Zhuli had long stopped crying. She clutched her mother, completely silent. Swirl didn’t dare try to comfort her. When I get home, she told herself, I will warm a little water, wet a cloth and wipe her frozen tears away. It’s nothing. Nothing that a little warm water can’t clean away.
Now the men came, the four brothers and her Wen. They were surrounded and quickly trussed up. Swirl could hear Da Ge shouting. Her daughter was weakly calling out, “Ba!” Swirl cupped her body around Zhuli, thinking that the child must not see, nothing must happen. But hands came and pulled at Zhuli. Voices shouted at the child to open her eyes, she had to learn. Swirl stumbled to her feet and tried to get her daughter back, but they moved decisively and brutally. When she looked up from the ground, she saw that Zhuli had been lifted onto a man’s thin shoulders. The girl sat, unmoving, staring ahead of her.
The arrival of Wen the Dreamer and his uncles had brought renewed life to the freezing crowd. New accusations came to the fore. One spoke of the famine and how he’d sold his land to Da Ge for nothing. “Robbery!” someone shouted. “You used your good fortune to trample your neighbours into the mud. How else could you acquire over seventeen acres in so short a time?” The brother of Er Ge’s wife accused Er Ge of mistreating her, beating her and even depriving her of food. Er Ge denied it, he tried to put up a fight but others came to knock him down. It was chaos. The strangers had dispersed through the crowd asking people, “Who beat you? Who humiliated your fathers and raped your daughters? Was it them?”
“It was…It was…”
“Who made their fortunes during the war?”
“These landowners think they can spit out a square of land. They think you should get down on your knees and bless them!”
“We must free ourselves!” There was revenge in their voices but also grief and weeping.
“Comrades, have the courage to stand together once and for all!”
“A life for a life!”
“Who humiliated you? Tell us. This is not your shame! Why should you carry it?”
A woman had rushed into the circle. She pointed at a man in a dark blue gown. “This man raped me when I was six years old,” she said. “He covered my face with my mother’s clothes and he…” She was cradling her stomach and began to sob. “That was only the beginning. He saw that my father was dead and I had no one to stand up for me. This monster, this animal! Every pain I suffered gave him pleasure.” Someone pushed a shovel into her hands. At first her blows were weak, as if only grief, not rage, motivated her. But the chanting of the crowd drove her on and the shovel took on a new, determined rhythm. She continued to land the shovel even after it made no difference.
“Twenty years of war and for what? To be thrown back into the gutters of society again?”
“I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!”
“I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out.
“Fair?” The man laughed bitterly.
“Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!”
“If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.”
Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny.
“Aren’t these your countrymen?” a man said, turning on Wen. “Isn’t this your crime?”
“My crime,” Wen said.
The man slapped him. “Is this your crime?”
“I admit it. I accept,” he cried.
Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved. Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed. Torches were lit and others demanded yet more killing. She saw Wen dragged forward. Her husband begged for mercy. The gun moved away from him, came back, moved away, came back. Her daughter was crying, struggling to free herself from the stranger’s rigid arms. “Ba!” she screamed. “Ba!” Er Ge was shot in the chest and then in the face. Three more men were shot. One would not die and had to be beaten. Swirl felt herself losing consciousness. A deep silence seemed to come at her from every side.
“It’s over,” someone said. She lifted her face and searched the darkness. A woman was hovering over her. It was the wife of the deputy village head, a girl who sometimes came to sit with Swirl in the village school and share a few stories of the city, learn a few songs. “Go home,” the girl whispered. “Tomorrow your house will be taken over by the peasants’ association, but there are some empty shelters up on the hillside. They’ll bring you there. They won’t leave you without a roof over your head. They are better than the landlords of the past.”
The girl’s voice faded and her form merged into the shadows. Zhuli was pulling at Swirl’s arms now, the child was filthy. When she finally looked up, she saw Wen crouched over the bodies of his two uncles, trying unsuccessfully to lift Da Ge’s body into his twisted arms.
—
But all this would not be told to Big Mother Knife until much later. Swirl would not speak and neither would Wen. At the time, Big Mother did not fully comprehend that struggle sessions and denunciation meetings still continued. No one else had been executed. Instead Swirl saw that those who had lifted shovels, who had landed blows or pulled the triggers of the pistols, appeared ill at ease. When they met Wen on the village roads, they stared at him, afraid, as if it was Wen who had killed a man. And if he had not done it with his own two hands, then surely, without him, no violence would have been necessary. At this altitude, the fog was unrelenting. A person could hardly see his own shadow anymore.
On the fourth night of her stay, Big Mother lay awake. This entire mud hut, she thought, was smaller than the pantry in Wen the Dreamer’s former house. The straw roof, of poor quality, needed to be replaced, it sounded like an ancestor shivering in the wind. She closed her eyes and a fragment of the famous poem that she had recited at Swirl’s wedding came back to her:
The marriage of a girl, away from her parents
Is the launching of a little boat on a great river.
You were very young when your mother died
Which made me the more tender of you.
Your elder sister has looked out for you,
And now you are both crying and cannot part,
Yet it is right that you should go on….
The words came from an earlier version of this country, another dream. On the kang, Little Zhuli dug her heels into Big Mother’s back as if to say, “There isn’t enough heat to go around! Keep me warm, old lady, or go your own way.” How could such a puny creature take up so much space? Fed up, Big Mother climbed out of bed. The little devil grunted in satisfaction, expanding into the warmth she had left behind.
Big Mother found her shoes. She shook them out ferociously. When she was satisfied no prickly creatures had nested there, she slipped them on. Overtop a second sweater, she buttoned her padded coat, pulled down her woollen hat and went out.
The winter air was not so terrible as she had feared. Big Mother pointed her good eye right then left, taking stock of her position. The moon was muffled by clouds and so she trusted the compass inside her own head, walking downhill until the trees fell away and she was surrounded by snow-draped land. A fallen branch sat on the crisp whiteness. She picked it up.
“But why am I awake,” she asked herself, “and on whom will I use this weapon?”