Red Sorghum

open sorghum leaves on the wooden cabinet and said with embarrassment, ‘Commander Yu . . . it won’t do any good. . . .’
    ‘Is it your intention to bring the Yu line to an end?’ Granddad asked glumly.
    Large beads of sweat glistened on Dr Zhang’s gaunt face. ‘Commander Yu . . . think about it. . . . Connecting blood vessels were severed. If I put it back in, it would still be dead.’
    ‘Sew the blood vessels together.’
    ‘Commander Yu, nobody in the world can reconnect blood vessels. . . .’
    ‘Then . . . is that the end of it?’
    ‘That’s hard to say, Commander Yu. He might still be all right. The other one’s just fine. Maybe he’ll be all right with just one. . . .’
    ‘You think so?’
    ‘It’s possible.’
    ‘Damn it to hell!’ Granddad swore sorrowfully. ‘Bad things always happen to me!’
    After the wound down below had been taken care of, Father’s face was attended to. Dr Zhang’s sweat-soaked clothing stuck to his back as he sat on a stool and panted breathlessly.
    ‘How much, Dr Zhang?’
    ‘Don’t worry about a fee, Commander Yu. As long as your esteemed son gets better, I consider myself lucky,’ he said weakly.
    ‘Dr Zhang, I, Yu Zhan’ao, am strapped at the moment. But someday I’ll thank you properly.’
    He picked up Father and carried him out of Dr Zhang’s house.
    Granddad looked down attentively at my father, who lay semiconscious in the shack, his face covered with gauze, with only his shifting eyes exposed. Dr Zhang had dropped by once to change his dressings. ‘Commander Yu,’ he said, ‘there’s no infection, and that’s a good sign.’
    ‘Tell me,’ said Granddad, ‘didn’t you say he’d be all right with just one?’
    ‘Commander, we can’t worry about that yet. Your esteemed son was bitten by a mad dog, and we’re lucky he’s still alive.’
    ‘He might as well be dead if that thing’s useless.’ Observing the murderous look in Granddad’s eyes, Dr Zhang mumbled something obsequious and slinked away.
    Granddad picked up his gun and walked over to the marshland to sort out his chaotic thoughts. Mournful signs of autumn were all around: the ground was covered with frost, and there were sharp, icy brambles on the soggy marshland floor. Granddad was sick and very weak, his son was hovering between life and death, the family was broken up, some gone and some dead, the people were suffering, Wang Guang and Dezhi were dead, Gimpy had gone far away, the ulcer on the woman Liu’s leg was still oozing pus and blood, Blind Eye did nothing all day long but sit, the girl Beauty was too young to know anything, he was being pulled by the Jiao-Gao troops and squeezed by Pocky Leng’s troops, the Japanese saw him as their mortal enemy. He climbed to the top of a rise in the marshland to gaze out over the scattered, broken remains of human bodies and sorghum stalks, utterly disheartened. What had he got from decades of fighting and vying over women? Only the desolate scene in front of him.
    The autumn of 1939 was one of the most difficult periods in Granddad’s life: his troops had been wiped out, his beloved wife had been killed, his son had been severely wounded, his home and the land around it had been torched, his body was racked with illness; war had destroyed nearly everything heowned. His eyes roamed over the corpses of men and dogs, a skein of threads getting more and more tangled wherever he looked, until it became a blur. Several times he drew his pistol, thinking of saying goodbye to this lousy, fucking world. But a powerful desire for revenge won out over cowardice. He hated the Japanese, he hated the troops of Pocky Leng and of Jiao-Gao.
    On this very spot, the Jiao-Gao forces had taken over twenty rifles from him, then vanished without a trace. There was no sign that they’d engaged the Japanese; he had heard only that they’d clashed with the troops of Pocky Leng. And Granddad suspected that it was the Jiao-Gao forces who had stolen the fifteen rifles he and Father had hidden in the dry well.
    The woman Liu, who still had a pretty face even in her forties, came to the edge of the marshland to find Granddad, trying to comfort him with affectionate gazes at his silver hair. She touched his arm with her large, rough hand and said, ‘You shouldn’t be sitting here thinking like that. Let’s go back. As the ancients said, “Heaven never seals off all the exits.” You should concentrate on getting your health