The Garlic Ballads

was a genre painting: yellow jute stalks, red jute stalks, green jute stalks … golden sunbeams on jute leaves … brighdy colored parakeets … a distraught Gao Zhileng, lips puckered in a whisde. The birds’ necks were drawn in as they made mournful cries that brought tears to their owner’s eyes.
    “I sent six men to the graveyard east of the village to dig a hole. It’s time to start out,” Mr. Yu announced.
    So the two new rush mats were laid out in the yard and covered with the sheet of pale blue plastic. Then four women carried out Jinju, in her new red satin clothes, and laid her on the plastic.
Click! Pop!
The reporter’s camera kept snapping pictures, while the powdered young woman ostentatiously filled a notebook with whatever she was writing. The yellow skin of her neck clashed with her white face powder, and again Gao Ma had to force back the urge to lop her head off where the two colors met.
    “Elder Brother, come see if there’s anything else we need to do,” Mrs. Yu said to Gao Ma.
    He took a last, close look at Jinju. Jute stalks and leaves rusded in the wind, and the eerie fragrance of indigo saturated his heart; the sunlight was bright and beautiful, the outline of the pale daytime moon sharp and clean. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely as he gazed down into Jinju’s smiling face. Jinju, Jinju, your scent fills my nostrils.
    Dimly he watched them roll her body up in the pale blue plastic and wrap it with the golden rush mats, which a couple of men then se cured with new cords made of jute, using their feet on the mats as leverage to lash them as tightly as possible. He heard bits of rush fiber snap as the cords tightened and watched the men’s feet step on Jinju’s bulging belly.
    Flinging his saber to the ground, he fell to his knees and coughed up a mouthful of blood, some of it dribbling down his chest. The parakeets rose from the jute plants and flew as fast as their wings would take them, then swooped earthward like swallows skimming the surface of water, their bellies nearly scraping the tips of the jute plants. The reporter couldn’t take pictures fast enough. The birds flew like shuttles on a loom, weaving a kaleiodoscopic design over Gao Ma’s and Jinju’s faces.
    He raised his arms high in front of him. The stammering policeman removed the broken handcuffs and replaced them with a new pair that gleamed bright yellow—both wrists this time.
    “Y-you think you can r-run away again? You might make it past the f-first of the month, but n-never past the fifteenth!”

C HAPTER 14

    Anyone not afraid of being hacked to pieces
Can unseat a party secretary or county administrator.
Inciting a mob may be against the law,
But what about hiding behind closed doors, shunning duties, and letting subordinates exploit peasants?
—from a ballad sung by Zhang Kou following mass interrogations at the police station

1.

    Gao Yang drove his donkey cart, loaded with garlic, down the county road under a starlit sky. The load was so heavy, the cart so rickety, that creaks accompanied him the whole trip, and each time the cart hit a pothole, he was fearful it might shake apart. As he crossed the little stone bridge over the Sandy River, he tightened the donkey’s bridle and used his body weight to steady the cart for the sake of the spindly animal, which looked more like an oversized billy goat than a donkey. Uneven stones made the wheels creak and groan. The trickle of water beneath them reflected cold stars. Negotiating the rise, he slipped a rope over his shoulder to help the donkey pull. The paved road leading to the county town began at the top of the rise; level and smooth, and unaffected by the elements, it had been built after the Third Plenum of the Central Committee. He thought back to his complaints at the time: “Why spend all that money? How many trips to town will any of us take in a lifetime?” But now he realized his error. Peasants always take the short view, never seeing beyond petty personal gains. The government is wise; you will never go wrong by heeding its advice, was what he told people these days.
    As he set out on the new road, he heard the rumbling of another cart twenty or thirty yards ahead, and an old man’s coughs. It was very late and very quiet. The strains of a song reverberated above the surrounding fields, and Gao Yang could tell it was Fourth Uncle Fang. In his youth, Fourth Uncle had been a dashing young man who sang duets with a woman from