Pow!

or why they made all those slurping sounds, like they were trying to suck something out of each other's mouth (and they actually did suck out something sweet and delicious). Now I know that's called smooching, or, more refined, kissing. I, of course, had no idea what it felt like but the expressions on their faces and the way they moved struck me as something quite passionate; it may have also been agonizing because I saw tears in Aunty Wild Mule's eyes.

    Mother was almost worn out; by the time Su Zhou rode past, her pace had slowed considerably, as had mine. It was not because she was having second thoughts, no, not that. She still wanted to get to the train station and bring Father home. Take my word for it. She was my mother, and I understood her; I could tell what she was thinking just by looking at her face and listening to her breathe. The main reason she was slowing down was exhaustion. She'd risen before dawn, lit a fire, cooked breakfast, loaded the tractor; then, taking advantage of the freezing temperature, poured water on the paper to make it heavier. Then had followed the dramatic reunion with Father, and she'd run off to buy a pig's head, and, I suspect, a bath at the sulphur springs that had just opened in our village (I could smell the sulphur when I saw her at the door). Her face glowed, her spirits soared and her hair was wet, all evidence of a bath. She'd come home filled with hope and happiness only to have Father's second departure hit her like a bolt of lightning or a bucket of icy water, chilling her from head to toe. Any other woman suffering a blow like that would have gone mad or cried her eyes out; my mother stood there glass-eyed and slack-jawed, but only for a moment. She knew that falling to the ground and pretending to die was not in her best interest, nor, especially, was another round of tears. What she needed to do was get to the train station as fast as possible and, before the train left, stop that homeless man—who had somehow retained his integrity—from leaving. For a while after Father left the first time, Mother had been fond of a saying she'd picked up somewhere: ‘Moscow doesn't believe in tears!’ It became her mantra. That and Comrade Su Zhou's ‘There are consequences to everything, good and evil’ were a pair of couplets that spread through the village. Mother's fondness for this saying revealed her grasp of reality. Crying does not help in a crisis. Moscow didn't believe in tears, nor did Slaughterhouse Village. The only way to deal with a crisis was to take action.

    We stood at the door of the station's waiting room, trying to catch our breath. Ours was a tiny station on a feeder line, and only a few local freight trains that also carried passengers stopped there. A wall with posters, fragments of slogans still stuck to them, stood in the windswept plaza. Underground enemies had scrawled counterrevolutionary slogans in chalk, mostly insults hurled at leaders of the local Party and government organizations. A woman selling roasted peanuts had set up shop in front of the wall—she wore a dark red scarf and a white surgical mask that showed only her eyes and their furtive look. A man stood beside her, arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips, bored stiff. An iron basin sat on the rear rack of the bicycle in front of him, and the smell of cooked meat wafted across from beneath a strip of gauze. It wasn't Shen Gang, and it wasn't Su Zhou. Where had they gone? Had all their beautiful, ambrosia-scented meat already wound up in someone else's stomach? How would I know? One sniff told me that the meat in that man's basin was beef and cow entrails, and that it had been injected with a large amount of food colouring and formaldehyde, which made it look fresh from the slaughterhouse and smell quite wonderful. My gaze sidled over to it, like a fishhook, aiming to snatch a piece. But my body was in the grip of my mother and being reluctantly dragged to the waiting-room door.

    It was one of those spring doors that had been out of fashion for more than a decade. You had to fight to get it open, which it did at last and with a loud clang. When you let go, it sprang shut and then bounced right back—if you hadn't moved away, it would slam into your backside and make you stumble if you were lucky and knock you to the floor if you weren't. I pulled the door open for Mother, then leapt in behind her; by the time the door slammed shut I was safely inside, ruining the