentries standing on it. Granddad led Father to the western end of the station, where there was a freight yard. A barbed-wire fence ran from the station all the way to the city wall, and searchlights on top of the blockhouses swept the area, illuminating a dozen or more sets of tracks.

They crawled up next to the barbed-wire fence and tugged on it, hoping to open a hole big enough to crawl through. But it was too taut, and one of the barbs punctured the palm of Father’s hand. He whimpered.

‘What’s wrong?’ Granddad whispered.

‘I cut my hand, Dad,’ Father whispered back.

‘We can’t get through. Let’s go back!’

‘If we had our guns…’

‘We still couldn’t make it.’

‘We could shoot out the lights!’

They retreated into the shadows, where Granddad picked up a brick and threw it towards the tracks. One of the sentries shrieked in alarm and fired. The searchlight spun around and swept the area as a machine gun opened fire, the sound so loud that Father nearly went deaf. Sparks flew from bullets ricocheting off the tracks.

The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the Mid-Autumn Festival, is one of the biggest market days in Gaomi County. The people still had to go on living, even though it was wartime. Business was business. The roads were filled with people at eight o’clock in the morning, when a young man named Gao Rong manned his post at the northern gate to search and question those entering and leaving town. He knew the Japanese soldier was watching him with ill-concealed disgust.

An old man in his fifties and a teenage boy were driving a goat out of town. The old man’s face was dark, his eyes steely; the boy’s face was red and he was sweating, as from a case of nerves.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Leaving town. Going home,’ the old man replied.

‘Not going to market?’

‘Already been. Bought this half-dead goat. Cheap.’

‘When did you come into town?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. We stayed with a relative. Bought the goat first thing this morning.’

‘Now where are you going?’

‘Leaving town. Going home.’

‘Okay, you can pass!’

The goat’s belly was so big it could barely walk. When Granddad whipped it with a broken-off sorghum stalk, it cried out in agony.

They stopped at the gravesite to retrieve their weapons.

‘Shall we let the goat go, Dad?’

‘No. Let’s take it with us. We’ll kill it when we get home, so we can celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.’

They arrived at the village entrance at noon, near the tall black-earth wall that had been repaired not many years before. A hail of gunfire erupted from the heart of the village and beyond, and Granddad immediately knew that what they’d been dreading had finally happened. He was reminded of the premonition he’d had for the past several days, and was glad he’d decided to go into town that morning. They’d fought the odds and accomplished their task; that was all anyone could ask of them.

Granddad and Father hurriedly picked up the half-dead goat and carried it into the sorghum field, where Father cut the hemp they’d used to sew up its rectum. They’d stuffed 550 bullets up the goat’s ass in that woman’s house, until its belly drooped like a crescent moon. During the trip back, Father had been worried that the bullets would split the goat’s belly or that the animal would somehow digest them.

As soon as the hemp was cut, the goat’s rectum opened up like a plum flower, and pellets came pouring out. After relieving itself violently, the goat crumpled to the ground. ‘Oh no, Dad!’ Father cried in alarm. ‘The bullets have turned into goat pellets.’

Granddad grabbed the goat by its horns and jerked it to its feet, then bounced it up and down. Shiny bullets came spilling out. They scooped up the bullets, loaded their weapons, and stuffed the rest of the ammunition into their pockets. Not worrying whether the goat was dead or alive, they ran through the sorghum field straight for the village.

The Japs had surrounded the village, over which a pall of gunsmoke hung. The first thing Father and Granddad saw was eight mortar pieces hidden in the sorghum field, the tubes about half the height of a man and as thick as a fist. Twenty or more khaki-clad soldiers manned the mortars under the command of a skinny Jap waving a small flag. When he lowered his flag, the soldiers dropped their shells into the tubes, and the glistening objects were launched into the air in whistling arcs, to land inside the village wall. Eight puffs of smoke rose from the village, followed by eight dull thuds that quickly merged into a single loud explosion. Eight columns of smoke blossomed like dark, hazy flowers. The Japs fired another salvo.

Like a man wakened from a dream, Granddad picked up his rifle and fired it. The Japanese waving the flag crumpled to the ground. Father saw the bullet bury itself in the man’s bony skull, which looked like a dry radish. His first thought was, the battle’s on! Looking confused, he fired his weapon, but the bullet struck the base of a mortar with a loud metallic ping. The Japs manning the mortars picked up their rifles and began firing. Granddad grabbed Father and dragged him down among the sorghum stalks.

The Japanese and their Chinese lackeys launched an attack, running at a crouch into the sorghum field and firing indiscriminately.

Machine-gun fire erupted. Crows perched on the village wall were silent. When the puppet troops reached the wall, wooden-handled grenades sailed over towards them and exploded in their ranks, bringing down at least a dozen men. Granddad hadn’t known about Ruolu the Elder’s purchase of grenades from Detachment Leader Leng’s munitions factory. Their comrades turned and ran. So did the Japanese. Dozens of men armed with hunting rifles and homemade cannons clambered up onto the wall, opened fire, then ducked back down, silent again. Later on, Granddad learned that similarly heated, bizarre battles had occurred at the northern, eastern, and western edges of the village.

The Japs fired another salvo of mortars, scoring direct hits on the iron gate. Thump, thump, the gate was shattered, leaving a gaping breach.

Granddad and Father opened fire again on the Japs manning the mortars. Granddad fired four shots, bringing down two Jap soldiers. Father fired only a single shot. Holding his Browning in both hands, he took careful aim on a Jap straddling a mortar and fired. The bullet struck the man in the buttocks. Terrified, he fell forward across the muzzle, his body muffling the sound of the explosion before being ripped apart. Father jumped for joy, just as something whizzed noisily past his head. The mortar tube had exploded, sending the bolt flying a good ten yards to land just beyond Father’s head. It missed killing him by only a few inches.

Years later, Father was still talking about that glorious single shot.

As soon as the village gate was blown apart, a squad of Japanese cavalry stormed the village, sabres drawn. Father stared at the handsome, valiant warhorses with three parts terror and seven parts envy. The sorghum stalks snagged their legs and scratched their faces; it was hard going for the horses. Metal rakes and wooden ploughs, bricks and roof tiles, quite possibly even bowls of steaming sorghum porridge, rained down on them from the gatehouses, forcing the screaming riders to cover their heads, and so frightening their mounts that they reared up in protest and some turned back. Granddad and Father had odd grins on their faces as they watched the chaotic cavalry charge.

Granddad’s and Father’s diversion brought throngs of puppet soldiers down on their heads, and before long the cavalry joined the search-and-destroy mission. Time and again the cold glint of a Japanese sabre came straight at Father, but it was always deflected by sorghum stalks. A bullet grazed Granddad’s scalp. The dense sorghum was saving their lives. Like hunted rabbits, they crawled on the ground, and by midafternoon they’d made it all the way to the Black Water River.

After counting their remaining ammunition, they re-entered the sorghum field, and had walked a li or so when they heard shouts ahead: ‘Comrades’ — ‘Charge’ — ‘Forward’ — ‘Down with the Jap imperialists.’

The battle cries were followed by bugles and then the rat-tat-tat of what sounded like a couple of heavy machine guns.

Granddad and Father ran toward the source of the noise as fast as their legs would carry them. When they arrived at the spot, it was deserted; they found amid the sorghum stalks two steel oil drums in which strings of firecrackers were exploding.

‘Only the Jiao-Gao regiment would pull a stunt like this,’ Granddad said, with his lip curled.

The Jap cavalry and puppet foot-soldiers sprayed the area with fire as they made a flanking movement. Granddad retreated, dragging Father with him. Several Jiao-Gao soldiers ran towards them at a crouch, grenades hanging from their belts. Father saw one of them kneel and fire towards a clump of sorghum stalks shaking violently under the charge of a stallion. The ragged gunfire sounded like an earthenware vat being smashed. The soldier tried to pull back the bolt of his rifle to eject the spent cartridge, but it was jammed. The warhorse bore down on him. Father watched the Japanese rider wave his glinting sabre and cut through the air, barely missing the soldier’s head. The man threw down his rifle and ran, but was soon overtaken by the galloping horse, and the sabre came slicing down through his skull, soaking nearby sorghum leaves with his gore. Father saw nothing but inky darkness as he slumped to the ground.

When he awoke, he had been separated from Granddad by the Japanese cavalry charge. The sun bore down on the tips of the sorghum, casting dark shadows around him. Three furry fox cubs darted in front of him, and he instinctively grabbed one of the bushy tails. An angry growl erupted from nearby stalks, as the mother fox leaped out of the cover, baring her fangs threateningly. He quickly released the cub.

Gunfire continued at the eastern, western, and northern edges of the village, as a deathly stillness enveloped the southern edge. Father called out softly, then began to shout at the top of his lungs. No reply from Granddad. A dark cloud of fear settled over his heart as he ran panic-stricken towards the sound of gunfire. Dimming rays of sunlight bathed the sorghum tassels, which suddenly seemed hostile. He started to cry.

Searching for Granddad, Father stumbled across the bodies of three Jiao-Gao soldiers, all hacked to death, their hideous faces frozen in the gloomy darkness. He then ran smack into a crowd of terrified villagers cowering amid the sorghum stalks.

‘Have you seen my dad?’

‘Is the village open, boy?’

He could tell by their accent that they were from Jiao County. He heard an old man instructing his son: ‘Yinzhu, remember what I told you. Don’t pass up quilt covers, even if the cotton’s all tattered. But look first for a cookpot, because ours is ruined.’

The old man’s rheumy eyes looked like gobs of snot stuck in the sockets. Having no time to waste on them, Father continued north. When he reached the edge of the village, he was confronted by a scene that had appeared in Grandma’s dreams, and Granddad’s dreams, and over and over in his own. People were pouring out through the village wall — men and women, young and old — like a raging torrent, heading for the sorghum fields to escape the heavy fighting on the eastern, northern, and western edges of the village.

Gunfire erupted in front of Father, who saw a hail of bullets rip into the sorghum field that dominated the front of the village. The villagers — men and women, young and old — were mowed down along with the sorghum stalks, every last one of them. The air was spattered with fresh blood, turning half the sky red. Father sat down hard on the ground, his mouth hanging slack. Blood everywhere, and everywhere its sweet stench.

The Japanese entered the village.

The sun, stained by human blood, set behind the mountain as the crimson full moon of mid-autumn rose above the sorghum.

My father heard Granddad’s muted call:

‘Douguan —!’