Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

could scoop up fleas by the handfuls in their cells and that the bedbugs were as big as broad beans. You had lived a steady, conservative life, Dieh, so how could a rock one day fall from the sky and knock you straight into a death cell? Oh, Dieh . . .
    The knife goes in white and comes out red! No one is better at butchering dogs and slaughtering pigs than my husband, Zhao Xiaojia, whose fame has spread throughout Gaomi County. He is tall and he is big, nearly bald, and beardless. During the day he walks in a fog, and at night he lies in bed like a gnarled log. Since the day I married him, he has badgered me with his mother’s tale of a tiger’s whisker. One day some roguish creature goaded him into pestering me to obtain one of those curly golden tiger whiskers that, when held in the mouth, confer the ability to see a person’s true form. The moron, more like a rotting fish bladder than a man, badgered me all one night, until I had no choice but to give in. Well, the moron curled up on the kang and, as he snored and ground his teeth, began to talk in his sleep: “Dieh Dieh Dieh, see see see, scratch the eggs, flip the noodle . . .” He drove me crazy. When I nudged him with my foot, he curled up even tighter and rolled over, smacking his lips as if he’d just enjoyed a tasty treat. Then the talk started again, and the snoring and the grinding of teeth. To hell with him! Let the dullard sleep!
    I sat up, leaned against the cold wall, and looked out the window, to see watery moonlight spread across the ground. The eyes of the penned dogs glistened like green lanterns—one pair, another, a third . . . a whole stream of them. Lonely autumn insects set up a desolate racket. A night watchman clomped down the cobblestone street in oiled boots with wooden soles, clapper beats mixed with the clangs of a gong—it was already the third watch. The third, late-night, watch in a city where everyone slept, everyone but me and the pigs and the dogs and, I’m sure, my dieh.
    Kip kip kip , a rat was gnawing on the wooden chest. It scampered off when I threw a whiskbroom at it. Then I heard the faint sound of beans rolling across a table in my gongdieh’s room. I later discovered that the old wretch was counting human heads, one bean for each detached head. Even at night the old degenerate dreamed of heads he had chopped off, that old reprobate . . . I see him raise the devil’s-head sword and bring it down on the nape of my dieh’s neck; the head rolls down the street, chased by a pack of kids who kick it along until it rolls into our yard after hopping up the gate steps in an attempt to escape. It then circles the yard, chased by a hungry dog. Experience has told Dieh’s head that when the dog gets too close—which it does several times—the queue in back lashes it in its eye, producing yelps of pain as it runs in circles. Now free of the dog, the head starts rolling again and, like a large tadpole, swims along, its queue trailing on the surface, a tadpole’s tail . . .
    The clapper and gong sounding the fourth watch startled me out of my nightmare. I was damp with cold sweat, and many hearts—not just one—thudded against my chest. My gongdieh was still counting beans, and now I knew how the old wretch was able to intimidate people: his body emitted breaths of shuddering cold that could be felt at great distances. In only six months he had turned his room, with its southern exposure, into an icy tomb—so gloomy the cat dared not enter, not even to catch mice. I was reluctant to step inside, since it made me break out in gooseflesh. But Xiaojia went in whenever he could and, like a snotty three-year-old, stuck close to his storytelling dieh. He hated to leave that room, even to come to my bed during the hottest days of the year, in effect switching the roles of parent and spouse. In order to keep unsold meat from going bad, he actually hung it from the rafters in his dieh’s room. Did that make him smart? Or stupid? On those rare occasions when my gongdieh went out, even snarling dogs ran off as he passed, whining piteously from the safety of corners. Tall tales about the old man were rampant: people said that if he laid a hand on a cypress tree, it shuddered and began to shed its leaves. I was thinking about my dieh, Sun Bing. Dieh, you pulled off something grand this time, like An Lushan screwing the Imperial Concubine Yang Guifei, or Cheng Yaojin stealing gifts belonging to the Sui Emperor and suffering