The Garlic Ballads

back into a murky darkness. But it was enough for Gao Yang to see how tall and narrow the cell was: a small electric lightbulb shaped like a head of garlic hung from the ceiling—painted gray, naturally—like a single dim star in a vast sky. The high ceiling couldn’t be reached even by one tall man standing on the shoulders of another. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to make a ceiling so high? It just made it hard to change the bulb. A couple of feet north of the light fixture was a small skylight covered by sheets of tin. When the light went on, a dozen or so large flies began buzzing around the room, which unsettied him. He spotted another phalanx of flies stuck to the walls.
    The would-be murderer—he was indeed middle-aged, as it turned out—picked up an enamel bowl from his cot and wiped some crumbs of food from the inside with his bare hand, then held it by the edge with one hand and began drumming it with a pair of red chopsticks. The gaunt young inmate fished his bowl out from under his cot. But instead of drumming it, he flung it onto the cot, then stretched lazily and yawned, squeezing tears from his eyes and mucus from his nose.
    The other inmate stopped drumming his bowl long enough to kick his younger cellmate with a rough leather shoe that looked as if it weighed several pounds; dark skin and yellow hair poked through rips in his trousers. His kick—it must have been a hard one—caught the younger man on the shin, drawing a painful screech out of him. Jumping to his feet, he hopped over to his cot and fell on it to rub his sore leg. “What was that for, killer? Do you enjoy being mean?”
    The middle-aged man clenched his strong, discolored teeth and snarled, “Your old man must have died young, right?”
    “Your old man died young!”
    “Yeah, he did, the lousy bastard,” the man said, to Gao Yang’s puzzlement. How could he call his own father a bastard? “But I asked if
your
old man died young.”
    “My old man’s alive and well,” the young inmate said.
    “Then he’s a bad father, and an old bastard to boot. Didn’t he teach you it’s impolite to stretch and yawn in front of others?”
    “What’s impolite about it?”
    “It brings bad luck,” the middle-aged man said somberly. He spat on the floor, stomped three times on the gooey mess with his left foot, then three more with the right one.
    “You’ve got a problem,” his young cellmate said as he rubbed his leg. “You should be shot, you killer,” he added under his breath.
    “Not me.” The middle-aged man laughed strangely. “The ones who are going to be shot are on death row.”
    After pushing the two enamel bowls into the corridor through the hole in the door, the old man licked his lips, like a lizard eating grease balls. Gao Yang was frightened by his rotten, misshapen teeth and weepy, festering eyes.
    The stillness in the corridor was broken by the banging of a ladle against a metal pail. The sound was still quite a ways away. The stooped old man shuffled up and gripped the bars to look out, but he was too short, so he moved away from the door and began scratching his head and twitching his cheeks like a jittery monkey. Then he flopped down on his belly to peek through the hole in the bottom of the door. Most likely, the basins were all he could see, so he stood up, still licking his lips. Gao Yang turned away in disgust.
    The banging sound drew closer, and the old man blinked faster. The other inmates picked up their bowls and walked to the door. Not knowing what to do, Gao Yang sat puzzled on his gray cot and stared at a centipede on the opposite wall.
    The sound of the pail outside the door was joined by the voice of the guard who had screamed at them moments earlier: “Cook Han, a new man was put in here today—Number Nine.”
    Cook Han, or whoever it was, pounded on the door. “Listen up, Number Nine. One steamed bun and a ladleful of soup per prisoner.”
    The ladle banged against the pail, after which a basin slid through the hole in the door, followed by another. The first was filled with four steamed buns—gray, with a porcelain sheen—the second half-filled with soup, dark red, with globules of fat floating on the top, along with a few yellowed shreds of garlic.
    The whiff of mildewed garlic thudded into Gao Yang’s awareness, causing immediate anxiety and nausea. His stomach gurgled like a restive pool; it seemed still inhabited by the three bottles of cold water he’d swilled down at