Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke Page B

rolled up to the elbow, and he was flexing and pinching the exposed arm. His face was unusually pale, covered with nervous perspiration. He crossed the kitchen, placed the bill on a corner of the stove and turned to his wife.
    ‘There,’ he said tearfully. ‘You see? I sold my blood.’
    She paused from her washing up and stared at her husband’s pale face.
    ‘Well, that’s more like it,’ she said, laughing. ‘Now you’re a real man.’
    She looked at him. ‘Do you want some sugar-water?’
    ‘No,’ he answered, his eyes filled with tears. ‘I spent half my life working for the revolution, and now I’ve been reduced to selling my blood.’
    Soon Li Sanren was selling his blood regularly. At first it was just once a month, then every twenty days, then every ten. Towards the end, if he had gone too long without selling blood, his veins would begin to feel swollen. It was as if theywere bursting with blood. If the blood wasn’t siphoned out it would begin to seep from his pores.
    As the number of villagers selling their blood increased, so did the number of bloodheads. There was a lot of competition. Bloodheads began going door to door with their equipment, collecting plasma as if it were scrap metal or worn-out shoes. You didn’t even have to leave your house. Every day you would hear them calling – ‘Blood collector! Anyone selling blood?’ – like pedlars hawking their wares.
    Blood merchants even went out into the fields to collect blood from farmers working their land.
    ‘Hey, there!’ the bloodhead would shout. ‘Got any blood to sell?’
    ‘Go away,’ the farmer would reply, ‘I just sold some.’
    But the bloodhead wouldn’t go away.
    ‘That’s some fine-looking wheat you’ve got there. The sprouts are nice and dark.’
    The farmer would beam with pride. ‘Can you guess how much chemical fertilizer I used?’
    The bloodhead would then kneel down for a closer look, as if admiring the newly sprouted wheat. ‘I don’t know how much you used, but I know you probably paid for it by selling blood. A pint of blood will buy you two bags of chemical fertilizer. On this little plot, one bag should be enough for a bumper harvest.’
    ‘Of course, farming’s the main thing,’ the bloodhead would say casually. ‘Some people quit farming when they start selling blood, or even abandon their land. Of course, blood always replenishes itself, but a person can only live so long. Even if you live to be a hundred, you can’t keep selling blood past a certain age. But a plot of land like this … you can farm it for a hundred, even a thousand years, and it’ll keep producing great harvests. Blood-selling is different. You can’t do that for hundreds or thousands of years. Am I right?’
    Now they were speaking the same language. Setting his work aside, the farmer would walk to the edge of his field to talk to this friendly stranger, a bloodhead from anothervillage. After chatting for a while, the farmer would impulsively roll up his sleeve and hold out his arm. ‘Tell you what,’ he’d say, ‘seeing as how we’ve hit it off so well, what do you say I sell you a pint?’
    After the farmer had sold another pint of his blood, and the merchant had paid for it, the two would part like old friends.
    Having established this comfortable rapport, the blood merchant would visit often. Every few weeks, he’d arrive at the field with his syringes and tubes, to chat for a while and extract another pint of blood from the farmer’s veins. That was how it worked.
    One day, Li Sanren was out in his field, using a pickaxe to turn the soil in the corners where his plow couldn’t reach. The wheat harvest was over, and it was time to plant the autumn corn. Autumn planting was different from summer planting: it was more of a race against time. If a farmer could manage to get his seed corn into the ground just one day early, it might ripen several days ahead of schedule, allowing him to harvest it before the winds