Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Her discovery presented the family with a dilemma. Should they eat them? They were naturally nutritious and pleasant to eat in an astringent sort of way. And they contained a goodly amount of water. But, of course, dandelion leaves, since the beginning of time, have been notorious for being diuretic. The odd pissed bed does not present any problems to a hungry family with abundant water supplies. But with only a quarter of a jar of water left no one wanted to lose any more water from their bodies. On the other hand, everyone now was drinking piss. Wei was drinking his own, Eldest Son was drinking his own (and, secretly, his mother’s), Cherry Blossom was drinking her own (and, secretly, Baby Girl Wei’s). So, being a pragmatic family, it was agreed they would all feast on the luscious and flavourful dandelion leaves.

  Afterwards, walking along in front of her parents, Baby Girl Wei had never felt happier. Everyone except her father had congratulated her and thanked her – especially her elder sister. She positively bobbed along.

  *

  For people in this awful situation – weary to death, short of both food and, much more importantly, water, their souls eaten by fear and bewilderment – hallucination is not uncommon. Wei was lost in a world of dark thoughts and anger, his wife (starving herself completely of all food and water for her first son’s sake) fanatically focused her half-crazy mind on one end. Eldest Son was in a permanent state of bewilderment. For comfort he endlessly remembered the times when Second Son was still alive and the two of them had spent so many hours together in the stable with the clever donkey and funny goat and the sunlight pouring through the rafters. Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei moved in a cloud of new-found intimacy.

  Sunk in their individual worlds, none of them noticed that the actual world through which they passed had itself – in an act of natural empathy – started to present itself in ever more strange and surreal ways.

  On the skyline of a range of hills which ran parallel with them to the west, as if in a dream, a camel train suddenly appeared loping along, heads to tails. Seventy or eighty of them floating in a line. They carried wealthy coal merchants, their families and possessions. The camels had originally been employed in the coal trade, carrying coal from the pits of Mentougou to the city of Beijing. The Beijing coal merchants had simply commandeered the camels and now swung along in their caravan like grand Arabian viziers, flanked by armed guards riding on mules.

  Across the flat yellow plain raced strange single-wheeled apparitions with sails. Chinese wheelbarrows were unlike Western ones. They were much larger and their single wheel was in the centre of the barrow, not at one end, so the wheel, a large one, stuck up through the centre of it, with a platform on either side to carry goods or passengers. Up to six passengers, three on each side, could be carried. Because the central wheel carried the whole weight of the barrow – unlike a Western one, where wheel and man shared the load – the Chinese coolie, at the back of a long shaft, could concentrate his efforts on balancing the barrow and pushing it forwards. Substantial speeds could be achieved. And that was before you added a mast and sail. With the sail providing the pull, the skilled coolie just had to keep the craft’s balance and run to keep up with it. If the wind was fair he had a lot of running to do. Thus the passengers, grudgingly, had to give far more water to their coolie than to themselves, and these delicate, fantastical creations curved and spun across the flat landscape elegant as swallows above a spring meadow.

  Through the light and sand haze suddenly appeared the burnt-out hulk of the giant Studebaker Roadster which had rolled past them so effortlessly days ago. It had not run out of petrol but out of water, radiator water. The engine had overheated, its oil had caught fire, from which the petrol ignited. A hundred yards beyond the wreck the ground was littered with top hats, where the pedestrianized bankers had suddenly all realized how useless top hats really were. Every so often after that the Wei family passed dead bankers with sunburnt heads – fat blowflies who thrived in the hothouse of financial Darwinism but were rendered toothless on a genuine tooth-and-claw death march. Of the wily chauffeur, who’d probably drunk the radiator water in the first place, there was no sign.

  Cherry Blossom tried on a top hat but it was far too large. She tried it on Baby Girl Wei who almost disappeared within it and had to be rescued by her mother. They all thought it incredibly funny. Wei stared at them.

  *

  Evening drew on. The sun started to set behind the line of hills to their west, with the result that the bodies and long, long legs of the hurrying camels threw gigantic, elongated shadows across the whole plain, as though huge spiders and monsters fought all around them and slashed across their bodies and faces.

  It was with these daggering flashes of light and darkness playing bewilderingly into his face and eyes that Wei suddenly attacked his youngest daughter, Baby Girl Wei. A few seconds before it happened Cherry Blossom, always graced with an uncanny instinct for inner family dynamics, suddenly deserted her newly intimate sister and ran straight to the outstretched hand of her mother. Wei’s wife and the rest of the family moved quickly forwards, leaving Baby Girl Wei alone with her father.

  Wei did not actually attack his daughter – his own flesh, a being he loved more than he loved himself. Despite the schism and darkness and demons which the Japanese bomb had exploded within him, he still retained enough humanity and grace to not actually strike her with the spade he was carrying. Instead he used it to herd her off, push her away, backwards. At first she thought he was playing with her.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Father?’ she asked giggling. ‘Is this some sort of game?’

  Wei grunted in guilt and terror. He had to do this. For the family. For the water they could no longer afford to give her.

  ‘Why are Cherry Blossom and Mummy going away so quickly? Let’s join them.’

  With pain he again used the spade to push her away.

  A note of fear entered her voice. So many strange, unexplained things had been happening recently in her tiny world. She wanted to be listening again to Cherry Blossom’s unending chatter.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Daddy? Let’s catch up Mummy and Cherry Blossom.’

  He pushed again at her with a grunt. Though it came out more like a whimper. He had to tell her. The two words formed on his lips. He had to force them out.

  ‘Daddy…’

  ‘Go,’ he gasped out. He tried again with his treacherous rubbery lips. ‘Go away.’

  ‘Where shall I go, Daddy?’

  ‘Go. Go away.’

  She tried again, pushing him. He pushed her back hard with the shovel and she fell over. He started to walk fast away from her. She stood up and started to run after him. She grabbed him hard around one leg and curled her tiny arms and legs around it, holding on tight as a clamp. Just like the game they had played so many times before where he walked along with her clamped to his leg, laughing and shrieking. He peeled her off and shouted at her. ‘Get off.’

  Again she got up and as she followed him, breathless now, she cried, ‘What is it, Father? What have I done wrong? Do I complain too much so you have to carry me? I’ll walk everywhere by myself, on my two legs, I swear it. I’ll be a good girl. I won’t cry and whine any more, Daddy,’ she cried in her fear.

  Again and again she ran up to him as he walked and he pushed her away. His own flesh, his own blood. It was as though he was tearing a part of his own body out of himself. ‘This is evil,’ he thought to himself. ‘This is the work of a demon. But I must do it.’

  He did not flinch. For an hour it lasted, her running to him, she growing weaker, til, exhausted, she was following him on hands and knees, her arms and legs pumping round and round like a mechanical toy or some crazed grasshopper. ‘Do not leave me, Papa, please do not leave me. I will not do anything wrong ever again!’

  It stirred awful memories in him of his elder sister, banished outside the farmhouse and courtyard during the famine, her ignored cries and wails for help coming to him as he lay in his bed as a child. And now he
was doing the same thing. But it had to be done. His wife’s logic was irrefutable.

  Eventually her lamentations, her pleas receded into the darkness. Occasional bewildered cries and moans. Then there was silence. Who knows what her last hours, her last moments were like? Wondering what was happening, what she had done wrong? Running to indifferent strangers, running from wild dogs or murderous crows.

  Never would Wei ever use a spade again without remembering exactly to what purpose he had once put it.

  He walked til he found his ‘family’ – his wife, his eldest son, Cherry Blossom. They had stopped and made a tiny encampment. His wife gave him a strange smile and handed him a bowl with a few mouthfuls of water in it and some dried beans floating on it. Eldest Son would not look at him. Cherry Blossom chattered away happily to herself. Wei passed Eldest Son his spade, threw himself on the earth, and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

  Where do the lost go? Where do their spirits wander? Will they ever know justice, experience love and joy again? Yes, justice and joy will be seen upon this earth again. In the darkest of dark places there shall be light. Light perpetual. Hallelujah!

  12

  The next morning Wei awoke and he knew what he had done. The long sleep had healed the rift within his mind caused by the bomb, by the awful onset of grief and shock in him at the deaths of so many so close to him. He understood he had murdered his own daughter. But he also realized that, by his wife’s cold-eyed logic, she had had to die so the family might survive. Until the shock of the bomb his old mind had reacted to any thought of killing members of his family with revulsion. After the bomb his new mind had seen the perfect logic and morality of killing one so the others might live. Now his two minds rested in harmony with each other. Became one again.

  His one duty was to see to the survival of his eldest son, so that the family would continue. He himself, after his foul murder, would never wish to shame and shock the family by daring to ask that he sat at their table in the afterlife. But his eldest son must have a seat of honour there, as would – and he smiled at this – his wife. Her single-mindedness in service of the family deserved it.

  His wife was sitting beside him, watching him, smiling with that gentle smile he had always so much loved throughout their marriage.

  ‘What you did last night was right, husband. I know how much you love your daughters. All the women in the family. What sort of justice do the gods give us,’ she asked, ‘that we must choose between which of our children we must kill?’

  Wei looked around. Eldest Son was standing guard with the spade, avoiding all eye contact with them. Wei looked for Cherry Blossom but could see her nowhere. It was as though she had disappeared. Wei decided to let this pass. He now had no daughters.

  ‘I admire you so much for doing the terrible deed which you were called upon to do. You did what the head of the family has to do – ensure the preservation of the family. The family will immortalize you for this.’

  ‘The family will not immortalize me for this, dear wife.’

  ‘But what choice did you have, dear husband? We could, I suppose, have sold her as a slave to some of the bandits. But they would have hideously mutilated her, blinded her, cut off parts of her body so that she could beg successfully on the pavements and earn good money for them. A lifetime of that? No, that would be too cruel!’

  ‘But perhaps that would have been Baby Girl Wei’s choice,’ thought Wei, but he did not say it.

  He looked at his wife. Her face and body were gaunt and shrunken, her movements slow. Lack of water had reduced her voice to a whispering, emotionless monotone, but above her mouth her hollowed-out eyes still crackled with fire and resolution.

  She took his hand.

  ‘Husband, when I die – which will not be long now – go through my clothes. You will find food for Eldest Son there. I have sewn beans and nuts into my seams for him, as well as the money we still possess. And do not waste your strength in burying me. Leave me out for the wild animals and birds. You must press on.’

  ‘Of course I will bury you,’ said Wei. ‘The earth is gentle. The earth is forgiving. How else will you manage to enter the afterlife?’

  What he said caused her great emotion and pain. She turned away from him. When she turned back she had picked up a bowl with a small amount of water in it and a sliced potato.

  ‘We have only a small amount of water left, husband. But I hope it will be enough so that you and Eldest Son, or at least Eldest Son, can make it to somewhere where there is food and water. So that one day you can return to our home and rejoin all our ancestors.’

  ‘I’m sure that will happen, dear wife,’ he replied, rising with difficulty to his feet and then pulling her to hers.

  They started on their trek again. The men could have walked faster – a slow plod – but they were slowed by the wander of Wei’s wife. They tried to steer her with gentle touches but she angrily brushed them aside.

  ‘Do not waste your energy on me,’ she said. ‘Keep walking. Leave me. I am finished.’

  But they didn’t. They continued to guide her slowly across the plain.

  Wei thought of when he had first met her. On the day of their marriage. How she had arrived at the gates to their courtyard in a red rickshaw, dressed all in red – sticking her head out from under the canopy to see everything that was happening, drink in every detail. The piety and fear and sincerity she had shown, the procession halfway up the courtyard, when she had been introduced to the ancestors. Reacting brightly, but with reverence, to each one of them, never having to be taught their names again. Then the marriage feast. So interested in everything that was happening. Remembering the names of all her relatives as soon as she was introduced to them. All the time casting a wifely eye around the house, calculating how things worked, deciding what went where, how she would organize everything. And then their marriage bed. Showing complete modesty, of course, but also expressing delight, appreciation, gladness with her soft strong body as they became one. He had never tired of her body, of her presence, of her endless service and bright energy within the growing family.

  And now, beside him shuffling and snuffling, like an eighty-year-old crone, except she was only two years over thirty.

  It only lasted three hours, then she collapsed upon the earth.

  They tried to get her upright. She refused. ‘Leave me. Do not waste your strength upon me. You must survive.’

  They laid her on her back. Wrapped a coat and put it behind her head. Eldest Son uncorked the water jar to pour her some water. She forbade it.

  ‘Please, Mother,’ pleaded Eldest Son, ‘please take some water.’

  ‘No,’ she ordered.

  Eldest Son started weeping.

  ‘Stop that,’ she ordered.

  He shook his head in disbelief. After a few moments he stopped. She turned her head and looked directly at him.

  ‘You, my son, must live. You, above all, must survive. Through all this “nonsense”.’ However quiet her voice had become, anger still crackled in it as she said the word ‘nonsense’ and indicated, with a twist of her shoulders, that she meant all this unnecessary chaos and flight and violence all around them. ‘Because when it is over, you, above all, must return to our farm. You must explain to our ancestors what has happened, how this catastrophe of us leaving them occurred. Tell them everything, Son.’

  Wei hung his head at this. He ate bitterness.

  She continued to her eldest son. ‘You are a strong, an able young man, and you must work on the farm again, tirelessly, until the crops grow every spring and are harvested every autumn, and when that is done, because you are a handsome, loving young man, you must find yourself a suitable bride and marry her and the two of you will once again bring children back to the farm, running around and singing songs, and in time a young eldest son who will succeed you, and when it comes time for you to die, sweet son, in ripe old age I pray, then when you meet your ancestors, are welcomed into their midst, I pray,’ she sobbed here, �
��I pray that you speak for me, that you explain I always remained faithful to them and ask that I might be allowed to join them at their table and might be honoured. Do you understand me, sweet Eldest Son?’

  Eldest Son had started crying again. Through his tears he said, ‘Yes, Mother, I understand you. I will do what you want.’

  ‘And then I want your son to hold a memorial for me, a funeral feast. Good food, from the farm. Fine wine, from the profits he will have made from his farming. But tell him not to spend too much. He’ll always need money in his purse. But if he could afford just a few musicians, a few dancers. Young girls, beautiful bodies. Who will dance around the graves and then slowly take their clothes off, so that the dead and the living might dance together, and his lands and his wife’s womb and the wombs of all the wives of your eldest sons following you shall be fertile and unending.’

  And as she spoke, it seemed to Wei as though her frail, wracked body wrecked upon the ground started dissolving and melting and she became as he remembered her on their marriage bed, writhing and turning and dancing in the act of love.

  She died. Her body stiff and silent on the earth. Wei stood up and started to dig her grave. He would not leave her body out to the mercy of the wild animals and crows. She would lie in the good earth and maybe, somehow, her spirit would be able to find its way back through the earth safe to the graves of his ancestors. He would not follow her. He now considered himself an outcast from his family. He had murdered his daughter.