Let me tell you something. That winter when I was nineteen, working in the countryside in Northeast China, I was pulled by an old crazy man and he talked about his woman all night long. Not his wife. A Japanese woman.

He was surnamed Bu, we all called him Bu Crazy. Originally, he was a horse feeder on our farm, had worked as a laborer in the old Manchukuo during the development group. Usually no one paid attention to him, thought he was dirty, called him a traitor. He never argued back, squatting outside the horse shed, rubbing his hands with snow until they turned red. Only I and he worked shifts together because he taught me how to chop hay. That day, it was below minus thirty degrees, and in the adobe house, it was just the two of us, the stove was out, and wind was pouring in through the cracks in the wall. In the dark, he suddenly asked me, kid, how old are you? I said nineteen. He was silent for a moment, then said, nineteen, a good age. Then he started talking.
He said that when he was nineteen, he was feeding horses at Feng Tian for a Japanese officer’s family. They had a daughter, three years older than him. In winter, his hands were full of frostbite, and that girl secretly slipped him a box of horse oil. He said he was reluctant to use that box of horse oil, kept it in his chest pocket, frozen hard, and at night, he would stick it to his chest. Later, one night, that girl called him into the barn, snow falling outside, straw piled inside. She said she was going back to Japan, might not come back again. Then she unbuttoned her cotton-padded coat.
When he reached this part, he sat up from the kang, crossed his legs, his eyes shining in the darkness. He said that the barn was filled with the smell of straw and horse manure, and he blew out the kerosene lamp because she said she didn’t want him to see her face. He said that was the only time in his life he touched a woman. The next day, she was taken away by military truck, and he stood in the horse shed all morning. Clutching that box of horse oil, but he didn’t give it to anyone.
He spoke very slowly, every detail remembered clearly. He described the pattern on that girl’s coat, the old saddle in the corner of the barn, the two tire tracks left in the snow when she left. I sat on the edge of the kang, my feet numb from the cold. Those things he talked about, I had never experienced, but I listened intently. It wasn’t excitement, but like being pressed into a deep well. A crazy man used his softest piece of himself to burn through a nineteen-year-old kid’s winter.
Later, as dawn approached, he suddenly stopped. Got up, walked to the door, pushed it open a crack, and cold wind poured in. He turned his back to me and said, kid, what I told you today, keep it in your stomach. I won’t be here tomorrow. The next morning, he was really gone. His bedding was rolled up, the cleaver was shining brightly, and on the wall, two crooked words were written in chalk: Gone.
I heard from the old folks on the farm that he was taken to