Red Sorghum

body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment. I’m not afraid of your eighteen levels of hell. I did what I had to do, I managed as I thought proper. I fear nothing. But I don’t want to die, I want to live. I want to see more of this world. . . .
    Grandma’s sincerity moves the heavens. Fresh drops of a crystalline moisture ooze from her dry eyes, which emit a strange light. Once again she sees Father’s golden face and two eyes that are so like Granddad’s. Her lips quiver, she calls Douguan’s name. ‘Mom,’ Father shouts excitedly, ‘you’re going to be okay! You’re not going to die. I’ve stopped the bleeding, it’s stopped! I’ll go get Dad, I’ll tell him to come. Mom, you can’t die, you have to wait for Dad!’
    Father runs off, his retreating steps turning into a gentlemonologue, then into the music from heaven that Grandma had heard a moment earlier. It is the music of the universe, and it emanates from the red sorghum. She gazes at the sorghum, and through the dimness of her vision the stalks turn crafty and surpassingly beautiful, grotesque, and bizarre. They begin to moan, to writhe, to shout, to entwine her; they are demonic one minute, intimate the next, and in her eyes they coil like snakes. But then they suddenly stretch out like spikes, and it is beyond her power to describe their brilliance. They are red and green, they are black and white, they are blue and green; they are laughing heartily, they are crying pitifully. Their tears are raindrops beating against the desolate sandbar of her heart.
    The blue sky shines through the spaces between the sorghum stalks. It is so high, yet so low. Grandma feels as though heaven and earth, man, and the sorghum are intertwined, huddled beneath a gigantic canopy. White clouds dragging earthly shadows behind them brush leisurely against her face. A flock of white doves swoops down and perches on the stalks’ tips, where their cooing wakes Grandma, who quickly distinguishes their shapes. The doves’ red eyes, the size of sorghum seeds, are fixed on her. She smiles with genuine affection, and they return her smile. My darlings! she cries silently. I don’t want to leave you! The doves peck at the sorghum grains, their chests slowly expanding, their feathers fanning out like petals in the wind and rain.
    A large flock of doves had once nested in the eaves of our home. In the fall, Grandma placed a large basin of clear water in the yard, and when the doves returned from the fields they perched neatly on the rim of the basin to spit the sorghum seeds from their crops into water in which their reflections shimmered. Then they swaggered around the yard. Doves! Driven from their nests by the storms of war, they grieve over Grandma’s imminent death.
    Grandma’s eyes glaze over once again, as the doves take flight, soaring through the vast blue sky, filling it with the rhythmic flapping of their wings. She floats upward to join them, spreading her newly sprouted wings to glide weightlessly in the air above the black soil and sorghum stalks. She gazes longingly at the ruins of her village, at the meanderingriver, at the crisscrossing roads and paths, at the bullet holes in the sky, and at the doomed creatures beneath her. For the last time she smells the aroma of sorghum wine and the pungent odour of hot blood. A scene she never witnessed suddenly takes shape in her mind: caught in a hail of gunfire, hundreds of her fellow villagers, their clothes in rags, lie in the sorghum field, arms and legs writhing in a macabre dance. . . .
    The final thread linking her to mankind is about to part; all her melancholy and suffering, her anxieties and dejection settle onto the field below, striking the sorghum like hailstones and continuing down to the black soil to take root and give birth to bitter fruit for generations to come.
    Grandma has completed her liberation. She flies off with the doves. Her shrinking thoughts, which might fit into a human fist, embrace only joy, contentment, warmth, comfort, and harmony. She is at peace. With genuine devotion she exclaims:
    ‘Heaven! My heaven . . .’

9
    WHILE THE MACHINE guns continued to strafe the area, the trucks’ wheels began to creep up onto the stone bridge. Flying bullets kept Granddad and his troops pinned down. A few men stuck their heads above the dike, only to pay for their recklessness with their lives. Granddad’s chest swelled with rage. All