Free Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke

he said, a smile lighting up his sickly face, ‘what do you say I come and live here, at the school?’
    And that’s exactly what he did. Li Sanren went home and fetched his bedroll, said goodbye to his wife and moved intohis new lodgings at the school. Life in the schoolhouse was, if anything, better than his life at home: the walls were thicker, not nearly so draughty, and there was always plenty of firewood. Some of his meals he took with Grandpa; others he cooked for himself in a small upstairs room.
    Winter settled in.
    The early days of winter brought another death to the village, this time a woman who had been infected despite never having sold a drop of blood. Wu Xiangzhi was only thirty when she died, and barely twenty-one when she’d married Ding Yuejin, a relative of ours. Wu Xiangzhi was a delicate thing, a timid sort of girl who fainted at the sight of blood. For this reason, her husband had always pampered her.
    ‘I’d rather die than let my wife sell blood,’ he’d say. ‘I’d sooner sell all the blood in my veins than let my woman get involved in such a dirty trade.’ Yet the husband who had sold his blood was still alive and well, while his wife was dead in her grave. Several years earlier they had lost a baby daughter to the fever, the infant who Wu Xiangzhi had nursed. The villagers could scarcely believe it. Was this the way the fever spread, was this how whole families got infected?
    Fear and uncertainty brought more people flooding into the school. Soon, nearly every villager with the fever was living in the elementary school. My uncle Ding Liang was one of the last to arrive.
    The day his wife dropped him off at the school gate, it was snowing. The couple stood awkwardly, shuffling their feet in the snow. ‘You’d better go,’ my uncle said at last. ‘There are too many sick people here. If I haven’t infected you, someone else might.’
    But my aunt continued to stand there, snowflakes falling on her hair.
    ‘You go on home,’ Uncle told her. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. My dad’s here.’
    Obediently, my aunt turned and began to walk away. Uncle watched her disappear into the snowstorm. She was quite faraway when he shouted, ‘Don’t forget to visit! Come and see me every day!’ My aunt nodded her head, confirming that she’d heard him, but still Uncle made no move to enter the schoolyard. He stood at the gate, gazing after his wife. It was the gaze of a lover, the gaze of a man who feared he might never see his wife again. Uncle loved his wife. He loved her as he loved this life.
    Uncle had been experiencing the symptoms of the fever for some time, but the initial discomfort had passed. Although he hadn’t the strength to lift a pail of water, he had regained his appetite and could eat a whole steamed bun and half a bowl of soup at one sitting. Several months earlier, when the disease had first taken hold, he’d assumed it was a common cold or fever. After a brief respite during which he had seemed to recover, his skin had begun to itch. One morning Uncle woke to find his face, crotch and trunk covered in nasty-looking sores. The itching was intolerable, so bad that it made him want to bash his head against a wall. He began suffering from unexplained sore throats, bouts of nausea and an inability to eat, even when he knew he was hungry. He seemed to vomit up twice as much food as he managed to swallow. By then, Uncle realized what was happening: he had the fever. Worried about infecting his wife Tingting or his son, my cousin Little Jun, Uncle decided to move out of his bedroom and into a separate room of the house.
    ‘Someday soon, I’ll be dead,’ he told my aunt. ‘Once I’m gone, I want you to take Jun and leave Ding Village. Get married to someone living far away, as far away as possible from this awful place.’
    Yet his conversation with my dad was a different story. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘Tingting and Jun went into the city for tests and they came