The Garlic Ballads Read Online Free PDF

into the stack of chaff up to the elbow without feeling a thing. The chestnut colt, suddenly energized, began to gallop, its hooves sending dirt clods thudding into the chaff with scary resonance.
    “Where do you think you’re going at this late hour?” Fourth Aunt shouted.
    “It’s not late. It’s barely dark out.” Just hearing Jinju’s voice made him feel slightly guilty.
    “I asked you where you’re going,” Fourth Aunt repeated.
    “Down to the riverbank to cool off,” Jinju replied with determination.
    “Don’t be long.”
    “Don’t worry, I won’t run away.”
    Jinju, Jinju, Gao Ma moaned softly, how do you stand it all?
    The latch clanged loudly as the gate was pulled shut. From his vantage point beside the chaff, Gao Ma longingly watched her blurred silhouette head north toward the river instead of coming toward him. He managed to keep from running after her, assuming this was a sham for her mother’s benefit.
    Jinju … Jinju … He buried his face in the chaff, his eyes dampening. Meanwhile the colt galloped back and forth behind him, and the parakeets squawked. Off to the south, in the stinking, weed-infested reservoir, frogs croaked to one another, the mournful sound falling unpleasantly on the ear.
    All this reminded Gao Ma of the night three years earlier when he and the regiment commander’s concubine had slipped away together: how the pert-nosed, freckle-faced woman threw herself into his arms, how he held her tight and smelled her heavy body odor. Like holding a wooden log, he embraced her even though he didn’t love her. You’re despicable, he had cursed himself, pretending to be in love in order to enhance your prospects with her patron. Yet things have a way of evening out, and I paid a heavy price for my hypocrisy.
    But it’s different with Jinju. I’d die for Jinju, my Jinju.
    She walked in the shadow of the wall, skirting the starlit threshing floor, and came toward him. His heart pounded wildly, he began to tremble, his teeth chattered.
    She walked around the stack and stopped a few feet from him. “What do you want to talk to me about, Elder Brother Gao Ma?” Her voice quaked.
    “Jinju …” His lips were so stiff he could barely get the words out. He heard his own heartbeat and a voice that quaked like a woman’s. He coughed—it sounded forced and unnatural.
    “Dont … please don’t make any noise,” she pleaded anxiously as she backed up several steps.
    The colt, feeling mischievous, rubbed its flank against the stack, even extracted some chaff with its lips and flung it to the ground in front of them.
    “Not here,” he said. “Let’s go down to the trench.”
    “I can’t…. If you have something to say, hurry up and say it.”
    “Not here, I said.” He walked down the edge of the threshing floor, all the way to the trench. Jinju still hadn’t moved. But when he turned to go back for her, she began walking timidly toward him. He threaded his way through the indigo bushes and waited for her at the bottom of the trench, and when she reached the gently sloping side, he took her hand and pulled her to him.
    She tried to take her tiny hand, but he cupped it tightly in his and stroked it. “I love you, Jinju,” he blurted out. “Marry me!”
    “Elder Brother Gao Ma,” she replied softly, “you know I’ve been betrothed so that my brother can get married.”
    “I know, but I also know it’s not what you want.”
    She loosened his grip with her free hand and liberated its mate. “Yes it is.”
    “No, it’s not. Liu Shengli is a forty-five-year-old man with an infected windpipe. He’s too sickly to even carry a load of water. Are you telling me you’d marry coffin pulp like that?”
    She whimpered in reply, the sound hanging in the air for a long moment. “What can I do?” she sobbed. “My brother’s over thirty … a cripple … Cao Wenling is only seventeen, and prettier than me.…”
    “You’re not your brother, and you’re not required to