This was, in fact, nonsense. The stones he'd laid today were all at the base of the wall. If he pulled out the bottom, could the wall above hang in thin air?

Benyi threw up his hands and walked off into the distance. But Zhaoqing, who'd tailed him all the way, quickly ran back, his face covered in smiles, saying that Benyi had changed his mind, that not one of the work points would be cut-or not for the time being, that he'd settle accounts later on. At this the tension finally, simultaneously vanished from everyone's faces. Seeing that Precious Huang's hammer had stopped, everyone piled in to stuff back into place the rocks he'd just smashed out.

On the way back to the village, a lot of people fought for the privilege of helping Zhihuang carry the tool basket: if Precious Huang hadn't been around today, they said, wouldn't everyone have been done over good and proper by Old Dribbler? Wouldn't they have been dead meat on the chopping block? They thronged Zhihuang on all sides to sing his praises, Precious Huang this, Precious Huang that, on and on it went. In my opinion, the word "precious" here was now no longer derogatory but had recovered its original meaning: something to be treasured.

: Zhihuang had been the hand-drummer in the old opera troupe, the head drummer in other words. He drummed beats like "Phoenix Nodding," "Dragon Gate Leaping," "Ten Vows Redeemed" and "Lion Dance," whirlwind blasts that made the blood surge, the spirit soar, a string of terrifying thunderbolts that fell like axe-blows. There were a lot of bar breaks and dotted notes, all kinds of dangerous and unexpected sudden halts. It stopped and started, died away then picked itself up, snatched itself back from the jaws of death, dramatically recovered from the brink of collapse. If it pulverized your every bone, dislocated your every muscle, made your sight run to your nose and your sense of smell run to your ears, smashed up every part of your brain- then it had to be Zhihuang's "Lion Dance."

You needed a full half hour to beat a set of "Lion Dance." Many drums were smashed under this lion's thunderous feet-Zhihuang's rock-chiseling hands were too heavy.

A lot of the lads in the village wanted to learn from him, but no one mastered his art.

He very nearly got to drum in our Mao Zedong Thought arts propaganda team. He accepted the invitation with great excitement and set about fixing up oil lamps, making gong hammers, writing Propaganda Team System, or something like that, on red paper in higgledy-piggledy characters, throwing himself into absolutely everything. He smiled at everyone: because he was too thin, when he smiled all that remained of his lower face were two rows of bright, clean, snow-white teeth. But he only drummed for a day, then never came back; the next day he went back to the mountain to break rocks. Fucha went to call him back, even promised to give him twice as many work points as the others, but he wouldn't budge.

The main reason, apparently, was he felt the new operas were dull, they had no scope to give free play to his percussion. Spoken poems, short songs, the bumper harvest dance-none of these needed the added excitement of a Lion. When a scene from a Model Opera-The New Fourth Army Convalescing in the Homes of the People-came along, his lion finally showed its muzzle, only to be slain by one wave of the director's hand.

"I haven't finished!" he yelled in outrage.

"How can people sing when all we can hear is you drumming?" The director was from the County Cultural Institute. "This opera's for strings and wind, when it finishes just tack on a finale and that'll do."

Zhihuang's face darkened, but all he could do was keep waiting.

When the Japanese devils had come on and the scene had livened up, was Zhihuang allowed to play a good hand? The director, it turned out, was even worse than he'd thought, and only allowed him to beat some running water sounds and bang a few small gongs at the end. He didn't get it, so the director grabbed the hammer and banged it a couple of times to show him, "just like that, got it?"

"What tune is it?"

"Tune?"

"There's no tune for the percussion?"

"No tune."

"So, just let it out any old how, like a kid having a crap?"

"The problem with you, you know, is you only know the old stuff, it's always Lion Dance this, Lion Dance that. What lion's dancing when the Jap devils come on, eh?"

Zhihuang had nothing to say to this and had to take what he was given. After one whole day of rehearsal, after drumming odds and ends with no pattern or order, he had no choice but to resign in massive disappointment. He had total contempt for the director and refused to believe there were any good operas in the world apart from Bi Rengui, Yang Silang, Cheng Yaojin, Zhang Fei, and the like; in fact he found it very hard to believe there was all that much else full stop in the world that could impress him. If you told him about special effects in opera films, how many people the world's biggest steamer could seat, how if you always walk forward you'll return to your starting place because the earth is round, how in gravity-less space a child's finger could lift 108,000 catties, and so on and on, he'd summarize his opinion of it all in four utterly cold, indifferent words:

"You're putting me on."

He wouldn't argue, or get angry, sometimes he'd even give a thin little smile; but he'd lick his lips and summarize, always, with perfect confidence: "You're putting me on."

Normally, he'd be really quite civil to us transferred youth, and had some respect for knowledge. He wasn't uncurious or unquestioning, quite the opposite: whenever there was an opportunity, he liked to approach those of us who'd been to middle school and ask questions he'd never been able to think of an answer to. It was just that he had his doubts about anything new-including Marxist writings-and was too quick to judge our answers, too absolute, he'd always be denying things without leaving any room for discussion.

"You're putting me on again."

For example, he'd seen films but categorically refused to believe that the kung-fu in revolutionary model operas was rehearsed. "Rehearsed? What rehearsal? These people've been having the bones knocked out of them since they were children, there's only flesh left in 'em; they get the living daylights thrashed out of them onstage, offstage they can't even pick up an empty water bucket."

At times like these, persuading him, convincing him the bones of those kung-fu fighters were still in place, that carrying water would be absolutely no problem at all, was harder than flying to the moon.

After stopping work one day, I spotted by the side of the road a small calf, too young to have grown horns, its furry muzzle round and well-formed, snuffling down under the mulberry tree eating grass. I felt like giving its tail a tug and had just extended a hand when, as if it had grown eyes in the back of its head, it slipped away, head tilted to one side. I was just about to go after it when a moo sounded out from a flatland in the distance and a big, glaring ox pointed its horns at me and charged ferociously, leaving the ground and mountains trembling in its wake; I dropped my hoe in terror and ran.

It was only some time later that, still with lingering fear, I came to retrieve my hoe.

While retrieving the hoe, I tried to ingratiate myself with the calf by feeding it some grass, but just as I'd waved the blades of grass near its mouth, the ox in the distance charged at me again, mooing like a banshee, with maddening obtuseness, intolerant of treatment either good or bad.