Needless to say, the Educated Youth didn't agree with this strange logic and spent the whole afternoon arguing till we were blue in the face, going on and on about how we were going to go and report to the commune, how there was no way we were going to let our revolutionary Educated Youth be seduced by that old codger Zhongqi.

Most of the villagers jabbered away without taking much notice. As Party Branch Secretary, Benyi didn't have anything sensible to say either. He summoned the Educated Youth to a meeting, where he first of all asked one of us to read a few pages of newspaper editorials. When the reading, and his nap, were both over, he yawned and asked Mou Jisheng: "Did you steal the team's peanuts last year?"

"I-I took a few handfuls."

"One planted peanut seed will grow into a lot of peanuts, d'you know that?"

"Uncle Benyi, we're meant to be discussing Zhongqi today, the peanuts are a completely separate matter,"

"What d'you mean, separate? It's in the small things that you show your attitude to the collective, show whether you have feeling for poor and lower-middle peasants. Wasn't it him (he used the distant, qu him, I remember) that hit Zhaoqing's kid and made him cry, last month when we were digging the pond?" Benyi glared at everyone.

No one said anything.

"When you look at a problem, you have to look at the whole thing, you have to look at it historically! Chairman Mao says that whatever happens, it's wrong to hit people."

"I just lost my temper…" Mou Jisheng defended himself weakly.

"You still can't hit people. What kind of behavior is that? Are you Educated Youth or street hooligans?"

"I… won't hit… anyone… again…"

"That's a bit more like it: when you're in the wrong you're in the wrong. You've got to be honest about things-why make a fuss when you're clearly in the wrong? We'll leave it at that: no self-criticism necessary, you'll just be docked thirty catties of grain."

Benyi had already moved off, hands tucked behind his back, looking wholly satisfied with his resolution of the problem. He wrinkled his nose as he went out the door, as if he'd caught a whiff of toad-and-green-pepper stir-fry from our kitchen. As for that business with Zhongqi, he'd sort it out, he said, he'd sort it out.

The matter was never raised again and was thus left unresolved.

When I call this incident to mind, I realize that logic is both useful and useless, can both clear and muddy the waters. Confronted with the unique logic of the Maqiao Party Branch and the general masses, our puzzlement and indignation were totally useless. Mou Jisheng continued to endure public censure: his refusal to repay Zhongqi (either in cash or in kind) and to pay the grain fine became ironclad proof of his lack of good faith. From this point on, he began to show signs of depression and deliberately performed bizarre and terrifying acts, such as swallowing shards of enamel or lifting a whole dirt cart on his shoulders, or working the oil press alone and telling all his companions to sleep; but by that point it was very difficult to provoke general astonishment and acclaim, or attract acolytes. His Miss Xia also left him-this female Educated Youth with her refined features can't have wanted to have her name linked with Zhongqi's wife; even if these links were entirely groundless, she couldn't escape the imaginings of other people. In the end, Master Black suddenly appeared before us one day with his chest covered in Mao buttons.

"What're you wearing those for, Brother Mou?"

"I'm going to liberate Taiwan." He smiled at us.

I stared, with surprise, hard into his eyes and discovered his gaze had become that of a stranger.

Master Black was diagnosed as hysterical and his residence registration was moved back to the city. He was still physically strong, apparently, and could still play basketball. He could also watch films, smoke cigarettes, ride a bike on the street-he had a full life in the city. It was just that he wasn't very good at recognizing people, would babble and have random mood swings-probably the early stages of hysteria. When an old classmate met him on the street and slapped him on the shoulder, he blinked, briefly hesitated, then turned around and walked off.

: Maqiao people had a whole set of procedures for taking revenge on bad elements from barbarian parts: "curse-grinding." Take, for example, someone who shat indiscriminately on Maqiao's ancestral graves, or was rude to Maqiao women. Without changing their voices or facial expressions, Maqiao people would covertly circle three times around this foreign visitor. After this had been done, they'd quietly bide their time until the visitor had gone into the mountains or the forests. When this moment came, they'd mutter incantations under their breath, complex, tongue-twisting rhymes that broke all the mountain place-names up, then mixed them all together: this was called their mountain incantation. Usually, the words of the incantation were highly effective. Their evil-doing victims would turn this way and that, unable to tell east from west, walking and walking till they returned to where they'd started, aware of the ever-darkening sky over their heads and with no one to call to for help. In the mountains, they might be hungry and cold, might step on an iron trap, might stir up hornets or ants and get stung till their faces and bodies swelled up with blood. People even said that there'd once been an ox-rustler from barbarian parts who'd died on the mountain, who'd never re-emerged from the sparse fir grove on the north face of Tianzi Peak.

Then there was the soul-taking incantation. All you needed to do was take a strand of the offender's hair, "grind" the words of the incantation again and again, and the offender's mind would cloud over until he or she ended up a walking zombie.

After Master Black returned to the city on grounds of ill health, rumors started up. Some suspected Zhongqi's wife of "grinding" a curse at Master Black. Needless to say, I had no truck with such rumors. I'd seen that woman: she hated Master Black, but she didn't have an evil word in her. Sometimes she'd sigh idiotically in front of the women in her neighbors' houses, about how all her born days she'd never begged for wealth or sought long life, all she'd wanted was to give birth to two sons, big as horses, strong as oxen, dead ringers for Master Black. That way, at least, those two breasts of hers wouldn't have hung there all her life for no good reason.

: When Mou fisheng was still in Maqiao, his energy levels were quite excessive, and after finishing work he'd still want to play basketball. When the Educated Youth were too tired to play, he'd get together some local lads, or sometimes even run a few li to the middle school in the commune and play on until midnight, the bouncing ball shimmering in the moonlight.

His demands on his students were very strict: sometimes he'd whistle, point to someone on court, and yell: "Tie your pants higher!"

Both referee and coach, he even monitored his players' pants.

He made his students master the strictest rules of the basketball court, including the "three seconds" rule. Before he arrived, Maqiao's boys had already played ball, just not with many rules: you could bounce the ball twice, when things got really hairy you could run with the ball, the only thing you couldn't do was hit anyone. Mou Jisheng trained his students by the standards of the county's top team and introduced them to the "three seconds" rule. When I revisited Maqiao many years later, the village had a privately run culture institute and half a basketball court, where a few young men-all faces that were utterly unfamiliar to me-were kicking up quite a ruckus as they played. Only one thing sounded familiar: my heartbeat quickened at the way they were always shouting out "three seconds."