Red Sorghum

flickering candlelight. His arm was stained with the dark dried blood that had oozed out from under the bandage. Not daring to say anything, Father closed his eyes again until the five funeral musicians hired for the event ran up against the envious local musicians, and their battle of horns disrupted everyone’s sleep. Father’s nose began to ache; scalding tears flowed from his eyes and ran into his ear. Here I am, he was thinking, nearly sixteen already. I wonder if these turbulent days will ever end. He looked at his father’s bloody shoulder and waxen face, and a feeling of desolation that didn’t suit his tender years entered his heart.
    A lone village rooster announced the coming day, and a predawn breeze carried the acrid smell of spring into the tent, where it caused the candles to flicker. The voices of early risers were now discernible; warhorses tethered to nearby willows began pawing the ground and snorting; Father curled up comfortably, and thought of Beauty, who would one day be my mother, and the tall, robust woman Liu, who should rightfully be considered my third grandma. They had disappeared three months earlier, when Father and Granddad had gone for training with the Iron Society to a remote little outpost south of the railway tracks; when they returned, their huts were empty and their loved ones gone. The sheds they’d thrown up in the winter of 1939 were covered with cobwebs.
    As soon as the red morning sun had made its entrance, the village came to life. Food peddlars raised their voices to attract customers, as the steamy, tantalising odours of buns in ovens, won tons in pots, and flatcakes in skillets began to waft through the air. A pockfaced peasant argued with a peddlar of buns, who refused to accept North Sea currency; the peasant had none of the Iron Society’s tiger-mount currency. By then twenty of the little buns had already found their way into the peasant’s stomach. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said. ‘Take it or leave it.’ The crowd urged the peddlar to accept the North Sea currency, whose value would be restored as soon as the Jiao-Gao regiment fought its way back. He did, and moved on, raising his voice: ‘Buns! Meat-filled buns! Fresh from the oven!’
    The tent showed the effects of the raging fire of the night before. Iron Society soldiers had dragged the physician and his scrawny mule the fifty paces or so to the inlet, where the stench of their scorched bodies attracted scavenger birds. The area around Grandma’s coffin had been swept clean of torn canvas, and the occasional unbroken wineglass lying in the cinders had been smashed by rakes. Grandma’s coffin shone in the early-morning light, hideous and scary. The deep-scarlet surface, once so sombre and mysterious, had been eaten away by flames, and the thick varnish had melted and split, leaving a maze of deep cracks. The coffin was so enormous that, as my father stood at its sweeping head, it seemed like the tallest thing in the world, and he had trouble breathing. He recalled how the coffin had been seized, and how its owner, an old man who must have been at least a hundred and still wore his white hair in a little queue, had refused to let go of the front edge:
    ‘This is my home. . . . No one else can have it. . . . I was a licentiate in the Great Qing dynasty, even the county magistrate called me “elder brother”. . . . You’ll have to kill me first . . . you pack of brigands. . . .’ His tears had given way to curses.
    Granddad had stayed behind that day, sending a cavalry detachment under the command of his trusted lieutenant to confiscate the coffin. Father tagged along. He had heard that this particular coffin had been made in the first year of theRepublic from four pieces of cypress, four and a half Chinese inches thick. It had been varnished yearly ever since, thirty coats already. The ancient owner rolled on the ground in front of the coffin, and it was impossible to tell if he was laughing or crying. Clearly he had lost his mind. The lieutenant tossed a bundle of Iron Society tiger-mount currency into his hands and said, ‘We pay for what we take, you old bastard!’ The old man ripped open the bundle and began tearing at the bills with his few remaining teeth as he cursed: ‘You bunch of bandits, not even the emperor stole people’s coffins. . . . You brigands . . .’ ‘You old bastard offspring of a stinking donkey!’ the cavalry-detachment commander shouted