Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  “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 reeducation. 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 stop the Russians invading from Mongolia. And so all the communes were issued with furnaces and a quota.

  Nobody 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 mobilized 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 organized 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 “turds,” but at least you can use real turds for manure. Every week the women loaded the ingots 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 rumors of food shortages traveled up the Valley.

  The first reaction among 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 counterrevolutionary 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. “Good-bye,” I’d said, across my cousin’s back room. He never stirred from the bed except to shit and piss.

  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 passed 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 nobody 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 gods 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 harbor. 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 colors 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 nearby.

  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 nobody 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 piss! He was with a Chinese guide, and after a minute I realized 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 shit, and only wash every two months. Their language sounds like farting pigs. They rut each other on impulse, like dogs and bitches 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 fro
m. 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.

  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 northeast, 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 homemade 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 recognized 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 ass 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 around. “Lieutenants! Find the hoard that this capitalist roader has leeched out of the masses! 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, splintering.

  “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 recognized 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 mommy and daddy? I’m pissing 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’ cocks in Hong Kong! Conspiring to overthrow our glorious revolution! Don’t look so shocked! The villagers were falling over each other to denounce class 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?”

  He knelt on my shoulder blades and peered into my face. My face was still pressed sidewards into the dirt, but I stared straight back. I could see right up his nose.

  “I’ll take that as a no. And what is this? Speak of the devil? Your suckling runt, unless I’m very much mistaken.” He twirled the photograph of my daughter between finger and thumb. Brain clicked open his lighter and watched for my reaction as he fed a corner to the flame. Not my daughter! The lily in her hair! Grief was rattling in me, but I suffered in silence. I wasn’t going to give Brain the pleasure of a single tear. He flicked my blackening treasure away before it burnt his fingers.

  “We’re all done here, General,” a girl said. A girl!

  Brain freed my windpipe at last. “Yeah. We should be pushing on. There are more dangerous enemies of the revolution than this abomination higher up the mountain.”

  I leaned against my Tree and looked at the wreckage of my Tea Shack.

  “The world’s gone mad,” I said. “Again.”

  “And it will right itself,” said my Tree. “Again. Don’t grieve too much. It was only a photograph. You will see her before you die.”

  Something in the wreckage gave way, and the roof thumped down.

  “I live here quietly, minding my own business. I don’t bother anybody. Why are men forever marching up the path to destroy my Tea Shack? Why do events have this life of their own?”

  “That,” answered my Tree, “is a very good question.”

  • • •

  I was one of the lucky ones. The following day I went down the path to the Village to borrow supplies. The monastery had been looted and smashed, and many of the monks shot where they knelt in the meditation hall. In the courtyard of the moon gate I saw a hundred monks kneeling around a bonfire. They were burning the scrolls from the library, stored since the days Lord Buddha and his disciples wandered the Valley. The monks’ ankles were tied to their stretched-back heads. They were shouting “Long Live Mao Tse Dong Thought! Long Live Mao Tse Dong Thought!” over and over. Gangs of Red Guard patrolled the rows, and stoned any monk who flagged. Outside the school the teachers were tied to the camphor tree. Around their necks hung signs: THE MORE BOOKS YOU READ, THE MORE STUPID YOU BECOME.

  Posters of Mao were everywhere. I counted fifty before I gave up counting.

  My cousin was in her kitchen. Her face was as blank as the wall.

  “What happened to your tapestries?”

  “Tapestries are dangerous and bourgeois. I had to burn them in the front yard before the neighbors denounced me.”

  “Why is everybody carrying a red book around with them? Is it to ward off evil?”

/>   “It’s Mao’s red book. Everyone has to own one. It’s the law.”

  “How could one bald lard-blob control all of China like this?

  It’s—”

  “Don’t let anyone hear you say such things! They’ll stone you! Sit down, Cousin. I suppose the Red Guard dropped by on their way up to burn the temples at the summit? You must drink some rice wine. Here you are. One cup. Drink it all down, now. I’ve got some bad news. Your remaining relatives in Leshan have gone.”

  “Where? To Hong Kong?”

  “To Correction Camps. Your daughter’s presents aroused their neighbors’ envy. The whole household has been denounced as class traitors.”

  “What’s a Correction Camp? Do people survive?”

  My cousin sighed and waved her hands. “Nobody knows …” No more words.

  Three sharp knocks and my cousin cringed like a mantrap had snapped on her gut.

  “It’s only me, Mother!”

  My cousin lifted the latch, and my nephew came in, nodding a greeting at me. “I came back from a Self-Criticism Meeting in the marketplace. The cow farmer got denounced by the butcher.”

  “What for?”

  “Who cares? Any crap will do! Truth is, the butcher owed him money. This is a handy way to wipe clean the slate. That’s nothing, though. Three villages down the Valley a tinker got his knob cut off, just because his grandfather served with the Kuomintang against the Japanese.”

  “I thought the communists fought alongside the Kuomintang against the Japanese?”

  “That’s true. But the tinker’s grandfather chose the wrong uniform. Chop! And outside Leshan, there’s a village where a pig roast was held two days ago.”

  “So?” said my cousin.

  My nephew swallowed. “They haven’t had pigs there since the famine.”

  “So?” I croaked.

  “Three days ago the commune committee was shot for embezzling the people’s butter cream. Guess what—guess who—they put in the pot.… Attendance at the pig roast was compulsory on pain of execution, so everyone shares in the guilt. Pot or shot.”

  “It must be quiet down in hell,” I thought aloud. “All the demons have come to the Holy Mountain. Is it the comet, do you think? Could it be bathing the world in evil?”