merchants had arrived. In my youthful memories, they were a mysterious lot, and this sense of mystery was surely heightened by their late-night arrival in our village. I couldn't stop thinking that there had to be some profound significance to their timing but the grown-ups apparently never thought so. I recall how, on some moonlit nights, when the silence was broken by a chorus of dog barks, Mother would sit up, wrapped in the comforter, stick her face close to the window and gaze at the scene out on the street. That was before Father left us but already there were nights when he didn't come home. Without a sound, I'd sit up too and look past Mother out the window, watching the cattle merchants drive the animals ahead of them, slipping silently past our house, the newly bathed cattle glinting in the moonlight like giant pieces of glazed pottery. If not for the chorus of dog barks, I'd have thought I was observing a beautiful dreamscape. Even their barking couldn't take away all the mystery of that sight. Our village boasted several inns but the merchants never bedded down in any of them; instead, they led their cattle straight to the threshing floor and waited there till dawn, even if a wind was howling or it was raining, even if the air was bitter cold or steamy hot. There were stormy nights when innkeepers went out to drum up business, but the merchants and their cattle remained in the inhospitable elements like stone statues, unmoved, no matter how flowery the invitation. Was it because they didn't want to part with that little bit of money? No. People said that, after they sold their cattle, they went into town to get drunk and whore round, on a spending spree that stopped only when they had barely enough to buy a ticket for the slow train home. Their lifestyle could not have been more different from that of the peasants, with which we were so familiar. Their thinking too. As a youngster, on more than one occasion, I heard some of our more eminent villagers sigh: ‘Hai, what kind of people are they? What in the world is going on in those heads?’ That's right, what in the world could they be thinking? When they came to market they brought brown cows and black ones, males and females, fully grown cows and young calves; once they even brought a nursing heifer whose teats looked like water jugs. Father had trouble estimating a price for her since he didn't know if the udder was edible.
The cattle merchants scrambled to their feet when they saw my father. They'd be wearing mirrored sunglasses even early in the morning, an eerie sight, though they smiled as a show of respect. He'd take me down off his shoulders, get down on his haunches ten feet or so from the merchants, take out a crumpled pack from which he'd remove a crooked, damp cigarette. The cattle merchants would take out their packets, and ten or more cigarettes would land on the ground by Father's feet. He'd gather them up and lay them back down neatly. ‘Lao Luo, you old fuckhead,’ one of the merchants would say, ‘smoke ’em. You don't think we're trying to buy your favours with a few paltry cigarettes, do you?’ Father would just smile and light his cheap smoke as the village butchers started showing up, in twos and threes, looking like they were fresh from a bath, though I could smell the scent of blood on their bodies (which goes to prove that blood—whether from cows or pigs—never washes off). The cattle, smelling the blood on the butchers, would huddle together, their eyes flashing with fear. Excrement would spurt from the bungholes of the young cows; the older ones looked composed, though I knew they were pretending—I could see the tails draw up under their rumps to keep from emptying their bowels and the tremble in their legs, like the ripples on a pond from a passing breeze. Peasants care deeply for their cows; to kill one, especially one advanced in years, has long been considered a crime against nature. A leprous woman in our village often ran over to the head of the village and wailed at the graveyard in the late-night stillness. Only one phrase, over and over: ‘Who among our ancestors killed a cow and left his sons and grandsons to suffer for it?’ Cows cry. Before that old