'Are you going up the Holy Mountain on a pilgrimage?'

The boys smiled. 'The Party will free the Chinese race from the fetters of religion. Soon there will be no more pilgrims.'

'No more pilgrims? So isn't the Holy Mountain going to be holy?'

'Not "holy",' they agreed. 'But still very impressive, for a mountain.' And I knew right then that even though their intentions were true their words were chickens.h.i.t.

When I wintered in the Village that year, distressing news reached me from Leshan. My daughter, her guardian and his wife had fled to Hong Kong, after the communists had ordered their arrests as enemies of the revolution. Everybody knew that n.o.body ever returned from Hong Kong. A tribe of foreign bandits called the British spread lies about Hong Kong being paradise, but the moment anybody arrived there they were put in chains and forced to work in poison gas factories and diamond mines until they died.

That evening my Tree had promised I would see my daughter again. I didn't understand. But I have learned that my Tree tells truths that don't make sense until the light of morning.

The fat girl wore stripey clothes that made her look fatter. She looked at the noodles, steaming and delicious, and looked at me. She slurped up a mouthful, held them in her mouth for a moment, shook her head and spat them onto the table.

'Foul.'

Her witchy friend took a long drag on her cigarette. 'That bad, huh?'

'I wouldn't feed it to a pig.'

'Old woman, don't you have any chocolate?'

Nothing was wrong with my noodles. 'Any what?'

Fat Girl sighed, bent down, scooped up some dirt and sprinkled it onto the noodles. 'That might improve the taste. I'm not paying a yuan for it. I wanted food. Not pigswill.'

Witchy Friend snickered, and looked in her bag. 'I've got cookies somewhere...'

Anger is pointless on the Holy Mountain. I rarely feel it. But when I see food being wasted so wantonly, I feel such rage that I can't control myself.

The noodles and dirt slid down Fat Girl's face. Her skin shone under the grease. Her wet shirt clung to her neck. Her mouth was an 'O' of shock. She gasped like a surfacer, flapped her arms, and fell backwards. Witchy Friend had leapt up and stepped back, flapping her wings.

Fat Girl climbed to her feet, red and heaving. She started charging at me, but changed her mind when she saw I had a pot of boiling water ready to douse her. I would have done, too. She retreated to a safe distance, and yelled. 'I'm going to report you you you you b.i.t.c.h! You wait! Just you wait! My brother-in-law knows an under-secretary at the Party office and I'm going to have your flea-infested Tea Shack BULLDOZED BULLDOZED! With you under it!'

Even when they were out of sight around the bend their threats floated downwards through the trees. 'b.i.t.c.h! Your daughters f.u.c.k donkeys! Your sons are sterile! b.i.t.c.h!'

'I can't abide bad manners,' said my Tree. 'That's why I left the Village.'

'I didn't want to get angry, but she shouldn't have wasted the food!'

'Shall I ask the monkeys to ambush them and remove their hair?'

'That would be a very petty revenge.'

'Then consider it done.'

The time that famine came up the Valley was the worst of all times.

The communists had organised all the farms in the Valley into communes. n.o.body owned the land. There were no landowners any more. The landowners had been hounded into their graves, had donated their land to the people's revolution, or were in the capitalists' prisons with their families.

All the peasants ate in the commune canteen. The food was free! For the first time in history every peasant in the Valley knew he would get a square meal in his stomach at the end of the day. This was the New China, the New Earth.

n.o.body owned the land, so n.o.body made sure it was respected. The offerings to the spirits of the rice paddies were neglected, and at harvest time rice was allowed to rot on the stalk. And it seemed to me that the less the peasants worked, the more they lied about how much they worked. When pilgrim-peasants from different communes in the Valley sat in my Tea Shack and argued agriculture, I watched their stories get taller. Cuc.u.mbers big as pigs, pigs big as cows, cows big as my Tea Shack. Forests of cabbages! You could get lost in them! Apparently Mao Tse Dong Thought had revolutionised production techniques, and was even spreading to the woods. The commune planner had found a mushroom as big as an umbrella on the southern slopes.

Most worrying of all, they believed their own chickens.h.i.t, and attacked anyone who dared used the word 'exaggerate'. I was just a woman growing old on a Holy Mountain, but no radish of mine got bigger.

That winter, the Village was bleaker, muddier, madder than I ever knew it.

I lived with my cousin's family. Rice farmers for generations, I asked my cousin's husband, why had they all become so lazy? The men got drunk most evenings, and didn't stir from their beds until the middle of the next morning. Of course, the women ended up doing most of the things the men were too hungover to manage.

It was all wrong. Bad spirits sat with the crows on the rooftops, incubating ill-intent. In the streets, alleyways, and the market square, n.o.body was walking. Days pa.s.sed without a kind word. The main monastery in the Village had been closed. I wandered through it sometimes, through its moon gates and ponds choked with duckweed. It reminded me of somewhere else. The Village was suffering from a plague that n.o.body had noticed.

I went to speak to the village elders. 'What are you going to eat next winter?'

'The fruits of Mother China!'

'You're not growing anything.'

'You don't understand. You haven't seen the changes.'

'I'm seeing them now. It's not tallying up-'

'China will provide for her sons. Mao Tse Dong will provide!'

'When things don't tally up, it's the peasants who pay! However clever this Mao's thoughts are, they don't fill bellies.'

'Woman, if the communists hear you talk that way, you'll be sent away for re-education. Go back up your mountain if you don't like it here. We're playing mah jong.'

That same winter Mao decreed his Great Leap Forward. New China faced a new crisis: a shortage of steel. Steel for bridges, steel for ploughshares, steel for bullets to keep the Russians invading from Mongolia. And so all the communes were issued with furnaces and a quota.

n.o.body in the Village knew what to do with a kiln the blacksmith had been hanged from his roof as a capitalist but everyone knew what happened to you if the kiln went out on your watch. My cousins, nieces and nephews now had to work scavenging for wood. The school was closed, and the teachers and students mobilised into firewood crews to keep the kilns fed. Were my nephews to grow up with empty heads? Who would teach them to write? When the supply of desks and planking was used up, virgin forests at the foot of the Holy Mountain were chopped. Healthy trees! News came up the Valley, where trees were scarcer, that the communists organised lotteries amongst the non-Party villagers. The 'winners' had their houses dismantled and burned to keep the furnaces fed.

The steel was useless. The black, brittle ingots came to be called 't.u.r.ds', but at least you can use t.u.r.ds for something. Every week the women loaded them onto the truck from the city, wondering why the Party wasn't sending soldiers to the Village to mete out punishment.

We discovered the answer by late winter, when the rumours of food shortages travelled up the Valley.

The first reaction amongst the men was typical. They didn't want to believe it was true, so they didn't.

When the village rice warehouse stood empty, they started to believe it. Still, Mao would send the trucks. He might even lead the convoy personally.

The Party officials said the convoy had been hijacked down the Valley by counter-revolutionary spies, and that more rice would be on its way very soon. In the meantime, we would have to tighten our belts. Peasants from the surrounding countryside started arriving in the Village to beg. They were as scrawny as chickens' feet. Goats disappeared, then dogs, then people started bolting their gates from dusk until dawn. By the time the snows were melting, all the seed for the next year's harvest had been eaten. New seed would be coming very soon, promised the Party Officials.

'Very soon' still hadn't arrived when I set off back up the path to my Tea Shack, four weeks earlier than my usual departure. It would still be bitterly cold at night, but I knew Lord Buddha and my Tree would look after me. There would be birds' eggs, roots, nuts. I could snare birds and rabbits. I'd survive.

Once or twice I thought of my father. He wouldn't survive another year, even down in the comfort of the Village, and we both knew it. 'Goodbye,' I'd said, across my cousin's back room. He never stirred from the bed except to s.h.i.t and p.i.s.s.

His skin had less life in it than a husk in a spider's web. Sometimes his lidded eyes closed, and his cigarette shortened. Was anything under those lids? Remorse, resentment, even indifference? Or was there only nothing? Nothing often poses in men as wisdom.

Spring came late, winter dripping off the twigs and buds, but no pilgrims walked out of the mist. A mountain cat liked to stretch herself out on a branch of my Tree, and guard the path. Swallows built a nest under my eaves: a good omen. An occasional monk pa.s.sed by. Glad of the company, I invited them into my Tea Shack. They said that my stews of roots and pigeon meat were the best thing they had eaten for weeks.

'Whole families are dying now. People are eating hay, leather, bits of cloth. Anything to fill their bellies. When they die, there's n.o.body left to bury them, or perform the funeral rites, so they can't go to heaven, or even be reborn.'

When I opened my shutters one morning the roof of the forest was bright and hushed with blossom. The Holy Mountain didn't care about the stupid world of men. A monk called that day. His skin wrapped his hungry face tightly. 'According to Mao's latest decree, the new enemies of the proletariat are sparrows, because they devour China's seeds. All the children have to chase the birds with clanging things until the birds drop out of the sky from exhaustion. The problem is, nothing's eating the insects, so the Village is overrun by crickets and caterpillars and bluebottles. There are locust clouds in Sichuan. This is what happens when men play at G.o.ds and do away with sparrows.'

The days lengthened, the year swung around the hot sun and deep skies. Near the cave I found a source of wild honey.

'Your family are surviving,' a monk from the Village told me, 'but only because of money sent by your daughter's people in Hong Kong. A husband was found for your daughter after New Year. He works in a restaurant near the harbour. And, a baby is already coming. You are to become a grandmother.'

My heart swelled. My family had done nothing but heap shame onto my daughter since her birth, and now she was saving their skins.

Autumn breathed dying colours into the shabby greens. I prepared firewood, nuts, dried sweet potatoes and berries and fruit, stored up jars of wild rice, and strengthened my Tea Shack against blizzards, patching together clothes made of rabbit fur. When I went foraging, I carried a bell to warn away the bears. I had decided in the summer that I was going to winter on the mountain. I sent word down to my village cousins. They didn't try to persuade me. When the first snows fell, I was ready.

The Tea Shack creaked under the weight of icicles.

A family of deer moved into the glade near by.

I was no longer a young woman. My bones would ache, my breath would freeze. And when the deep midwinter snows came, I would be trapped in my Tea Shack for days on end with n.o.body except Lord Buddha for company. But I was going to live through this winter to see the icicles melt in the sun, and to kiss my daughter.

When I saw my first foreigner, I didn't know what to feel! He I guessed it was a he loomed big as an ogre, and his hair was yellow! Yellow as healthy p.i.s.s! He was with a Chinese guide, and after a minute I realised that he was speaking in real language! My nephews and nieces had been taught about foreigners in the new village school. They had enslaved our people for hundreds of years until the communists, under the leadership of Mao Tse Dong, had freed us. They still enslave their own kind, and are always fighting each other. They believe evil is good. They eat their own babies and love the taste of s.h.i.t, and only wash every two months. Their language sounds like farting pigs. They rut each other on impulse, like dogs and b.i.t.c.hes in season, even in alleyways.

Yet here was a real, living foreign devil, talking in real Chinese with a real Chinese man. He even complimented my green tea on its freshness. I was too astonished to reply. After a few minutes my curiosity overcame my natural revulsion. 'Are you from this world? My nephew told me there are many different places outside China.'

He smiled, and unfolded a beautiful picture. 'This,' he said, 'is a map of the world.' I'd never seen such a thing.

I looked in the middle for the Holy Mountain. 'Where is it?' I asked him.

'Here. This is where we are now. The mountain is here.'

'I can't even see it.'

'It's too small.'

'Impossible!'

He shrugged, just like real people shrug. He was good at mimicry. 'This is China, you can see that, right?'

'Yes,' I said dubiously, 'but it still doesn't look big enough. I think someone sold you a broken map.'

His guide laughed, but I don't think being ripped off is anything to laugh about. 'And this is the country I'm from. A place called "Italia".'

Italia. I tried to say this place, but my mouth couldn't form such absurd sounds so I gave up. 'Your country looks like a boot.' He nodded, agreeing. He said that he came from the heel. It was all too strange. His guide asked me to prepare some food. I tried to say this place, but my mouth couldn't form such absurd sounds so I gave up. 'Your country looks like a boot.' He nodded, agreeing. He said that he came from the heel. It was all too strange. His guide asked me to prepare some food.

While I was cooking the foreign devil and his guide carried on speaking. Here was another shock they seemed to be friends! The way they were sharing their food and tea... How could a real person possibly be friends with a foreign devil? But they seemed to be. Maybe he was hoping to rob the devil when he was sleeping. That would make sense.

'So how come you never talk about the Cultural Revolution?' the devil was saying. 'Are you afraid of police retaliation? Or do you have wind of an official revision of history proving that the Cultural Revolution never actually happened?'

'Neither,' said the guide. 'I don't discuss it because it was too evil.'

My Tree had been nervous for weeks, but I hadn't known why. A comet was in the north-east, and I dreamed of hogs digging in the roof of my Tea Shack. The mist rolled down the Holy Mountain, and stayed for days. Dark owls hooted through the daylight hours. Then the Red Guard appeared.

Twenty or thirty of them. Three quarters were boys, few of whom had started shaving. They wore red arm bands, and marched up the path, carrying clubs and home-made weapons. I didn't need Lord Buddha to tell me they were bringing trouble. They chanted as they marched near.

'What can be smashed-' chanted half...

'Must be smashed!' answered the other. Over and over.

I recognised the leader, from the winter before the Great Famine. He was a dunce at school, who rarely moved a muscle except to do occasional bricklaying work. Now he swaggered up to my Tea Shack like the Lord of Creation. 'We are the Red Guard! We are here in the name of the Revolutionary Committee!' He yelled as if hoping to knock me over by the power of volume.

'I know exactly who you are, Brain.' 'Brain' was his Village nickname, because he didn't have any. 'When you were a little boy your mother used to bring you to my cousin's house. I cleaned your a.r.s.e when you shat yourself.'

I thought these children were like bears: if you show fear they attack. If you act as if they're not really there, they carry on up the path.

Brain slapped me across my face!

It stung, my eyes watered, and my nose felt caved-in, but it wasn't the pain that shocked me it was the thought of an elder being slapped by a youth! It ran against the laws of nature!

'Don't call me that again,' he said, casually. 'I really don't like it.' He turned round. 'Lieutenants! Find the h.o.a.rd that this capitalist roader has leeched out of the ma.s.ses! Start looking in the upstairs room. Mind you search thoroughly! She's a devious old leech!'

'What?' I touched my nose and my fingers came away scarlet.

Boots thumped up the stairs. Banging, ripping, laughing, smashing, spintering.

'Help yourself,' Brain told the other Red Guards, pointing to my kitchen. 'This saggy corpse stole it from you in the first place, remember. Destroy that religious relic first, though. Smash it to atoms!'

'You'll do nothing of the sort-'

Another blow felled me, and Brain stood on my face, pushing my head down into the mud. He stamped on my windpipe. I thought he was trying to kill me. I could feel the imprint of his boot. 'Just you wait until I tell your mother and father about this.' I barely recognised my voice, it sounded so strangled and weak.

Brain tossed his head back and barked a short laugh. 'You're going to report me to my mummy and daddy? I'm p.i.s.sing my pants at the prospect. Let me tell you what Mao says about your parents: "Your mother may love you, your father may love you, but Chairman Mao loves you more!"'

I heard Lord Buddha being smashed.

'You're going to be in trouble when the real communists hear about this!'

'Those revisionists are being liquidated. The Village Party Females have been found guilty of whoring with a Trotskyite splinter group.' He dug his big toe into my navel, and looked down at me from the dimness. A spoonful of saliva splashed onto the bridge of my nose. 'Whoring, a subject you're no stranger to, I've heard.'

I was still strong enough to feel anger. 'What do you mean?'

'Spreading your thighs for that feudalist! The Warlord's Son! Runs in the family, no doubt! We know all about your mongrel whelp sucking the imperialists' c.o.c.ks in Hong Kong! Conspiring to overthrow our glorious revolution! Don't look so shocked! The villagers were falling over each other to denounce cla.s.s traitors! Don't tell me you've forgotten how good it felt to have a man up you!' He bent down to whisper in my ear. 'Maybe you need a little reminder?' He squeezed my breast. 'That hairy pouch between your legs still has a splash of oil in it, has it? Maybe-'

'We found her money, General!'

That probably saved me. The Red Guard certainly wouldn't. He stood up again, and opened my strongbox. In the background the destruction of my Tea Shack was continuing. The youths were stripping my Tea Shack of food like locusts.

'I'm appropriating your stolen goods in the name of the People's Republic of China. Do you wish to lodge an appeal with the People's Revolutionary Tribunal?'