by Geling Yan
On the day the letter arrived, having said his piece, he could relax and think about family matters. How to keep Duohe and Xiaohuan at arm’s length. What to do about Duohe, who went to the Neighbourhood Committee but never spoke. Whether to give in to Xiaohuan’s strident demands to go out to work. But it was the business of Dahai the revolutionary martyr that occupied his mind the most. Who’d have thought it, his brother Dahai had survived into his thirties, become a chief of staff, married and had kids, without ever going home to find his father and mother before dying his glorious death. He thought that Dahai had really let the side down. When the study meeting broke up, an orderly who delivered newspapers and letters in his section had given him the letter written by his father. His few lines of large, coarse, bold characters were overflowing with joy: he said that he and Erhai’s mother were going to Jiamusi to visit the grandchildren.
Zhang Jian read on. His elder brother had left roots for the Zhang family, so wasn’t he off the hook? And Duohe was off the hook too; they could send her away. But where would they send her away to? Never mind that for now, the main thing was that he was going to liberate the proletariat – himself!
Zhang Jian went back to the family living quarters, not far from the production area. Xiaohuan had gone out again. Duohe came up with quick steps, knelt in front of him, removed his heavy suede boots for him, and carried them gingerly outside. Suede boots ought to be a light brown colour, but the boots of people from the coke-smelting plant would come out pitch black after the first day. He had had a wash in the factory, but people on the street could still tell that he was from the coke plant. All workers were tainted by it, the colour had leached into the deeper layers of their skin.
It was a very big room. Two wooden beds, joined together, had been placed on its east side, like a kang. At the west end was a big iron stove, and they had set up a sheet-iron chimney that coiled halfway round the ceiling, before emerging from a hole under the eaves. So long as they managed to keep the stove alight, the room was warm enough to make wearing padded cotton indoors unbearable.
It was the middle of August, so Duohe cooked the meal outside, and she had to take her shoes on and off every time she came and went, which made her busier than anyone. Xiaohuan was lazy. Provided nobody actually put her to work, she grumbled incessantly but abided by Duohe’s Japanese rules.
He had just sat down when a cup of tea silently appeared in front of him. The tea had cooled nicely, it had been brewed according to the time he left work. After the tea arrived, a fan appeared too. By the time he took the fan, all he could see of Duohe was her back. Xiaohuan was the source of his happiness, but Duohe was the source of his comfort. The new workers’ village had several dozen red-brick single-storey buildings, all new and built in a hurry, with a Neighbourhood Committee for every twenty or thirty buildings. In the Neighbourhood Committee, Duohe was Zhang Jian’s deaf-and-dumb sister-in-law, who was always following behind her rowdy elder sister Zhu Xiaohuan, going to buy vegetables, or scavenging for coal. When Xiaohuan met with acquaintances on the road, she would make a wisecrack as she passed, and Duohe would always bow apologetically behind her.
Duohe brought over Xiaohuan’s half-finished sweater. When the fit was upon her, Xiaohuan would unravel Zhang Jian’s cotton work gloves and dye them, to knit a sweater for Girlie, with peacocks and ears of wheat in all kinds of different stitches. But her enthusiasm would pass quickly, and she always left her sweaters half done, for Duohe to finish. When asked how to do the fancy stitching, she could not be bothered to teach Duohe, who was left to puzzle it out herself.
They only had this room and an outer one, a shack thrown together out of oilcloth and broken bricks. Every family had made themselves a shed outside their door; only the style, materials and size varied from family to family. On two big wooden beds six wooden boards had been laid out horizontally, each over a foot wide and more than three metres in length. Girlie’s pillow was at the foot of the bed, and Zhang Jian’s was in the middle, while Duohe and Xiaohuan slept one on each side of him, just like the sleeping arrangements on a big kang. When they had first moved in, Zhang Jian had said they should partition the big room into two, at which Xiaohuan, revolted, had said: It’s hardly worth putting up a wall to cover up your night-time goings-on! Xiaohuan had a murderously sharp tongue, but she could still be magnanimous in her dealings with others. When from time to time she was woken at night by Zhang Jian and Duohe, she would just turn over and tell them to keep the noise down, there was a child sleeping with them on the kang too.
When Duohe had given birth to her son it was Xiaohuan who had delivered him, and Xiaohuan had nursed Duohe through her month’s confinement after the birth. Xiaohuan had called the son ‘Erhai’, and became much more friendly towards Duohe, having decided, in her own words, to give face to the Buddha, if not to the monk. When her son had died, she told Duohe to hurry up and have another: only by having another little ‘Erhai’ could she stanch the wounds of the whole family. The passing of little Erhai at barely a month old had torn a lump of flesh from all of their hearts.
From then on, whenever Zhang Jian wriggled into her quilt Xiaohuan would drive him out again: if he had plenty of seed going spare he shouldn’t scatter it on ground where it wouldn’t sprout, leaving Duohe’s patch of fertile soil to go barren. Little Erhai had died the previous year, and Duohe’s fertile soil was showing no signs of quickening. Duohe was redundant, Zhang Jian thought; now they had his elder brother’s orphan children, the Zhang family had somebody to keep their incense fires burning.
‘Erhai,’ Duohe suddenly said, looking at him.
The first time she had seen him, they had been separated by a layer of light brown fog – the sack that had held her and given her a layer of protection from the snowy day. They had put her on the stage, and he had walked towards her. She was huddled up in the sack, and only got a glimpse of him. Afterwards she had shut her eyes, her head pulled in between her shoulders, like a chicken ready for the slaughter. She stored that glimpse of him in her mind, and reviewed it repeatedly. He was tall, true enough, but she had not been able to see his face, and she did not know if he was clumsy, or poorly proportioned. He was picking up the sack – was he carrying her off to be butchered? Her curled-up legs and frozen body were dangling in mid-air, in the sack, swaying along with his footsteps, and from time to time she would briefly bump into his calf. Every time she bumped into him she shrank, nauseated, into an even smaller ball. Pain started to revive, like countless tiny burrs, boring its way from the soles of her feet, her toes and her fingertips towards her arms and legs. He was carrying her, striding forward between a great mass of pitch-black feet and pitch-black silhouettes and laughing voices, making slow, deliberate responses to someone’s jokes. She felt like that great mass might come up at any moment and trample her into the snow. Just then she heard an elderly woman’s voice beginning to speak. After that came the voice of an elderly man. The smell of farm animals seeped through the seams in the sack. Shortly after that she was set down on a wooden board. It was the bottom of a cart. Dropped there in a heap like dung or dirt. The horse set off at a run, urged on by a whip, running faster and faster, shaking her down into something ever more tightly packed. A hand kept coming up and lightly patting her body, whisking away the snowflakes. It was an elderly hand, it could not stretch out fully, and its palm was very soft. Every time the palm of the hand patted her, she would shrink towards the back of the cart. Through the pale brown fog, she saw the corner of a courtyard, one wall studded with many black cowpats for fuel. Once again it was the tall man who picked her up and carried her through a door. The sack fell away from her, and she saw him. Another fleeting glimpse. It was only afterwards that she took her time looking over the man she had seen so briefly: he was like a big beast of burden, with a pair of eyes so much like those of an overworked mule. The fingers of the beast of burden were very close to her; if he wanted to touch her, let him try, there was nothing wrong with her teeth.
&n
bsp; Lucky I didn’t bite him then, she thought.
‘Pregnant, I am,’ Duohe said.
‘Oh,’ Zhang Jian responded, his eyes open wide. It really was a fertile field, continuing to produce plentiful harvests!
That evening Xiaohuan came back with Girlie. As soon as she heard the news she whirled round and trotted straight back out again, saying that she was going to get some wine. At supper they drank until sweat stood out on their foreheads, and Xiaohuan dipped her chopsticks in the spirits and dripped the liquid onto Girlie’s tongue. Girlie’s face scrunched up, and she threw back her head and laughed out loud.
‘This time when Duohe’s stomach gets big again, the neighbours are bound to suspect: how come the sister-in-law gets herself a big belly with never a sight of her husband?’ Xiaohuan said.
Zhang Jian asked her if she had a plan, and she lowered her face. A plan? she said. Easy. Shut Duohe up in the house, and she would tuck a pillow in her waist and go strolling about everywhere. Duohe stared blankly at the table.
‘What are you thinking?’ Xiaohuan asked her. ‘Of running off again?’ She turned to Zhang Jian, and pointed at Duohe. ‘She wants to run away!’
Zhang Jian looked at Xiaohuan. She was thirty if she was a day, and still she was incapable of being serious. He said that her trick wouldn’t work. There was only one toilet for each row of houses, so several people had to share each pit; how was she supposed to go to the toilet with a pillow stuck up her shirt? Was Duohe not to go out of doors to use the toilet? Xiaohuan said that holding in a bit of pee wouldn’t kill you. Rich families all sit on chamber pots in their own home. Zhang Jian told her to give it a rest.
‘Or how about I go back with Duohe to Anping village, and have the kid there?’ Xiaohuan said.
Duohe’s eyes sparkled; she looked at Zhang Jian, then at Xiaohuan. Zhang Jian silently drew in two mouthfuls of smoke from his pipe, and nodded gently to himself.
‘Our house is a long way from the village!’ Xiaohuan said. ‘There’s lots to eat there, and the freshest chickens you’ve ever seen! The flour is fresh too!’
Zhang Jian stood up. ‘Give it a rest, go to sleep.’
Xiaohuan paced around him, left and right, saying that whenever he was required to come up with a plan or take the initiative he was no bloody use at all. A big man like him, in the end he’d still always obey his smiling tiger of a mother. Zhang Jian let her ramble on as she pleased, stretched both arms wide and yawned hugely. He did not want to produce his idea before it was fully formed.
Once Zhang Jian came up with an idea there was no room for negotiation. The following day when he came in the door, and Duohe approached to untie his shoelaces, he told her to wait, there was something he had to say first: they were moving next month. Moving? Where to? A very long way away. Further than Harbin? Much further. Nobody in the section really knew precisely where it was, so he told them it was a city to the south of the Yangtze River. Why go there? A quarter of all the workers in the factory had to go.
Duohe knelt down, and undid the laces of his suede boots. South of the Yangtze River? She repeated those four characters in her mind. Xiaohuan and Zhang Jian’s question-and-answer session continued. One said she wasn’t going, the other said it wasn’t up to her. Why did they have to go? Because of all the hard work he’d had to do to get the application accepted.
For the first time, Xiaohuan felt afraid. Go south of the Yangtze River? She had never even imagined that she might get so much as a glimpse of the Yangtze in her whole life. Xiaohuan had spent six years at primary school, but she did not have a clue about geography. The centre of her world was Zhujiatun, the Zhu family village, where she was born and grew up; Anping village was already foreign territory to her. When she had married into Anping the fact that it was just thirty kilometres away from Zhujiatun had been an important consolation. Now she was going to go to the south bank of the Yangtze. How many rivers and streams were there between the Yangtze and Zhujiatun?
That night Xiaohuan lay on the kang, unable to imagine a life where she could not run off to Zhujiatun. If she decided she had had enough of Zhang Jian she would have to carry on anyway: there would be no father, mother, brothers, grandmother or Manzi nearby. She felt a hand reach into her quilt, and take hers. Her hand was exhausted and useless, all temper fled. That hand held hers, and laid it against those lips that were so reluctant to move when he spoke. His lips were no longer as fleshy as when they were first married; all bone-dry creases now. His lips opened, and took her fingers inside them.
After a moment, he pulled Xiaohuan’s arm under his quilt too, followed by her entire body. And he took her in his arms. He knew she was the pampered daughter of a country family who had never seen anything of the world, he knew how frightened she was, and what she was afraid of.
Xiaohuan had learned something in her thirty years. She had come to understand that with some things there was no point in making a fuss. They were going south.
4
IT WAS A brand-new city on the south bank of the Yangtze River, surrounded by nine mountains, surrounding three lakes, and bordering the river on one side. Two of the mountains, called Flower Mountain and Jade Mountain, were like giant bonsai arrangements, one was about five hundred metres high, the other about six hundred, covered in fine pine woods, and on windy days you could hear the wind whistling in the pines even at its base. At the foot of both mountains and following their shape, a series of red-brick apartment blocks had been erected. Looking down on the green mountains and the red buildings from the summits was enough to make anyone want to burst into a chorus of ‘Socialism is Great’.
All the residential blocks were a uniform four storeys high. Zhang Jian’s family had the last flat in the row on the fourth floor. None of the neighbours could take a wrong turning and end up in their home, either deliberately or accidentally. The flat had two rooms, and a corridor where you could put a table to eat. If you leaned out over the balcony and turned your face to the left, you would find yourself surveying a gentle slope covered with golden-red flowers in full bloom.
Duohe had not set foot outside the door once in all her pregnancy. That afternoon, she pulled on Zhang Jian’s canvas overalls to cover her bulging eight months belly. She puffed and panted her way up the slope, wanting to see the flowers that covered the mountain in a sheet of flame. When she came closer, she was disappointed to find that these were not the katakuri that had bloomed on the hills of Shironami village. Katakuri flowers bloomed every year in April, and were replaced by the more beautiful mountain lilies when summer came. Xiaohuan and Girlie always came back from climbing the mountain with pine cones, wild onions and wild celery, but they had never once brought back flowers.
Forced to lean back slightly under the weight of her alarmingly large belly, Duohe could not see the road beneath her feet, and she had to hold on tightly to one tree after another as she slowly climbed her way up the slope. The March sun was already quite hot, and before long Duohe had stripped down to just a tight-fitting vest. She made a bundle of the overalls, and slung them on her back, lashing them to her body with the sleeves.
Seen up close, the red-gold flowers had a thin layer of down on their petals, with long stamens poking out. When Girlie was curious about something, her eyes would pop open, and those camel’s eyelashes that came from Erhai would become black stamens. Duohe often saw her own face reflected in Girlie’s black eyes, dark as the bottom of a well. Girlie called Xiaohuan ‘Mummy’ and Duohe ‘Auntie’, but every time her gaze landed, itching, on Duohe’s cheek, the back of her hand or the back of her neck, she would think that at six years old Girlie was not that easy to fool. Her brain was moving at an incredible speed, turning over the exact relations between these three people. It would not be too long before Girlie found her own answers, and their secret mother–daughter relationship would begin.
In the distance, the little train in the factory hooted melodiously, in a slightly higher key than a normal train, and slightly more muffled.
Duohe had no kin in all the world. All she could do was rely on her own body to create family for her. Every time she became pregnant she would pray, quietly and unobserved, on bended knees to her dead mother and father, while in her stomach more of her flesh and blood was growing.
A few months ago, when Girlie and Duohe were bathing together, the girl suddenly reached out a tender forefinger and drew it along that brown line on her belly, asking if this was the place where her stomach opened and shut. She said, yes it was. Girlie’s finger applied more pressure as it moved along, painfully grazing her belly with her fingernail. But she made no effort to avoid it, and let her ask deeper questions. Sure enough Girlie said: When it opens up, a little person will come out. She smiled, watching her fascinated expression. Girlie spoke again, saying that she had come out of there, then that place had closed up, and when my little brother comes out it will open here again. Her fingernail sliced its way forcefully up and down, wanting to open it up then and there. She would see through all the lies grown-ups told.
With two bunches of red-gold flowers clutched in her hands, Duohe realised that every step down the mountain would be very difficult. She found a stone and rested, as the little train in the steel foundry drove from one end to the other with its drawn-out note, and then after a while drove past in the opposite direction, hooting again. Duohe closed her eyes. The noise from the train was the sound of her childhood. All the children of Shironami village had grown up listening to the little trains, and the Japanese goods they ate, wore and used had all been brought there by rail. All the parcels of neatly arranged, exquisitely wrapped nori seaweed and the bundles of carefully folded printed cloth. There was a deaf-mute in Shironami village who could do a first-rate imitation of the shrill call of the train. Duohe closed her eyes and sat on the stone, and imagined the sound of the distant train as the deaf-mute’s voice.
