These terrible words stunned the adults. The rumour said that Bunny then stood up, reached out a hand to his father, and said: "Come with me for a second."
His father stood up obediently.
"Come downstairs with me for a second, there's something I want to say to big brother Gela's mama."
Enbo went downstairs, leading Bunny by the hand.
Bunny leaned against the doorframe, the same white bandage from the hospital at Shuajingsi still wrapped around his neck, and smiled faintly at Sangdan.
Sangdan fell to her knees with a thud.
"You're ok … you're ok, that's good. That's all I …"
"Mrs Gela's mama, go back home, tell big brother Gela I know it wasn't him who my blood come out. I mean, he should know already that I would never believe it was him."
"But … my son is going to die," Sangdan replied.
"No, he won't. I swore an oath, so he won't die, because he isn't the person who hurt me. When my wound heals, we'll play together again. I love him."
Sangdan was so moved that there were no intervals between her tears; they flowed down her face in rivers. She squeezed Bunny in her arms and landed a volley of fierce kisses on his head. After a while, Bunny said, very calmly: "Mrs Gela's mama, you should go back home."
Enbo said his piece, too: "It's not that we were trying to be heartless, it's just that everyone was saying it, so what choice did we have? They wouldn't let us ignore it! Anyway, the child is right, you should go home, and don't worry."
Sangdan pulled herself to her feet. She went home and told Gela what had happened, taking care to repeat Bunny and Enbo's words exactly. Gela heaved a long sigh, and fell into a peaceful sleep. His fever slowly began to retreat.
As for the rest of the village, they thought these rumours added a bit of extra flavour to the New Year celebrations. In the past, the New Year was celebrated with traditional singing and dancing and a fair at the temple, but those things belonged to the Old Society, which the authorities said had to disappear, along with the Old Society itself. And it was just as the authorities said—the old things fell apart. As a result, New Year had become a purely material affair in the New Society; when the first bus came, shortly before the New Year, it brought a quarter litre of grain wine for each person in the village, as well as a half kilogram of peanuts per person, and fifty lollipops per person. This delivery accounted for one hundred percent of the holiday cheer allotted to each person in the new, material New Year celebrations. Of course, that's not including the joy brought by the rumours that sprang up around the issue of who injured little Bunny, and the many interpretations and offshoots of each of these rumours. On the surface, Ji village seemed as dead as ever, but secretly, the villagers gained a good amount of excitement from the whole affair.
On the seventh day of the New Year, Gela was just about well enough to make his way out of the house, though he had to lean on the wall for support as he walked. He slumped feebly down on the sheep skin rug, his eyelids heavy. A few curious people walked by in front of him, but he was so weak he couldn't even open his eyes fully to return their stares.
Another rumour was started on that day. According to the new rumour, Gela was recovering not thanks to being forgiven by Enbo's family, nor because of Bunny's oath. The new rumour said a mysterious man sneaked into Gela and Sangdan's house at midnight sometime after Gela got sick. The man brought with him some opium paste. Opium, by the way, had vanished from those parts long ago. The man dissolved some of the paste in water, which he poured down Gela's throat. Apparently, Gela's heart, and his raging fever, immediately began to calm down. Using opium like this used to be a common cure for minor sickness in Ji village; it had been very effective.
No one who believed this rumour was in any doubt that the man was Gela's father. But who was he, exactly? This was the question on everyone's lips.
Here was truly an excellent rumour; it piqued the villagers' curiosity and took their excitement to the next level. But no one was satisfied with the answers people gave to the question it asked. People said that even Sangdan didn't know the identity of her son's father. They said that the men who frequented her bed were too many, and she was too stupid anyway to keep track of which one came when. More importantly, they said, her visitors always came under cover of night, with no torch or lamp, so Sangdan wouldn't even have been able to see their faces.
After the seventh day of the New Year, it was time for the villagers to go back to work. In the past, there wasn't any work to be done in winter, but the authorities had decided to have the forest on the south slope of the mountain behind the village cut down, so that more land could be opened up for cultivation. So now the villagers had work they could do in the winter, too. The men worked on chopping down the trees, while the women gathered up the fallen wood into piles which they then set on fire. Once spring arrived and melted the frozen earth where the forest once stood, the villagers ploughed the new land ready for planting. But it was still winter for now. The village's gang of wild kids: Aga, the Wangtie brothers, Jimi Harelip, and the newly renamed Yangtze, found a good number of bird nests among the piles of dead wood, many of which were the size of a basketball, or even larger. They turned the nests upside down and put them on their heads, running around making spooky noises and pretending to be ghosts.
The village returned to its usual calm.
Apart from the sound of axes from the mountain slope, and the monstrous noise of huge, thousand-year-old trees falling to the ground, there were no other noises in the village. The sun poured down its light in torrents, bringing some thin warmth to the winter days.
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