The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  I turned my anxious gaze to barge number seven and looked for Father, since it was time to unload. I didn’t want him to see me. The gangplanks were down on the other boats by now, but not ours. Father was still inside, obviously hiding from Zhao Chunmei. But he was wasting his time. ‘You can hide through the first of the month, but not through the fifteenth,’ I heard myself grumble, quoting a popular saying. ‘Come out of there if you’ve got the balls. All you know how to do is thump women – thump, thump. Well, come out and take a look where your thumping has led!’

  The other boat people, who were watching me pace back and forth, interrupted their discussions about Zhao Chunmei and waved greetings. ‘Hey, Dongliang, coming back, are you? That’s good. Things always work out when a son obeys his father.’ I was in no mood to pay any attention, so they directed their shouts at barge number seven: ‘Come on out, Secretary Ku. There’s nothing to worry about now, they’ve taken the woman away. Your son Dongliang’s back!’

  Still he wouldn’t come out, and I refused to go aboard until he did. So I stood there watching a bunch of pigs squeal and squirm in our forward hold, giving off a stench I could smell from here. I wondered why our barge had been chosen to transport the pigs. Was it a sign of trust or just the opposite? Was it intended to show consideration for my father or to make things hard on him? I held my nose and surveyed the goods on the other barges, now that the oilcloth tarps had been removed and the goods were laid out in the open. There was machinery for the Southern Combat Readiness Base in wooden crates with strict warnings not to open them. There were also steel oil drums. Those I found interesting, since they had foreign words printed on them – not English, apparently, some language I’d never seen before. I’m kind of weird in a way – when I encounter words in languages I don’t know, I read them to myself. Ne-fo fo-gai-te ke-la-si si-que-ge: Never forget class struggle – a chain reaction. I read and I read, and my thoughts went in a new direction, until I began thinking things I shouldn’t.

  Barge number seven was the last to unload, which made sense, since livestock is always hard to control. The stevedores, under the supervision of a man from the Pork Association, came aboard with bamboo poles and ropes, and were greeted by terrified squeals. When the first animal was carried off upside-down, its four legs tied to a pole, the others created a major disturbance, causing the barge to rock precariously as if tossed about by high waves. And still my father refused to emerge. Something must be wrong in there. I picked up a piece of coal, aimed at the cabin door, and threw it. ‘What are you doing in there, Dad?’

  The porthole opened and Father’s hand made a brief appearance before vanishing again. Why was he hiding in there? I coughed. Something stirred, but he still wouldn’t come out. Busy as he was, Desheng glanced my way and tapped the deck of barge number eight with his foot as a signal for me to come aboard. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘Don’t stand there like an idiot. Are you waiting for your dad to send a written invitation?’

  I shook my head. ‘I can come aboard or not, it makes no difference to me. I will if he wants me to, and I’ll stay here if he doesn’t.’

  Desheng’s wife giggled and poked her husband. ‘He wants his dad to ask him to come aboard,’ she said as she picked up a pole, ran to the bow of her boat and banged on our cabin. ‘Come out of there, Chairman Ku,’ she shouted. ‘Zhao Chunmei is gone, but your son’s here. He wants to know if you want him back on the barge.’

  Still no sign of him. But the stirrings within grew in intensity. Something hit the deck with a bang, followed by the unmistakable sound of one of Father’s throaty moans. Then his head emerged slowly through the porthole. His face was the colour of clay, but his hand, which followed his head out, was covered with blood. He looked at me with a dull expression and waved his bloody hand. ‘Come here!’ he said. ‘Help me! Hurry!’

  At first I thought he’d cut his finger, and as I ran across Desheng’s barge I shouted for him to get his first-aid kit. But I stopped dead when I got inside. He hadn’t cut his finger. I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I could not believe what he’d done.

  You won’t believe it either. The stench of blood permeated the air, and blood ran between the cracks of the floorboards. A pair of scissors lay on Father’s favourite sofa. His trousers were down around his knees and there was so much blood in his crotch that I could barely see his penis. At first it looked whole, but then I saw that the front half was hanging by a thread. Rocking unsteadily, he leaned slowly towards me. ‘Help me!’ he said. ‘Use those scissors. It’s my enemy, you must help me get rid of it.’

  I was scared witless. Desheng’s wife shrieked, but was quickly shouted down by her husband. ‘What are you standing around here for? Go on, get out!’ With studied calmness he crouched down and examined my father’s bloody organ. ‘It’s still connected!’ he exclaimed happily. ‘That’s a good sign. Let’s rush him to the hospital and get it sewn back on.’

  I wrapped a blanket around Father’s waist and Desheng carried him ashore on his back, watched by all the barge people and stevedores. ‘What happened?’ they asked as I ran past. ‘Who stabbed him? All that blood!’

  Desheng’s wife was running alongside us, helping by clearing the curious out of our way. ‘Haven’t you ever seen blood before? This isn’t a movie, you damned rubberneckers, so get out of our way.’

  ‘Did Dongliang stab his old man?’ someone asked.

  ‘What do you use for a brain?’ she said. ‘Whoever heard of a son stabbing his father? A demon got to him, and it’s all Zhao Chunmei’s fault. She brought that demon down on him.’

  Desheng ran on to the pier with my father on his back. Patches of bright sunlight dotted the path, and a strange feeling came over me. Father and I seemed to be heeding Zhao Chunmei’s call, running down a path she’d laid out in white funeral garb. Though I felt the sticky blood leaking on to me, I was oblivious to his weight as I helped support him – from the waist down he was as light as a feather. All the curses that had been flung his way had been fulfilled. Men’s curses, women’s curses, curses by family members and mortal enemies – all fulfilled. Father’s slightly crooked but extraordinarily vigorous member, a one-time bully, an enemy of the people, of women and of men, and, most significantly, of himself, had at last been subdued by Father himself.

  He was unconscious by the time we reached the Milltown Hospital, but he’d managed two sentences to Desheng before he lost consciousness. ‘I’m not afraid of Zhao Chunmei, Desheng,’ he said. ‘Brief pain is better than prolonged suffering, so now I can make amends.’ Then he added, ‘I guarantee you that I’ll never again be unworthy of the spirit of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang.’

  The Arrival of the Security Group

  LATER ON I became a deckhand.

  On my trips back to town, there were kids who didn’t know my name, but who followed me and heard adults call out my nickname, Kongpi. If any of them didn’t know who Kongpi was, they said: the fleet’s kongpi. And if that still didn’t do it, they added a footnote: the son of Half-Dick. It was no secret. Everyone in Milltown knew I had a strange and laughable father. He only had half a dick.

  I was in good health for the first year or so. But then one day I discovered that I was walking strangely. Following my father’s scandalous act with the scissors, every time I went ashore I was careful to avoid traces of red on the ground, afraid they might be drops of his shameful blood, and I averted my eyes from white bits of rubbish, worried they could be strips of Zhao Chunmei’s mourning garb. One afternoon, as I was walking along with the sun beating down on me, I found myself staring at my shadow as it moved across the cobblestones. It looked a little like a duck, and at first I thought the distortion was caused by the angle of the sun, so I adjusted my walking style and cocked my head to see what my shadow looked like now. I watched as the outline twisted awkwardly, uglier than ever, now a goose, and suddenly I was aware that I really was walking strangely, my feet splayed outward, just like Desheng and Chunsheng. But I was nothing like tho
se two, who went ashore barefoot. I always wore shoes. Having grown up on the water, they had developed a peculiar walking style that was well adapted to the boat’s motion. I’d walked on land for fifteen years, so why were my feet splayed like theirs? I took off my shoes, removed the insoles, shook out the sand and pebbles, and examined them inside and out. Nothing there. So I sat by the side of the road and took a good look at my feet. They were dirty, but that’s all. Strange. Why would two good feet suddenly forget how to walk the way they’d done for more than a decade? Why had they started acting as if they belonged to a duck or a goose?

  Walking with splayed feet is ugly. For a woman, it’s humiliating. What kind of woman walks with her legs and feet spread out like that? Is it supposed to be some sort of come-on? And if a man walks that way, he can’t blame anyone for thinking it’s because an abnormally heavy penis and testicles get in the way.

  So I sat by the side of the road and analysed the differences between my feet and those of Desheng and Chunsheng. I concluded that I was an acute splayed-feet walker who’d been influenced not by other seamen, but by my own father. Ever since his damaged penis had been restored to a degree of functionality, thanks to reconstructive surgery, I’d been burdened with the feeling that the nearly severed half was now attached to my own body, that my underwear was too tight and that my crotch was getting heavier by the day. I also felt as if my brain was affected, that splay-footed manner of walking was determined not by the feet but by the brain. Even an idiot knows the difference between a river and dry land, but my brain had merged the two and sent messages of caution to my feet: Careful, careful, use as much strength as you need to walk steadily and guard against the ground moving, against the motion of waves and undercurrents and eddies. Once I obeyed those messages, stepping cautiously on the cobblestones and vaguely noting the shadow my head cast, a mysterious image lit up in my brain, and from then on, every road on the riverbank was either my port or starboard deck, and I trod it carefully. From then on, Milltown was a camouflaged body of water, which I had to navigate slowly.

  Eventually I became a true splay-footed walker. My father did not influence my general health, but I became infected with a germ called ‘halves’. As I looked at the world of the river around me, I arrived at the bizarre conclusion that only half of my world remained. Birds on the shore danced and sang as the water rushed along, but there were no dancing or singing birds around me, just rushing water, and I found that water disgusting. I rode up and down the river behind a fast-moving tug that towed our barge in a mad dash. The wind, the speed and that mysterious germ came together to launch an assault on my eyes and ears. No matter how stirringly the loudspeaker on the shore blared its messages, I only ever heard the first half, the remainder blown away by the wind. When I stood at the bow trying to take in the sights on both banks, if my eyes focused on the wheat fields to the left, I forgot about the market towns on the right and could not tell the difference between the places we’d just passed. The scenery changed with each successive day, but my hasty glances created a half-baked understanding of the triumphant socialist construction on the banks of the river. When we passed a duck farm, I saw workers laying a foundation and digging a ditch on the sandbar; I didn’t know it was the Victory Hydroelectric Station and assumed it was just an extension of the duck farm. I grumbled at the sight, wondering why the ducks were being treated so well when I didn’t even have a home on shore. When we sailed past Phoenix, I saw people building a cement pylon to the east, and all I could think was, ‘They’ve just built a hydroelectric station near the duck farm, and now here’s Phoenix building another.’ Was it a competition? I was oblivious to the fact that an identical pylon was going up on the other bank, and that Phoenix was in fact getting not a hydroelectric station but a new bridge.

  The people on shore were all talking about Milltown, my hometown, and how it was undergoing a spectacular transformation and would become a key sector, the most important one in the Golden Sparrow River region. Word had it that a secret combat-readiness facility was to be constructed in Milltown, but since it was all hush-hush, no one knew for sure what sort of facility it would be, which was why everyone – on shore and on the river – was talking about it. Some thought it might be an air-raid shelter, others that it would be a missile-launching site, while some predicted that it would be a petroleum pipeline that served the Southern Combat-Readiness Base. After hearing more and more comments, I finally worked out what they meant by a ‘key sector’, but had no way of telling whose prediction was more reliable. If Father had still been in office, I’d have been privy to first-hand information. Too bad. As they say, a river flows east for thirty years, then west for the next thirty. Father and I were now the last to hear any news relating to the Golden Sparrow River region.

  I never liked asking people for news, and in my personal investigation into signs relating to the military construction, I found none. The General Affairs Building was still the highest authority in Milltown. The skies were bluer than before, the air cleaner, and production on the wharf was being reorganized. The mountain of coal had been pared down; commodity storage, always haphazard, was being systematized; and relatively clean public toilets had appeared, with the smell of disinfectant lying heavy in the air. Other than that, there didn’t seem to be any earth-shaking changes or improvements in a town that was the focus of public opinion.

  One day I was walking down by the piers when I passed a chemical warehouse and was surprised to see that it had been newly painted, white with red windows. A sign on the door read: ‘Pier Security Group’. I stuck my head through the door and spotted familiar faces: Scabby Five, Baldy Chen and Wang Xiaogai, each sporting a red armband with the words ‘You Zhi’ printed on them. I quickly figured out that it stood for Milltown Zhi-an, or Security Group. After the words came some Arabic numbers in parentheses, evidently their personal numbers. I knew what the armbands meant, but I was in a teasing mood. ‘Does that say “Lard-town”? Are you the lard group? If so, you belong in a wok.’

  Their expressions hardened when they heard my voice. ‘What do you know?’ Xiaogai said with a disgruntled look. ‘Can’t you read? We’re the Milltown Security Group.’

  ‘Security group?’ I said. ‘Under whose authority?’

  ‘The General Affairs Building, pig brain. What do you think?’

  But I couldn’t let it go. ‘Three guys keeping watch over a rundown chemical warehouse, and you call it a security group!’

  ‘At the moment it’s just the three of us,’ he said, ‘but there’ll be more of us pretty soon. We might not have a big office, but we’ve got big-time authority, and we’re going to let you see just how big that is.’

  With obvious impatience, Scabby Five, my long-time foe, glared at me and cut his colleague off. ‘What are you doing, explaining things to someone like him?’ he said, making a handcuffing gesture. ‘He wrote a counter-revolutionary slogan, and that makes him a target for us! If he doesn’t watch his mouth, I’ll come down hard on him.’

  Nothing but farts came out of Scabby’s mouth – empty, stinky talk – and I wasn’t about to argue with him. I focused my attention on the sign on the door. ‘Zhi-an,’ I said. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Blinking furiously, Xiaogai glanced at his two colleagues, looking for help. But, less well educated even than him, they too were stuck for a response. Having suffered an embarrassing loss of face, he growled, ‘You and your goddamn never-ending questions, Kongpi. It means just what it says – zhi-an. Don’t try any of your tricks on me.’

  I wasn’t trying to trick him. I knew that the word an meant ‘safety’, but I didn’t know if zhi meant to take charge of people or to make them suffer, so I said, ‘Since you have no authority over the goods or the longshoremen, who are your supposed zhi?

  Scabby Five was the first to react. ‘Good question!’ he said hatefully. ‘And the answer is you!’

  ‘Not only you,’ Baldy said, ‘though you’re the one we need to watch the close
st. We’re charged with watching the whole fleet.’

  Wang Xiaogai, who had a ‘2’ on his armband, was the group’s second-in-command, I later learned, so no wonder he talked like a bureaucrat. ‘And not only you people on the barges,’ he said as he adjusted his armband. ‘These are critical times, and things get busy at the police station, so we’re in charge of wharf security – all of it.’

  I looked up into the blue sky, with its patches of puffy white clouds, then stood on my tiptoes to gaze at the top of the General Affairs Building – no signs of those so-called critical times, as far as I could see. ‘What’s all this nonsense about critical times?’ I said. ‘What’s so critical about them? I for one can’t see it.’

  ‘If we let a kongpi like you see things,’ Wang Xiaogai said with a sneer, ‘they wouldn’t be critical, would they?’

  Usually, when we pulled up to a pier, I avoided the other boat people, either by going ashore before or after them. On this occasion I’d been the first person ashore, so after leaving the Security Group office, I headed for Milltown. But I hadn’t got far before Wang Xiaogai and the others caught up with me. ‘Stop right there,’ they called out. ‘You have to wait till everyone’s ashore, so you can all go into town together.’