Country Driving [65]
There were two officers in uniform. They had come from the nearest station in Shayu, a bigger village six miles away in the valley. Cops never visit a remote place like Sancha unless there’s a problem, and these two knew exactly where to go—they made their way directly to our house. They asked to see our passports, and wrote down our Beijing addresses, and then one of them gave the bad news.
“You can’t stay here at night,” the officer said. “It’s fine to come here during the day, but at night you have to go back to Beijing.”
“Why can’t we stay here at night?” Mimi asked.
“It’s for your safety.”
“But it’s very safe here. It’s safer here than in Beijing.”
“Something might happen,” the man said. “And if anything happens, it’s our responsibility.”
The officers were friendly but adamant, and that evening we left the village. The next time we came out, the same thing happened. Our house rental was handled by a local man named Wei Ziqi, who finally explained the reason. One of the neighbors called the police every time we arrived in Sancha.
“Do you remember the first time you came here?” Wei Ziqi said. “You looked at two houses: this one, and a house that belongs to another man. He’s the one who calls the police.”
“Why does he do that?”
“Because you’re not renting from him,” Wei Ziqi said. “He’s angry about that.”
Most men in our part of the village were related, and the whistleblower shared Wei Ziqi’s family name: they had the same great-great-grandfather. But they weren’t close, and Wei Ziqi responded quickly when we asked what the man was like. “I’ll give you an example,” he said. “In the mountains you aren’t allowed to cut down certain trees for firewood. This is true even if they’re dead, which doesn’t make sense. So people do it anyway, but sometimes that man will call the police to report it. That’s the kind of person he is. He likes to cause trouble.”
It was the first time I’d heard a character sketch that involves firewood, but who doesn’t know a man like that? Certainly our first impressions had made us wary. He was in his late forties, and he had a handsome face, but his gaze was unsettling. There was something calculated about it—he had none of the open curiosity of the other villagers. He spent most of his time alone, although sometimes I heard him speaking gruffly to his wife. She had a haunted, nervous air; whenever I encountered her on the village pathways she smiled uncomfortably and stammered so fast that I couldn’t understand. Other villagers told me that she was mentally ill, and some of them believed that she had been possessed by a spirit. One evening, when I was spending the night alone in my house, I heard a noise and went outside to investigate. At the edge of the threshing platform, something rustled in the shadows; I shone a flashlight and saw that it was the woman. She muttered incoherently and scurried away into the darkness. Nobody else had ever responded like that—if they came to stare, they simply stared. For much of that night I lay awake, listening to the wind in the trees, but I never saw her near my home again.
We could have rented her husband’s house, which might have seemed like the simplest solution. The place was terrible, with a dirt floor and smoke-stained walls; the rent was low and we could have paid the money and left it empty. But it seemed a bad precedent, and it would only open up further dealings with the neighbor. Between ourselves, Mimi and I called him the Shitkicker: he stirred things up in the village. In this case, he had involved the police down in the valley, and over the next year we did everything possible to win their trust. We stopped frequently at the police station, and periodically we