by Geling Yan
But in reality Zhang Erhai was a man she could never leave or abandon. Besides, he was the only one in the whole world who could handle her; who else could she get to put up with someone like her? She and Zhang Erhai were too well matched. If she went, what a golden opportunity that would be for that Jap woman. Would she treasure everything about Erhai from his head to his heel the way Xiaohuan did? She never would; everything that was good about Erhai would be wasted on her.
Even if she could bring herself to leave Erhai, she could not bear to be without Girlie. Somehow she linked them together, all in a muddle. Xiaohuan had never expected that she would love a child so much, and she was uncertain whether her love for her was because she looked on her as half of Erhai. Looking at her and seeing Erhai’s shadow, surges of warmth welled up in her heart, again and again, and she would clasp her so tightly that Girlie would suddenly panic, and with a ‘Wah!’ she would start to howl. Just like she was crying in her arms right now, kicking and struggling for dear life.
Xiaohuan gave a start, and hastened to comfort the child. Her heart was full of doubts: how could you love someone so much and yet not be yourself? Why did you have to cause him (or her) pain and be unable to prevent yourself from mistreating him (or her), or let him (or her) know that this pain is love? Does love have to be painful? She gently laid the sleeping child back down on the kang. Xiaohuan paid no mind to what Erhai and Duohe were doing, whether they were now sleeping sweetly, heads pillowed on each other’s arms. She would never know Erhai’s true attitude to Duohe – and if she had known she would not have believed it.
This attitude had changed somewhat after Erhai learned about Duohe’s background and her helpless, friendless state, but not in any fundamental way. Every time he went to her room it was like a martyrdom, in which both Duohe and himself were the sacrifices. And all because of that damnable business of keeping the family line going. On every visit, the first thing he did was to turn out the lamp. Unless the lamp was out it was hard to put his face close to hers. Duohe was a bit better now, she no longer dressed as if for her coffin. She undid her clothes soundlessly in the darkness, and pulled the clasp from her hair, which now came halfway down her back when loose.
That evening, after Erhai came in, he heard her feeling her way towards him. Erhai’s body tensed: what was she up to? She was squatting down, no, she was kneeling. Since her arrival at the Zhang family courtyard, she had scrubbed the brick floors of all the rooms until they were as clean as a kang: you could kneel anywhere on the floor. Her hand groped towards Erhai’s trouser legs, and felt downwards until she touched his shoes. Erhai’s shoes were very simple, he didn’t need her to take them off for him. All the same he did not move, and let her get on with it. She removed his shoes and socks, and placed them on the side of the kang. Erhai then heard the sound of cotton cloth and padded cotton rubbing together. She opened up her outer clothes and her underwear. In fact, this was unnecessary – Erhai was not about to touch any other part of her body. That was an irrelevance – he came here only to conduct official business.
Duohe had put on weight after the birth of the child. Her body was no longer that of a girl; her stomach was rounded and smooth and her hips were much bigger. Erhai heard her cry out softly. He went a bit more gently. The only thing that had changed about him was that he no longer had any desire to cause pain to this lone young woman. Erhai never dared to consider the future. Once she gave birth to a son, would they continue to house this Japanese orphan, stranded far from her home?
Duohe’s hands were very cowardly. She had set them on either side of his waist, rubbing at the layer of hot sweat there. This was what he couldn’t bear, her two childish hands. Sometimes he would see them at the dinner table, and think of that moment at night. They were always very timid, rubbing his shoulders, back, waist in an exploratory way. One time they briefly brushed over his forehead. It was so pathetic, the way she wanted to know him. Duohe only laughed out loud with Stationmaster Zhang, Erhai’s mother and Girlie. When she laughed it was even heartier than Xiaohuan, and she would sit on the ground, shaking her fists and kicking her legs with laughter, her hair coming down all over the place, provoking Stationmaster Zhang and Erhai’s mother into laughter too, even though they could not make out what had set her off in the first place. She was unable to say what had made her laugh. Erhai would wonder at this: she whose family had died and left her alone in the world, but who was still able to laugh so well.
Duohe’s weak hands patted his waist, like she was soothing her daughter to sleep. He suddenly heard her say: ‘Erhai.’
The tones were wrong, but he could more or less hear what she meant.
He involuntarily let out an ‘Mm?’
‘Erhai,’ she said again in a slightly louder voice, encouraged now she had a reaction.
‘Mm?’ he said again. He had already discovered the source of her problem: she was not rolling her tongue properly, and was trying to imitate the way the others said ‘Erhai’r’, with two rolled tongue sounds coming on top of each other. She had got the tones wrong too, it sounded like she was saying ‘Hungry Crane’.
Erhai was almost asleep, when the next part came. She said ‘Girlie’, but in a very odd way that sounded like ‘Pressed Potato’.
Erhai understood: she was showing off her Chinese to him. He rolled over and turned his face away, indicating very clearly that she would get no more teaching from him. Duohe’s hands came up again, less timid this time, and grabbed at his shoulders.
‘Nice day,’ she said.
Erhai gave a start. This phrase was copied from his father. Stationmaster Zhang would go out to meet the first early-morning train, returning home when it was time for the family to get up, and he would greet them all with ‘Nice day!’ To a railway worker a ‘nice day’ was something important; when the day was nice the trains would stop and pass through on time, he would not need to hang about at the station, or to take too much trouble over his rounds, and at his age his complaints about walking the track were becoming increasingly bitter.
‘Nice day?’ She was hoping for a little praise or correction from Erhai.
‘Mm.’
‘Have you eaten?’ she said.
This time Erhai did react. He almost laughed out loud. When people who wanted Erhai’s parents to do them a favour came bearing gifts, Erhai’s mother would immediately relieve them of their gifts saying: ‘Have you eaten?’
‘Make do.’
He did not even need to think about that one. Erhai could hear at once that this was one of Xiaohuan’s catchphrases. No matter how good a job Xiaohuan made of anything, no matter how people praised her, she would always say, ‘Well, make do.’ Whether the thing was the way you wanted it or not, whether you were pleased or not, whether it tasted good or not, her mouth would always be full of ‘make do’. Sometimes when she was in high spirits, Xiaohuan would whisk her way through all the rooms and the yard with a broom, saying ‘Make do’ over and over again.
Erhai thought, he could not pay any attention to her, if he started paying attention she would never let up. Then he’d get no sleep at all. He had work to do the next day.
She was looking up at the ceiling, saying over and over again: ‘E’he, E’hai, Erhe … Hungry Child, Second River …’
He hugged himself tightly and turned his back on her. The next day he mentioned the matter to his parents.
His father smoked a full pipe of tobacco, and then said, ‘Well, we can’t have her learning to speak Chinese.’
‘Why not?’ Erhai’s mother asked.
Stationmaster Zhang stared at his wife. How could she fail to understand something so obvious?
Erhai understood what his father meant. Duohe was not to be trusted; who could say that she wouldn’t run off some day? If she spoke Chinese, running away would be much easier.
‘You can hardly keep her from learning to talk, can you? If a cat and a dog live together for long enough they both end up miaowing and howling!’ Erhai’s mothe
r said, beaming.
‘If she does run off she’s got to give us a son first,’ said Stationmaster Zhang.
‘Is it up to you what she has?’ Erhai’s mother was still beaming.
The three of them smoked their pipes in silence.
From then on, whenever Erhai visited Duohe’s room, she would always come out with a few disconnected Chinese words. ‘A bit off’ and ‘out of the way’ she got from Xiaohuan, along with ‘well, that’s just peachy’ and ‘oh my giddy aunt’, both words from Xiaohuan’s jokes and rages, which Duohe relocated into her own mouth. Though you had to listen hard in order to recognise them. Erhai did not even grunt at her, allowing her to experiment as she pleased. But he stepped up his pace, going at it many times in a night. In his heart he resented his parents, for he knew they were hurrying him along even if they never actually said a word.
Duohe, on the other hand, got the wrong idea. She thought that Erhai was becoming attracted to her; sometimes when she bumped into him in the daytime, she would dart a secret smile at him, and her face would be suffused with blushes. It was when she smiled that he realised just how alien she was; at those moments her smile conveyed her meaning in a way that was so very unlike a Chinese girl. But in what way it was different, he could not say. He just thought that when she smiled everything became even more of a mess.
This increased messiness was making her hands braver and braver during the night. It had got to the point where he could take no more. One night her hands grasped hold of his, and placed them on her delicate, slightly moist stomach. While his hands were still hesitating whether to shake hers off, her hands were already pressing his onto her bulging breast. He did not dare move a muscle. If he were to snatch his hands away, it would be like cursing her for her shamelessness, but if he did not remove his hands she would think that he had taken a liking to her. Xiaohuan was right there in the same house. How could he do that?
But even without Xiaohuan, he still would not have felt anything for her.
Back when his father was a worker walking the tracks at Hutou station, his elder brother Dahai fell in with a gang of Communist anti-Japanese partisans who lived out in the mountains and woods. Fifteen-year-old Dahai went with his brother to collect handbills from the partisans, and left them lying about on the trains. When they had just reached Hutou village, they saw that Japanese soldiers had tied up two partisans, who had been stripped of their shirts and trousers to reveal handbills tied to their waists and legs. The Jap devils hung them up at the door of the village post office, and they didn’t even kill them properly, but poured boiling water over their heads. It took several buckets of boiling water, which soaked their skin and the leaflets until both were falling apart. Not long after that, Dahai disappeared.
His mother and father had spent all those years raising Dahai with nothing to show for it. For the sake of the worry they had suffered over him, and the tears they had shed, Erhai could not permit himself to become fond of a Japanese woman.
In the surrounding villages, Japanese soldiers had slaughtered people and burned their homes. They had trapped dozens of miners in a shaft of the copper mine and blown them up, just to kill a few anti-Japanese activists. And as for the airs and graces the Jap women who used to live in the village gave themselves … Even Japanese dogs knew that the Chinese could not be considered human, they were slaves from a defeated nation. One time a crowd of gorgeously dressed Japanese prostitutes was waiting at Anping village station, as their train was delayed, and they didn’t even use the toilet in the station but took the only washbasin to piss in, several of them surrounding one squatting woman, shading her with their umbrellas, smiling as they peed. There was no need to be discreet around the Chinese men waiting for the train, because people are not discreet around mules or horses when relieving themselves.
Erhai ground his teeth. Let him not think of the ghastliest scene of all.
… Several Japanese soldiers, jabbering and shrieking away, singing drunken, out-of-tune songs, in front of them a Chinese woman riding on an ox, then falling from its back. By the time they reached her, a purplish-black stain was spreading across the crotch of her thick green padded cotton trousers. The woman’s hair had come down, and below it her face was paper white. The woman paid no attention to the Japanese soldiers crowding about her, her two hands were thrust between her legs, as though to block the blood. The Japanese soldiers could see what was going on from her bulging stomach, and from the blood. There was no fun to be had with her, so they staggered off, still singing their tuneless songs. The man who had witnessed all this did not know Xiaohuan, but that was how he had described the scene over and over again to the people who came crowding round. While Erhai was running like the wind with Xiaohuan in his arms, that man ran equally fast behind him to tell him all about it, barely able to catch his breath.
How could Erhai allow himself to get fond of Duohe, a Jap woman?
She was pitiable, true, with nobody to turn to and no home to go to, but all the same … she deserved it!
When he thought of that word ‘deserve’, Erhai felt a momentary pang in his heart. He did not know who the pain was for, for Duohe, or for himself, for being capable of such harshness to a poor girl like her. What Xiaohuan said was true; Duohe owed her a little life. At the least, those compatriots of Duohe’s who could commit murder without batting an eyelid owed Xiaohuan a life.
How could Erhai get fond of this Jap woman?!
With a burst of energy, Erhai viciously snatched back his hands. He jumped off the kang, groped for his clothes and shoes, and put them on, hopping from foot to foot. Duohe knelt on the kang, a dark shadow full of disappointment.
‘Erhe?’
The hand that had just touched one of her round breasts felt as if there was a toad resting in its palm.
‘Erhai …’ At least now she had the right pronunciation and clear tones.
‘Out of the way!’
She was silent for a moment, and then started to chuckle. Xiaohuan would say this phrase in her most cheerful moods. Sometimes when Erhai said something to her, she would make as if to kick him, and come out with those words: ‘Out of the way!’
Erhai sat back down on the kang again. Duohe might have lived eighteen years, but her brain had not matured that far. He had just lit his pipe when Duohe leapt on him from behind, her jaw resting on the crown of his head, and both legs wrapped round his waist, her feet in his stomach. ‘Out of the way!’ she said, laughing. This evening she was making Erhai her playmate.
Erhai had never been so helpless. With Duohe, things always changed in this strange and baffling way, leaving him feeling foolish and upset. He waited until her craziness had worn itself out, then he knocked out the ashes of his pipe on the ground and clambered back onto the kang. All he could feel was Duohe’s hair waving about, and her soft, soft hands, seemingly all over his face and neck. Very soon he fell asleep.
* * *
fn1 Speakers of Chinese and Japanese cannot understand each other when they talk, but their writing systems share a lot of the same characters, which often have similar meanings in both languages. The name can be understood in both Japanese and Chinese writing systems, but the pronunciation is quite different. So where a Japanese person sees the name Takeuchi Tatsuru, a Chinese would read it as Zhunei Duohe.
3
ON A PATCH of wheat field between the village and the station, a battle was fought for a day and a night. One side wanted to destroy the railway, the other side to capture it, and nobody in the village really understood what it was all about. The crops in the field had been harvested, and all those straw stacks became the scene of the battle. Early in the morning of the second day the sound of gunfire ceased. Not long after, the people heard the whistle of a train, and said, The soldiers that wanted to capture the railway have won.
Xiaohuan had been cooped up in the house, and she could bear it no more. Carrying a bowl of maize-flour porridge, she picked up a salted radish in her chopsticks and slipped outs
ide. There was no change to be seen in the straw stacks, the wide-open field was very still, and it did not look remotely like a battle had just been fought there. A flock of sparrows descended, pecked for a while at the grains of wheat that had fallen on the ground and then flew away again. Who knew where the sparrows had gone while the fighting was going on. At this moment the field seemed particularly vast; any piece of scenery in the distance seemed caught between the sky and the ground. A crooked scholar tree, a scarecrow, a half-collapsed shelter, all became coordinates on the horizon. Xiaohuan knew nothing of coordinates or horizons, she was only standing there in the autumn of 1948, stock-still and stunned at this ghostly scene.
The sky in the east turned red and brightened, and in a blink of an eye half of the sun was up. Xiaohuan saw a thread of golden light on the horizon. Suddenly she saw dead bodies, one after another, lying aslant or on their backs with their faces turned to the sky. So that’s what a battleground is like. Xiaohuan took another look at the sun on one side and the retreating night on the other. This was a good place for battles, room enough to charge, space enough to kill.
The side that had killed and routed their opponents was called the People’s Liberation Army. The PLA were a smiley lot, keen to lend a hand, and fond of dropping by people’s homes. The PLA came to Stationmaster Zhang’s home to visit and help out, and they would snatch whatever job you were working on right out of your hands. The PLA brought many new words with them; officials were called cadres, and the man who patrolled the tracks wasn’t called the track-walker, he was the Working Class. Boss Lü who ran the wine shop in the village was no longer Boss Lü but a spy. The wine shop had been popular with the Japanese in the past as a place to stay, and no shoes or socks were allowed inside.
