Red Sorghum

The little bastard’s got more fight in him than a wolf cub!’
    Little Foot Jiang, who had regained consciousness, struggled to his feet.
    ‘Commander Jiang,’ Detachment Leader Leng said, ‘what do
you
think I should do with you?’
    ‘Killing me will only bring you trouble, Detachment Leader Leng,’ Commander Jiang said with bold assurance, but with his face bathed in cold sweat. ‘The day will come when thepeople liquidate you for your monstrous crime of slaughtering noble fighters of the anti-Japanese resistance!’
    ‘You can pass the time here until I’ve had something to eat. I’ll deal with you then.’
    The Leng soldiers sat around eating horsemeat and drinking sorghum wine.
    Suddenly the sentry on the northern wall of the village fired a shot and ran into the village. ‘The Japs are coming – the Japs are coming!’
    Detachment Leader Leng grabbed the sentry’s sleeve and asked angrily, ‘How many Japs? Are they real Japs or lackeys?’
    ‘I think they’re lackeys. Their uniforms are yellow. A whole line of yellow, running towards the village at a crouch.’
    ‘Lackeys? Kill the sons of bitches. Company Commander Qi, take your men up to the wall, and hurry!’ he ordered.
    Then he turned to two guards with machine guns. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he commanded. ‘Pop ’em if they act up!’ Surrounded by his bodyguards, he ran at a crouch towards the northern edge of the village.
    Less than a quarter of an hour later, fighting broke out. The opening salvos of rifle fire were followed by machine-gun fire, and before long the air was filled with the shrieks of incoming projectiles that exploded in the village, sending shrapnel slamming into the village wall and the trunks of trees. Amid the din of shouting came the
jiligulu
of a foreign tongue.
    It was real Japs after all, not lackeys. Detachment Leader Leng and his troops put up a stubborn defence, but abandoned their positions after half an hour of fighting and fell back to the cover of toppled walls.
    Japanese artillery shells were already falling into the inlet. The anxious Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers stomped their feet and ducked their heads. ‘Untie us!’ they bellowed angrily. ‘Fuck your living mothers! Untie us! If you came out of Chinese pricks, untie us. If you came out of Japanese pricks, then kill us!’
    The guards ran to the stack of rifles and picked up two swords, with which they cut their prisoners’ ropes.
    Eighty soldiers ran like madmen to the stack of rifles and the pile of hand grenades; then, ignoring the numbness of theirarms and the hunger in their bellies, they charged the Japanese, yelling wildly as they ran straight into a hail of lead.
    Several dozen columns of smoke rose from the village wall following the explosions of the first salvo of hand grenades thrown by the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers.

FIVE
Strange Death

1
    FULL PURPLE LIPS, like ripe grapes, gave Second Grandma – Passion – her extraordinary appeal. The sands of time had long since interred her origins and background. Her rich, youthful, resilient flesh, her plump bean-pod face, and her deep-blue, seemingly deathless eyes were buried in the wet yellow earth, extinguishing for all time her angry, defiant gaze, which challenged the world of filth, adored the world of beauty, and brimmed over with an intense consciousness. Second Grandma had been buried in the black earth of her hometown. Her body was enclosed in a coffin of thin willow covered with an uneven coat of reddish-brown varnish that failed to camouflage its wormy, beetle-holed surface. The sight of her blackened, blood-shiny corpse being swallowed up by golden earth is etched forever on the screen of my mind.
    In the warm red rays of the sun, I saw a mound in the shape of a human figure rising atop the heavy, deeply remorseful sandbar. Second Grandma’s shapely figure; Second Grandma’s high-arching breasts; tiny grains of shifting sand on Second Grandma’s furrowed brow; Second Grandma’s sensual lips protruding through the golden-yellow sand . . . I knew it was an illusion, that Second Grandma was buried beneath the black earth of her hometown, and that only red sorghum grew around her gravesite.
    Standing at the head of her grave – as long as it isn’t during the winter, when the plants are dead and frozen, or on a springday, when cool southerly breezes blow – you can’t even see the horizon for the nightmarishly dense screen of Northeast Gaomi sorghum.