by Geling Yan
As soon as he heard Xiaohuan calling out, Zhang Jian guessed that something must have happened to Duohe, and therefore something must have happened to the child in Duohe’s belly. He realised that he had already left the police and all those other people far behind him. Another guess pursued him: he would have to make that evil choice again, the way he had all those years ago. Keep the adult or keep the child. The next guess was that he would say to the doctor: Then … keep the child. After such a choice, he might perhaps feel for the rest of his life that he had committed a great sin, but he thought that this time he would not make the same decision as he had before. The beam of his torch found Xiaohuan.
Xiaohuan was standing on the far side of that stone-lined ditch in flowery underpants with two bundles in her arms, her mouth all bloody. The new moon had just risen from behind the mountains, and the bloodstain on the ground was black as pitch. By the time she had told him what had happened – Duohe had given birth – the police had started to appear, saying among themselves: Had a baby? … Who gave birth? … Twins! … Alive?
People gathered by the side of the ditch. Duohe had already stood up, and, with Xiaohuan and Zhang Jian’s help, dragged herself into her clothes, which hung unevenly on her. She was half leaning into Xiaohuan’s arms, one hand clutching a pine tree for support. The people said, it’s just as well we found you, now we can relax, how did you come to go climbing the mountain with such a big belly? So long as mother and sons are all right, that’s the main thing, you must live a charmed life.
They switched on the torches and shone them on the two children, and on their mother. Every time light from a torch came up, the babies’ mother bowed deeply. And they returned the bow, although very soon after they started to feel that they had no recollection of ever having bowed in such a way before.
Everybody was laughing and joking, saying that Zhang Jian should hand out red eggs to celebrate the birth. They should be good for five eggs each at the very least, after having helped him comb the mountain in the middle of the night. One policeman, a morose, elderly man, was called Old Fu. Old Fu never cracked a smile; he felt that Zhang Jian had managed his household very poorly, and if it hadn’t been for his sister-in-law, his wife and kids might well not have come out of it alive.
The matter was perfectly clear: of the two women, the one who had given birth was Zhang Jian’s wife, and the one wearing red flowery underpants and carrying the children was his sister-in-law. It was just like making fried dough twists, once they were cooked it would require a lot of effort for Zhang Jian to tease the strands apart. All he could do just then was to say the first thing that came into his head, promising with a chuckle to take red eggs to the police station.
When they reached the foot of the mountain, the two policemen who were carrying Duohe continued past the turning on the little road that led to Zhang Jian’s building. He became anxious, and asked them where they were taking her. To the People’s Hospital – where else? She’s had the children, what would she want with a hospital? Xiaohuan became anxious too, and hurried up to grab hold of the stretcher. The police insisted on a check-up, to see if anything was the matter with the mother and children. Even if they are all fine you still have to do your bit for hygiene – suppose the worst happened and something went wrong after giving birth on a barren mountain, what would we tell the Party organisation?!
It was well after midnight before they got Duohe and the two babies, and a frightened Girlie, settled down and asleep.
Xiaohuan told Zhang Jian to sleep as well, she would keep watch that night, to make certain that Duohe and the children were safe.
In the early morning pigeons landed on the balcony. Their continual cooing woke Zhang Jian from his doze. Xiaohuan had squeezed in next to Girlie and was fast asleep, while his head was occupying a small part of Duohe’s pillow. The two little boys were both under Duohe’s armpits. There they were, all sleeping in the same nest, old and young, male and female. He raised his head. Duohe was looking at him. He felt that she had spent a long time looking him up and down, from head to heel. Did she have to do it while he was sleeping, and all his defences were down? Outside it was broad daylight, but the lights were still on inside the room. Duohe’s outstretched foot was pallid and swollen.
Zhang Jian walked outside, and bought a bowl of soya-bean milk at a stall on the corner of the street, where he got the stallholder to stir in two poached eggs and three big spoons of brown sugar, turning the soya milk brown. When he returned carrying the soya milk and eggs, Xiaohuan had moved nearer the centre of the bed, squeezing Girlie over to Duohe’s side. Duohe’s eyes were still fixed on him, watching him as he came down the corridor holding the big, coarse pottery bowl in his hands. He thought again, What does she mean by looking at me like that? He had come all this way just now without a hitch, but now the soya milk was splashing out.
They called the twins Dahai and Erhai (first born and second born), and when they were a month old, Zhang Jian widened the two wooden beds, to form two kangs. Dahai and Erhai both slept in Duohe’s little room, and he slept in the big room with Xiaohuan and Girlie. Occasionally someone from the factory would come to discuss work with Deputy Group Leader Zhang, and the big room also became a sitting room. Working hard and avoiding speaking were Zhang Jian’s strong points, and it was thanks to these points that he had risen to the rank of Deputy Group Leader of the Crane Drivers’ Group.
From then on Zhang Jian never entered Duohe’s room. At six and a half, it was easy to give Girlie orders. You would say to her, Go and get Dahai and Erhai, and she would first carry in one of her two little brothers, then the other, for Zhang Jian to kiss and play with. Erhai was slightly thinner, and that was how Zhang Jian told the twins apart. The brothers were superb eaters and excellent sleepers, and the next time Zhang Jian looked properly at Duohe, he found that all her surplus flesh had been converted into milk and suckled away by the two boys. Duohe was still Duohe, and every day from dawn to dusk she methodically went about her usual business. Girlie’s clothes were ironed into perfect brightness and neatness, even a patched pair of checked trousers was ironed into knife-sharp creases. On the sixth day after she had given birth to the children, she had got out of bed bright and early, picked up a bucket of water, knelt on the floor with her bottom sticking in the air, and polished the concrete floor until it shone blue.
Zhang Jian had two friends at work, who had come with him from Anshan: Peng and Shi. Rivalries promptly broke out between them and their colleagues from Shanghai and Wuhan. The first time Xiao Peng went to Zhang Jian’s home the twins were just over a month old. He wanted to get Zhang Jian to proofread his application to join the Communist Youth League. When the door opened he stood stock-still in the doorway. He asked what flooring Zhang Jian’s family had put down, and they told him it was a concrete floor, same as everyone else’s. Impossible, he said. He knelt down and rubbed the floor with one finger, saying, So smooth, it’s like jade. Then he looked again at his finger, to which not even a speck of dust clung. He looked at the row of shoes at the door of the Zhang home, and again at the snow-white cloth socks on the feet of the Zhang family, and walked in gingerly on the tips of his oily, dirty suede boots. The second time he came it was with Xiao Shi, and they came prepared, having changed into their least holey and malodorous socks.
Some time later, when Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi again visited the Zhang home, they found that the Zhang family had prepared too; the Zhangs’ sister-in-law silently set two pairs of wood-soled slippers in front of them. They felt like Zhang Jian’s sister-in-law did not have a face, all they saw of her was the crown of her head, or else the back of her neck.
It was mainly because of Xiaohuan that they came to the Zhangs’ home. Xiaohuan had treated Xiao Peng with such friendliness and warmth on his first visit that he stopped feeling homesick. It was only once Xiao Shi had heard his description that he came with him to meet her. She would wrap a big apron around her slender waist, and ask, with a cigarette holder stuck in
her mouth at an attractive angle, what they would both like to eat, and she would make it for them. Xiaohuan never paid much attention to such everyday matters as oil, salt, firewood and rice; so long as the result tasted good, she was perfectly happy to use up half a kilo of oil in one session. So long as she had good lard, chopped in pieces and fried with plenty of soy sauce and onions, she could mix it with rice and put it on to steam, and the result was fragrant enough to lift the roof off the whole block.
Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi noticed that the Zhangs’ sister-in-law never came to table, but took the three children into the little room where she fed them separately. One time the group in the big room had eaten themselves into a merry mood, and said, Bring the twin boys over so we can play with them. Half drunk, Zhang Jian raised his voice, and called out to Girlie to carry Dahai and Erhai over. A few minutes passed and Girlie’s bobbed head appeared at the edge of the door frame, saying, ‘Dad, my auntie says that I’d drop them. If you want them carried over, come yourself.’
When Zhang Jian had downed two or three ounces of spirits, he staggered next door, feeling like a little god, and saw his two sons lying in Duohe’s arms drinking milk. Duohe was wearing a front-opening cotton top knitted out of yarn taken from gloves, and right now it was open all the way, exposing two pinkish-white breasts, which pillowed the round, bulging faces of the twin boys. Zhang Jian had never noticed what Duohe looked like when nursing children, but this time he looked and looked, this time his heart suddenly gave a lurch. Duohe said in that language of hers that she thought was Chinese that he could take them away, the boys had both drunk their fill. If he did not take them now they would go to sleep. Zhang Jian walked up, his hand brushed past the hollow of Dahai’s throat. When Duohe shrugged her shoulders, his hand touched her nipple. His hand was chilly.
What had happened that first night they were together? Had it been his hands that had first got to know her body? He had put out the lamp without looking at her. There was no brightness at all in the room, she was just a thin, small, black shadow. Her head seemed very big, her hair exceptionally thick. Although her hair was black too, it was not the black hair he was familiar with. It was barbarian black hair, a different species. The barbarian males had killed, burned and looted, and the lone, solitary woman they had left behind was no more than a thin, black shadow. He had closed in on her, then moved in closer still, looming bigger and bigger in her eyes. Darkness makes big, tall things even larger. In her eyes, he must have been the enormous black shadow of a man who killed, burned and looted. She had begun to cry. Slowly her legs had given way and she had collapsed on the kang. He had not been a barbarian towards her, he had not even been particularly rough with her, it was just that his movements were utterly devoid of interest. His movements were very effective, but absolutely indifferent. She had cried ever more painfully. The little, thin, black shadow had shaken and curled in on itself, like the grub of a green hawkmoth. He had started to get barbaric, to murder and pillage on this quivering black shadow.
She was not completely indifferent to him. At the least she regarded him as an occupying army. What thoughts did the women of the enemy nations have towards an occupying army? He felt she was looking at him in that way again, full of ambiguous thoughts. He raised his head, and sure enough, her eyes were deeply, profoundly barbarian, full of hostile provocation.
And that wasn’t all that was wrong. Things were wrong within himself. His heart lurched over and over again, he could not move a step.
Zhang Jian came round with a start at the sound of Girlie’s voice. Girlie was talking to Duohe in Japanese, saying that she did not want to wear the ‘wanpiisu’. Zhang Jian realised that it was a flowery dress. How could he have failed to notice the conversations that had always been going on between the two of them? From time to time half a sentence of Japanese would be slipped into half a sentence of Chinese. What would happen if they spoke this peculiar language outside?
‘From now on you’re not to say that any more,’ Zhang Jian said to Girlie in a quiet voice.
Girlie looked at him with eyes identical to his own, ignorant and innocent.
Zhang Jian turned his face towards Duohe. ‘Don’t teach the children Japanese.’
Duohe also looked at him, apparently just as ignorant and innocent.
5
XIAOHUAN HAD CHANGED jobs twice in the space of a year. She first went to the factory as a temporary worker, where she learned to cut serial numbers, but having learned the way of it, she complained that it was too dull. In the time it took to finish one number she’d spent enough time with her own thoughts to last her a lifetime. You were supposed to do over ten numbers in a day, and that was a lot of lifetimes. She quit her job and lazed around at home for two months, her temper worsening perceptibly with idleness, and then she took herself off to work at a guest house. It was near the train station, and there were many guests from all over the country, which meant that she had plenty to chat about. It looked like she would not be switching jobs again for a while. The thing Xiaohuan disliked most about working in the guest house was the shifts. She had to spend sixteen hours at a stretch sitting in the duty room on the last Sunday of every month.
It was on a Sunday that it happened. Xiaohuan set off bright and early for work. She had just gone out when Zhang Jian got up. He leaned on the railing of the balcony, smoking, and heard somebody open the window behind him. Duohe. Her eyes were on his back, the back of his neck, and his head of thick, hard scrubbing-brush hair. Xiaohuan was not there. It was as if they could hear each other’s hearts beating.
With the coming of autumn, the weather was still hot, but in a different way. The heat from the distant steel factory did not linger so long in the air. How good it would have been if there was no Duohe in this family, Zhang Jian thought mercilessly. He saw the neighbours going out, all in their family groups, the father riding his bike with the mother sitting on the seat at the back holding the baby, the eldest child and the second one on the crossbar, complaining, laughing, cursing as they turned the corner onto the main road below the building. He envied them desperately. His own bicycle could be done up too, he had already added a little chair he had welded himself to the handlebars for Girlie to sit on, and Xiaohuan could go on the back seat with Dahai on her back and Erhai in her arms. They too could be a family for people to envy. And yet they had to have this extra person, this Duohe.
When Zhang Jian had smoked two Donghai cigarettes down to stubs, he walked into the big room, and heard the voice of Girlie, who had just woken up, rattling away. As soon as she woke up she would go dashing over to Auntie Duohe’s little room. Girlie seemed to be saying that her brothers were doing this or that and she wanted to do it too. Nobody could control Duohe’s conversations with Girlie, the Japanese words so fluently mixed in. He walked to the door of the room, and assumed a forbidding expression.
‘Girlie, in this house we don’t speak foreign.’
‘I wasn’t speaking foreign.’ Girlie raised two broad eyebrows, identical to his own.
‘How come I didn’t understand what you were saying just now?’
Girlie looked at him in bewilderment. After a while she finally said, ‘Then you were talking foreign.’
He could feel Duohe’s eyes on his right hand. He had hit Girlie twice, both times when he had been in one of his stubborn fits. Normally he adored Girlie, he had even worked bits of scrap metal from the fitters’ bench into little tables and chairs for a doll’s house for her. When he hit Girlie the two women formed a united front. Duohe took him by surprise from behind, battering his lower back with her head. Xiaohuan’s mouth was a deadly weapon, a long string of vile words: Quite the lad, aren’t you? In the factory you lick the leaders’ arseholes to get yourself made a little group leader, but when you come home you pick the soft meat to pound!
His eyes on Girlie’s feet, he said, ‘Duohe, our family are Chinese.’ Girlie was wearing a pair of white cloth sandals, the uppers made by Duohe and the soles by Xiaohuan. G
irlie’s perfectly clean toenails were visible outside the white cloth. Nowhere else in this town could you find white cloth sandals or pinky-white translucent toenails.
Duohe’s silent, unobtrusive obstinacy could be seen all over the house: the concrete floor scrubbed to a gleaming blue-green, clothes ironed pencil-straight, the three children’s shoes and socks without a speck of dust on them.
If everything could be untangled and done all over again, if there had been no war and the Japanese hadn’t been so bestially cruel in China for so many years, Zhang Jian would marry Duohe. He would not care what country she was from.
He just stood there in front of her, startled by his own thought: He’d marry her? He was fond of her …?!
When they had eaten breakfast, Duohe, squeakily singing a Japanese song, strapped Dahai and Erhai to her chest and back and took Girlie by the hand. Only then did he react: the four of them were going out. Going where? To the park. Did she know the way? No, but Girlie did.
Zhang Jian stood up and slipped a shirt onto his bare back. Duohe was watching him, not daring to let a smile appear on her face, but suddenly it floated up. She dashed back to the little room, and Zhang Jian heard her unstrap the two boys and open the wooden chest. After a while the lid of the chest came down with a slam, and Duohe emerged in a patterned dress and a cloth sun hat, carrying a woman’s handbag with frilled scalloped edging. She trotted about the little flat, her footsteps quick and rather clumsy.
This was the first time Duohe had had a proper outing, let alone a chance to take the three children out with Zhang Jian. She was wearing and carrying all her worldly goods.
