Green Vines

by Zou Jingzhi, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

Because the Great Northern Waste was free of frost so little of the year, most crops wouldn’t thrive there. On the other hand, with the fertile soil and dramatic swings from hot to cold, anything that did survive would grow to be extraordinarily plump and flavorful. During the long winter (six months), our staple food (wheat flour) remained the same, and the side dishes seldom varied: potatoes and cabbages, boiled and fried, or fried and boiled. Through the entire season, the canteen menu scrawled on the chalkboard hardly ever needed to be altered. Of course, even cooked the same way, the ingredients occasionally changed. For instance, if a cow died, the vegetables would be served with beef. If a pig died – as long as it didn’t have swine pox – they would come with its rind, or fatty pork slices. But these were rare occurrences, because pigs and cows didn’t often die. Once, I ate some beef from a cow struck dead by lightning, but its flesh was tough and flavorless, meat only in name, its goodness zapped away by the electricity, like gnawing at wax. Old sows didn’t taste good either, bland and chewy as rubber. Still, it had to be eaten for the reassuring sensation of tasting meat, however loosely defined. There was that one time I got to enjoy some delicious veal. After I’d eaten, my schoolmate Lion Snout told me it was a young female, killed when a bull tried to mount her. That made me feel the cruelty behind the flavor, as if I’d been an accomplice to a crime. I cursed the blabbermouth. Why tell me something like that?

Potato and cabbage were so important that, as soon as autumn arrived, we’d send teams out to quickly harvest them. Cart after cart would get unloaded into the storage cellar, and after thousands of root vegetables had gone through the narrow opening, our winter was secure. We could stay alive as long as these two staples kept appearing on our tables. The only alternative was a salty preserved vegetable known as “scare away the guests.” If it had come to that, we’d have ended up as shriveled as the radishes in the pickle vat.

Vegetable cellars were crucial in our lives, but at the time, most divisions didn’t have a decent one, probably because of the belief that revolution was more important than life, and that the harder your existence, the closer you were to the revolution. After all those excellent potatoes and cabbages were harvested, if they weren’t put away in time, the snow would arrive and they’d end up frozen solid, at which point, the only recipe left was to prise one free with a pickax, thaw it, boil it, serve it. Even the greatest imagination couldn’t make these dishes taste anything but acrid. Neither the joy nor suffering of life was discernible in them any longer.

As we went through the process of being rehabilitated, us Educated Youths became increasingly aware of the need for a vegetable cellar, eventually accepting that eating unfrozen potatoes without beef might not be harmful to the revolution. And so we’d dig a deep, wide pit, hastily shoveling the vegetables in and putting a roof over them before the snow arrived. After that, you’d often see the duty cook climbing down into the cellar, emerging with basket after basket of unfrozen potatoes or cabbages, a sight that made us feel life was good and under control.

These cellars had other uses, though we only discovered this after the incident. I just went down a few times, when I was called upon to assist the cooks. There was an electric light that, when turned on, illuminated the potatoes’ and cabbages’ peaceful faces. There was no wind or snow down here, but it wasn’t hot, and the air was thick with decay. Your hand had the power to choose, and all these vegetables, imprisoned so long, would glare at you coldly. A person picking the next victim to be eaten cannot expect a warm welcome in a vegetable cellar. I couldn’t feel good down there, no matter how much it added to our existence. It felt like a dungeon full of lives I’d never get to know.

Camp Three, Eighteenth Company, was a small group, so naturally their cellar was small and cozy too. At the time, dalliances between Educated Youths rarely progressed beyond a spiritual level, partly because love was forbidden, but even more because we had no opportunity to so much as talk. Every division had hundreds of eyes looking out for this sort of thing – imagine being romantic under such scrutiny! Courage wasn’t enough. And so most relationships took place under conditions of great secrecy, like working undercover, carried out through facial expressions and code words, or even more often, when forcibly separated, by thought alone. Love like this carried the intensity of suffering, so every second together was worth a thousand pieces of gold. Most people found themselves like bows stretched to breaking point.

Love stimulates the mind. One couple thought of using the cellar: the boy was an Educated Youth from Tianjin, a platoon leader in our company, normally dignified and severe. The girl was from Tianjin too, unruffled and soft-spoken, of average appearance. Before this happened, no one had any idea they were together (up till then, I’d thought it would take superhuman ability to conceal love, but the Cultural Revolution produced just such superhumans). I don’t know how often they met there – when I get to this part, I think of Juliet’s tomb.

We found their naked bodies in the cellar. The girl was a little closer to the entrance, as if she’d struggled to get out. The boy probably died faster, gloriously, no suffering on his face. In the midst of so many vegetables, they looked like stage props, or perhaps sculptures, left where they were, alone or maybe connected. Their souls lay scattered amongst those silent winter vegetables.

We dragged their corpses from the warm cellar. I don’t know why none of us thought of putting clothes on them, so their pale bodies flopped out naked against the snow, not moving, black hair spreading over the white ground, only the tiny hairs on their bodies stirring in the wind – signal flags sending a last message. They shouldn’t have lit a coal-burning stove in the enclosed space. Even after all these years, I often recall this incident and find myself imagining the loving scenes I didn’t actually witness. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps deaths like these, beautiful as art, shouldn’t cause regret or sadness. Which of us is fit to feel pity?

The entire company refused to eat the stored vegetables, perhaps afraid of stirring something up. In fact, they refused to go near the cellar altogether, so it fell into disuse and caved in. That spring, the buried potatoes sprouted, sending vines up through the soil, a patch of bright green.