God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [60]
Liao: Were you there when your brother was killed?
Zhang: After my brother was imprisoned, nobody, not even his wife and children, knew his whereabouts. Two days before the execution, my family was told that my brother would be transferred from a jail in Luquan County to Sayingpan for one condemnation meeting and then to another in Shengfa Township. After that, he would be sent back to Pufu to be executed. If we wanted to see him for the last time, we had to get up at midnight and walk twenty kilometers to a place between Sayingpan and Shengfa and wait by the side of a road. So we did. The night before my mother left, we sat together and cried. We tried to keep our voices low so the neighbors wouldn’t hear us. My mother slaughtered a chicken and cooked it with rice, and she and my second elder brother and my elder sister left the house. She didn’t allow me to go for fear that it could be too traumatic for me. I was thirteen years old. My mother and my siblings came back the next evening. I asked if my oldest brother had eaten the chicken. My mother nodded; her eyes were all red. Over the years, my mother told me about her last meeting with my brother.
They waited at the designated spot for about three hours. The truck carrying my brother stopped, and he got out. My mother begged the militiamen to take off his shackles so he could eat his last meal. They did. My brother ate the chicken and the soup. When he finished eating, he whispered to my mother:
“I’m going to be gone soon. Don’t be sad. I’m not afraid of death. While I was locked up in jail, I’ve been carrying a miniature Bible. I smuggled it in with me. I’ve been praying in my heart. I know that I won’t be able to escape death. People in the region have charged me with many crimes even though they don’t even know me. I’m innocent and their charges are false. I’m not going to admit guilt. But I’m not going to appeal either. I know it’s useless. They will ship me back to Pufu to have me killed there. I’m glad that I’m going back to Pufu. I have my Bible with me. I will be buried in the place where I used to work and preach. Mother, we are all going to die someday. Don’t be discouraged by my death. Continue with your faith.”
On the day of my brother’s execution, the militiamen came and told my sister-in-law, “We are going to execute your man. Bring some nice food.”
Like my mother, my sister-in-law slaughtered and cooked a chicken and some rice. My oldest brother ate it all. She was sobbing. My brother wiped away her tears and told her to follow the words of the “Leader.” He told her to focus on the children and not be bothered by the taunts and insults from others.
We knew exactly what the word “Leader” meant. He didn’t want to implicate his wife and say it in front of the guards. My sister-in-law understood. She stopped crying. They took him away. After a final public condemnation meeting, the militiamen shot him by the roadside and dumped his body in a shallow hole in a ravine. About ten months later, we were notified that we could collect the body. Do you know why? The ravine was pretty close to the main road and my brother’s exposed corpse scared people. The county leadership decided our family should take the counterrevolutionary’s body away so no one would have to look at it.
My brother’s rotting corpse looked like a fallen tree stuck in a stream. My second oldest brother and my mother went down into the water to drag it out, and it fell to pieces. We collected the bones, washed them, and put them in a box we had brought with us.
My mother found his little Bible tangled up inside his rotting clothes. It was about two centimeters thick, no bigger than the palm of my hand. Though his clothes and flesh had rotted away after ten months in water at the bottom of a ravine, his Bible had survived. We all stopped what we were doing and began praying, not a formal prayer but silent prayers of thanks. God had stayed with him all