cooing of the pigeon outside comes through the window. I think it’s already pounced on its mate. But here I am, still unable to get a reprieve.
The dark cypress at the entrance to the village has been lashed by frost and the leaves have turned a deep red. Beneath it, a man with an ashen face is leaning on a hoe. You ask him the name of the village. His eyes look right at you but he doesn’t reply. You turn to her and say the fellow is a grave robber. She bursts out laughing. Once past him she says in your ear, he’s got mercury poisoning. You say he stayed in the crypt too long. There were two of them, the other one died from mercury poisoning but he survived.
You say his great-grandfather did this all his life and his greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather was also in the profession. With this profession if one’s ancestors have been in it, it’s hard to wash one’s hands of it. Unlike opium smoking which results in the ruin of families and the squandering of property, grave robbing can bring huge profits for no capital. If a person is hard-hearted and is good at it, if there’s a good haul, generations afterwards will become addicted. You feel wonderful talking to her like this. She’s holding your hand, docile and compliant.
You say that in the time of his great-grandfather’s greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather, the Qianlong Emperor made a tour of the area. Naturally enough, the local officials wanted to win favour and busied themselves choosing local beauties and collecting the treasures of former dynasties for the emperor. The father of his greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather had only two mu of poor ancestral land which he worked during the farming season. In the off-season he would boil up a few catties of sugar, add colouring, and make candy men which he’d take in the baskets of his carrying pole to hawk around the towns and villages in the area. He made a whistle the shape of a little boy’s penis and Pigsy carrying his wife on his back, but could he earn much from these? The great-grandfather’s greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather whose name was Li the Third liked to roam around all day — he wasn’t interested in learning to make candy men but he was interested in carrying a wife on his back. Whenever he saw women he’d go over to chat with them. The villagers all called him Skin Leak. One day a snake-medicine doctor arrived in the village. He had a cloth sack for snakes on his back and carried a bamboo tube, a crowbar and an iron hook as he set off to poke among the graves. It looked like fun so Li the Third went along with the doctor and helped to carry his tools. The doctor gave him a snake pill which looked like a black bean and told him to keep it in his mouth: it was very sweet but it was cooling and quenched the thirst. After going along with him for a couple of weeks it was clear that snake catching was a front and that the man actually dug up graves. It happened that the snake doctor was looking for an assistant and this was how Li the Third started getting rich.
When Li the Third came back to the village he was wearing a black satin skullcap with a jade button on the top. It was old cheap stuff he’d got from Pockmark Chen’s pawnshop in Wuyizhen (this was before the old street of the town was torched by the Long Hairs). He was proud and cocky, or as the villagers put it was starting to show his mettle, and soon afterwards people were coming around to raise the matter of marriage with his father. However, he married a young widow and people didn’t know whether it was the young widow who had seduced him or whether he’d got the young widow into his clutches. Anyway, sticking up a thumb he’d boast that he, Li the Third, had visited the Joy of Spring Hall with the red lanterns in Wuyizhen. After all he’d disposed of a shiny silver ingot. He said nothing about the ingot being black from soaking in the lime and sulphur of the grave and that he had to work hard scrubbing it clean with the side of his shoe.
The grave was on a rocky hill two li east of Roosting Phoenix Slope and was discovered by his mentor who noticed rain water running into a hole after a heavy bout of rain. As they poked around it became larger and after they had been digging from noon till almost dark, it was big enough for a person to go in, and of course it was he who had to go in first. He crawled and crawled and, fuck, fell right in, scaring him half out of his wits. In the mud and slush he came across quite a few pots and jars and, all in one go, smashed the whole lot. There was a bronze mirror he took from a wooden coffin which had rotted into a sloppy mess like soya-bean pulp. It was shiny and didn’t have a spot of green tarnish, just the thing for the women to use when they combed their hair. He said if he was telling even half of a lie his mother was a bitch. Unfortunately his mentor, that old bastard, took everything and only gave him a bag of silver. He’d had a raw deal but was wiser for it, now he too could work out the entrance to a grave.
You arrive at the Li Family Ancestral Temple in the village. An ancient stone tablet carved with cranes, deer, pines and plum blossoms is set into the newly built buttress above the front doors. You push open the unlatched doors and immediately hear an elderly voice ask what you are doing. You say you’ve come to look around. A short, well-fed old man emerges from a room in the corridor. It would seem being the caretaker of the ancestral temple is quite a good job.
The old man says the place isn’t open to outsiders and with these words starts pushing you out. You say your surname is Li and you’re a member of the clan. You’ve been abroad and are now back visiting your native village. He wrinkles his bushy white eyebrows and looks you over from head to toe. You ask if he knows that earlier on there was a grave robber in the village. The lines on his face deepen and you wince at his expression, most memories can’t help being painful. You can’t tell if he’s sifting through memories or trying to recognize you. In any case, it’s awkward looking at his contorted old face. He mumbles to himself for some time, not daring to rashly believe this clan member wearing sports shoes instead of hemp shoes. After a while he blurts: Isn’t he dead? It’s not clear who is dead but he probably means the father, not the sons and grandsons.
You tell him the descendants of the Li family abroad are all rich through a stroke of good luck. He gapes at this, moves aside, bows, and reverently leads you into the hall of the ancestral temple. He seems to be an old servant of the family. He used to wear black oil-cloth shoes and was keeper of the keys, he is referring to the time before the temple was converted into a primary school. It has now been restored to the family and the primary school has been shifted elsewhere.
He points at the horizontal tablet. It looks like an archaeological relic and the lacquer is peeling off, nevertheless the full implication of the calligraphy in regular script is quite clear: “Illustrious Ancestors of the Glorious Clan.” The iron hook under the tablet is for hanging the clan genealogy but that’s kept by the father of the village head and normally it isn’t brought out.
You say it’s mounted on yellow silk and looks like the central scroll for a main hall. He says, quite right, quite right. In the land reform period when it was burnt, a new one was secretly made and hidden upstairs. Later on when people’s things were confiscated, the floorboards were ripped up and it was found and burnt again. The present one was made by the father of the primary schoolteacher Mao Wa’er, according to what the three Li brothers managed to piece together. Mao Wa’er already has an eight-year-old daughter and she wants to have another child. Don’t people now have to carry out family planning? If there’s a second child it means not just a penalty but also that an identity card won’t be issued! You say, is that so? You also say you’d like to have a look at the family genealogy. He says it’s sure to have you there, it’s sure to have you there, everyone in the village with the surname Li has been put in. He adds that there are only three families with other surnames in the village. These are families where there have been marriages with women of the Li family, otherwise they wouldn’t want to stay on in the village. But people with other surnames remain people with other surnames, also women are not entered in the genealogy.
You say you know all this. The founder of the Tang Dynasty, Li Shirnin, had the surname Li before he became emperor. While the Li clan of the village doesn’t
