Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

animal that had displayed extraordinary behaviors in prior months and years. If, at the time, I’d been aware that the arrogant soul of Ximen Nao and the memory of a renowned donkey were hidden deep inside you, I’d have been disappointed in your behavior. You should have fought back, should have raised havoc in the marketplace, should have played the major role in that carnivalesque episode, like one of those bulls in a Spanish corrida. But you didn’t. You held your head low, tattered shoes hanging from your horns, a symbol of shame, unhurriedly chewing your cud, as people could tell from the rumblings down in your stomachs. And so it went, from early morning till noon, from chilled air to warm, till the ground baked in the sun, till the fragrance of braised buns emerged from the Supply and Marketing Cooperative dining hall. A one-eyed young man with a badly worn coat thrown over his shoulders came limping out of the marketplace, dragging an impressive yellow dog behind him. He was an infamous dog-killer. Born into a poor family, and quickly orphaned, he was sent to school by the government free of charge. But, hating school with a passion, he ruined what could have been a glorious future. Preferring a life of complete freedom over one involving books and study, he made no attempt to better himself, and the Party could do nothing about it. Killing dogs and selling them for their meat, he enjoyed life to the fullest. Now at the time, private butchering was illegal, whether it was pigs or dogs. The government held a monopoly in the trade. But they left one side of the net open for this particular dog-killer. Any government, whatever its makeup, would treat someone like him with leniency. He was a dog’s natural enemy. Neither very tall nor very big, he wasn’t particularly quick on his feet and had poor eyesight. A dog wouldn’t have trouble tearing him limb from limb. But any dog, from mild-mannered to vicious, tucked its tail between its legs, shrank in on itself, and, with naked fear in its eyes, whimpered imploringly when it saw him, accepting its fate as it let him put a rope around its neck and hang it from a tree. He’d then drag the strangled animal back to the hole beneath a stone bridge where he lived and worked to skin and clean the dog with river water, then chop it up and toss the meat into a pot. After he fired up his stove with kindling, the water would come to a boil and release dense steam from under the bridge; as it followed the currents, the fragrance of dog meat would suffuse the river all around.
    An evil wind rose up, snapping the banners so ferociously that one of the poles snapped in two, sending that banner circling into the air to dance for a moment before landing on the ox’s head. That’s when you went wild, exactly what I’d been waiting for, me and many of the gawkers in the marketplace. This farce could only end riotously.
    You began by shaking your head in an attempt to flick off the banner. I know what it’s like to look at the sun by covering my head with a red flag; bright red, like a vast ocean, as if the sun were immersed in an ocean of blood, and I was struck by a feeling that the end of the world was upon me. Since I’m not an ox, I don’t know how you felt with a red banner covering your head, but the violence of your movements led me to assume that you were terror-stricken. The tips of your steely horns were those of a fighting bull. If a pair of knives had been attached to them, you could have decimated the crowd and routed the survivors. Even after many shakes of your head and sweeps of your tail, the red banner stayed put, and panic set in; you ran. Now, your reins were tied to my dad’s waist, so when you, a four-year-old bull weighing nearly five hundred catties, without an ounce of unwanted fat, an animal filled with the vigor of youth and unimaginable strength, took off running, you dragged him behind you as if he were a mouse on the tail of a cat. You ran straight into the crowd, drawing fearful howls and screams. My brother could have been giving the best speech ever heard at that moment, and no one would have been listening. Truth is, they all came to watch the show, and couldn’t care less if you were revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Take that red banner off his head! someone yelled. But who was willing or brave enough to do that? Taking it off would have ended a good show. In running for cover, the people subconsciously formed tight clusters.