The Garlic Ballads

A jailer led him down the long corridor while another walked behind him to the right, pressing a rifle muzzle up against his ribs. An identical gray metal door with an identical small opening fronted each cell, the only differences being the Arabic numbers above the doors and the faces looking out through the tiny openings. They were bloated, grotesquely enlarged, the faces of living ghosts. He shuddered. Every step was torture. Behind one of the windows a female convict giggled. “Jailer, here’s twenty cents, buy me some sanitary napkins, okay?” The jailer responded with an angry curse: “Slut!” But when Gao Yang turned to see what the woman looked like, he felt a nudge from the rifle. “Keep moving!”

Reaching the end of the corridor, they passed through a steel door and climbed a narrow, rickety staircase. The jailer’s leather shoes clacked loudly on the wooden steps, while the slaps of Gao Yang’s bare feet were barely audible. The warm, dry wood felt so much better on his feet than the damp, slippery concrete corridor floor. Up and up he climbed, with no end in sight; he was soon panting, and as the staircase wound steeply round, he began to get dizzy. If not for the jailer behind him, silently nudging him along with his rifle, he’d have lain down like a dying dog, spread out over as many steps as were required to support him. His injured ankle throbbed like a pulsating heart; the surrounding skin was so puffy his anklebone all but disappeared. It burned and ached. Old man in heaven, please don’t let it get infected, he uttered in silent prayer. Would that aristocratic woman be willing to lance it and release the pus? That thought reminded him of how she had smelled.

A large room with a wooden floor painted red. White plaster shows through the peeling green paint on the walls. Bright daylight shines down from the ceiling on four crackling electric prods. Desks line the northern wall. A male and two female jailers sit behind the desks. One of the women has a face like a persimmon fresh from the garden. He recognizes the words painted on the wall behind them.

A jailer orders him to sit on the floor, for which he is immensely grateful. He is then told to stretch his legs out in front and rest his manacled hands on his knees. He does as he’s told.

“Is your name Gao Yang?”

“Yes.”

“Age?”

“Forty-one.”

“Occupation?”

“Farmer.”

“Family background?”

“Urn … my, uh, parents were landlords….”

“Are you familiar with government policy?”

“Yes. Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse to do so. Not coming clean brings severe punishment.”

“Good. Now tell us about your criminal activities of May twenty-eighth.”

2.

Dark clouds filled the sky on May 28 as Gao Yang drove his donkey; it was scrawnier than ever, after exhausting itself day after day lugging eighty bundles of wilting garlic to town so Gao Yang could try his luck again. Nine days since Fourth Uncle had met his tragic end, but it seemed like an eternity. During that period Gao Yang had made four trips to town, selling fifty bundles of garlic for a total of a hundred twenty yuan, minus eighteen yuan for the various fees and taxes, which left him a profit of one hundred and two. The eighty bundles he was hauling now should have been sold two days earlier at a purchasing station set up north of the tracks by the South Counties Supply and Marketing Cooperative, which was buying garlic at fifty fen a pound. But just as Gao Yang reached the scales with his load, a gang of men in gray uniforms and wide-brimmed hats showed up, led by Wang Tai.

Gao Yang nodded obsequiously to Wang Tai, who, ignoring him, went up and began arguing with the co-op representatives, eventually knocking over their scales. “No one’s going to walk off with a single stalk of Paradise garlic until my

storehouse is filled,” Wang Tai insisted. The dejected representatives of the South Counties Supply and Marketing Cooperative climbed into their trucks and drove off.

So Gao Yang packed up his garlic. But before he left, he tried again to get the attention of Wang Tai as he walked off with his men.

Dark clouds filled the sky two days later, on May 28. It looked like rain. Gao Yang had just crossed the tracks when someone up ahead passed word down: “The supply and marketing co-op’s storehouses are full, so now we can sell our garlic anywhere we want.”

“But where? The locals have already squeezed out us farmers from outlying districts. They don’t care if we live or die.”

As the talk heated up, feelings of helplessness began to grip the farmers, but none turned his cart around and headed home. It was as if their only hope lay up ahead somewhere.

The line of wagons pressed forward, so Gao Yang fell in behind them, gradually realizing that instead of heading toward the cold-storage area, they were rolling down the renowned May First Boulevard on their way to May First Square, directly in front of the county government compound.