The next night, she came back to the haystack. The boy had turned the hollow into a nesting cave, and he told the girl they had nothing to be afraid of, not even if it rained or the wind turned cold.
The third night, the boy was startled awake by some noise. When he peeped out the window of his house, he saw all the men in the village circling it, holding up hoes and pickaxes. He fled out the back window and found all the streets and alleyways full of people. Sixty or seventy dogs were barking at the same time. He could hide himself only in the hollow he’d made. The villagers stuck pitchforks into every haystack.
Afterward, they lit them all on fire. The boy from the city didn’t come out.
The villagers said he’d seduced six or seven girls in their early teens. In order to protect their reputations, they were never named. These girls had been too greedy, the townspeople said. They’d gone into the haystack with him for a paltry piece of candy. The eleven-year-old girl thought what had happened between him and her was more than just a piece of candy. He’d never offered her anything in return for those kisses and caresses. By the time he was pulled out from the smoldering ashes, the pale-faced student had become a human-shaped lump of charcoal. Only the harmonica had survived intact.
His descriptions of foreign countries now seemed completely wrong. But this was what the little girl had aspired to as she grew up. From the age of eleven, she had known for sure that she would travel farther than any other woman from their village—farther than those girls who’d ended up working in cotton mills in Shanghai or Nanjing, farther than the women who’d left with the land reform brigades in the fifties, farther than those who’d gotten into Tongji University in the sixties. She was the only female student for hundreds of miles around, in thousands of years, to get a place in the Military Academy of Foreign Languages. She was sixteen years old, the youngest candidate.
That girl was Hongmei.
Before meeting in person, Hongmei wanted to tell the secret talker her deepest secrets so this relationship could be built with the highest degree of honesty. Their beginning would be different, no longer full of beautiful misunderstandings or lies. She had told him this and wanted him to see what sort of creature she was, always giving in to emotion. The longings of her heart and flesh were more important to her than truth or falsehood, love or hate. She finally felt free.