Free Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke Page A

up negative. When I’m dead, you’ve got to make sure they don’t leave the village. If Tingting ever remarried, I’d roll over in my grave. My soul would never rest in peace.’
    Yes, Uncle loved his wife, almost as much as he loved his life.
    One day, thinking about his illness, and the fact that he would soon die, the tears began to fall. ‘Why are you crying?’ my aunt asked.
    ‘It’s not dying I’m afraid of,’ Uncle sniffled. ‘I just hate the thought of leaving you alone. Promise me that when I’m gone, you’ll get remarried and take our son away from this village.’
    His conversation with my grandpa was a different tune. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘you know Tingting listens to you, and you know she trusts you. Since no one in this world will ever love her as much as me, and no one will ever treat her better, you’ve got to convince her to stay in the village and never get remarried.’
    But Grandpa wasn’t ready to make this promise. ‘If you stay alive, son,’ Grandpa reasoned, ‘she’ll have no cause to get remarried. There’s an exception to every rule, right? Folks get diagnosed with terminal cancer all the time, but some of them survive for ten more years.’
    Hoping that he might prove an exception to the rule, Uncle went on with his life, taking second helpings at meals and drinking double shots of sorghum whisky for dessert. As a twenty-nine-year old man in his prime with an attractive twenty-eight-year old wife, his biggest worry now was his sex life. His wife refused to let him touch her, or even hold her hand. What was the point of defying the odds, of going on living, if your life had no meaning? He wished he had someone to talk to, but when it came to sex, he had no idea how to broach the subject.
    Oh yes, Uncle loved his wife. He loved her, but he also loved his life.
    It was unfortunate that after leaving her husband standing at the school gate, my aunt forgot to turn back and look at him. Uncle kept watching, waiting for her to turn around, but she never did. He bit his lip so hard it bled, but he wasn’t going to cry.
    Still biting his lip, Uncle kicked at a pebble on the ground.
    The little village school grew crowded. Nowadays, the people roaming the halls were not elementary school students butgrown men and women, mostly between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Following Grandpa’s instructions, the sexes were segregated: men’s dorms in the classrooms on the second floor, and women’s dorms on the first floor. Some brought proper beds from home, while others slept on doors or wooden planks. The less-fortunate simply pushed a few desks together and slept on top of them. The tap in the schoolyard was constantly running, and there was always a line of people waiting in front of it. Near the tap, there were two small storage rooms piled with broken desks, chairs and classroom equipment. One had been converted into a kitchen for the residents. As soon as one person had cleared a space near the door and set up a stove, another installed a wooden board for kneading dough beneath the windowsill, and so on, until the little room was so cluttered you could hardly put a foot down.
    The clean white snow in the schoolyard was trampled into mud.
    Spaces beneath stairwells overflowed with jars, crockery, and sacks of rice and grain.
    Grandpa bustled around the school, giving instructions to the residents and overseeing what got moved and where. He made sure that the classrooms were cleared of essential items. Blackboards, chalk, textbooks and homework notebooks left behind by students were collected and locked safely in a storage room.
    Though students had stopped coming to class, the school remained in use. There were people who needed it. Grandpa, his brow moist with youthful perspiration, busied himself looking after everyone’s needs. Having something to do made him feel younger and more energetic. Even his hunched back seemed straighter. Although his hair was still white, it looked