Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

section chief out into the yard, where the man had to move his arms back and forth in the water to keep standing. Jintong looked behind him and spotted a clutch of chickens perched on the roof, alongside the wicked fox. Long Qingping’s corpse floated out of the room and followed him. When he sped up, so did the corpse, and when he made a turn, the corpse followed suit. Long Qingping’s corpse nearly made him soil himself out of fright. Finally, her tangle of hair was caught in the wire fence around the war relics, and Jintong was free of her. The artillery barrels poked out of the muddy water; of the tanks, only the turrets and guns showed above the surface, like enormous turtles sticking their necks out of the water. When the two men drew up to the tractor unit, the chicken farm collapsed.
    In the tractor unit garage, people had crowded onto a pair of red Russian combines, and more were trying to climb aboard; by doing so, they sent others sliding down into the water.
    A surge of water washed away the security section chief, gaining for Jintong his freedom. He and several rightists headed, hand in hand, toward the Flood Dragon River under the leadership of the high-jumper Wang Meizan, with the civil engineer Liang Badong bringing up the rear. Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, Qiao Qisha, and others he didn’t know walked between the two men, joined by Jintong, who half walked and half swam into their midst. Qiao Qisha reached out to him. The women’s wet blouses stuck to their bodies, almost as if they were naked. By force of habit, however disgusting, he cast fleeting glances at the chests of Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, and Qiao Qisha. They carried Jintong back to the dreamland of his youth, and drove Long Qingping’s image out of his head. He felt himself turning into a butterfly crawling out of Long’s blackened corpse to dry his wings in the sun and flit among a garden of breasts that emitted a strange redolence.
    Jintong found himself wishing he could trudge through this water forever, but the Flood Dragon River dike dashed his hopes. Farm workers huddled atop the dike were hugging their shoulders as the floodwaters flowed slowly down the trough and sent a soft mist into the air. There were no swallows, there were no gulls. Off to the southwest, Dalan was shrouded in the whiteness of rain; everywhere they looked they saw the chaos of water.
    When the red-tiled grain storage shed finally fell, the Flood Dragon River Farm became nothing but a gigantic lake. Sounds of weeping rose from the dike — leftists were crying, and so were rightists. Director Li Du, a man they seldom saw, was shaking his gray head — Lu Liren’s head, that is — and shouting shrilly, “Don’t cry, comrades. Be strong. As long as we remain united, we can overcome any difficulty …” All of a sudden, he clutched his chest and began to crumple. The head of the management section tried to catch him, but he fell onto the muddy ground in a heap. “Is there a doctor here? Anyone with medical knowledge, come, quickly!” the man bellowed.
    Qiao Qisha and a male rightist ran up. They checked the victim’s pulse and raised his lids to look at his eyes. Then they pinched the trough under his nose and the spot between his thumb and index finger, but that did no good. “He’s gone,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Heart attack.”
    Ma Ruilian opened her mouth and released wails from Shangguan Pandi’s throat.
    As night fell, the people huddled to stay warm. An airplane with flashing green lights appeared in the sky, rekindling hope below. But it flew past, like a comet, and never returned. At some time in the middle of the night, the rain stopped, and hordes of frogs croaked an earsplitting chorus. A few stars twinkled tentatively in the sky, looking as if they were about to fall to earth. During a brief respite from the croaking frogs, the wind whistled through tree branches floating past us. Out of nowhere, someone dove into the water and immediately turned belly-up, like a large fish. No one screamed for help; no one even seemed to notice. Before long, someone else jumped in, and this time, the reaction on the dike was, if anything, even more callous.
    Starlight shone down on Qiao Qisha and Huo Lina as they walked up to Jintong. “I want to tell you about my background in a roundabout fashion,” Qiao Qisha said. She then turned to Huo Lina and spoke to her in Russian for several minutes. Huo Lina matter-of-factly interpreted for her.