All night long, the village dogs howled.

When Ma Ming woke, there wasn't a trace of Three Ears in his grass nest.

Nothing was seen of him for months on end.

One day in early autumn, some of the women were turning creepers on the sweet-potato patch when one of them cried out; sensing there was something there, everyone turned to discover someone standing on the road, two great big eyes staring out from under a mane of long hair. Someone finally made out that it was Three Ears, his face livid with rage. No one knew where he'd sprung from, nor how long he'd been standing there, staring silently.

The mane of hair walked over, a bag on his back, right up to Tiexiang.

Tiexiang took several steps backwards.

Thump-before anyone had seen what was happening, a wood knife was thrown at Tiexiang's feet and the mane knelt before her, neck stretched out as far as it could: "Kill me!"

Tiexiang shouted at the other women, "Help, someone! Help!"

"Are you going to kill me or not?"

Tiexiang went ashen, turned, and ran.

"Don't move!" Three Ears shouted at the top of his lungs; Tiexiang swayed briefly but didn't dare move any farther. He stood up, a thin, cold smile protruding sharply out of his face, "Lady, if you don't kill me, how're you going to have any peace? You poured a bowl of shit over my head, did you reckon I could swallow that?" Before Tiexiang could grasp what was going on, he suddenly pulled out a thick vine whip from his waist, and- crack-dealt Tiexiang a blow which left her staggering-another crack- she fell to the ground. She screeched and lifted her arms to ward off the blows, but when the women standing near saw how terrible the expression on Three Ears' face was, none dared intervene and all they could do was hurry back to the village to report as quick as they could.

"You filthy woman, you filthy whore, if you don't kill me, how's this thing going to end?…" Three Ears swore then whipped, swore then whipped until she rolled and writhed around everywhere. An observer looking on from afar would have seen and heard nothing, no one, nothing but grey, foggy waves of dust and sand, a pile of green potato leaves rolling here, turning there, making a rustling sound, a few shredded leaves flying up now and then. In the end, when her cries weakened and the leaves stopped moving, Three Ears finally stopped and dropped the whip.

He opened the cloth bag he'd brought with him, took out a new pair of leather shoes and a new pair of plastic sandals, and dropped them in the pile of now motionless potato leaves. "I'm still aching for you, you've seen that now!"

Then he stalked off.

At the intersection, he turned and shouted at the women: "Tell that piece of trash Benyi that I, Ma Xingli, stuck his wife twenty-five times, stuck her till she screamed-"

The people of Maqiao had almost forgotten he was called Ma Xingli.

: Benyi's first thought was to seize Three Ears, right there and then. When he returned from the construction site and heard the news from Zhongqi that his wife had had an affair with Three Ears, he was overcome with a murderous rage. But in the end the little bit of brain he had left made it clear to him this was a major loss of face; what would it achieve to kick up a huge fuss putting Three Ears on display? Thinking it over, then over again, the only thing to do was lock the door and thrash his wife to pieces. He broke a clothes-washing pestle on his adulterous wife, who rolled all over the floor under his blows until she tremblingly admitted everything. She still had a bit of fight left in her, though, and went along with Benyi's plan of dragging Three Ears into the melee. While the two men were slugging it out, it looked like Benyi was getting the worst of it, and he yelled at his wife to come and help out. Her loyalty was still with her old man, and an inspired lunge mid-fracas at Three Ears' crotch area almost knocked him out cold.

With this, Benyi finally got his hands free, fetched the hemp rope he'd prepared long in advance, and tied Three Ears up as tightly as a zongzi- a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves.

But Benyi had never imagined that his adulterous wife would suddenly disappear the following year. Three Ears didn't cross his mind once: even if she'd eloped or been abducted, only the director of the Cultural Institute or the photographer came under suspicion. He thought he'd lost a simply inhuman amount of face and completely ignored public business for days on end, locked and bolted the door, stuck two plasters on his forehead, and slept right through. Murderous gall rose deep inside him again: Party Secretary or no, wherever he next found that devil woman, he'd finish her off with one knife-stroke.

Most of the villagers hadn't considered Three Ears either, would never have imagined that a woman as attractive as Tiexiang would abandon two kids still in school and go off with a lazybones like him. People merely supposed something was going on in the Cultural Institute, and even sent someone to the county seat to make inquiries.

The following autumn, a piece of very surprising news came over from Jiangxi. This news proved that Tiexiang had in fact eloped and that she'd robbed a grain truck on the highway with Three Ears; out of the bandits hunted down by the army and the People's Militia, one had been beaten to death and ten or so arrested. The final two had been tough nuts to crack, evading arrest by hiding here and there in the mountains. Afterwards, making use of information provided by a local peasant, the People's Militia searching the mountains finally pinned them down and forced them into a mountain cave. The militia encircled the mouth of the cave several times over and shouted out: having got no response, they finally hurled in a hand grenade and blew them to smithereens. The militia discovered afterwards that the two dead were a man and a woman, so thin they only weighed seventy or eighty catties each. The woman's stomach stuck out, several months into pregnancy. An official seal was discovered among their clothing and bags for starting a coppermining cooperative, or something of the sort. There were also two blank prescription letters, two sheets of special lesson preparation paper, and a few envelopes for official letters on which were written the name of this county and this commune. It was only thanks to this that Public Security contacted the area to send someone to identify them. Commune Head He went and identified, from the photographs left at the police substation, the blurred mass of flesh and blood that had been the faces of Tiexiang and Three Ears.

Commune Head He paid two of the local peasants twenty yuan to bury them.

According to Maqiao's ancient rules, as Tiexiang was unchaste and Three Ears was unrighteous, as both had contravened family rules and national law and been disloyal, in death they had to have "nailed backs." In other words, after their deaths, they had to face downward in their graves and nine nails had to be hammered into their backs. Facing downwards meant they had no face to look other people in the face. Nailing their backs meant they would be forever locked in the netherworld, that they could never again be reincarnated or reborn to bring further disaster upon others.

As Maqiao people hadn't taken charge of their corpses, they couldn't nail their backs. When they mentioned this, the old people in Maqiao couldn't conceal their great sense of anxiety at not knowing what further trouble from them might lie in store.