Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

the ladle that his effort had not been in vain. He either brought the ladle up to his mouth or brought his mouth down to the ladle, I’m not sure which. From the look on his face, I knew he was enjoying a brief taste of the good life. He scraped the last bit of sweetness from the vat with the ladle, making a sound that set my teeth on edge. It was worse than the blaring of loudspeakers and made me tense and uncomfortable. I wished someone would stop him from embarrassing all of Ximen Village; I was afraid I’d fall out of my tree if he kept it up much longer, and I could hear the other pigs stirring. “Stop that scraping,” they shouted through an inebriated haze. “You’re killing us!” Well, he tipped over both vats and crawled into one, probably to lick the bottom. It’s a true marvel to have such a greedy mouth. He reemerged after a while, his clothes shiny; he reeked of something sweet. If it had been springtime, he’d have been swarmed over by bees or butterflies, but it was wintertime — no bees, no butterflies. There were, however, ten or fifteen big, fat flies buzzing around him, two of which landed on his filthy, kinky hair.
    “. . . and we must employ ten times the passion and put forth a hundred times the effort to expand Ximen Village’s advanced experience. Every member of the commune and production brigade must personally take charge. The workers, youth, women, and mass organizations must strive to work together. We must draw tight the class struggle bowstring and reinforce the control and surveillance of all landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists, and be on guard against sabotage by concealed class enemies . . .”
    Mo Yan, smiling happily and whistling, caught my attention by strutting over to the generator room, so I followed him with my eyes, watching him go inside, where the diesel motor was humming along.
    “The storekeepers of each brigade must rigorously protect against the theft of pesticides and their introduction into pig feed by class enemies . . .”
    Jiao Er, the duty watchman for the generator, was leaning up against the wall, sound asleep in the warmth of the sun, which gave Mo Yan the opportunity to work his mischief. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, grabbed his pecker with both hands — up till this moment I had no idea what he was planning to do — and took aim at the fan belt, wetting it with a clear stream of piss. A strange sound preceded the slippage of the belt, which hit the ground like a dead boa. The loudspeaker went silent as the generator squealed, its motor spinning uselessly. The clearing and the thousands of people in it were, it seemed, submerged underwater, for the speaker’s voice was suddenly weak and drab, like the dull pops of fish bubbles as they reached the surface. The desired atmosphere was in a shambles. I saw Hong Taiyue stand up, followed by Ximen Jinlong, who got to his feet and strode toward the generator room. At that moment I knew that Mo Yan had done something terrible and that bitter fruit awaited him.
    Too dumb to know what trouble he was in, Mo Yan stood in front of the slipped fan belt looking puzzled, wondering how the little bit of water he’d made had caused the belt to come off like that. The first thing Ximen Jinlong did when he burst into the room was slap Mo Yan on the head. The second thing he did was kick Mo Yan in the ass, and the third thing he did was bend down, pick up the fan belt, and replace it on the turbine. But as soon as he let go, off it came again. He tried again, this time using a metal pole, and managed to make it stay. He then coated the belt with a layer of wax, and it held.
    “Who told you to do this?” he yelled at Mo Yan.
    “Nobody . . .”
    “Then why’d you do it?”
    “To cool the belt off.”
    The interruption caused by the loudspeaker failure had dealt such a blow to the production HQ VIP that he brought an abrupt end to his speech. After a brief flurry of confusion, the pretty elementary teacher Jin Meili mounted the stage to announce the program. In not-terribly-standard-but-pleasant-sounding Mandarin, she announced to the masses in the clearing and, more important, to the officials who had by then taken seats on both sides of the stage: “The Ximen Village Elementary School Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team theatrical performance will now begin!” By this time the electricity had been restored to the loudspeakers, from which shrill screeches