There was no neat ending. Of course, it didn't need a neat ending, I could weigh each version for myself. I had absolutely no doubt the whole story resulted from general confusion at a time of low flame, that it was a shared illusion of theirs, just like everything my mother saw while ill.

When people hope to see something, that something will always pop up one day or another. People have two possible means of making this something appear: at times of high flame, they use the techniques of revolutionary, scientific, or economic development; at times of low flame, they use illusion.

People can't be made identical to each other. If I can't raise the flame of most Maqiao people, I don't think I have any reason to rob them of their right to illusions, to prevent them from imagining that their Tiexiang returned once more to Maqiao, that she overcame the boundary between the living and the dead and wept in the arms of her sister-in-law by the side of the lotus pond.

: Uncle Luo wasn't originally from Maqiao: he'd been a long-term hired hand all the way up to land reform, after which he became village head for a few years, making him a veteran cadre in Maqiao. Various people had proposed marriage to him at various times, but each time he'd refused. He was a confirmed bachelor: when he'd eaten his fill, there was no one else in his household to go hungry. When just he worked, everyone in his household toiled. Sometimes people called him "Red Flower Daddy"-"red flower" meant virgin.

People later discovered that the reason he wouldn't get married wasn't because he lacked money, it was because all his life he'd kept his distance from women, had been afraid of women; whenever he saw a woman approach he'd do his utmost to take a detour off elsewhere; you'd never, ever find him anyplace where there were a lot of women around. His nose was very sensitive, peculiarly so: he could always sniff out a fishy smell on women's bodies. He thought the only reason women used face powder was to cover up their fishy bodily smell. In spring in particular, the air was always full of this fishy female smell (which was particularly strong on women of about thirty), mingled with a smell of rotting melons; it could travel one hundred paces on the wind and his head would swim as soon as it hit his nostrils. If he remained in contact with this smell for any length of time, it would do terrible things to him: his face would go yellow, his forehead would break into a cold sweat, he'd retch over and over again.

He'd ascertained, moreover, it was this very fishy smell that had spoiled his fruit. Behind his house were two peach trees which, despite blooming luxuriantly every year, never produced much fruit; even when fruits appeared, they would rot away one by one. Some said these trees were diseased. He shook his head: those rotten women and their wild goings-on make me ill, he said, so how's a tree to bear it?

He was referring to the fact that the two peach trees were next to a tea plantation, where every year women would go to pick tea and generally let their hair down; as he saw it, it would've been strange if the trees hadn't gone rotten.

Some didn't give much credence to what he said and wanted to test his nose, test whether it really was different from everybody else's, whether it really had this implacable hatred for women. So, at the end of one working day they stole his straw coat and offered it to some women as a cushion to sit on, before returning it back to its original place to watch what kind of reaction there would be.

Everyone was astounded: when he picked up the raincoat, his nose wrinkled and face darkened instantly:

"You low-life lowlifes, who touched my raincoat?"

The men present glanced at each other, pretending to know nothing.

"What've I ever done to you? When did I do you wrong? To make you do this to me?" He made a face and stamped his foot in genuine anger.

The raincoat thieves quickly slipped away in alarm.

Uncle Luo threw away his coat and huffed and puffed his way back home. Anxious to make peace, Fucha washed the coat in the pond. But the coat never again reappeared on the old village head's back-people said he'd burned it immediately.

No one dared play another joke like this on him. If you invited him to dinner, there could never be any female guests at the table, nor any women's clothes drying nearby. And when arranging his work assignments, you had to be careful not to send women off with him. Once, Benyi sent him off on the tractor to the county seat to buy some cotton flower seeds, a trip that took him a whole two days; when he got back, he said when he'd set out his leg had suddenly started to hurt, but he hadn't been in time to catch the tractor and had had to go on foot, so he'd lost a day. It was only afterwards, when villagers happened to bump into the tractor driver in the commune, that they discovered he had been in time to catch the tractor, but just because there were a few women catching a lift on the vehicle he'd absolutely refused to get on, insisting that he preferred to walk by himself. There was no one to blame but himself.

He walked very slowly: the thirty li from the county seat back to Maqiao took him a whole day. And not only that: he did everything slowly, nothing rashly, as if he knew full well there were days beyond days, and also days beyond the days beyond the days, there was no need to shit your breakfast as soon as you'd got it down. The young men all liked to work with him, as he'd make the day fairly relaxed, not overly pressured. One day, the young men went with him to Tianzi Peak to repair the aqueduct over the mountains. The weather was terribly cold that day and an ice crust had frozen over the ground; even though everyone's feet were tied up with grass rope, they still slipped at every step, and at every fall, wails and laughter rose and fell in waves. By the time everyone arrived at the construction site, they were all dreading the work ahead of them, and seeing as even the cadres hadn't arrived and Uncle Luo was the only person who had any speech rights to speak of, they begged him to agree to let everyone wait a while, at least until the sun had come up and melted the ice, before starting work. His drowsy eyes full of sleep, Uncle Luo dug his tobacco out of his cloth bag saying: "Who's to say otherwise? Dragging everyone out from under their quilts on such a cold day, as if you were going to bury your nearest and dearest…" Whatever he was saying wasn't all that clear, but everyone caught what he meant. A roar of delight went up, then everyone dispersed, each looking for a corner to hide from the wind and warm himself up. Uncle Luo had searched out from who-knew-where a few withered, fallen leaves and had squatted down around a mounded fire, winning himself several jostling companions.

"Maybe you'd like to bring over a couple of baskets of charcoal, eh? Set up a few stoves, eh?" Benyi cleared his throat before producing these two enigmatic conversational gambits: everyone jumped with fright. No one knew where he'd popped up from, wielding a bamboo measuring pole.

Uncle Luo, his eyelids stuck up with sleepy dust, remained sedate: "The road's too slippery to stand up on, how d'you get that pole here? Didn't you see? Even the dogs won't go out on a day like this."

That's right, that's right, everyone else seconded him.

"Well, that's great!" Benyi gave a cold laugh, "So I came here to supervise your sleeping: Party members and People's Militia can take the lead sleeping, poor and lower-middle peasants can overcome hardships sleeping, you can all sleep everything into its fundamentals. D'you all know what sleep is?"