over the door, the constables calmly knocked at the door.
No response from inside.
They attacked the door.
From his vantage point, he had a vague suspicion that the constables had no intention of arresting him. They would not have dawdled like that if they had, and they would have knocked more aggressively. No, they would have scaled the wall to get inside if they’d had to, something many of them were good at. Agreeable feelings toward the constables washed over him. He did not have to be told that Magistrate Qian was in the background, and behind him, his own daughter, Meiniang.
The door eventually gave way to the assault on it, and the torch-bearing constables swaggered into the shop. Almost immediately, he heard his wife’s feigned wails of insanity and crazed laughter, accompanied by the bawling of his terrified children.
The constables put up with the racket as long as they could before reemerging with their torches, some jabbering something he couldn’t hear, others yawning. After a brief discussion in front of the shop and some shouted commands, they mounted up and rode off. As soon as the hoofbeats and torchlight disappeared, peace and quiet returned to the town. He was about to come out of hiding when lights flared up in town, all at once, as if on command. Everything stopped for a moment, and then dozens of lanterns appeared on the street, forming a luminous, fast-moving line that snaked its way toward him. Hot tears slipped out of his eyes.
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7
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Relying on the guidance of an experienced old man, he hid during the daylight hours over the days that followed and slipped back into town at night, when the streets were quiet and deserted. He spent his days in the woods on the opposite bank of the Masang River, where there were a dozen or so cottages the villagers used to cure tobacco. That was where he slept during the days, crossing the river to return home late at night. He headed back to his cottages first thing the next morning with a bundle of flatbreads and a gourd filled with water.
Many of the willow trees near the cottages were home to nesting magpies. He would lie on the kang, eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating. At first he could not screw up the courage to step outside, but gradually he grew less guarded and slipped out to look up at the squawking magpies in their nests. He and a tall, well-built young shepherd struck up a friendship. He shared his flat-breads with Mudu, the simple, honest young man, and even told him who he was—Sun Bing, the man who had killed the railroad engineer.
On the seventh day of the second lunar month, five days after killing the German, he finished off several of the flatbreads and a bowlful of water in the afternoon and was lying on the kang listening to the magpies and to the tattoos of a woodpecker attacking a tree. As he slipped into that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, the sharp crack of gunfire snapped him out of his stupor. He had never before heard the sound of a breech-loading rifle, which was nothing like that of a local hunting rifle. He knew immediately that this was bad. Jumping off the kang and picking up his club, he flattened himself against the wall behind the door to await the arrival of his enemies. More gunfire. It came from the opposite bank. Unable to sit still in the cottage, he slipped out the door, bent at the waist, and scrambled over a series of crumbling walls to move in among the willow trees. A cacophony of shrill sounds erupted in town: his wife was crying, his children were bawling, horses whinnied, mules brayed, and dogs barked, all at the same time. But he could not see a thing. Then an idea struck him. Slipping his club into his belt, he began climbing the tallest tree he saw. When the magpies spotted the invader, they launched an attack, but he drove them off with his club, once, twice, over and over, until they retreated. He stood on a limb next to a large nest and, holding on to keep from falling, looked down at the far side of the river. Now he could see what was happening, all of it.
At least fifty foreign horses were arrayed in front of his teashop, all ridden by foreign soldiers in bright, fancy uniforms with round, feathered caps, and firing bayonet-fitted blue-steel