Gradually the night grew darker, throwing in sharp relief the bright scarlet clouds above the snow covered the peak of Mt Awutapi to the northwest of the village. But down below in the valley where the village lay, night rose from the ground upwards like water, so that only the faces of those who were looking up at the sky were still illuminated by the light of the distant sunset; their bodies were sunk in darkness. The men were still passing the bowl around the circle, but the pungent, stinging liquid it contained was unable to stave off the cold that rose through the air together with the darkness. The talk turned back to ghosts. Ghosts have no physical shape, or at least, no human had ever seen the shape of a ghost, but this fact did nothing to dispel the clear sensation, shared by every man drinking in the square that night, that they were in the presence of ghosts. And while the ghosts had no visible shape, they did have claws, icy claws that slowly eased up the backs of each and every man there.
Yang Mazi poured the last of the month's wine into the bowl, before noisily pulling down the shutters over the window of the Supply and Marketing Cooperative. Having closed the shop, the men watched as he walked into the distance, and listened to the bunch of keys that jangled in his hands.
Zhang Lobsang spat a violent gob of saliva on the ground, and said:
"Time to go home everyone, there's no more wine. Fuck, it's cold. No amount of wine's going to be good against that."
The men all felt unusually heavy and weighed down, like logs that have been soaked in water for a long time. One by one, they found the energy to heave their corpses up off the ground and walk, slightly unsteadily, towards home, but not without stealing a quick glance at the crimson clouds behind snowy mount Awutapi that were at that moment burning out into blackness—ritualistic glancing at the mountain was a force of habit for the villagers.
Enbo was still lying prone on the ground—Zhang Lobsang nudged him with his foot, saying: "Get up, kid, time to go home."
But Enbo slept on, oblivious and heavily unconscious. Observing the state of the other man, Zhang Lobsang muttered:
"Fuck, must be some kind of fucking blessing to be able to get this drunk off a few sips of wine."
Zhang Lobsang still had more to say, but then he saw that the crowd was already dispersing. He figured there was no point carrying on if there was no one to listen, so he left to wend his own unsteady way back home.
Enbo, meanwhile, slept on, heavily and undisturbed, wrapped up under a blanket of dust and dirt.
Six
It was just before midnight when Enbo finally came home. It was about the same time his family began to worry about him.
Hearing the courtyard gate swing open, Grandma Er Chiang sighed in the direction of her daughter-in-law:
"Looks like the drunk man is back. Goodness, what a life for us women, first it's waiting for our husbands to come home, then it's our sons, and if we live to be really old, we get to wait for our grandsons to come home."
Bunny, who was nesting in his grandma's lap, poked his head out and cheeped:
"No! I'll never drink, I'll never make my grandma and my mummy and my wife wait for me at home!"
Er Chiang ran loving fingers through the little boy's hair:
"Oh, you're such a good boy, but the only way you'll never drink is if you never grow up; as long as you grow to be a man, you can't escape drinking; that is part of what it means to be a man."
"Oh mother, you shouldn't talk that way to children."
Right on the heels of Ler Kymcog's admonishment, the drunken man in question began dragging his heavy feet up the stairs, but his imminent arrival didn't prevent Er Chiang from having the last word:
"Don't, don't chide me like that; men have their lot, just the same as us poor women have our lot. And mark my words, those men; they're just as much to be pitied as we are."
At that moment a short, audible groan came from the mouth of Jamcan Gonbo, who until then had been thumbing his prayer beads and ignoring the women's conversation. His eyelids had been sagging, but now they snapped open; everyone followed his gaze to the entrance of the room.
The sight that met them there was Enbo's face, soiled with dirt and bits of his own vomit, though the muck did nothing to conceal the pallor and downright terror that lay underneath. Enbo staggered over to the fireside, trailing a current of cold air behind him.
Within a second, his wife's face was whiter than his:
"Darling, what terrible thing has happened to you?"
"I'm sorry, uncle, I really do believe in Buddha, and I know better than to believe in ghosts, but tonight, I saw a ghost. I have no doubt in my mind."
"Oh, Enbo" , Jamcan Gonbo groaned again.
"Believe me, I really did see a ghost."
"What did you see?"
"Gela left … he left with his retard mother to become a vagrant."
"Child, everyone has their fate; maybe theirs is to be vagrants."
"But," Enbo flung up his hands to cover his face, tears flooding between his fingers, "but, they have no food, no warm clothes, and I'm sure they've had dogs set on them by unfriendly villages, and children following them and heckling them, throwing stones at them; they have no travel permits, so they don't even have the right to be vagrants; they're already dead, I know it, they died on the road. Their ghosts had nowhere to go, except Ji village; that's why they've come back!"
"They … are you saying that Gela and Sangdan have really come back?"
"Yes, they've come back, or … their ghosts have come back!"
"What do Gela and Sangdan's ghosts look like? Are their faces full of resentment?"
"Dear uncle, forgive me, I didn't see."
"Well then, what did you see?"
"I saw fire."
"Fire?"
