劉慈欣 : 鄉村教師

The Village Schoolteacher

By Liu Cixin

Translated by Christopher Elford and Jiang Chenxin

HE REALIZED that the final class would have to be moved forward.

The pain in his side surged up again, nearly knocking him unconscious. He

didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, and could only move with great difficulty

to the bedside window. The moonlight shone on the paper window a brilliant silver,

making the small portal look like a door leading to another world, a world where

everything was silvery, like a bonsai terrarium made of silver coins and snow that

wasn’t cold. Quivering slightly, he raised his head to look through a hole in the

window paper and all at once the mirage vanished. He saw in the distance the

village where he’d spent his entire life.

Spread out under the moonlight, the silent village looked as though it had been

abandoned a century before. The houses, with the characteristic flat-topped roofs

found on the Loess Plateau, were of a shape no different from the loess mounds

that surrounded them. In the moonlight they were of the same tinge, as though

the village had merged with the hillside. Only the old pagoda tree, standing out

in front, could be seen clearly. The crows’ nests in its withered branches stood out

a blacker black, like large ink drops on the deep silver tableau. The village did

have its moments of beauty and warmth. At harvest time, the young men and

women who had gone off to work in the city would return, and the village would

fill with the sounds of their joyous laughter; every rooftop was stacked high with

golden corn and children could be seen rolling about in the freshly cut hay on

the threshing ground. Or there was the New Year when the gas lamps over the

threshing ground burned bright and there would be several days of wild festivities,

the rowing of the ‘land boat’, and the dancing of the ‘lion dance’. Of these lions not

much remained save some clicking wooden skulls with the paint worn off, and

a few bed-sheets, since the village could not afford to replace the coverings with

proper lion skins … yet everyone had great fun. But after the 15th, the young

people would all have returned to their jobs and the village had nothing to

enliven it. Only at dusk, when the smoke rose from the chimneys in thin wisps,

would one or two old men appear on the outskirts of the village, their faces,

wrinkled like mountain hickory nuts, raised and peering eagerly at the road that

led out of the mountains, till the last rays of the sun hanging from the branches of

the pagoda tree faded away. By nightfall the lights in the village had long been put

out. Electricity was expensive. It was now up to 1.8 yuan per kilowatt hour.

The faint sound of a dog barking drifted through the village, as though it was

talking in its sleep. He looked around at the yellow earth in the moonlight and

felt suddenly that it resembled the unbroken surface of a lake. If only it really

was water. The drought was in its fifth straight year. The villagers had to carry

water to irrigate the land to have any harvest at all. He thought of the fields as

he looked off the distance at the tiny mountain plots. In the moonlight they

looked like footprints left by some prehistoric giant passing over the mountains.

On these rocky slopes, covered with brambles and artemisia, there was only space

for small plots here and there. Farm machinery was out of the question; even a

draft animal could barely turn a full circle on the fields, so the fields had to be

tilled by hand. Last year a farm machinery company came around selling a mini?push-tractor that would function even on these palm-sized plots of land. A good

enough machine, the villagers said, but you must be joking: did the salesmen

know how little these tiny fields produced? Even tilling them as carefully as if one

were embroidering flowers, you’d be lucky to harvest enough to feed yourself year

round; in a time of drought you might not even recover the price of the seeds you

planted. With fields like these, who could afford a three or four thousand yuan

push-tractor, plus the two-yuan-a-litre diesel fuel you’d need to run it? How could

these outsiders understand just how hard life was in the mountains?

Several shadows passed by the windows. They squatted together at the edge

of a field not too far off, for who knew what reason. He knew that they were his

students. He could sense their presence when they were near him even without

using his eyes. He had developed these intuitive skills over the course of his life,

and they only sharpened in its final moments.

He could even identify which of the children it was under the moonlight. He was

sure that Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua were among them. They were locals and

so were not meant to board at the school, but he had taken them in anyway. Ten

years ago Liu Baozhu’s father had purchased a wife from Sichuan. The woman

gave birth to Baozhu and by the time the child was five, Baozhu’s father slackened

his watch on the woman. The result was that she escaped and ran away back to

Sichuan, taking all the money in the house with her. After this, Baozhu’s father

wasn’t himself anymore. He started gambling, and just like any old bachelor in

the village, he reduced his household to but four walls and a bed. And then he

started drinking. Every night he would hit the sweet potato wine hard, drinking

himself oblivion. He took his anger out on the kid, slapping him around once

a day, violently beating him up every three. Just last month in the dead of night,

he took a fire poker and beat Baozhu within an inch of his life. Guo Cuihua was

even worse off. Her mother was respectably married—a rare occurrence in these

parts—and her husband was very proud of the fact. But as all things good are

short lived, as soon as the wedding festivities were over, she was discovered to be

insane. That no one noticed before the wedding must have been due to the fact that

she’d been drugged. Besides, what sane women would come to a place so poor that

a bird wouldn’t bother to shit on it? But despite all this Cuihua was born, and with

some difficulty, grew up just the same. Her mother’s illness grew worse, acting up

more frequently. She hacked at people with a kitchen knife in broad daylight and

tried to burn her house down in the middle of the night. More often she would just

laugh darkly to herself. Her laughter made people’s hair stand on end.

The rest of the children were from other villages, even those who lived near

were separated from their homes by ten kilometres of mountain road. They had

no choice but to live at the school. They would have to spend the entire term at

this makeshift village school. In addition to their bedding they also brought with

them a sack of rice or flour, which the children cooked together on the school’s

large cooking stove. When winter came, a dozen of them would gather around the

stove to watch the food pop and sizzle. The straw burning inside the stove cast an

orange glow onto their faces … this was one of his most cherished memories. He

would be sure to take the image the next world with him.

Outside of the window several tiny red sparks appeared among the children,

standing out a brilliant red against the silver-grey night. They were burning

incense. Then they lit spirit-money, the flames casting the children’s forms in

bright orange against the silver-grey winter night. It made him think back to

the stove fire, which brought to mind yet another scene. When the power went off

in the schoolhouse (either because the wiring was bad, or, more often than not,

because the school hadn’t been able to pay the electricity bill) and their lessons ran

late, he would hold a candle to the blackboard. ‘Can you see?’ he would ask. ‘Not

really!’ the kids would respond. With so little light it most certainly wasn’t easy to

see clearly, but they had missed so many lessons that he had no choice but to hold

classes at night. He would light another candle, holding it together with the first

in his hand. ‘Still can’t see!’ they would chorus. And so he would add another

candle. They still couldn’t see clearly but this time the children wouldn’t bother

to shout out. They knew he would not light another candle—it would cost too

much. He could see their faces drifting in and out of the circle of candlelight. They

looked like little bugs struggling with all their might to throw off the darkness

surrounding them.

Children and firelight, children and firelight. Always children and firelight,

always children and firelight at night. It was what this world had burned his

mind, this image, and yet he never understood exactly what it meant.

He knew they were burning the incense and spirit-money for him. They had

done it many times before, but this time he didn’t have the strength to go out

and reprimand them for being superstitious. He had spent his entire life lighting

the fires of science and civilization in their hearts but he knew that in a remote

mountain village shrouded in ignorance, the fires he lit were small in comparison

to the fires of superstition, like the candle he held against the blackboard in

a freezing cold classroom deep in the mountains on a dark winter’s night. Six

months earlier some villagers had taken the rafters from the already run-down

school dormitory. They said they needed them to fix the old temple. When he asked

how the dormers would get on without a roof over their heads they said the kids

could sleep in the classroom. When he reminded them that the classroom let in

drafts on all sides and asked what the children would do in the winter, they said,

‘Well, they’re all children from other villages anyway.’ He went after them with a

bamboo shoulder-pole and ended up with two broken ribs in the resulting fight. A

couple of decent people took him thirty kilometres to the township hospital.

During his check-up they discovered by chance that he had cancer of the

oesophagus. There was nothing strange about this, as the area was a high-risk

zone for oesophageal cancer. The doctor congratulated him on his happy turn of

fortune. The cancer was still in its early stages and hadn’t yet begun to spread;

a simple operation would take care of it. Oesophageal cancer has a high post?operative recovery rate. He was lucky.

He had come all the way to the city and was in the cancer ward when he asked

the doctor how much the operation would cost. The doctor replied that given his

situation he would be qualified to move to the poverty-relief ward and other costs

could also be reduced, making the final sum not large, probably around 20,000

yuan. Seeing as he had come from a remote mountain area, the doctor explained

in great detail the procedure for staying in the hospital. He listened quietly and

then asked abruptly, ‘If we don’t operate, about how long do I have?’ The doctor

stared at him blankly for a moment before saying, ‘About half a year.’ The doctor

then looked confused as he let out a sigh of relief, as if he had been greatly

reassured.

At least he would be able to send off this year’s graduating class.

He really couldn’t afford the 20,000 yuan. The salaries of locally-sponsored

teachers were low, but since he had worked for many years and had only himself to

worry about, it would be reasonable to suppose that he would have some savings.

But he had spent all that money on his students, and could not remember how

many times he had helped to pay tuition and other fees. Most recently it had been

for Baozhu and Cuihua. Many times he had noticed that the food cooking in the

pots lacked oil so he had used his own money to buy meat and lard for them …

Now he had only about one-tenth of what it would take to pay for the operation.

Following one of the wide city avenues, he walked in the direction of the train

station. It was dark and the neon lights were already casting their enchanting

glow across the cityscape, a gorgeous radiance that baffled him; when night fell,

the tall buildings turned giant multi-coloured lanterns. The music that

drifted through the night air was frenzied and mellow by turns.

In a world that he had never been a part of, he thought back on his relatively

short life. He was calm; each person had his own life to live. Returning to his

primary school in the mountains twenty years ago after graduating from middle

school had sealed his fate. Besides, he owed the greater part of his life to another

village schoolteacher. The school he was now in charge of was the one he’d spent

his childhood attending. His mother and father had died early and so the crude

school was his only home. His teacher had taken him in and treated him like a

son.

Even though they were poor, his childhood had not been without love. One

winter, when school let out for the holiday, his teacher brought him to his own

home. His teacher’s house was far away and they had to travel down long

mountain roads packed with snow. By the time they caught sight of the dim lights

burning in his teacher’s village it was already midnight. It was then that they

saw behind them four small green shimmering discs of light. Wolves’ eyes. At the

time there were still many wolves in the mountains and one could see piles of wolf

droppings near the schoolhouse. He’d been naughty once, igniting and tossing the

whitish grey lumps the classroom, filling it with heavy smoke. The children

had bolted out of the classroom choking and his teacher had been very angry. Now

the wolves behind them were slowly drawing close. His teacher broke off a thick

tree branch and waved it in their path to block their approach, shouting for him to


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