Red Sorghum

back by eating and drinking and breathing as much and as hard as you can. . . .’
    Her words touched him. He looked up at her kind face and tears began to fill his eyes. ‘Sister-in-law,’ he moaned.
    She stroked his bent back. ‘Just look,’ she said, ‘a man barely forty reduced to this by his suffering.’
    She supported him as they walked back together. He looked at her lame leg and asked with concern, ‘Is it any better?’
    ‘The ulcer has healed, but it’s thinner than the other one.’
    ‘It’ll fill out later.’
    ‘I don’t think Douguan’s injury is as serious as it looks.’
    ‘What do you think, will he be all right with only one?’
    ‘I think so. Single-stalk garlic is always the hottest.’
    ‘You really think so?’
    ‘My younger brother-in-law was born with only one, and look how many kids he’s got.’
    Late at night, Granddad rested his weary head in the warmth of the woman Liu’s bosom as she stroked his bony frame with her large hands. ‘Can you do it again?’ she whispered. ‘Do youstill have the strength? Don’t despair. Doesn’t it make you feel better to do it to me . . . ?’
    Granddad smelled the slightly sour, slightly sweet odour of the woman Liu’s breath and fell fast asleep.
    Mother could not rid her mind of the picture of Dr Zhang picking up that purplish, flattened ball with his tweezers. He had examined it carefully before tossing it into a dish filled with dirty cotton balls and pieces of skin and dead flesh. Yesterday it had been Douguan’s jewel; today it lay in a dish of filthy debris. Mother, who was fifteen and had begun to understand a thing or two, felt both bashful and frightened. While she was taking care of Father, she kept staring at his gauze-wrapped penis; her heart fluttered, her cheeks burned, she blushed deep red.
    Then she learned that the woman Liu was sleeping with Granddad.
    ‘Beauty,’ the woman Liu said to her, ‘you’re fifteen now, and no longer a child. Try playing with Douguan’s penis; if it gets hard, he’s your man.’
    Mother was so embarrassed she nearly cried.
    Father’s stitches were removed.
    Mother slipped into the shack where Father was sleeping and tiptoed up to his kang, her cheeks burning. She knelt beside him and carefully pulled down his pants. In the light streaming into the room she looked at his injured, grotesque penis. The head, wild and proud, had an air of defiance. Timidly she held it in her sweaty hand and felt it gradually get warmer and thicker. It began to throb, just like her heart. Father woke up and squinted at her. ‘Beauty, what are you doing?’
    Mother shrieked in alarm, jumped to her feet, and ran out, bumping smack into Granddad in the doorway.
    Granddad grabbed her by the shoulders and demanded, ‘What’s wrong, Beauty?’
    Mother burst out crying, wrenched free of Granddad’s grip, and ran away.
    Granddad rushed into the shack, then rushed out again likea man crazed and ran straight to the woman Liu. He grabbed her breasts and squeezed them tightly. ‘Single-stalk garlic is the hottest!’ he said almost incoherently. ‘Single-stalk garlic
is
the hottest!’
    Granddad fired three shots in the air, then brought his hands together in front of his chest and screamed: ‘Heaven has eyes!’

9
    GRANDDAD TAPPED THE wall with his knuckles. Sunlight streaming in through the window reflected off the Gaomi statuette on the highly polished kang table. The window was covered by paper that Grandma had cut into strange, ingenious designs. In five days everything in the place would be reduced to ashes in a terrible battle. It was the tenth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939. Granddad had just returned from the highway, his arm in a sling and reeking of gasoline. He and Father had buried the Japanese machine gun with the twisted barrel and were searching the house for the money Grandma had hidden.
    When the wall produced a hollow sound, Granddad smashed a hole in it with the butt of his pistol, then reached in and pulled out a red cloth packet. He shook it. It jingled. He poured its contents out onto the kang – fifty silver dollars.
    Pocketing the silver dollars, he said, ‘Let’s go, son.’
    ‘Go where, Dad?’
    ‘Into town to buy bullets. It’s time to settle scores with Pocky Leng.’
    The sun had nearly set when they reached the northern outskirts of the city. Snaking darkly through the sorghum fields, a black locomotive chugged along the tracks of the Jiao-Ping–Jinan