The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan Read Free Book Online Page B

right foot? What about his right arm when he strides with his left foot? How does his breath smell? What’s his blood pressure? His heart rate? Do his teeth show when he smiles? Does his nose crinkle when he weeps? So much cries out to be described, and there are so few words in my lexicon. I can only raise my glass. Out in the yard, snow-laden dead branches cracked and splintered; ice on a distant pond was three inches thick; dried-out ice covered clumps of reeds; geese, wild and domestic, roosting for the night were startled out of their dreams and honked crisply, the sound carrying through the clean, chilled air all the way to the eastern room of the home of Diamond Jin’s seventh uncle. He says he went to his seventh uncle’s house every evening, and stayed till late at night. The walls were jet-black; a kerosene lamp stood atop an old three-drawer table against the east wall. Seventh Aunt and Seventh Uncle sat on the brick bed platform; the little stove repairman, Big Man Liu, Fang Nine, and storekeeper Zhang all sat on the edge of the platform killing time through the long night, just like me. Every night they came; not even stormy weather could keep them away. They reported on what they’d done that day and passed on news they’d picked up in villages and hamlets in rich, vivid detail, full of wit and humor, painting a vast canvas of village life and customs. A life rich with literary appeal The cold was like a wildcat that crept in through cracks and gnawed at my feet. He was just a child who couldn’t afford a pair of socks, and had to curl his blackened, chapped feet in woven-rush sandals, icy drops of sweat coating his soles and the spaces between his toes. The kerosene lamp seemed to blaze in the dark room, making the white paper over the window sparkle, the freezing air streaming in through its rips and tears; sooty smoke from the kerosene flame wisped toward the ceiling in neat coils. Seventh Aunt and Seventh Uncle’s two children were asleep in a corner of the brick bed; the girl’s breathing was even, the boy’s was labored, high one moment, low the next, mingled with nightmare babble that sounded like a dream brawl with a gang of ruffians. Seventh Aunt, a bright-eyed, educated woman with a nervous stomach was hiccuping audibly. Seventh Uncle gave every appearance of being a muddle-headed man whose nondescript face had no distinctive curves or angles, like a slab of gooey rice-cake. His clouded eyes were forever fixed dully on the lighted lamp. Actually, Seventh Uncle was a shrewd man who had schemed and plotted to trick the educated Seventh Aunt, ten years his junior, into marrying him; it was a convoluted campaign that would take far too long to recount here. Seventh Uncle was an amateur veterinarian who could puncture a vein in a sow’s ear and inject penicillin intravenously, and who also knew how to castrate hogs, dogs, and donkeys. Like all men in the village, he liked to drink, but now the bottles were empty; all the fermentable grains had been used up, and food had become their biggest concern. He said, We suffered through the long winter nights with growling stomachs, and at the time no one dreamed that I’d ever make it to this day. I don’t deny that my nose is keenly sensitive where alcohol is concerned, especially in rural villages where the air is unpolluted. On cold nights in rural villages, threads of a variety of smells come through clear and distinct, and if someone is drinking liquor anywhere within a radius of several hundred meters, I can smell it.
    As the night deepened, I detected the aroma of liquor off to the northeast, an intimate, seductive smell, even though there was a wall between it and me, and it had to soar across one snow-covered roof after another, pierce the armor of ice-clad trees, and pass down roads, intoxicating chickens, ducks, geese, and dogs along the way. The barking of those dogs was rounded like liquor bottles,