None of these young men knew who the Educated Youth had been. They had no idea who these people were, these people who, a long time ago, had stayed in the village for a few brief years, these people from barbarian parts who'd been guests in the village and had no deep understanding of Maqiao; neither was there any need to express interest. I strolled through the village. There wasn't a trace left of our years in Maqiao, even the old, familiar scratches on the mud wall had gone. Out of the few friends I vaguely remembered, none were to be found, all had departed this world one after another, either last year, or the year before, or three years before, or three years before that. With their passing, the Maqiao of my memories sank stone by stone, soon to disappear without a trace.

I'd lived here for six years. One gust of wind had scattered the days of those six years, leaving behind one lone relic: "three seconds"-although its meaning had changed. From what I could glean from watching the lads on the basketball court in front of me, "three seconds" not only outlawed hanging onto the ball for more than three seconds under the basket, it extended also to the flouting of all rules: hitting, shoving, running with the ball. Anything "three seconds" equaled "against the rules." In his time here, Mou Jisheng could never, ever have imagined this would come to pass.

: In the winter, when the commune would be wanting to build a grain store here, a middle school there, they were forever sending instructions down from above that each person was to contribute five fired bricks. Maqiao didn't have money for buying bricks and the villagers had to go to the mountains to dig up graves-overgrown, untended graves, of course.

The mountain-dwellers lived mainly in thatched barns or wooden houses, but their graves were anything but slapdash affairs, using great heaps of fired bricks to build immortal structures that would withstand centuries and millennia. These graves had been through too much history: most of the mounds had collapsed and been covered over with dense brambles and grass, with nothing to mark them out from regular fiat ground covered with vegetation-one cursory glance couldn't distinguish where the grave was. After we'd hacked away at the vegetation around the grave with sickles, and removed the topsoil with rakes, the blue bricks supporting the grave would slowly come into view, stone by stone. At this moment, the faint-hearted girls among the Educated Youth would scurry a long way off into terrified hiding. The men, each attempting to be braver than the next, would jostle to lodge the teeth of their rakes into the joins in the bricks, slowly heaving them to and fro until the bricks loosened and the first brick was pried off with a violent wrench.

If the grave had been fairly well preserved, it was like a pot well sealed against moisture: as the grave was broken open, a white mist would rise up, billowing in waves out of the pit and spreading in gusts a bitter stench of skeleton that turned the stomach. After the white vapor had slowly thinned into nothingness, we timidly crowded closer, peering at the black world within the grave through the gap opened up in the bricks. By the light of a quivering thread of penetrating sunlight, we could glimpse the once-human skeleton, its big empty eye sockets, or its broad pelvis. We could also glimpse random piles of earth and rotting wood. We grave-diggers wouldn't normally expect to find any treasures of gold and silver in the grave: we'd be doing well to come across one or two bronze or ceramic vessels. Many of the skeletons we saw had been positioned facing downwards: this meant our luck was definitely out. According to local custom, people like this had had bad ends, been struck by lightning, hanged, or shot, for example. Those who'd survived them hadn't wanted them to revisit the world of light and pass their bad luck on, had wanted at all costs to prevent them being reborn. Facing them downwards was a crucial step in ensuring they never revisited the light of day.

In death, as in life, different people receive different treatment.

There was one time when, digging out a female corpse, we discovered that although her bones were white, her hair was as glossily jet-black as if there was still breath in her and reached down almost to her waist. Her two incisors hadn't rotted either, and they gleamed and protruded out of her mouth in splendid isolation, a good three inches long, so it seemed. We fled in terror. In the end, after some inquiries, the team committee paid Master Black-who had no fear of ill omens-two catties of meat and one catty of wine to paraffin and burn the skeleton, to stop this female spirit making any further trouble. Years later, I learned from an academic that this is actually perfectly normal. Human death is a long, slow process, and given a congenial environment the hair and teeth will continue to grow. Foreign physicians had done plenty of research on the subject.

We started to carry down more and more bricks from the mountain. The skeletons, of course, were left, abandoned on the mountain. People said that wherever there was a concentration of eagles hovering and swooping back and forth in the sky over the mountains was probably where the strong, rank smell had stimulated their appetites. Others said that in the evenings you could hear the sounds of men howling and women crying on the mountain: surely it was the ghosts, cursing their grave-diggers as they froze with cold.

Nevertheless, we still went into the mountains every day to carry out our dastardly mission.

Normally, Zhaoqing was as cowardly as they came, but he never hung back when we were digging ancestral graves. I later discovered that the reason why he always pushed himself forward was because he hoped to find a rare treasure in the grave pit: shaped like an uneven parcel of vegetables and of a dazzling crimson color, growing on the tongue of the dead person, like human breath that had coagulated over a long period of time in the tomb and then bloomed forth with incredible beauty. The peasants called this thing resembling a parcel of vegetables "lettuce jade": it was the best tonic in the world, they said, an intense concentration of physical strength that could focus the spirit and enrich the blood, could add to the yin and strengthen the yang, could dispel wind, protect embryos, prolong life. There's a reference to it in The Extended Virtuous Words: "Just as there is no false gold, there is no true lettuce jade." The villagers also said not just anybody could posthumously exhale lettuce jade; only the mouths of the wealthy, of those who had tasted top-drawer delicacies, slept on cotton pillows, whose bodies had been nurtured in gold and jade while they lived, would bear fruit in one hundred years' time.

One day while digging in the ground, Zhaoqing suddenly let out a long, tragic sigh.

"It'll never happen, never happen. What's the point in going on?" He shook his head: "This rotten mouth of mine's never going to grow a lettuce jade."

Knowing what he meant, his listeners also turned mournful. They thought about the strips of sweet potato, the aged brown rice, and the blackened dried vegetables they swallowed every day: if even their bottoms couldn't produce any kind of a smell, what hope was there of growing a lettuce jade?

"Uncle Luo could grow one," Wanyu was very confident of this, "he's got a godson in barbarian parts who sends him money."

"Benyi's got a hope too, he's pretty sturdy, there's a lot of fat on him," Zhaoqing said. "The bastard, at those meetings he goes to every other day, they kill a pig every time, there's so much meat it bends their chopsticks."