Free To Live by Yu Hua Page A

out of the tunnel, and I chose a direction. There were shots being fired close by, and there would often be stray bullets whizzing past me. One time I was making a run for it when the guy next to me suddenly just fell down. I thought he had passed out from hunger, but when I turned around I saw that half of his head was missing. It scared me so bad that my legs went soft and I almost collapsed. Getting your hands on some flatbread was even harder than it had been to get rice. It was said that the Nationalists were losing more men by the day, but as soon as that plane would appear in the sky, everyone suddenly popped out of the ground, and the barren earth appeared instantly to have grown row after row of grass that moved with the plane. As soon as the flatbread was air-dropped, the soldiers on the ground split up, each person rushing to the parachute he had his eye on. The bread packages weren’t sturdy, either, so as soon as they hit the ground they broke apart. Dozens if not a hundred men would all rush to the same spot. Some of the soldiers collided,
knocking each other unconscious before they even got close to the drop point. I tried to get some, but aside from a few measly bread cakes, all I ended up with was a sore body—it was as if someone had tied me up and whipped me with a belt. When I got back to the tunnel, Old Quan was already sitting there. His face was all black-and-blue, yet he hadn’t even ended up with as many bread cakes as I had. Old Quan, who had been in the army eight years, still had a good heart. He put his bread on top of mine and said, “Wait until Chunsheng gets back, and we’ll eat together.” We
kneeled down in the tunnel with our heads sticking out, watching for Chunsheng.
    After a while we saw Chunsheng running with his back arched, and he was carrying a pile of rubber shoes. The
kid was so happy his face was bright red. He tumbled into the tunnel and, pointing at the rubber shoes that covered the ground, asked us, “Did I get a lot or what?”
    Old Quan flashed me a confused look and asked Chunsheng, “Can we eat them?”
    Chunsheng said, “We can use them to cook rice.”
    We thought about it and immediately realized that Chunsheng was on to something. Seeing there wasn’t a single mark on Chunsheng’s face, Old Quan said to me, “This little bastard has got one up on both of us.”
    From then on we didn’t fight over flatbread; we followed Chunsheng’s method. When everyone was piled up on one another fighting over bread, we took off their shoes. Some didn’t flinch, while others would kick wildly. We carried a steel helmet with us and would viciously hit those naughty feet with it. The feet that took our beatings would twitch a few times and then become stiff, as if they had been frozen. We carried the rubber shoes back to our cave to start a fire. At least we had rice, and this way we could avoid getting our asses whipped. As we cooked our rice we watched those barefoot guys half-walking, half-hopping around in the middle of winter. We couldn’t stop laughing.
    The sounds of the guns and cannons came closer and closer, and it didn’t seem to matter if it was night or day. We stayed in our tunnel and slowly grew accustomed to the noises outside. Often a bomb would explode nearby. All of the cannons in our company were destroyed; we never got the chance to fire even a single shot, and already they had become a pile of worthless steel. We became increasingly bored. After a few more days, Chunsheng wasn’t even scared anymore—being scared was no use. The gun and cannon shots got closer and closer, but we always thought they were still far away. The worst was that it was growing colder by the day. At night we could only sleep a few minutes at a time before we would wake up freezing. The cannon explosions outside would shake the ground and leave us with our ears ringing.
    No matter what anyone said, Chunsheng was still a child. On one occasion he was sleeping like a baby