Red Sorghum

mountain of stuff and, with a single kick, sent the old man sprawling onto the ground. He rose to his knees and begged, ‘Spare me, Eighth Route Master, spare me!’
    ‘I’m not with the Eighth Route Army,’ Granddad said, ‘or the Ninth Route. I’m Yu Zhan’ao the bandit!’
    ‘Spare me, Commander Yu, spare me! What good would it do to let all this stuff burn? I’m not the only “potato picker” from the village. Those thieves got all the good stuff. I’m too old and too slow, and all I could find was this junk.’
    Granddad picked up a wooden table and threw it at the old man’s bald head. He screamed and held his bleeding scalp as he rolled in the dirt. Granddad reached down and picked him up by his collar. Looking straight into those tortured eyes, he said, ‘Our hero, the “potato picker”, then raised his fist and drove it with a loud crack into the old man’s face, sending him crumpling to the ground, face up. Granddad walked up and kicked him in the face, hard.

3
    MOTHER AND MY three-year-old little uncle already had spent a day and a night hiding in the dry well. The morning before, she had gone to the working well with two earthenware jugs over her shoulder. No sooner had she bent over to see her face in the water than she heard the clang of a gong from the village wall and the shouts of the night watchman, Old Man Wu: ‘The Japs are here, they’ve surrounded the village!’ She was so frightened she dropped the jugs and carrying pole into the well, spun on her heel, and ran home. But before she got there she met her parents, my maternal grandfather and grandmother;he was armed with a musket, his wife was carrying her son and a cloth-wrapped parcel.
    Ever since the battle at the Black Water River, the villagers had been preparing for the calamity they expected to come any day. Only three or four families had gone into hiding; the others, though frightened, were reluctant to give up their broken-down homes, their wells – bitter and sweet – and their quilts, no matter how thin and tattered they might have been. During the week of the lull, Granddad had taken Father into the country town to buy bullets, driven by a desire to settle accounts with Pocky Leng. It never occurred to him that the Japanese bloodbath would inundate his own village.
    On the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Zhang Ruolu the Elder – he with one large eye and one small, he with the extraordinary bearing, he the intellectual who had studied in a private school, he who had played such a vital role in the burial of the martyred warriors – mobilised all able-bodied residents to reinforce the village wall and repair the gates, and appointed night watchmen to bang gongs and shout warnings at the first sighting of enemy troops. The villagers, male and female, young and old, took turns manning the wall. Mother told me that the voice of Ruolu the Elder was loud and crisp, almost metallic. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘a people united in spirit can move Mount Tai. Only if we’re united in spirit can we keep the Japs out of our village!’
    As he was speaking, a shot rang out from the farmland beyond the village, and an elderly watchman’s head exploded; he rocked back and forth, then tumbled off the wall, sending the villagers scurrying for cover. Ruolu the Elder, dressed in tight pants and shirt, stood in the middle of the road and shouted, ‘Fellow villagers, calm down! Mount the wall as we planned! Don’t be afraid to die. Those who fear death will find it, those who don’t will live on! Our lives are all that stand between the Japs and our village!’
    Mother watched the men run to the wall and throw themselves down on their bellies. My maternal grandmother, whose knees were knocking, was frozen to the spot. ‘Beauty’s dad,’ she shouted tearfully, ‘what about the children?’ My maternal grandfather ran back to her, rifle in hand, and lashedout, ‘What are you wailing about? Now that it’s come to this, it makes no difference whether we live or die!’ She didn’t dare utter a sound, but the tears kept flowing. He turned to look at the village wall, which hadn’t yet come under fire, grabbed Mother with one hand and her brother with the other, and ran with them to the vegetable garden behind the house, where there was an old abandoned well, its rickety windlass still in place. He looked down into the well and said, ‘Since there’s no water, we’ll hide the children here