Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  Zhang Jian had had enough, and roared in a muffled voice: ‘Shameless!’

  ‘They’re our brothers, what’re you afraid of?’ Xiaohuan looked towards Xiao Shi and Xiao Peng. ‘Great lads of twenty – in our village they’d be fathers already!’ Just like in the past, she turned her head and called out: ‘Duohe, have you made the tea?’

  Yet Duohe did not appear as in the past, softly and noiselessly, smiling broadly and bowing deeply, carrying in a wooden tray in both hands, laid out with teacups, saucers and toothpicks.

  Xiaohuan herself went to the kitchen, and clumsily carried out two cups of tea. Xiao Shi and Xiao Peng had always thought that there was something a little bit odd about this family, but today the atmosphere was getting stranger by the minute.

  While they were playing chess in the larger room, Xiao Peng, who was sitting out, saw a thin, dark woman walk past. He looked again, and it was Duohe. She had lost the big bun on her head, which was now wrapped in a patterned towel, and was dressed in blue-and-white-striped trousers and shirt, which flapped around her stick-thin body like flags. He hadn’t been to the Zhangs’ for a month, what had happened to them …?

  ‘Why, that’s never Duohe?’ Xiao Shi cried.

  Duohe stopped in her tracks, and adjusted the positions of Dahai in her arms and Erhai on her back, hitching them up. She looked at him, her mouth still soundlessly singing something. Xiao Shi thought, let her not be talking to herself. He and Xiao Peng had heard the neighbours say that Zhang Jian’s sister-in-law was a bit disturbed.

  A few days later Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi went to Zhang Jian’s home to while away their Sunday, and they saw that Duohe was almost back to normal. She had cut her hair into a fringe that came to her eyebrows, her thick black hair all tucked behind her ears, and her face was tanned. She seemed to suit this dark face, like a student.

  She smiled silently just as before, smiling until her mouth broke open as far as it would go, bustling with little tripping steps about the cement floor, which was polished to a blue sheen. It took a kick from Xiao Shi to tell Xiao Peng that he had been staring at Duohe for too long.

  Xiaohuan came in from outside, a nurse’s cap covered in dirt and dust on her head. The Neighbourhood Committee was mobilising all the workers’ dependants to support socialist construction, to go and break rocks to lay a road to the door of the People’s Auditorium. When they came to mobilise Zhang Jian’s family, Xiaohuan went out, swearing and muttering, leaving Duohe at home.

  ‘A hammer came smashing down on top of my big toe!’ she said cheerfully. ‘I should be grateful I was wearing that pair of Zhang Jian’s suede boots. I’ve still got ten toes left!’

  As soon as Xiaohuan was back the atmosphere became more cordial. Once again she donned her apron, ordering this and sending off for that, making life more pleasant for everyone. She earned five fen an hour breaking rocks, but for every hour she would smoke a jiao’s worth of cigarettes. When she came back home she assumed the aspect of a wage earner, as careless with her money as any wealthy woman. She fried five eggs, all the family had, then minced them with bean noodles and garlic chives for filling, and made two hundred dumplings.

  While eating his dumplings Xiao Peng still kept measuring up Duohe, who was in the little room.

  Xiao Shi said with a laugh: ‘Hey, your eyes are popping out of your head, don’t go and swallow them!’

  Xiao Peng blushed, got to his feet with a jerk and gave him a kick. Xiao Shi was short in stature, with a round nose and round eyes in a girlish face, and when he had taken his oath on entering the Communist Youth League he had had just such a mischievous look to him. Xiao Peng, on the other hand, was a classic strapping North-easterner. Xiao Shi actually thought that Duohe had changed for the better; without that antiquated bun on her head she was very easy on the eye, with a pleasing quality to her that was different from other women.

  ‘Sister Xiaohuan, why don’t you set Xiao Peng up with a girl?’

  Xiao Peng stood up again for another assault, but Xiaohuan held him back.

  Xiaohuan said: ‘Sit down, sit down, I’ll fix the pair of you up.’

  Zhang Jian had been slowly shelling pumpkin seeds while all this was going on. He would peel three or four, then tip them into his mouth. Then he would take a long draught of spirits until he was pulling a woeful face. On hearing this, his half-closed eyes slid sideways to glare for a moment at Xiaohuan, and he said: ‘Our Girlie’s right here, listening!’

  Xiaohuan pretended not to understand that Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi’s noisy quarrel was aimed at Duohe, saying that in the guest house where she used to work there was a cashier, with two big thick plaits: when should she bring her over for her two brothers to check out?

  Xiao Peng was none too pleased; he drank in silence, and did not eat his dumplings. Xiao Shi said not to worry, Sister Xiaohuan, both he and Xiao Peng knew how to put their best foot forward with women, neither of them would have any trouble. Zhang Jian, who had been drinking steadily until his face was flushed and stern, said that if the two of them wanted to visit his house they should behave in a decent manner; if they did not they wouldn’t be allowed to come again.

  When Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi left, it was already eight o’clock in the evening, and there were only three hours before Zhang Jian had to leave for the night shift. He slept for a while, then got up again and steeled himself before his fingers finally pressed on the door of Duohe’s room, pushing it gently open.

  Duohe was knitting a top out of yarn. She had not lit the lamp, using the light that came in from the street. Her face was mostly in shadow, but the look in her eyes held him back. She had misunderstood him. That wasn’t what he was after. He stood in the doorway and said in a quiet voice: ‘I’ve applied for a residence permit for you. Once you have a residence permit you can’t get lost wherever you go.’

  The chilly pressure of Duohe’s eyes on his body became a little warmer and softer. It might be that she did not understand what a residence permit was, but she had spent these years relying not so much on an understanding of language as a kind of almost animal instinct. This instinct led her to believe that a residence permit was something vital, that it was a good thing.

  ‘Once you have a residence permit, you can go out any time you want.’

  Her eyes thawed, and they swept back and forth over his face.

  ‘Get some sleep.’ He pulled at the door with one hand, about to withdraw.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ she replied. An outsider would hear the awkwardness in these words at once. It was not just the diction and pronunciation – she was returning a greeting or salutation, as if ‘get some sleep’ meant ‘goodnight’.

  But to Zhang Jian these words were perfectly normal, and he could find no fault with them. He closed the door on her, holding his breath, twisting the metal doorknob to the left a whisker at a time, retracting the brass tongue, then he turned back the doorknob, allowing the tongue to inch its way out, muffling the clunk of the door in his thick, solid palm, completing the set of actions needed to close this door in almost total silence. The children were fast asleep, he did not want to wake them. Or that was how he explained it to himself.

  But Xiaohuan had another explanation. When she heard him groping his way to bed, she started to laugh quietly. Laughing at how he’d got himself kicked out of bed by her. He’d done nothing of the kind. If he was up for it that was fine by her, she wasn’t jealous anyway. How could she be jealous at a time like this? He was just telling her about the household residence! If he stuck to just doing the business without going on about it he had her unconditional support, otherwise would he have been able to have kids by her back then? Bollocks to unconditional support! And would he want to do that with her at a time like this? What was he, a pig? Couldn’t she see the state she was in when she came back home?

  Xiaohuan merely sniggered, and ignored his explanations.

  Zhang Jian was not remotely sleepy. He sat on the bed, his big knees drawn up almost to his lower ja
w. He felt so utterly useless and so completely in the wrong that it was driving him out of his mind. If Xiaohuan came out with just one more off-colour remark he would jump off the bed and leave.

  Xiaohuan leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette, and began to smoke, contentedly and with relish. When she had finished her cigarette, she let out a long sigh. Then she began to talk in a rambling way about how women were all very base: once they had had intimate relations with a man, they let their own fate be absorbed into that of the man, whether the woman admitted it or not. Besides which, it was not just a case of intimate relationships, she’d given birth to a brood of his children! She might refuse to admit that she’d given her life to him but it was no use: she was kidding herself!

  Zhang Jian sat there, not moving a muscle. From next door drifted the sound of a child’s half-roused crying. He did not know if it was Dahai or Erhai. The bigger the twins got, the more alike they looked, a moment’s inattention and you’d get them mixed up. Especially when they were naked. Duohe was the only one who could tell them apart at a glance.

  Xiaohuan lit a second cigarette and passed it over to Zhang Jian. He did not take it, but groped for his pipe on the windowsill, packed it with tobacco and lit it. How could Xiaohuan have such a clear understanding of where the truth lay? Zhang Jian remained alert. Her talk moved gradually from disconnected comments to Duohe herself. Duohe’s a Japanese woman, true enough, but I bet you a whole carton of Donghai cigarettes that she let her life become absorbed into that of her man a long time ago. Whether she’s fond of the man or not is a matter for another day, it makes no difference anyway, but suppose she wanted to break her own life away from the man’s life, she couldn’t do it. If you want to reconcile with Duohe there’s only one way to go about it, and that’s to get intimate with her. Any woman would put on a superficial show of pushing her man away, no doubt there’d be a couple of punches or a kick or three, but it was all fake. She might not know she’s faking it; she would be thinking she’s really pushing you away, venting her spleen, working off her grievances, but in fact she’s already reconciled with you; you wanting her will go a lot further with her than any amount of ‘sorry’ or ‘apologies’.

  Zhang Jian listened, taking it all in. Xiaohuan was partly right. She was no fool when it came to the important things. He lay down close to her, his head pressing into her waist. Her hand reached out to his head and tousled his hair. In the last two years she had been prone to attentive, affectionate gestures of this kind, which were also to a certain extent an expression of superiority, treating him as a member of the younger generation, or a little brother. Still, the way she ruffled his hair at that moment made him feel exceptionally comfortable. He fell into a soft, deep sleep, and when he woke his mind felt clean, bright and calm. It seemed that he had not been in such good spirits for a very long time.

  At eleven o’clock, Zhang Jian set off in good time for the night shift. He put on his shoes in the hallway, and the noise of his canvas work clothes rubbing together woke Duohe from a shallow doze. The sounds made by a man going out to work at night to earn a living for the whole family make a woman feel extremely safe.

  Duohe lay on the bed, listening to this man walking towards the door, off to earn a living, his aluminium lunch box gently clattering. He must have bumped into the door frame while groping for the door in the dark. The sound caused a wave of drowsiness to wash over her.

  Over a month earlier, she had climbed up from the stones by the riverside, found the road back to the bamboo grove, made her way in and realised that she had taken a wrong turning. She turned back again, and took another road. She had found the place where Zhang Jian and the children had rested, and saw a shoe that Dahai or Erhai had dropped. She turned round and groped her way out, and she had searched every place where there were crowds. Before long, she had walked herself into familiarity with the several kilometres that had been entirely new to her; she had even searched all the public toilets several times. In this park, whose tourists were gradually thinning out, she suddenly saw why Zhang Jian had brought her all this way to the riverside. In order to abandon her. She realised that these small, very steep stone steps on which she found herself sitting were far removed from everything else. The village of Shironami where she was born and grew up was so far away. Beyond Shironami, still further to the east, was her motherland, Japan. There was also a Shironami village in Japan, where generations of her ancestors were buried. She had been able to find Shironami village again in Girlie, Dahai and Erhai; through their eyes she could still see all the joys and sorrows of those far-off ancestors buried in the Shironami village of her motherland, that silence and calm that was peculiar to the people of Shironami, that mad happiness and violent rage that only they had. Every time she rubbed the boys’ hair, she would think of her father and brother come back to life again in the form of her children, borrowing their tiny bodies to warm her, and giving her a means of support. Duohe had sat on that little path of stones facing the Yangtze River, between the distant sky and the distant water, and thought about how the three little Shironami villagers she had given birth to were now separated from her, as if they were at the ends of the earth.

  By the time she had followed the stony path up and down again, the park was empty. She wanted to ask for the train station, but she did not know how to say the words ‘train station’. She walked to a tea stall that was just packing up, where she dipped her finger in spilled tea and wrote the two characters on the table. The owner of the tea stall was an old lady of sixty, who smiled at her and shook her head, her face red with embarrassment, meaning that she was illiterate. The old lady called over a passer-by, and asked him to read the two characters written on the tabletop. The passer-by was a young lad pulling a cart, he thought she must be deaf and dumb, and patted his handcart with big gestures and exaggerated expressions, to show that he would take her there in his cart. When she got off the cart, her hand went into the side pocket of her dress, and she twisted the five-yuan note between her fingers, not knowing if she should get it out to give to the young man. Finally she decided not to give him money, but to give him a few extra bows instead. Her deep, ninety-degree bow, knees held tightly together, both hands brushing the knees, seemed to put the young man in a panic, and he hurried away, pulling his cart behind him, turning round from far off, only to unexpectedly find himself on the receiving end of another bow. This time he ran off without even daring to turn his head. She very quickly discovered that he had brought her to the wrong place. Because she had only written ‘train’, and not the third character for ‘station’, the young man had put her down at a place where two train tracks met. Before long a goods train came through. The goods train suddenly slowed down at the crossing. Several children who had been sitting beside the reedy ditch jumped on board. The children shouted to her: Come on up! Come on up! She broke into a run, and the children stretched out their hands and pulled her up. Once she was on board she asked: Of Yushan? Yushan going to? The children exchanged glances, unsure what it was she was asking. She felt there was absolutely nothing wrong with her words, but still they did not understand, and her confidence ebbed away. In the howling gale, she reassembled that sentence in her mouth again, and asked in a voice half the volume: Going to Yushan? One of the boys took the lead, and nodded to her. They seemed a bit disappointed to have used such a lot of energy to pull up a woman they could not even communicate with.

  Beneath the tarpaulin the wagon was full of watermelons. The children pulled the tarpaulin aside and made themselves at home among the fruit, the tarpaulin becoming a roof and a quilt to cover the seven or eight of them including Duohe. It was only then that Duohe understood why their speed had decreased when they reached that section of track: they had just passed a place where the track had been washed away by the rains, and was now under repair. Duohe lay prone on the melons, her body rolling from left to right, and through gaps in the tarpaulin she could see the worksite brightly lit by lamps. She understood what Zhang Jian
had wanted when he’d looked at her that morning: he had wanted her body. He had leaned on the railing of the balcony smoking, she had opened the window behind him, but he still had not turned his head. In the end it had been too much; he had turned to look at her, they were two metres apart, but his lips had already kissed her. He had wanted to enjoy her one last time.

  To her surprise, Duohe let the gently rolling melons rock her to sleep.

  The cold woke her. She did not know where the tarpaulin that had covered her had gone. She turned her head, the children were nowhere to be seen, and a good number of melons had got down from the wagon with them. The train was plunging into endless black night, charging forward into even deeper darkness; she did not know the time, or the place. But she did know that everything was working in Zhang Jian’s favour, letting him have his way, letting him separate her and her children. She was finally parted from her motherland, from Sakito and Shironami and from every departed member of her bloodline.

  The train started and stopped in the poisonously hot sun, started and stopped in heavy rain. She steeled herself many times to jump down, then steeled herself as many times to stay on. After meals of watermelon for days in succession, her whole body was seeped through with red and yellow watermelon juice, and watermelon peel was sticking to her matted hair, which had been blown out of its bun by the wind. Her head was full of the roaring of the wind, and the rasping sound of the train rubbing against the darkness. That noise poured into flesh, bone and blood vessels, and flew into the air with two tracks of tears. She lay supine on the icy-cold, rolling watermelons, thrown from left to right by those untrustworthy, irresponsible spheres. Many years before she had been put in a sack, and flung on the back of a galloping horse by bandits, and her despair then had been no less than the despair she felt now. She lay on the melons, facing the sky, thinking of Amon.