Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  The reefs that stretched out into the river were more than half submerged. Ships passed back and forth, hooting. Zhang Jian thought that Duohe was dead, and he was the one who had done the deed. Faced with the choice between his two spouses, this was the only thing he could have done.

  They searched for a whole day. They could not carry on searching without a thought for hunger or thirst, nor could they carry on leaving the children in the care of the Neighbourhood Committee. Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan took the nine o’clock slow train south. He saw Xiaohuan lean back with her eyes closed. He thought that she was catching up on the sleep she had missed at work, but then she suddenly hunched her shoulders, as if she had cramp, and opened her bright, penetrating eyes. As soon as they fell on Zhang Jian, she leaned back again. It seemed that she had realised that the man sitting opposite her was not worthy of her trust: she had been on the verge of saying something, but then stopped.

  In the following days, Zhang Jian gradually realised what she had been going to say. She went to reception centres for indigents in the surrounding cities and counties, and checked among the people they had taken in, but she did not find Duohe. With Duohe gone, Xiaohuan had to ask for leave to take care of the two boys and Girlie. Dahai and Erhai were not accustomed to Xiaohuan; Xiaohuan changed their nappies twice a day, whereas Duohe had changed them six times. Also because Xiaohuan did not wash nappies regularly, they were often not hung out to dry for long enough, they had to endure half-damp nappies, and soon they started to suffer from nappy rash. Girlie dropped out of the children’s choir, and every day she would run straight home as soon as school was over, her sheet-iron pencil case banging and clattering on her bottom all the way. She had to help wash vegetables and rice, because in the afternoon Xiaohuan took her brothers on visits to the neighbours, to teach them how to make little hedgehogs and goats out of steamed bread with red-bean filling. People would not take Xiaohuan seriously when she said things like ‘my sister’s run off with someone’.

  In just over ten days, the cement floor which had always gleamed greenish blue with cleanliness was covered in a layer of oil and dirt. Xiaohuan never cleaned up properly after scattering fatty meat when making dumplings in the corridor. At mealtimes she was always the first to sit down, and by the time the two others had joined her, she would remember that she had not brought the food through. When she brought in the food, she would forget to put out chopsticks for everyone. And while she worked she was always cursing at the top of her voice: that vegetable stall sold mud with the vegetables; those black-hearted sods in the rice shop, they mixed sand in with the rice. Or else it would be: Zhang Jian, we’re out of soy sauce, just nip out and get me some! Girlie, you’re so lazy there’s maggots growing between your bones, the basin of nappies I told you to soak for me has been there for a full day!

  Xiaohuan’s job in the guest house had only been temporary in the first place, and after two weeks away from work she was issued with a warning. Xiaohuan could not abandon the two boys, her only choice was to grit her teeth and resign from a job she actually liked, and which had been so hard to find.

  One day Zhang Jian drew a basin of water, sat on the side of the bed and washed his feet with soap. Xiaohuan sat down, looking at his two feet, all weighed down with cares, as they stirred water that was greyish white with soap.

  ‘Has Duohe been gone twenty days?’ Xiaohuan said.

  ‘Twenty-one,’ said Zhang Jian.

  Xiaohuan ruffled his hair. She was not willing to mention that washing the feet with soap in this way was something Duohe had compelled him to do. Zhang Jian had never put up any serious resistance to Duohe. Who would? Duohe’s compulsion was of the silent kind, she would come tripping over with a basin of hot water, put it next to your feet, then set down a cake of soap. Half squatting, half kneeling, she would take off your socks. When she lowered her head to gauge the water temperature, anyone would surrender. Twenty-one days without her, and they still washed their feet according to her methods. How much longer would be needed for Xiaohuan to get Zhang Jian completely under her own jurisdiction again?

  And would she get all of him back under her control?

  After a month, Zhang Jian started to find this home unbearable. That day he had been on the night shift. When he woke from sleep he filled a bucket of water and started to scrub the floor, wiggling his bottom just like Duohe. It took several minutes to scrub a patch of floor bright and clean. As he was scrubbing, he heard a female neighbour’s voice cry out: ‘Aiyo! Isn’t that Auntie? What’s the matter, Auntie? How did you get like this?’ The female neighbour’s voice was shrill, as if she had seen a ghost.

  The door opened behind Zhang Jian. He looked over his shoulder, and saw her come in: a begrimed, splotched figure. You could see at a glance that the patterned dress had served for a month as quilt, sheets, towel, bandages, nobody would ever believe that it had once been white. The neighbour was behind Duohe, her hands held open but empty, not daring to support this dirty, debilitated creature.

  ‘How come you’re back?’ Zhang Jian asked. He wanted to crawl up from off the floor, but he could not. He had collapsed right there on the spot from relief and a kind of delayed fear, as if he had been pardoned.

  Duohe’s hair hung loose about her shoulders like a ghost. Just then, Xiaohuan came out of the kitchen, put down the spatula she was holding, dashed over and flung her arms around Duohe.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ She burst into tears, one minute taking Duohe’s face in her hands and looking at it, then clasping her to her breast, then holding her at arm’s length again. That face was very dark, beneath a surface layer of greyish white. There was a dead expression in her eyes. Xiaohuan had thought that she would never forget the way Duohe had looked when she first came out of the sack, but in fact she had forgotten. It took the Duohe she saw at this moment to remind her how terrible she had looked back then.

  The neighbour was sharing in the grief and gladness of this family reunion with a heart full of suspicion, but her mouth was repeating: ‘You’re back, that’s good, you’re back, that’s good,’ over and over again. Nobody in the family paid any attention to the pity and disgust in her eyes as she looked at Duohe. The neighbours’ guesses had been confirmed: there was something wrong with her brain.

  The door closed on the neighbour. Xiaohuan got Duohe settled on a chair, bawling to Zhang Jian to make some hot water with sugar. Xiaohuan had always been lax about hygiene, but right now she thought that a bit of hygiene was just what Duohe needed. Having packed Zhang Jian off to get hot sugar water, she also called urgently to him to wring out the nappies in the wooden bathtub, she was going to give Duohe a wash.

  Duohe leapt from her chair, and pushed open the door of the small room with a clang. The two boys were lying on a pile of cotton wadding, because nobody had got round to changing their urine-soaked quilt and sheets. The atmosphere in the room was thick, a heady mixture of food, excreta and urine. The children had been gnawing the corners off playing cards, and chewing on steamed mantou bread, and the bed and floor were covered in crumbs. Duohe lifted up a boy with each hand and sat cross-legged on the bed, so the children were at once positioned safely and securely. She undid the buttons on the bodice of her dishcloth-filthy dress, and the twins immediately bit down on that pair of nipples without opening their eyes. A few seconds later, both of them spat out the nipples. Duohe once more stuffed them back into their mouths. This time they immediately spat them out. Dahai and Erhai had been having a nice sleep, then woken up to suckle on two dry nipples, like two shrunken grape skins whose juice had all been drained, and now they suddenly turned hostile, crying and shrieking, beating with their fists and kicking their feet.

  Duohe did not move a muscle, or make a sound, holding on to them calmly but stubbornly. Her flaccid breasts swayed with every struggle. Those breasts looked like they belonged to a fifty-year-old; the flesh had been dried out by suffering, and her ribs were clearly visible in neat descending rows below her collarbones.<
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  Duohe stuffed her nipples into Dahai’s and Erhai’s mouths again, and once more they spat her out. Her hands pressed against Dahai’s mouth, forcing him to suck; it seemed that if he kept on suckling for long enough, her milk would return, sucked back from the deep places of her life. So long as the children drank their milk, their relationship to her would be something that even the gods could not overturn, a law set down by heaven, and her position would be superior to that man and woman in the other room.

  She had failed with Dahai. So she moved on to Erhai. One of her hands ruthlessly pressed down on the back of his head, the other hand pushed the nipple upwards towards his mouth. His head was under attack from left and right, and his smothered face was turning purple.

  ‘Why are you doing this to yourself? How could you still have milk?’ Xiaohuan said.

  How was Duohe supposed to understand logic or be rational? She was being completely unreasonable with her two baby sons.

  Finding himself with no means of retreat, Erhai simply staged an assault, biting down on the nipple that persisted in persecuting him. Duohe cried out in pain, ‘Ow!’ and let her nipple slip from her son’s mouth. The two useless nipples that nobody wanted hung there, snubbed and tragic.

  Zhang Jian could bear it no more. He picked up Erhai in his arms, cautiously telling Duohe the children had already got used to eating rice porridge and soft noodles, and they were growing pretty well, as she could see. They hadn’t lost so much as an ounce of flesh.

  Duohe suddenly put Dahai down. In a blink of an eye she was on him, tearing at Zhang Jian’s clothes. She might be just the shell of a woman, but when she moved she was like a wildcat. She hung onto Zhang Jian’s broad shoulders, one fist battering at random his head, cheeks and eyes. Her feet had grown claws too, and ten long toenails left bloody tracks on Zhang Jian’s calves. Faced with this sudden onslaught, and terrified the child he was protecting in his arms would get hit by a stray punch, Zhang Jian was beaten until everything went black in front of his eyes.

  Worried that Dahai would be frightened, Xiaohuan held him close and retreated to the door. Before long Duohe had beaten Zhang Jian into the corridor, where he knocked over the pail of water, trod on the scrubbing brush and staggered backwards. The iron spatula was kicked across the floor, clattering as it went.

  Duohe was weeping and howling as she beat him, and there were words of Japanese in her cries. Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan thought that these must be dirty words. Duohe was saying: So close, so close! She had come so close to not being able to come back at all. She had come so close to rolling off as she clung to the train that carried watermelons. She had come so close to losing control and soiling her dress when she had diarrhoea. She had come so close to allowing Zhang Jian’s plot against her to succeed.

  Xiaohuan was watching closely, and when the opportunity came she snatched Erhai out of Zhang Jian’s hands. She knew that right now it would be impossible to hold Duohe back. She had become a creature somewhere between human and ghost; she would naturally be possessed of an inhuman strength. Xiaohuan whisked the leftover tea and cold food off the table, to keep the damage from the fight to a minimum. If Xiaohuan had been in her shoes she would not have hit this man, she would have taken the razor he used for shaving to him.

  Duohe relaxed her grip on Zhang Jian. He was attempting to justify himself with lame arguments, saying she had run off by herself and got lost. But Duohe couldn’t hear what he was saying; the twins had cried like resonant trumpets since their birth, and now they were getting bigger the trumpets had become full size, and they were blowing in chorus, each vying to outdo the other.

  Duohe went for the spatula on the floor and slashed at Zhang Jian with it. He ducked, and the spatula hacked into the wall. At this moment he was locked in a life-and-death struggle, not with Duohe, but with the people of Shironami village. Theirs was a unique, hellish rage that could only be produced by a long period of silence and calm. The people of Shironami village had taken over Duohe’s body, and the spatula she was brandishing became a samurai sword.

  ‘Let her hit you a few times, she’ll be all right once she’s seen a bit of blood!’ Xiaohuan persuaded Zhang Jian from the side.

  But her voice was buried beneath the wailing of the children, and Zhang Jian did not hear a word of it. Even if he had heard he would not have necessarily paid any attention. He just hoped that Duohe would use up her strength lashing out at empty air. He looked for his chance to spring into the big room and close the door, but when it was half shut Duohe managed to block the door with her body. It became a vertical pair of scales, with one person inside and one out, and the weight on both sides equally matched. Zhang Jian thought it was quite terrifying, the way a woman like a willow blown by the wind could hold her own against him in a fight: Duohe’s hair was loose and streamed around her, and her heavily tanned face was a greenish-purple colour, beneath the greyish white of starvation and lack of sleep. She was exerting too much strength, her mouth was stretched into two lines, exposing her teeth, unbrushed for over a month. Xiaohuan had never seen such a terrible sight. She yelled at the top of her tobacco-smoked lungs: ‘Bloody hell, Zhang Liangjian! Are you made of bran? Will you fall to bits if you get a couple of slaps? Let her hit you a few times, and then it’ll be over with.’

  All Duohe’s toes seemed to be gripping into the concrete floor, holding her crookedly against the door. Then she suddenly gave up; the door banged open wide, and Zhang Jian collapsed in a heap.

  She had lost the interest and energy needed to call him to account. The silence of the villagers of Shironami could be a still more terrible thing.

  Zhang Jian got to his hands and knees. Duohe’s feet were right in front of him. These were the feet of a refugee fleeing from famine; the ten toenails were all black mud, and scales and spots of compacted dirt like those of a snake had formed on the surface, running all the way to her calves, mingled with mosquito bites.

  Xiaohuan wrung out a facecloth and offered it to Duohe. Duohe’s eyes were fixed straight ahead, and she did not take it. Xiaohuan shook out the facecloth and swiped it across her face, saying over and over again: First have a rest and get your strength back, then you can have a go at him. She rinsed the blackened facecloth and came up to wipe Duohe’s face for her again. Duohe did not move an inch; it was as if her head belonged to somebody else. Xiaohuan’s mouth never stopped: Hit him? That’s letting him off lightly! You should get a penknife and carve him up slowly! Bloody useless lump, isn’t he? A big man takes the four of you out and doesn’t even realise when he’s one short! Look at him, the lord and master, but when has he actually taken charge of anything? There’s always someone to take charge for him, in big things and small!

  Xiaohuan aimed a kick at Zhang Jian’s backside, and told him to go and heat some water right away. By the time Zhang Jian had boiled a big pot of water, carried it into the toilet and fished out all the nappies from the tub, Xiaohuan’s smoky voice was still chattering away: And to think they made him a group leader in the factory. In charge of two dozen men. Put him in charge of three kids and one adult and he can’t even keep the figures straight!

  Xiaohuan pulled Duohe into the toilet. Everything she did was done neatly and prettily – provided it was something she wanted to do. With a few swipes of the scissors she cut and shaped Duohe’s hair, then she pressed her down into the tub and scrubbed her from head to foot with a loofah. The dirt on her feet and calves would take time to get off, so Xiaohuan repeatedly splashed handfuls of water onto her, then plastered on a thick layer of soap and left it a while to soak. You could only end up in a state like this after a very close brush with death. But all the time she was chattering away about the children: in Girlie’s homework book each exercise gets a hundred per cent. When Dahai and Erhai hear the loudspeakers outside singing ‘Socialism is Great’ they stop crying. Girlie was chosen by her class to present the volunteer soldiers with flowers when they came to give a talk. Now and again she would raise her voice and ask
if the next kettle of water was hot yet.

  Altogether they turned three tubs of water black before they produced anything close to the Duohe she had been before. A heavily tanned, leggy Duohe. After cutting away her hair, her head was wrapped in a towel containing lice treatment. Girlie seemed to come back from school with lice every other day, so Duohe had always kept some lice treatment handy.

  Outside the door someone was shouting for Zhang Jian.

  Before they had time to open it, a hand had pulled the kitchen window up. The Zhang family kitchen, like that of the other residents, looked onto the common walkway which was open to the air. The face outside the window was Xiao Peng’s. Xiao Peng had been sent to the local technical school to study Russian, and when Xiao Shi happened to be on the night shift and they were free during the day, the pair of them would go to Zhang Jian’s home. If Zhang Jian was in, they would play chess or a card game called Chase the Pig; if Zhang Jian was working the day shift they would amuse themselves bantering with Xiaohuan. When Xiaohuan was out, Duohe would serve them in her silent way with two cups of tea and two pieces of home-made pomelo-skin sweets. At first neither of them could get accustomed to the taste of those sugary, salty, bitter pomelo sweets of Duohe’s, but after a while they would ask Zhang Jian or Xiaohuan as they drank their tea: No pomelo sweets today then?

  As Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi came in, their eyes immediately fell on a purple bruise on Zhang Jian’s face. They asked him which of those Shanghainese bastards he’d given a seeing-to. Xiaohuan said that Zhang Jian had been beaten by his wife; the couple had come to blows on the kang and they didn’t know their own strength. Just then Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi observed scratch marks on Zhang Jian’s arms. They did not believe Xiaohuan, and said the first thing that came into their heads: Sister Xiaohuan, you know how to fight anyway, he didn’t make a mess of your face. Xiaohuan winked one eye and said with a grin: He didn’t have the heart – who’d keep him company on the kang otherwise?