Red Sorghum

village curled like foxtails, as occasional pops, like the crackling of dry wood, momentarily filled the air with a charred odour that merged with the stifling stench of blood.
    The wound on Granddad’s arm had turned worse, the scabs cracking and releasing a rotting, oozing mixture of dark blood and white pus. He told Father to squeeze the area around thewound. Fearfully, Father placed his icy fingers on the discoloured skin around the suppurating wound and squeezed, forcing out a string of air bubbles that released the putrid smell of pickled vegetables. Granddad picked up a piece of yellow spirit currency that had been weighted down by a clod of earth at the head of a nearby gravesite and told Father to smear some of the salty white powder from the sorghum stalks on it. Then he removed the head of a cartridge with his teeth and poured the greenish gunpowder onto the paper, mixed it with the white sorghum powder, and took a pinch with his fingers to daub on the open wound.
    ‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘shall I mix some soil into it?’
    Granddad thought for a moment. ‘Sure, why not?’
    Father bent down and picked up a clod of dark earth near the roots of a sorghum stalk, crumbled it in his fingers, and spread it on the paper. After Granddad mixed the three substances together and covered the wound with them, paper and all, Father wrapped a filthy strip of bandage cloth around it and tied it tight.
    ‘Does that make it feel better, Dad?’
    Granddad moved his arm back and forth. ‘Much better, Douguan. An elixir like this will work on any wound, no matter how serious.’
    ‘Dad, if we’d had something like that for Mother, she wouldn’t have died, would she?’
    ‘No, she wouldn’t have. . . .’ Granddad’s face clouded.
    ‘Dad, wouldn’t it’ve been great if you’d told me about this before? Mother was bleeding so much I kept packing earth on the wounds, but that only stopped it for a while. If I’d known to add some white sorghum powder and gunpowder, everything would have been fine. . . .’
    All the while Father was rambling, Granddad was loading his pistol. Japanese mortar fire raised puffs of hot yellow smoke all up and down the village wall.
    Since Father’s Browning pistol lay under the belly of the fallen horse, during the final battle of the afternoon he used a Japanese rifle nearly as tall as he was; Granddad used his German automatic, firing it so rapidly it spent its youth and was ready for the trash heap. Although battle fires still lit upthe sky above the village, an aura of peace and quiet had settled over the sorghum fields.
    Father followed Granddad, dragging his rifle behind him as they circled the site of the massacre. The blood-soaked earth had the consistency of liquid clay under the weight of their footsteps; bodies of the dead merged with the wreckage of sorghum stalks. Moonlight danced on pools of blood, and hideous scenes of dismemberment swept away the final moments of Father’s youth. Tortured moans emerged from the field of sorghum, and here and there among the bodies some movement appeared. Father was burning to ask Granddad to save those fellow villagers who were still alive, but when he saw the pale, expressionless look on his father’s bronze face, the words stuck in his throat.
    During the most critical moments, Father was always slightly more alert than Granddad, perhaps because he concentrated on surface phenomena; superficial thought seems ideally suited to guerrilla fighting. At that moment, Granddad looked benumbed; his thoughts were riveted on a single point, which might have been a twisted face, or a shattered rifle, or a single spent bullet. He was blind to all other sights, deaf to all other sounds. This problem – or characteristic – of his would grow more pronounced over the coming decade. He returned to China from the mountains of Hokkaido with an unfathomable depth in his eyes, gazing at things as though he could will them to combust spontaneously.
    Father never achieved this degree of philosophical depth. In 1957, after untold hardships, when he finally emerged from the burrow Mother had dug for him, his eyes had the same look as in his youth: lively, perplexed, capricious. He never did figure out the relationship between men and politics or society or war, even though he had been spun so violently on the wheel of battle. He was forever trying to squeeze the light of his nature through the chinks in his body armour.
    Granddad and Father