Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [157]
A FEW MILES out of Tun-hsi, a nightmare landscape appears before us. People dressed in rags crawl by the side of the road. Dead bodies lie splayed in the fields and dot the road. The smell should be atrocious, but the corpses have no blood or meat left to decay. They’re like mummies—gray and emaciated. Wild dogs are plentiful, and they feast on the dead. I drive slowly, swerving from one side of the road to the other in an effort to miss the gruesome obstacles. Z.G. sits behind me. We could still be pulled over, and the master would never ride next to the driver. I keep glancing in the rearview mirror. Z.G.’s eyes are wide with shock. We’re both terrified for Joy.
I come around a corner and brake as hard as I can. A couple lie in the center of the road. I can’t drive around them. We sit in the car, the engine idling.
“What should we do?” I ask, my hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Let’s give them something to eat. Maybe we can move them that way.”
I don’t want to get out of the car, but I do. Z.G. and I look in the trunk and pull out some crackers. We walk tentatively toward the couple, both of us holding our crackers at arm’s length. The man reaches forward to grab Z.G.’s cracker and then collapses, dead. The woman takes the cracker from my hand, clutches it to her chest, and curls into a little ball to protect it.
“You should try to eat it,” I say softly. The woman stares at her dead companion, her eyes unseeing, her treasure protected. It’s as though I’ve given her the most precious Christmas gift possible, something that should be saved and cherished—never broken, let alone eaten.
Z.G., showing nerve I didn’t know he had, grabs the dead man’s heels and pulls him to the side of the road. Then I help him move the woman. As soon as we’re done, he gruffly says, “Come on. We need to keep moving.”
Several more times, we have to stop to move the dead or dying from the road. The sun shines resplendently overhead. Always I expect silence when I get out of the car—no singing, no sounds of working in the fields, no braying of animals, no birds trilling—but cicadas, immune to the concerns of humanity, drone steadily. Then, at one of our stops, cutting right through the cicadas—and piercing into my soul—children and babies yelp, sob, and whimper. Z.G. and I scan the fields, searching for the source of these sounds that seem to come at us from every direction.
Ahead of us something moves—bouncing angrily—not far from the side of the road. It’s a small girl’s head and shoulders. The parents have dug a hole deep enough to prevent escape and abandoned their daughter in it. They must have hoped someone would stop and take her home. I take a few steps forward so I can see down into the hole. The girl’s naked. Her skin hangs like wrinkled tofu skin, and her belly is swollen and purple. Then Z.G. grabs my shoulders.
“Look.” He points to different spots in the field.
Other children and babies have been abandoned in these pits too. They’re everywhere. I think I’m going to be sick.
“This is horrible, but we have to go,” Z.G. says.
“But—” I gesture to the field.
“We can’t help them. We have to get Joy and her baby.”
I’m overcome with despair. If I save even one of these children, then I might be too late for my own flesh and blood. I close my ears and my heart, get back in the car, and continue driving.
Finally, we reach the old drop-off point for Green Dragon Village. Since the director of the Artists’ Association called ahead, I expect to see a welcome party, as we had the last time we came. Instead, the road is ominously empty and quiet, while the footpath we used to take to Green Dragon has been blocked with sawhorses and other junk. A sign with an arrow to the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune points to a new road that cuts through the fields and veers around Green Dragon’s enveloping hills. The commune’s cadres wouldn’t have done this unless they wanted us to see Joy and the baby there—at the site of the mural.
I take the road to the center of the