Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

has it been? Let’s see . . .” She counted on her fingers. “One, two, three years . . . my goodness, it’s been eight years. For a dog that’s half a lifetime!”
    We touched noses and licked each other’s face. We were very happy.
    Just then my second brother came toward me from the west, along with his mistress, Baofeng. A skinny boy was right behind Baofeng, and the smell told me it was Gaige. I was amazed by how tall he’d gotten.
    “Number Two, look who’s here!” Our elder brother cried out. “Dog Two!” I shouted as I ran over to greet him. He was a black dog who’d gotten our father’s genes. We looked a lot alike, but I was much bigger. We three brothers kept nudging and rubbing up against one another, happy to be together again after so long. After a while they asked me about our sister, and I told them she was doing well, that she’d had a litter of three pups, all of whom had been sold, earning a lot of money for her family. But when I asked after our mother, I was met by gloomy looks. With tears in their eyes they told me she’d died, though no one knew she was sick. Fortunately, Lan Lian had made a coffin and buried her in that plot of land that meant so much to him. For a dog it was a fine tribute.
    While we three brothers were getting the most out of our reunion, Baofeng looked over at us and seemed shocked when she saw me. “Is that really Dog Four? How’d you get so big? You were the runt of the litter.”
    I looked her over while she was looking me over. After three reincarnations, Ximen Nao’s memories still hung on, although buried under a host of incidents over a period of many years.
    On a page of history in the distant past, I was her father, she was my daughter. But now I was just a dog, whereas she was my dog-brother’s mistress and the half sister of my master. She had little color in her face, and her hair, though it hadn’t turned gray, looked dry and brittle, like grass growing atop a wall after a frost. She was dressed all in black, except for patches of white on her cloth slippers. She was mourning the loss of her husband, Ma Liangcai. The gloomy smell of death clung to her. But, thinking back, she’d always had a gloomy, melancholy smell. She seldom smiled, and when she did, it was like reflected light on snow — dreary and cold, a look that was hard to forget. The boy behind her, Ma Gaige, was as skinny as his father. A onetime pudgy-faced little boy had grown into a gaunt teenager with ears that stuck out prominently; surprisingly, he had several gray hairs. He was wearing blue shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt — the Ximen Elementary School uniform — and a pair of white sneakers. He was carrying a plastic bowl filled with cherries in both hands.
    As for me, I followed my two dog brothers in a look around Ximen Village. I’d left home as a puppy and had virtually no impressions of the place outside of the Ximen family home, but this was the village where I was born; in the words of Mo Yan in one of his essays, “hometowns are tied to a person by blood.” So as we strolled down the streets and scoped out the village in general, I was deeply moved. I saw some familiar faces and detected many unfamiliar smells. There were also a lot of familiar smells that were somehow absent — no trace at all of the strongest smells of the village back then, of oxen and donkeys. Many of the new smells were of rusted metal emanating from yards we passed, and I knew that the mechanization dream of the People’s Communes had not been realized until land reform and independent farming were once again the backbone of agricultural policy. My nose told me that the village was awash in feelings of excitement and anxiety on the eve of major changes. People all wore peculiar expressions, as if they thought that something very big was about to happen.
    We returned to the Ximen house, followed by Ximen Jinlong’s son, Ximen Huan, who was one of the last to arrive. I had no trouble spotting him by his smell, even though he reeked of fish and mud. He was naked but for a pair of nylon bathing trunks and a brand-name T-shirt thrown over his shoulder. He was carrying a line of silver-scaled little fish. An expensive watch glittered on his wrist. He spotted me first, dropped what he was carrying, and ran up to me. Obviously, he saw me as a ride, but no self-respecting dog was about to let something like that happen. I moved out of the way.
    His mother, Huzhu, came running out of the