The Garlic Ballads

Gao Ma led her in search of seats. Three rows of benches painted an unknowable color, running the length of the room, were filled with sleeping people and a few seated passengers squeezed in among them. Gao Ma and Jinju spotted an empty place on a bench next to a bulletin board for newspapers, but upon closer inspection they saw that it was all wet, as if a child had peed on it. She balked, but he just brushed the water off with his hand. “Sit down,” he said. “ ‘Conveniences at home, trouble on the road.’ You’ll feel better once you get off your feet.”

Gao Ma sat down first, followed by a scowling Jinju with her swollen, puffy legs. Sure enough, she soon felt much better. For now she could lean back and present a smaller target for prying eyes. When Gao Ma told her to get some sleep, since their bus wasn’t due to leave for an hour and a half, she shut her eyes, even though she wasn’t sleepy. Transported back to the field, she found herself surrounded by jute stalks on the sides and the sharp outlines of leaves and the cold gleam of the sky above. Sleep was out of the question.

Three of the four glass panes over the gray-green bulletin board were broken, and a couple of sheets of yellowed newspaper hung from shards of broken glass. A middle-aged man walked up and tore off a corner of one of them, all the while looking around furtively. A moment later, the pungent odor of burning tobacco drifted over, and Jinju realized that the newspaper was serving as the man’s roll-your-own paper. Why didn’t I think to use it to dry the bench before we sat down? she wondered, as she looked down at her shoes. The caked-on mud was dried and splitting, so she scraped it off with her finger.

Gao Ma leaned over and asked softly, “Hungry?”

She shook her head.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.

“Why? We’ll have plenty of opportunities to spend our money from here on out.”

“People are iron,” he said, “and food is steel. I need to keep up my strength to find work. Save my seat.”

After he laid his bundle beside her on the bench, Jinju had the sinking feeling that he was not coming back. She knew she was just being foolish — he wouldn’t leave her there, he wasn’t that kind of man. The image of him in the field with headphones over his ears — the first real impression he had made on her — flooded her mind. It seemed at turns to be happening right now and ages ago. She opened the bundle and took out the cassette player to listen to some music. But, afraid people might laugh at her, she shoved it back in and retied the bundle.

A woman looking like a wax figurine sat on a deck chair across from Jinju: her jet-black shoulder-length hair framed an ivory complexion and matched her thin, crescent-shaped eyebrows. She had astonishingly long lashes and lips like ripe cherries, dark red and luminous. She was wearing a skirt the color of the red flag, and her breasts jutted out so pertly they made Jinju feel bashful; reminded of talk that city girls wore padded bras, she thought about her own sagging breasts. I always knew they’d grow big and ugly, and that’s exactly what happened, she thought. But city girls wait in vain for theirs to grow big and sexy. Life is full of mysteries. Her girlfriends had warned her not to let men touch her breasts, or they’d rise like leavened bread in a matter of days. They were right: that’s just what had happened.

A man — also outlandish looking, of course — had lain his permed head in the lap of the woman in red, who was running her pale, tapered fingers through his hair, combing out the springy curls. She looked up and caught Jinju staring at her, so embarrassing Jinju that she lowered her head and looked away, like a thief caught in the act.

At some point during all this, the room brightened and the loudspeakers blared an announcement for Taizhen passengers to line up at Gate 10 to have their tickets punched. The heavily accented female voice on the PA system was so jarring it set Jinju’s teeth on edge. Bench sleepers began to stir, and in no time a stream of passengers — bundles and baskets in hand, wives and children in tow — descended on Gate 10 like a swarm of bees. They formed a colorful mob, short and stubby.

The couple opposite her acted as if there were no one else around.

A pair of attendants walked up to the rows of benches and began nudging sleepers’ buttocks and thighs with broom handles. “Get up,” they insisted. “All of you get up.” Most of the targets of these nudges sat up, rubbed their eyes, and fished out cigarettes; but some merely started the process, then lay back to continue their interrupted nap as soon as the attendants had moved on.

For some reason, though, the attendants were reluctant to disturb the curly-haired man. The woman in red, still running her fingers through his hair, looked up at the bedraggled attendants and asked in a loud, assured voice, “What time does the Pingdao bus leave, miss?”