by Justin Hill
‘Paying you well are they?’ he asked.
‘Hmm,’ the boy said.
‘When I was your age I was in the army. Fought against the Japanese I did. And then against the Guomindang. And then we built this country up.’
The boy shivered and rubbed his hands that were blue and white, and chapped with blotches of red.
‘Enough handfuls of earth, and you have built a mountain!’ Old Zhu exclaimed from the past, and then it occurred to him that this boy was being paid to tear his mountain down. He grinned for a moment, a grin that felt heavy and awkward on his face, then said ‘Good work’ and walked on.
Old Zhu tried walking down to the river. There had been a time when you could count the stones through the crystal-clear water, but now the water was black and sickly, sheets of algae matting the shore where ice plates of frost started out to cross the river. The inky water reflected the factory, trees lapped the bank, rainbows spread on oily patches. A gust of wind blew holes in the reflections. Old Zhu watched the rainbows dance for a moment and decided it was time to go and collect the ashes of Party Secretary Li.
Old Zhu cycled, and regretted it as soon as he’d set off. The streets were so noisy and chaotic, so many people, so many cars and motorbikes, so many bicycles and crazy cyclists, so many hawkers jostling the pavements and spilling out into the road, so many people and peasants and thoughts in his head where there wasn’t enough room for them all. The snow had melted to black slush that splattered and sprayed up from car wheels. It was a long way. And uphill too.
Old Zhu pedalled slowly and the joints of his bicycle creaked in protest as the chain ground its arthritic way round and round. It took him nearly an hour to navigate his way back to Number 4 Incinerator, where other funeral processions were washing up bodies like flotsam, and then washing away again. He pushed his bike through the crowds and noise, the tyres drawing straight lines across the fallen wreaths that were being trampled into the snow. The colours ran and mingled, making patches of blue and pink and indistinct brown, all criss-crossed with footprints and cycle tracks. He looked back but couldn’t trace which way he’d come, just knew that he was there.
Old Zhu rested the bike against the wall, and it leaned heavily. The lock was rusted shut, so he let it be and went inside. No one would steal it, surely.
Inside the Number 4 Incinerator Office there was a confused queue of people trying to get in and get out all at the same time. The wintry weather had frightened everyone, they were in a rush to get home and hibernate. Hands and shouting mouths loomed all around, the air was filled with curses and names and was humid with the grief and desperation of so many people. Old Zhu felt fear spread from his gut like warm tea; he clutched inside his pocket and found the ticket, and with head low he slowly pushed through to the front, ticket clasped in his hand.
The counter was besieged by a tight army of desperate relatives and friends who fought off intruders with elbows and fists. Old Zhu tried to force his way in three times and failed each time. He had reached the end of his endurance when a yellow-skinned girl with gloves knitted in every colour of the imagination took his hand and gave him her place. He was so grateful he forgot to thank her, forgot all about her until well after the event. He pushed into her niche and enlarged it, then pulled himself forward and held up his ticket for inspection.
‘I’ve come for Party Secretary Li,’ he called out but the attendants took no notice.
‘I’ve come for Party Secretary Li,’ he said again, waving the ticket. People were trying to push past him and he elbowed them back. He felt he was trying to ride the waves, and that they were crushing him instead. An old grey-haired woman with sinews of steel embedded herself into the front row. He was using his elbows to shove her back, without success, when he felt the ticket being snatched from his fingers.
‘Name?’ the attendant snapped.
‘Zhu Zhonghua,’ he said quickly.
‘ID card.’
He produced it.
‘Receipt?’
He panicked and felt inside his jacket pocket, found it and held it up. The man took it. ‘Number eighty-seven!’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Next.’
Party Secretary Li came out of Number 4 Incinerator in Old Zhu’s arms, carried carefully in a brown cardboard box that rattled. The rattling had startled Old Zhu.
‘There’s no ghost in there,’ the attendant had shouted so everyone could hear. ‘It’s just bones!’
Everyone had turned to laugh, but they had stepped away from him as well and Old Zhu had taken the box, rattles and all.
Just bones.
Old Zhu tied the box to the back of his bicycle, and Party Secretary Li took his last ride down the long hill between here and the Number Two Space Rocket Factory. Old Zhu didn’t need to pedal going back, but kept his hands pressed down on the brakes that squeaked and grated as the wheels spun round. His white hair flew back in the wind, and he felt quite exhilarated for a moment as he swept down on the world like a rush of wind. Exhilaration for a moment long enough to remember a tune from the early years after liberation, and hum it along. He hummed and sang odd words about green hills and workers’ solidarity and their new socialist paradise, and the wheels spun round and round and the bones rattled for the joy of cycling down hill, and a snow storm of white dust raged inside the box.
Old Zhu cycled through the factory gates, and parked his bike next to the staircase that went up to Party Secretary Li’s flat. He took the box in his arms and trudged up the stairs, then knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder this time. Silence.
‘Autumn Cloud!’ he shouted, and banged again.
Nothing.
Old Zhu checked the floor number, and checked the door. It all fitted. This must be the right flat. He tried again, but still nothing.
Old Zhu looked at the door and shook his head. One more knock.
Nothing.
He tried knocking on the neighbour’s door opposite, and a voice shouted from inside.
‘Who is it?’
‘Old Zhu!’
The door was opened a crack and a face peered out.
‘That’s the flat of Party Secretary Li isn’t it,’ he said, pointing behind him.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where Autumn Cloud is?’
‘She’s gone away.’
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know. Gone to stay with relatives. She’s got a child who works in the country.’
‘She’s gone away?’
‘Yes.’
But I’ve got her husband here in the box, Old Zhu thought; but said, ‘Ah–thank you.’
The door closed.
Old Zhu stood between the two closed doors and wondered which way to go. It was a strange position to be in–with the bones of a man whose wife has gone off to the country. In the end he went down, carrying Party Secretary Li in his arms. He took the box back to his flat and put it on the table, made himself a cup of tea and sat down, exhausted. When his wife came back she was just about to ask him how it went when she saw the brown cardboard box on the table. ‘What have you bought?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing.’
She took one step forwards. ‘What’s this then?’
‘It’s the ashes.’
She gave him a dangerous look, ‘Ashes of what?’
‘Party Secretary Li.’
She screamed. ‘Aya! What’s he doing on my table? Get him out of here. You can’t bring dead bodies in here! What luck will it bring us?’
They argued and shouted, just to fill the flat with noise. The box was picked up and put down, shouted at and shouted about. It was thrown onto the balcony and brought back inside. At last they reached an impasse.
‘I’ll go back to my parents’ house if you keep that box!’ Old Zhu’s wife threatened.
‘Your parents are dead!’ Old Zhu shouted in exasperation, red-faced and breathless.
His wife didn’t answer. They stood and stared a
t each other, then she bit her lip and turned and walked into the kitchen. She picked up the chop and slammed it down onto the chopping board. It quivered. She hit the pot against the wall, kicked the gas stove, and considered smashing a plate. Old Zhu let her rail and carried the box into the bedroom. It wouldn’t fit under the bed, so he opened the wardrobe and slid it in at the bottom; put a pair of shoes on top of it, made it look as if it belonged.
That night his wife insisted she couldn’t sleep with a dead man in her wardrobe, but she did. It was Old Zhu who couldn’t sleep. He thought of everything that had happened, and thought of their son who had left home to work in the Special Economic Zones. He woke up the next morning and found the world was still smudged by white snow. Sitting alone Old Zhu’s thoughts were still of his son who had gone away. He checked on his wife, she was still snoring wistfully in her dreams, so he closed the door and went to the phone, picked it up and dialled a number in Guangzhou.
The line was crackly and faint. Only his voice seemed loud as he shouted down the phone. ‘Da Shan!?’
‘Da Shan? I can’t hear. It’s a bad line.’
‘Good. We’re well.’
‘You’ll have to shout.’
‘I think so.’
‘Yes, she’s well. She’s asleep at the moment. I don’t like to wake her. She misses you.’
Old Zhu cleared his throat and took a deep breath. ‘Listen, your mother thinks you ought to come home.’
‘She’s not well.’
‘Yes. I think so too …’
‘OK, I know you’re busy,’ Old Zhu said at last, ‘when you can get away.’
Da Shan retraced the journey back to his hometown like he was returning to childhood. He’d left seven years before, on a spring day when wisteria flowers weighed heavily on the branches and afternoon butterflies danced in the sun. It had been a beautiful warm day and he’d left never thinking he’d return.
His mother had cried. For her leaving home was like falling in with bandits on the road. She’d been silent the days before he left, then at the station she’d tried to argue him into staying.
‘Who will care for us if you go?’
‘I’ll come back,’ Da Shan had said.
‘If you come back we’ll be dead,’ she’d said, and regretted it straight away. It was an unlucky thing to say. It tempted Heaven.
‘I can get a job in Guangzhou.’
‘Why not work at the factory?’ his father had said. ‘In a few years time the leaders will have forgotten.’
Da Shan almost laughed in exasperation. ‘What’s the point? I can get a good job in Guangzhou. Maybe even Shenzhen or Hong Kong.’
His father had warned him sagely, ‘Other hills always seem taller than this one.’
‘Yes father,’ he’d answered, without listening.
Da Shan had left home and found that the hills on the horizon really were taller, they were steeper and more beautiful as well, and on the pale afternoons they looked sapphire blue. He’d written to tell his father this; continued to write deliberate and infrequent letters listing things he had achieved, friends he had met, and giving reasons for what he’d done. His father never answered, he’d been upset that Da Shan hadn’t stayed on to work at the factory. Upset that his son was a capitalist. It was an even more unlucky than being a counter-revolutionary.
Da Shan checked the battery on his mobile, but it was dead. He sat and looked out of the train window. Two days of the world passing by, a film of daily life, from dawn to dusk, in minute detail. Winter deepened with each mile, taking him deeper into the snow-clad limestone hills that rose up like camel humps all around. Here and there frigid black rivers slithered between white slopes and thatched villages; peasants moved like hungry scarecrows through fields of broken stubble; ragged children looked up and waved, while young boys ran and tried to jump aboard, before giving up and throwing stones.
‘Coca-Cola, beer, cigarettes, noodles,’ shouted the cabin guard, moving slowly through the carpet of bodies, kicking those who slept, and barging past the slow.
‘Any meat?’ Da Shan asked when the man reached him.
‘Beef jerky,’ the man said.
‘How much?’
‘Six yuan.’
‘OK, give me two.’
Da Shan chewed the beef strips slowly as the train chugged through each minute of the forty-three-and-a-half-hour journey. His jaw slowly ground the meat into threads and then the threads into something he could swallow. He washed them down with a sip of cool green tea. It had been a long time, he told himself. Returning home gave him a cold feeling in his stomach. He’d tried to bury the past, left it to moulder under a cold blanket of moss, but in quiet moments fragments came back to him. On dull wet days he could still hear the ghosts sighing.
On the second day Da Shan started to recognise the landscape of hummock hills, paddy fields, village roofs and icy lakes. This was almost home–Hunan Province where the people were as hot tempered as the food they ate. Men like Mao Zedong and the Pioneering General Cai E, who fired his pistol and toppled the Qing Dynasty. And home to Shaoyang, where Da Shan had abandoned all of his childhood dreams.
He looked out at the black trunks streaked with winter mist and poor farmers scattering handfuls of manure on the frozen soil. Their only dream was to leave the land and go to the big city and stuff their fantasies with hot food and crisp bank notes. Every day more of them setting off, spilling out again at cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou. Seduced and confused and trapped in the modern world of cars and neon. Supermarket shelves stacked high with extravagances they could never afford. Unable to return to their villages, and unable to master the new drugs of wage and profit. No better off than they were in the dynasties past. Exploited.
Laws that govern are too slack, he thought
but the laws that punish stern.
The hills and forests of pine and bamboo continued until late into afternoon of the second day when Da Shan started to recognise the contours of the land. There were place names he knew and accents that were close to home. The skyline of Shaoyang city edged out from behind the curves of the land and he could see the North and East Pagodas, stacked chimneys and thousands of grey concrete blocks of flats. He recognised the old monastery crouched amongst the trees on the white hill, sat up and felt his heart beat quicken. The landscape was as familiar as scenes from his childhood, but the snow-clad hills and trees had no reason to act familiar. They watched his train approach with cold disinterest.
Train Number 516 trundled into Shaoyang Railway Station with a blast of its horn and a curt announcement on the station tannoy, came to rest with a long sharp hiss of steam and hydraulics. Platform Number 8 was full of waiting peasants and unemployed workers who were migrating with the geese, in search of work and money, seated and sleeping figures that burst to life when the train arrived, like beansprouts searching for the light. They ran with sacks tied to their shoulders, up and down the train in search of an open door and window. People inside the train kept the windows and doors shut, which caused a rush of panic along the platform; panic, and the fear of being left behind in their towns and villages where the hours and days silently devoured their lives.
Battle raged around the train for five full minutes. Windows were forced up, hands pulled people through or clenched into fists and tried to fight them off. But eventually doors were forced open and the migrant workers scratched, kicked and clawed their way onto the train.
Only a few passengers got off. Da Shan was one of them, fighting against the funnel of humanity who wanted to get on. His shirt sacrificed a button to the crowd before it let him go and he wrenched himself out of the press.
‘Fucking peasants,’ he muttered.
A whistle blew, a flag waved, the brakes eased and the monolithic train moved off, carriage after carriage, till the last one passed and sped out of sight, hurrying to keep up. It dragged a swirling gust behind it and Da Shan shuddered at the vindictive cold. He was home.
He l
eft the station and hailed a taxi. ‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘The Space Rocket Factory,’ Da Shan answered, and almost laughed.
The man turned on the radio and hummed along to a string of Hong Kong pop tunes. His voice was flat and tuneless as he sang. His Cantonese accent was terrible.
‘You come on the Guangzhou train?’ the man raised his voice over the music.
‘Yeah.’
‘Working there?’
‘Yeah.’
The man nodded. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and offered one to Da Shan. They weren’t foreign cigarettes, but he took one anyway. ‘Thanks.’
They smoked with the windows open to the night as the driver negotiated the traffic lights and roundabouts, swerving through the sprawl of itinerant salesmen who sold yesterday’s fashions from their rusty rickshaws.
‘Had the taxi long?’ Da Shan asked.
‘A year,’ the man said. ‘Cost me forty thousand yuan. Borrowed it off my brother. He works in Guangzhou.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s in a factory there. Makes clothes for export. Good money.’
‘And you?’
The driver laughed. ‘I get by,’ he said. ‘I get by.’
As they drove Da Shan saw that Shaoyang had changed. The old wooden houses were gone, replaced by concrete right angles and flashing neon signs. The driver drove along the river and turned in through the factory gate. It had sprouted a crown of grasses and a bent sapling clung to the red brickwork. The painted characters had been chipped and eroded by time, but they were still legible:
Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory, down the right column.
Work to Build the Four Modernisations, down the left column.
We Wel Come Your In Vest Ment,written in English across the top.
It was so tragic he almost laughed. The taxi pulled in under the gateway with its optimistic slogans, and braked. Da Shan climbed out.
‘How much?’ he asked.
‘Twelve yuan.’
