Under the Red Flag Read online

  Leng’s house was at the northern end of Horse Village, within ten minutes’ walk. When he arrived, Liao led his boar directly into Leng’s yard and closed the gate behind him. He wanted to get the business done quickly, take the pay, and return home for the supper of scrambled eggs, fried dough cakes, soy paste, raw scallions, stewed hairtail, which he bought in Dismount Fort that morning after he had sold a litter of piglets there. He liked that fish best and never could have enough of it.

  To his surprise, in the middle of Leng’s yard was standing a huge white boar. Beyond it a young sow was lying on her back against a nether millstone. The boar’s owner, Ma Ding, whom Liao recognized at a glance, was talking with Leng. Second Dog, Leng’s teenage son, was shoveling manure out of the pigpen. Seeing Liao and the black boar, the boy stopped to make a face, a snouty pout, at his father and Ma Ding.

  Anger welled up in Liao. I’m taken in, he thought. Leng, you dung-eater, you have Ma here already, ahead of me.

  He wanted to walk straight to Leng and give him a round of curses that would make his ancestors squirm in their graves, but he hesitated because right in front of him was the white boar that was so large, even larger than his black boar. Shedding fierce glints, the white boar’s lozenge eyes were blinking at Liao and the black boar behind him.

  Leng realized the embarrassment he had caused. He stopped talking and turned around, coming over to calm Liao. He had hardly walked a step when Liao yelled out and was thrown to the ground. A black shadow flitted over his body and dashed to the white boar. Both Leng and Ma jumped aside instinctively. Chickens and ducks burst away in every direction, and a rooster landed on the wall, then flew off to the neighbor’s yard. Second Dog thrust the shovel into the manure heap and vaulted out of the pigpen, shouting excitedly, “Good pig, get that foreign bastard. Drive him back home!”

  The boars’ growls, louder than those sent out by a pig in a slaughterhouse when a long knife stabbed into its throat, were vibrating through the neighborhood and the village.

  Liao got up to his feet. The two pigs were already in a melee. Though the white boar was bigger and heavier, the black one was nimbler and fiercer. Watching them rolling about, Liao felt his boar was by no means inferior to that white foreign beast. Just now when the fight broke out, by instinct he had wanted to stop them, uncertain if his pig could match its enemy, but now he changed his mind. His boar had to be the master in this village at least. Let him fight to protect his territory, Liao thought, to keep his wives and concubines, to get rid of that foreign bastard, and teach both Ma and Leng a hard lesson. See if they dare to look down on me and my boar again.

  Instead of trying to separate the pigs, Liao stood there motionless and enjoyed watching them fighting. Likewise, Ma and Leng seemed also eager to see the fight through. Unlike the men, Second Dog openly took sides, waving a wooden stick to urge the black boar on. They all forgot the sow that had escaped into the pigpen.

  The white boar opened its jaws, snapping at its attacker. Its scarlet tongue was dripping blood, which the men couldn’t tell was from the wounds on the black boar or from the bleeding inside its own mouth. Again and again its flinty teeth cut through the air but missed the black boar, which seemed clever, able to parry the attacks with its snout.

  After a few rounds the two pigs disengaged themselves. Each stepped back for ten feet or so, turned around facing the other for a moment, as if dazed by the hot blood pumped into their heads, then dashed toward each other and clashed with a muffled noise. Neither of them lost its balance or retreated a step. Instead they stuck together, holding each other with their snouts, and started a kind of wrestling. The two bodies turned tense as if having shed their fat. The pigs were circling around and around rather slowly; each wanted to throw the other down, but neither was able to make it. Their columnar hind feet sank into the earth.

  Suddenly the black boar passed water. A thick line of greenish liquid gushed out and fell on the ground. Liao’s heart shuddered, because he realized his boar couldn’t match the white beast in strength. He was right; in a few seconds the black boar began retreating, two deep grooves emerging under its hind feet. The ground soaked with the urine could no longer give a solid footing. The white boar pushed and pushed and pushed, till with a crushing thrust it hurled its enemy over. The black boar collapsed right in front of its master’s feet, whining and gasping. Liao felt a sharp pain in his heart and wanted to bend down to help it up, but he restrained himself, seeing a smile cross the square face of Ma Ding, who was looking at the black boar contemptuously. Anger flamed up in Liao and he kicked his pig ferociously in the flank. That sent it to its feet at once. The boar seemed to understand its master’s mind and went for its enemy again.

  This time they fought differently. The black boar appeared to know its own physical inferiority and tried resorting to its teeth. With its mouth open, it snapped at the white boar, which couldn’t move fast enough to avoid every attack. Yet the white boar was so large it stood there like a bridge pier.

  Liao worried. Obviously his boar had no chance of winning the fight. While he was figuring how to invent an excuse for withdrawing his force from the battle, the black boar stepped aside; then, approaching the white boar slowly, all of a sudden it jumped into the air with its front legs upwards. The pair of pointed feet plunged and stabbed into its enemy’s face. The white boar growled wildly. Below its right eye an inch of hairy skin was torn off together with a chunk of flesh, and the cut, smeared with yellowish mud, turned scarlet instantly.

  “Good pig! He sure knows how to scratch,” Leng cried.

  “Kill this foreign beast,” Second Dog shouted, whacking the white boar’s rump with the stick.

  “Second Dog!” Ma yelled. “You son of a rabbit, don’t abuse a pig! It’s just a dumb animal.”

  Liao was pleased. Looking at Ma, he put on a smile and said, “We stop here, Old Ma, all right?”

  Ma didn’t respond, as though he hadn’t heard Liao.

  The two pigs went on biting each other. The white boar looked pink now, but there weren’t many wounds on its body, and it had gotten only a few short rosy furrows on its sides. Though the black boar didn’t change color, it had more wounds than its enemy. Yet its fighting spirit was not sinking. The dark snout reached for the under part of the white belly and took a solid snap at the soft area beneath the ribs. The white boar gave out a deafening howl, and blood was dripping on the ground. The black boar was stunned by the murderous sound and paused, standing there as if wondering. The white boar jumped up into the air and its cavernous mouth dived onto its enemy. The huge pink jaws crushed the dark head and struck the black boar away at least ten feet. Immediately the black boar dashed off growling, and the white boar was chasing behind. None of the men had seen how it had happened—in the dust a black ear, bigger than an open hand, was twitching and twitching like a giant bat.

  The black boar rushed into the latrine and came out from the other side. The white boar followed. The poles supporting the latrine were smashed and tossed to the ground. The instant the white boar emerged from the other side the latrine collapsed.

  “My outhouse! Oh, my outhouse,” Leng cried. “You two stop your pigs. They’re destroying my property.”

  Second Dog picked up a pitchfork and went for the white boar, shouting, “Goddamn it, I’m going to run you through, white beast!”

  “No, hold!” Ma yelled and threw up his hands.

  “Second Dog, put it down!” his father ordered harshly. The boy froze and dropped the pitchfork.

  The pigs couldn’t be stopped now. The black boar seemed to be recovering from the giddiness caused by the loss of the ear and stood against the adobe wall. With its entire face covered with blood, it looked so monstrous that the white boar faltered in front of the gruesome pig-face. The black boar sent out a thundering roar to the sky and started charging at the white boar that was shaken a little.

  The white boar began to dodge its desperate enemy. Gradually the black boar turned to chasi
ng the white boar, jumping about and biting away at the pink rump and flanks. By now both Liao and Ma wanted to stop the fight, but it was too late, impossible. Nobody dared come close to the pigs, because the black boar was biting at anything within reach. It pursued the white boar so incessantly that the larger pig simply didn’t have a chance to stop to put itself together for a real fight.

  Then the white boar turned and was headed toward the front gate, the black boar following behind. With a crash the wooden gate disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  When the men could see clearly again, both pigs were out of sight. The men ran out and saw them rolling in the wheat field across the road. The white boar now stopped escaping and was engaged in the battle. Wheat seedlings and dark clods were flying around the two pigs that were kicking, jabbing, biting, tearing, grumbling.

  As the men were going up to them, both boars stepped back a little, then dashed into each other. The two heads collided with such a clash that both animals staggered and fell to their sides, whining in pain. Around them, the wheat field was scarred with dark patches of soil stripped of the green seedlings.

  “We must stop them. They’re ruining Sun Fu’s crops,” Liao said loudly to Ma, Leng, and the villagers who had just arrived to watch.

  Leng went back to pick up a plank of the gate. “Give me a hand,” he said to Ma. “We’ll use this to separate them.”

  Ma carried the other end of the plank. They walked to the boars, which were knocking at each other with their snouts.

  Liao went to pick up the other plank of the gate. With the help of another man, he carried it into the field. They tried the strategy of inserting the plank horizontally between the pigs, and once the two were separated, each plank would hold a boar back. Liao kept approaching them from the side of his own pig, because he thought it knew its master and was less likely to turn upon him. After trying a few times, Liao and his helper succeeded in putting their plank between the pigs. He kept yelling at his boar, “Stop it! Stop, you beast that doesn’t know your own parents!”

  For a short while the black boar seemed to calm down a little, but it started again. The dark body glided over the plank and landed right on the white boar. With loud growls the two pigs began rolling about again. “Heavens, that black boar wants nothing but death,” someone in the crowd said. Second Dog was telling his pals how the white boar had toppled the latrine.

  “Hey, you folks,” Liao shouted to the crowd, “give us a hand. The pigs have ruined enough things. Do you want the entire field to be turned up?”

  Six young men ran over to help. Meanwhile Leng and Ma had managed to insert their plank between the pigs. The other board was immediately put in front of the black boar. Then both planks moved away slowly to separate the pigs as far as possible.

  At last the fight was stopped. The two fighters, still whining, were actually too exhausted to continue. Besides, numerous hands were holding them down.

  While Ma was tying a rope around his pig’s neck, a few youngsters threw stones at the white boar from a distance and shouted in unison, “Foreign pig, go home! Foreign pig, go home!”

  “Little turtles,” Ma cursed, “my boar must’ve fucked your teachers pretty bad, or you wouldn’t be taught to be so patriotic.”

  Liao didn’t have his rope with him. It must have been in the yard, so he turned to Second Dog, who happened to be close by, and said, “Can you hold this for me for a moment? I’m going to get my rope.” The boy took over, holding the corner of the plank and standing by the black boar. He looked at its gory face and felt bad about the ear stump, on which some bluebottles were busy sucking the blood.

  Now that Ma had led his pig away, the men holding the black boar let it go. While people were wiping blood and dirt off their hands with wheat seedlings, the black boar sneaked aside and bit Second Dog in the left thigh. The boy was tossed down. A large piece of pale flesh flapped through a triangular gap on his denim pants. He was twisting and gasping on the ground but couldn’t cry out. The white bone and the bluish tendons were displayed for quite a while before the astounded villagers could lay their hands on the boy to stop him from writhing in the soil. Meanwhile the black boar was bolting out of the field toward the willow bushes on the bank of the Green Snake Stream.

  “Oh, my son!” Leng cried, holding Second Dog in his arms. “Save my boy!”

  A leather waistband was immediately tied at the end of the boy’s thin thigh, and then a dirty yellow shirt was bound around the wound. In no time the shirt turned crimson. Two men ran off to fetch a tractor; the boy had to be sent to the hospital in Gold County without delay.

  Liao returned with his rope. He had been in Leng’s yard for a while, looking not only for the hemp rope but also for the pig’s ear, which he had not found. Somebody must have stolen it. It couldn’t be a dog. Liao suspected Leng’s wife had committed the theft. Walking back to the crowd, he swore loudly from a distance, “Whoever stole my pig’s ear and eats it will have his bowels busted to ninety-nine pieces!”

  “Fuck your grandma!” Leng jumped at Liao, grabbed the front of his jacket and punched him in the face. “Look at what your beast has done to my boy. If only I had a gun, a gun! Oh my, my boy.” He burst out crying again. Liao was too stunned to respond. He saw fifty feet away a body twitching slightly in the crowd.

  He ran over and looked at the breathless boy on the ground. “Oh my heaven!” His calves cramped, and he couldn’t move and had to sit down.

  The owner of the wheat seedlings, Sun Fu, arrived. Seeing the field leveled up, his first desire was to pour all kinds of curses on those who were responsible for the damage, but the sight of the injured boy restrained him from doing that. Instead, he went to join the crowd that was talking about the possibility of Second Dog’s death.

  Liao dared not leave, though his stomach was gurgling. If the boy hadn’t been injured, he’d have left without delay for the warm supper at home. But had he done that now, all the villagers would have condemned him and his mating business would have been gone in a matter of days, so he stayed, sincerely hoping to do something, if possible, to comfort the Lengs. Since he couldn’t do anything, he kept a low profile, quietly listening to others describing the fight to those who had missed it. Who could imagine pigs were so destructive? Someone suggested the black boar must have had wild blood. By comparison, the white boar seemed tame and less harmful to humans. Maybe white pigs were safer to raise, especially if you had kids.

  A tractor arrived ten minutes later and a large cotton blanket was thrown down. The boy was wrapped up and loaded in the trailer. The horn tooted urgently as the tractor was pulling away.

  Holding the unconscious boy in her arms in the trailer, Leng’s wife cried loudly as though at a funeral. All the way to the hospital, Leng never stopped cursing Liao and Ma and their ancestors. Time and again he thought of ratsbane and swore to himself that he would poison the black boar.

  Winds and Clouds over a Funeral

  Sheng arrived at Gold County to work as a junior clerk in the military department at a large textile mill. Five days later he was informed that his grandmother had passed away. The departmental chief gave him three days to attend the funeral at home. Sheng went to the bus station at noon and got on a bus bound for Dismount Fort.

  He used to enjoy seeing the landscape outside the county town, especially the long reservoir that supplied water for six counties, and the large concrete dam that blocked the gorge of a valley and connected two rocky hills. In the middle of the dam stood a small house like a pillbox with loopholes. When the bus crept down the winding road along the bank, the water would flash like large fish scales in the sun. But today Sheng had no appetite for scenery. He closed his eyes and tried to take a catnap. He didn’t feel very sad, though he loved his grandmother.

  Four months before, when he returned home from the army, his grandmother had been so sick that few people thought she would survive the spring. At that time Sheng was waiting at home to be assigned a job, so he was free and co
uld look after her. Every day he talked with her and fed her; occasionally he washed her clothes. He also worked part-time. In the morning, together with a group of youngsters and old men, he loaded bricks onto trucks at a kiln. It was hard work, and in three months he made six hundred yuan—a large sum. He gave all the money to his mother, who saved it for him, or rather, for his wedding, though he didn’t have a fiancee yet. Since his father, Ding Liang, was the chairman of the commune, it wasn’t difficult for Sheng to find a full-time job in his hometown, but he preferred to go to Gold County.

  Gradually, his grandmother recovered, could move about, and even began to cook for the household again. People were amazed and would say to her, “You’re lucky to have a good grandson looking after you.” She would smile and nod to agree.

  In late February when she was very ill, she had thought she was dying. One evening she asked the entire family—her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson—to come to her bedside. She spoke to them calmly, “I’m dying. I have nothing to regret in my life. I’ve eaten whatever I wanted to eat and enjoyed a lot of ease and comfort. Death is death. When I’m dead, everything will be over for me. Don’t miss me. Don’t think of me. Just go on with your life.” She paused, then resumed, “But I have a wish. I want to be buried after I’m dead. I don’t want to be burned. Don’t take me to the crematory. I don’t want to go there. You don’t have to buy me a coffin. Just put me in a wooden box, nail it tightly, and bury it deep in the earth. Remember, deep in the earth, so that no tractor can plow me out when it turns the soil.”