The Four Books by Carlos Rojas Read Free Book Online

put their clothes back on and go with him. He scared them so badly they both turned pale, whereupon he led them to the Child.
    In this way, he achieved merit in the eyes of the Child.
    A few days before the Spring Festival, he was permitted to return home to spend the Lunar New Year with his wife.
    Everyone searched the bushes and ravines, or the fields around the other brigades, looking for adulterers. They were gone for a long time, until the sun was high in the sky. Eventually they returned, and when they saw one another no one asked what the others had discovered. Instead, they laughed with embarrassment and disappointment.
    One professor, for the sake of saying something, asked, “Did you take a shit?”
    Another laughed and replied, “I had a little diarrhea.”
    Yet another remarked, “I drank too much water today, and keep having to take a leak.”
    Then they began silently pulling the plow again without getting distracted and looking around in all directions.
    Things continued like this for another six days, but in the end no one managed to catch any adulterers. However, the two hundred mu of land we had been allotted and assigned was plowed faster than the others. When we were almost done, everyone was so exhausted they seemed ready to collapse, and they all returned to the compound and fell into bed. I felt the same way. My plow had vibrated so violently that my arms were numb like two sticks, and when I pinched them it was as though I were pinching the leg of a pig or a dog. It was at this moment, as I was sleeping like the dead, that the Technician shook me awake and whispered urgently in my ear, “Quick, get up. I discovered that there are five women in the fourth brigade who didn’t return from the fields.”
    I stared in surprise, then sat bolt upright in bed. Relying on the moonlight streaming in through the window, I put on my shoes and followed the Technician out of the building. We stood in the shadow of a tree out front, and I listened as he told me how every day at dinnertime, when everyone in Re-Ed was returning to the canteen from the fields, he would carefully note who was eating together and who seemed unusually affectionate with each other. He said he observed at least ten couples. He even noticed some men who gave women food to eat, and women who would place in the man’s bowl the buns they couldn’t finish, or couldn’t bring themselves to finish. He said that in order to prove that these ten couples had become unusually affectionate with one another, after dinner he went to hide behind a wall in front of the women’s dormitory, and he watched for which women either failed to return to their room, or returned but then immediately left again.
    “Five in all,” the Technician told me softly. “It is now the middle of the night, and while there are twenty-seven women in the ninety-ninth, only twenty-two have returned to their room.”
    The night was already as dark as the bottom of a well, but the moon was shining brightly overhead, as though frozen in the sky. A dull rumble of exhausted snores could be heard coming from the dormitory—the sound resembling a mixture of mud and clay, like a dirt road after a heavy rain. In the darkness, I stared at the Technician’s face, as though examining an incomplete sketch.
    “Why don’t you catch them?”
    “If I were to catch them alone in the middle of the night, won’t they simply claim that I had entrapped them? But if you were to go with me, you could be my witness.”
    I reflected for a moment. “But then if we catch someone, who will get credit for reporting them?”
    “I’ve already thought of that,” he said. “If we catch one couple, we will share credit, if we catch two couples each of us will take credit for one, and if we catch three then we’ll split the credit sixty/forty, with you getting forty percent while I get sixty—since, after all, I’m the one who has invested the most time and effort into this.”
    That seemed