Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
people. What happened to its leg?”
The fat woman ran up.
“We don’t serve independent farmers, so get out of here!”
My master stopped walking and, in a voice filled both with dejection and passion, replied:
“You fat sow, I am an independent farmer, and I’d rather die than be served by the likes of you. But this donkey of mine is the county chief’s personal mount. He was carrying the chief down the mountain when his hoof got caught in some rocks and broke off. That’s a work-related injury, and you have an obligation to serve him.”
I’d never heard my master berate anyone so passionately before. His birthmark was nearly black. By then he was so skeletal he looked like a plucked rooster, and a very smelly one, as he advanced on the fat woman, who kept backing up until, covering her face with her hands, she burst into tears and bolted.
A man in a well-worn uniform, hair parted in the middle, looking very much like a local official, walked up to us, picking his teeth.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to feed my donkey, I want you to heat a tub of water and give him a bath, and I want you to get a doctor over here to bandage his injured leg.”
The official shouted in the direction of the kitchen, drawing a dozen people out into the yard.
“Do as he says, and make it quick.”
So they washed me from head to tail with hot water, and they summoned a doctor, who treated my injured leg with iodine, put a medicinal salve on the stump, and wrapped it with heavy gauze. Finally, they brought me some barley and alfalfa.
While I was eating, someone carried out a bowl of steaming dumplings and placed it in front of my master. A man who looked like a mess cook said softly:
“Eat up, elder brother, don’t be stubborn. Eat what you have here and don’t give a thought to your next meal. Get through today without worrying about tomorrow. In these fucked-up times you suffer for a few days, then you die, the lamp goes out. What’s that, you don’t want these?”
My master was sitting on a couple of chipped bricks tied together, bent over like a hunchback and staring at my useless stump; I don’t think he heard a word the mess cook said. His stomach was rumbling again, and I could guess how tempting those plump, white dumplings must have been. Several times he stuck out a black, grimy hand to pick one of them up, only to quickly pull it back.
11
With a War Hero’s Help, an Artificial Hoof
Starving Citizens Dismember and Eat a Donkey
My stump healed and I was out of danger, but I’d lost the ability to work and was just a crippled donkey. The slaughterhouse team came by several times with an offer to buy me and improve the lives of Party cadres with my meat. My master sent them away with loud curses.
In a story called “The Black Donkey,” Mo Yan wrote:
The mistress of the house Yingchun found a beat-up leather shoe somewhere, brought it home, and cleaned it; she filled the inside with cotton, sewed a strap onto the top, and tied it to the crippled donkey’s injured leg, which helped to stabilize him. And so, in the spring of 1959, a strange scene appeared on village roads: the independent farmer Lan Lian pushing a cart with wooden wheels, piled high with fertilizer, his arms bare, his face defiant. The donkey pulling the cart wore a beat-up leather shoe on one leg as he hobbled along, his head drooping low. The cart moved slowly, the wheels creaked loudly. Lan Lian, bending deeply at the waist, pushed with all his might. The crippled donkey pulled with all his might to make his master’s job a little easier. At first, people stopped and stared at this strange team, and a few even covered their mouths to stifle a laugh. But eventually the laughter died out. During the early days of their co-op labor, elementary schoolchildren would fall in behind them; one or two of the bad kids would throw stones at the donkey, but they were invariably punished at home.
In the spring, the earth takes on the quality of leavened dough; in addition to the wheels of our heavily laden cart, my hooves also sank deeply into the ground, making it almost impossible to keep moving. The fertilizer had to be taken out into the fields, so hard work was called for; I pulled with all my might to make the job easier on him. But I hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when I left the shoe my mistress had made stuck in the dirt. When the exposed stump hit the ground like a club, the terrible pain pushed my sweat glands
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