The Garlic Ballads

straight to the crematorium.”
    “Secretary Huang, I beg you, please dont…” He was back on his knees, crying and pleading. “My mother suffered her whole life. Death was a release for her. Now that she’s in the ground, let her lie there in peace—”
    Secretary Huang cut him off. “Gao Yang, you d better straighten out your thinking! Your mother enjoyed a life of leisure and luxury by exploiting others. It was only proper that she be reeducated and reformed through labor after Liberation. Now that she’s dead, cremation is just as proper. That’s what will happen to me when I die.”
    “But Secretary Huang, she told me that before Liberation she wouldn’t even allow herself a single meal of stuffed dumplings, and that she’d get up before dawn, whether she’d had enough sleep or not, to earn money to buy land.”
    “Are you asking to have the party’s verdict overturned?” an enraged Secretary Huang demanded. “Are you saying that land reform was a mistake?”
    A rifle butt thudded into the back of Gao Yang’s head. Golden flowers danced before his eyes as he fell forward, his face banging the brick floor.
    A militiaman jerked him to his feet by his hair so the police chief could smack him across both cheeks with a shiny wooden switch.
Crack! Crack!
—loud and crisp.
    “Lock him up in the west wing,” the police chief said. “Dai Zijin, call an immediate meeting of the branch-committee members here in the office—use the PA system.”
    Gao Yang was locked in an empty room in the west wing of the brigade headquarters, under the watchful eye of two armed militiamen sitting on a bench across from him. Thunder rolled outside, and the skies sent buckets of rain thudding into the leaves of parasol trees in the compound and onto the red-tiled roof in a deafening cadence.
    The loudspeakers crackled for a moment, then sent forth the voice of Dai Zijin. Gao Yang knew the names released into the air.
    “Gao Yang,” one of the militiamen said, “you re in big trouble this time.”
    “Little Uncle,” replied Gao Yang, “I didn’t bury my mother on brigade land.”
    “What you did with her body isn’t what this is all about.”
    “What
is
it all about?” he asked fearfully.
    “Aren t you trying to get the verdict on her reversed?”
    “I only told the truth. Everybody knows that. My father was a famous skinflint who only cared about saving up money to buy land. He’d beat my mother if she bought an extra turnip.”
    “You’re wasting your time telling me,” the militiaman said indifferently.
    That evening, in spite of the heavy rainfall, a meeting of all brigade members was held, and although Gao Yang eventually forgot most of the particulars, he would always remember the sound of the rain and the shouted slogans, which continued without letup from early evening to late at night.
    The following morning a squad of militiamen tied Gao Yang to a bench and placed four bricks strung together with hemp around his neck; it felt like a piece of garroting wire that would lop off his head if he so much as moved. Then in the afternoon the police chief tied his thumbs together with a piece of wire and strung him up from a steel overhead beam. He didn’t feel much pain, but the moment his feet left the ground, sweat seemed to squirt from every pore in his body.
    “Now tell us, where’s the landlord’s wife buried?”
    He shook his head, which swelled with images of a weed-covered plot of land and a swollen stream. The clumps of grass he had dug up and replanted had been soaking up rain all this time, until they must look as if they had never been moved. His footprints, too, would have been washed away by the rain; so long as he kept his mouth shut, Mother could rest in peace. He vowed never to reveal his secret, not if it cost him his life.
    Not that his determination remained rock-solid the whole time: he screamed in agony when the police chief rammed a thorny branch several inches up his ass: “Uncle, spare me, please … I’ll take you there “
    The bloody branch was removed and he was lowered from the steel beam. “Where’s she buried?”
    He looked into the police chief’s dark face, then peeked down at his own body, and finally gazed out the window at the misty sky. “Mother,” he said, “wait for me, I’ll be there soon….” Lowering his head, he made a mad dash for the wall, but was restrained by two militiamen.
    Indignation filled his heart. “Brothers,” he shouted