Buddhist rosary like a retired yuanwailang, or, better yet, I think, a laotaiye, with a houseful of sons and grandsons. But he was neither a laotaiye nor a yuanwailang—he was the preeminent executioner in the Board of Punishments, a magician with the knife, a peerless decapitator, a man capable of inflicting the cruelest punishments, including some of his own design, a true creative genius. During his four decades in the Board of Punishments, he had—to hear him say it—lopped off more heads than the yearly output of Gaomi County watermelons.
My thoughts kept me awake that night, as I tossed and turned on the brick kang, like flipping fried bread. My dieh, Sun Bing, had been arrested and locked up by County Magistrate Qian, that pitiless son of a bitch. Even if he were the worst person in the world, he would still be my dieh, and my mind was in such turmoil I could not sleep, forestalling any possibility of rest. I heard large mongrels grunting in their cages and fat pigs barking in their pens—pig noises had become dog sounds, and dog barks had turned into pig songs. Even in the short time they had left to live, they were tuning up for an opera. If a dog grunts, it is still a dog, and when a pig barks, it remains a pig. And a dieh is still a dieh, even if he does not act like one. Grunt grunt, arf arf. The noise drove me crazy. They knew they would be dead soon. So would my dieh. But animals are smarter than humans, for they detected the smell of blood that spread from our yard, and could see the ghosts of pigs and dogs that prowled in the moonlight. They knew that daybreak, soon after the red rays of sun appeared, would mark the hour that they went to meet Yama, the King of Hell. And so they set up a yowl—the plaintive call of impending death. And you, Dieh, what was it like in your death cell? Did you grunt? Bark? Or did you sing Maoqiang? I heard jailers say that condemned prisoners could scoop up fleas by the handfuls in their cells and that the bedbugs were as big as broad beans. You had lived a steady, conservative life, Dieh, so how could a rock one day fall from the sky and knock you straight into a death cell? Oh, Dieh . . .
The knife goes in white and comes out red! No one is better at butchering dogs and slaughtering pigs than my husband, Zhao Xiaojia, whose fame has spread throughout Gaomi County. He is tall and he is big, nearly bald, and beardless. During the day he walks in a fog, and at night he lies in bed like a gnarled log. Since the day I married him, he has badgered me with his mother’s tale of a tiger’s whisker. One day some roguish creature goaded him into pestering me to obtain one of those curly golden tiger whiskers that, when held in the mouth, confer the ability to see a person’s true form. The moron, more like a rotting fish bladder than a man, badgered me all one night, until I had no choice but to give in. Well, the moron curled up on the kang and, as he snored and ground his teeth, began to talk in his sleep: “Dieh Dieh Dieh, see see see, scratch the eggs, flip the noodle . . .” He drove me crazy. When I nudged him with my foot, he curled up even tighter and rolled over, smacking his lips as if he’d just enjoyed a tasty treat. Then the talk started again, and the snoring and the grinding of teeth. To hell with him! Let the dullard sleep!
I sat up, leaned against the cold wall, and looked out the window, to see watery moonlight spread across the ground. The eyes of the penned dogs glistened like green lanterns—one pair, another, a third . . . a whole stream of them. Lonely autumn insects set up a desolate racket. A night watchman clomped down the cobblestone street in oiled boots with wooden soles, clapper beats mixed with the clangs of a gong—it was already the third watch. The third, late-night, watch in a city where everyone slept, everyone but me and the pigs and the dogs and, I’m sure, my dieh.
Kip kip kip, a rat was gnawing on the wooden chest. It scampered off when I