Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  Amon was the woman who had lain by the roadside giving birth. Amon’s long hair had come loose, her face was like wax, her lips a ghastly pale as she lay there in the Manchurian September dusk of 1945. She was lying there like a heap of blood-soaked rubbish: a kimono seeped through with blood, two bloody legs, a bloody child with the steam still rising from it. She had walked all through her labour, right up to her delivery, and the baby was at its last gasp, the long umbilical cord twining like a vine attached to an underripe melon. Amon would not let anyone come close, showing her teeth and gasping hoarsely: ‘Keep going! Get a move on! Don’t come over! Don’t kill me! I’ll catch up in a bit! Don’t kill me – I haven’t found my husband and son yet!’ gesturing over and over again with her bloodstained hands. It was not until long after they had passed by her that people realised that her bared-tooth grimace had in fact been a smile. She was smiling as she begged them for mercy. Her bloody hands were balled into fists, waving up and down in turn, beating time to her hoarse cries: ‘Keep going! Keep going! …’ in a voice like ripping cloth.

  There had been nothing dignified about Amon; she wanted desperately to find her son.

  And so an equally undignified Duohe appeared in front of the travellers who were coming and going from all over China, her loose hair matted into a black cape, her sour-smelling dress a mass of green flies.

  That station with its clouds of flies was called ‘Wuchang’. She did not know how many times they had changed engines before they reached this stop. From the buildings, houses and the more densely concentrated telegraph poles that had started to appear, she could see that this was a big place, bigger than either of the towns she had lived in. The watermelons and leather were being unloaded a wagon at a time. Soon they would reach hers. It suddenly occurred to her that she had used dozens of the melons, for washing her face and hands and as a chamber pot. Together with the watermelons the children had taken, there must be a hundred, at least, that were no longer usable. Those hundred and more melons would be laid to her account. Do you have proof that you have not eaten or ruined those hundred watermelons? Do you have proof that you were not working in collusion with bandits along the track to throw off those melons, and that soon you will divide the spoils with them? Duohe did not understand how Chinese law punished things like this, but she knew that no law in all the world would lightly forgive such things.

  She took her chance, and climbed down from the wagon. By the time the people unloading the previous wagon had had a chance to react, all they could see was a blotchy shadow, dirty, with loose, streaming hair, flashing by and disappearing in a cloud of steam from a passenger train that had just pulled in. She clambered between the wheels of the carriages, whose undersides were hung with the black dust of a thousand kilometres, which rubbed off to join the red and yellow melon-juice stains on her white dress with its red, yellow and green spots.

  As she walked among the passengers, they forgot all about the heavy luggage on their shoulders and turned their heads to look at her repeatedly.

  This was when the melon meals of the last few days hit home. The shock of the surge in her guts left her cold all over, and goose pimples burst out on her hands and neck. She knew how to ask for the toilet in Chinese. But she did not understand the answers people gave her when they finally understood what she was saying. Everybody spoke with completely different tones and accents, kindly repeating something to her over and over again. She thought they must have heard the gurgling sound in her guts. She clutched her stomach, half bowing, not daring to move a muscle. In the end a woman in the crowd grabbed her sticky hand and took her to the toilet.

  As she was squatting over the trench, it suddenly crossed her mind that she had no toilet paper.

  That woman was surprisingly considerate and understanding; she opened the partition door and passed her a sheet of paper with people’s faces printed on it. There was still plaster dust on the back, showing that it had just been ripped from a wall. There was a red cross over the faces, who stared in goggle-eyed astonishment at their final fate. If she had had any alternative at all, she would certainly never have put paper with faces on to such a use.

  When she left the toilet, light-headed and leaden-footed, she was approached by two people in gauze face masks. She had spent enough time squatting in the toilet for the woman to guess what was the matter. The woman was talking to the people in the masks in a loud voice, saying something she did not completely understand, and pointing to Duohe. Now they were closer she could distinguish their sex. The man said in Chinese with peculiar tones that Duohe was seriously ill, and that she should go with them. The woman said that the station clinic was not far, just a few steps. Both their eyes were smiling above their big masks. Duohe found that she had already started to go with them.

  Groaning men and women were lying on the benches of the clinic. Two more people were lying on white beds with wheels. When Duohe was brought in, the woman in the mask said something to one of the men who was lying on a bench, who pulled in his legs, and the woman in the mask told Duohe to sit in the place where the man’s bare feet had just been. Duohe had only just sat down when the man put his feet back again, forcing her to sit on the floor.

  The woman in the mask brought a thermometer from the inner room and put it in Duohe’s mouth. This thermometer made Duohe feel safe. In the years since she came to the Zhang family, the only thermometer when she had a fever had been the palm of a hand. The palm of Xiaohuan’s or Zhang Jian’s hand (and in the past it had been Stationmaster Zhang or Erhai’s mother’s hand) would press down briefly on her forehead, and that was her temperature taken. This was the first time since she had left her village that her mouth had come into contact with this chilly, fragile stick of glass. She closed her eyes, drinking in the slight tang of the ethyl alcohol: that taste was her memory of Dr Suzuki. Just then the man in the mask walked over, lifted up Duohe’s eyelids and looked carefully. His fingers were as light and dextrous as Dr Suzuki’s.

  According to the thermometer, she did not have a fever, her temperature was more or less normal. The woman in the mask was a nurse, and now she came over, saying she wanted to take some blood. While she was swabbing Duohe’s arm with ethyl alcohol, tying on a rubber tourniquet and sticking in the needle, she told Duohe in her slightly distorted Chinese that there was a bad outbreak of schistosomiasis just now, and trains coming in from the east always carried a few who had it badly.

  Duohe could not really follow what she was saying, but she could guess that there was some terrifying disease about just now. She asked the nurse what schistosomiasis was.

  The nurse looked at her, seeming not to understand.

  She thought, was her speech really so hard to follow? Could she have got her words backwards? She plucked up her courage and asked again, this time changing the order of her sentence.

  The nurse asked where she was from.

  Duohe did not speak.

  Having taken her blood, the nurse brought a cardboard folder with a form laid out on it. She said that this was a medical history, and she must fill it out. The headings she had to fill in were: Name, Address, Family Members, Marital Status … Duohe picked up the pen, and put it down again. Without knowing why, she started to cry. No matter what she wrote it would not be accurate. The only address Duohe could remember was that of her home in Shironami village. From the moment when the people of Shironami village set their feet on the bloody road of refugees, filling in that section had become an impossibility. After that hand grenade had fallen next to her mother, brother and sister, how was she supposed to fill in ‘Family Members’? Since Zhang Jian had abandoned her on the rock by the Yangtze River, since her breasts had swelled into iron balls because there was no one to suckle them, since her secret conversations with Girlie had been cut off, and the space in her arms for Dahai and Erhai was empty, the four characters, identical in Chinese and Japanese, for ‘Family Members’ were the four characters she least wanted to see.

  The female nurse
stood next to her, watching her cry. After a while, she squatted down, trying to find Duohe’s eyes in the gaps between her hands which she held in front of her face. More time passed, and the male doctor came over and asked whatever was the matter.

  The five patients lying on the benches and beds had all ceased their groaning, listening to her cry.

  She was weeping so hard she could not catch her breath. Several times she choked up, so that no sound at all came out, and the doctor and the nurse, believing that she had finished crying, opened their mouths to ask ‘Where is your home? Do you have any identity papers?’ Then she would take another breath, the floodgates would open, and she would continue crying. She wept until all the muscles and bones in her body were dislocated and cramping; in her tear-drowned eyes, the male doctor’s two anxiously shuffling feet became a pair of unrecognisable foreign objects.

  She cried until the last of her energy was spent, leaning against the leg of the bench. The doctor and the nurse were whispering something in low voices; she did not care, and even if she had cared she would not have understood. The language they spoke together was full of squeaks and glissandos, it was completely different from the Chinese of Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan.

  They changed back to the language they had been using with her: Has something happened at home? Did you meet a bad man? Her appearance led them to suspect that she had been physically abused. Had she just recently had a narrow brush with death? She must have had a terrible shock. They understood: anyone who had suffered excessive shock would be unwilling to talk about it for some time.

  They gave her an injection. By the time they had pulled out the needle, the two human shapes in front of her eyes were already starting to blur at the corners of her vision. In another blink of an eye, they and the dimly lit space had mingled into a continuous greyish-white blur.

  When she came to, woken by her swollen breasts, it was morning. She took a look around her, to find that she was no longer in the clinic, but in a hospital ward. Outside the window rain was falling. There were three more beds in the ward, and she did not understand why she had the room to herself. They had changed the clothes she had been wearing for a pair of shapeless, sexless pyjamas printed with the Red Cross and the name of the hospital. Her patterned dress was balled up on the empty bed opposite. She thought of those five yuan. She did not know just how big a sum of money five yuan was, but right now it was all she had.

  Rather to her surprise, the five yuan was still in the cloth bag with the frilled border, which like her dress bore sticky water stains and the sour smell of watermelon. She stuffed both the money and the dress under her pillow.

  It seemed that her movement had brought someone over. He was wearing a white uniform with insignia on the collar. She realised who it was: a policeman. She had seen the police; around New Year and at festivals they would come to the residential blocks and stand at the foot of the building telling the dependants and children hanging over the common balcony: ‘Increase your vigilance, prevent the enemy from making use of this opportunity to commit sabotage – if you see someone suspicious or a stranger report it immediately.’

  This policeman was in his early twenties, and he studied her as he settled his pith helmet on his head. He asked if she was feeling any better. His language was different again from the male doctor and the female nurse, with another kind of intonation to it, so he had to repeat himself three times over before she nodded. Then she gave him a bow.

  ‘For the moment, just concentrate on getting better, eh?’ the policeman said.

  This time she nodded after the second repetition, and after that she bowed again.

  ‘Don’t be so polite,’ he frowned, which meant that he was getting rather impatient with her, and at the same time he gestured with his hand. She understood his expression and gesture first: he did not like the way she bowed too much. ‘We’ll talk again when you’ve recovered.’

  After that the policeman made another sign: lie back down on the bed, he was going. She lay down and looked at the ceiling, which was in urgent need of plastering, wondering whether the policeman was well intentioned or hostile. It seemed that he was neither of these things. It seemed that he was both at the same time. The ceiling was a mass of fine cracks, the plaster flaking away in places. What would the policeman make of her after their conversation?

  And what was a policeman doing here? Was he the kind of policeman that exhorted them to ‘report suspicious people or strangers immediately’? That male doctor and female nurse must have reported her to the police after they had given her the sedative. She was a suspicious person. No wonder she was in a ward by herself. Suspicious people threaten the safety of normal people.

  A very young nurse came in, pushing a small trolley. She pulled over an iron stand from the corner of the room, took a bottle of medicine from the trolley and walked to the foot of the bed. Her big eyes widened for a few seconds, then returned to the medicine bottle. She very earnestly put three or four holes in Duohe’s arm, before at last she got the needle in. After two hours, when the drip was finished, Duohe crawled to the foot of the bed, and saw a card hanging there: Name: ?; Sex: Female; Age: ?; Place of Origin: ?; Cause of Illness: Acute gastroenteritis.

  This was a highly questionable patient. This patient was being kept under observation. Did the policeman outside the door have a gun? The moment this suspicious patient went out of the door, and dashed along the corridor, a bullet would bring her down to the shiny artificial stone floor. This corridor was seven or eight metres long; she had got a rough estimate of its length from the sound of the little nurse’s trolley when it was being pushed in. What about the toilet? Just use the chamber pot underneath the bed. She couldn’t, she was not used to chamber pots, she had to have a toilet. It’s not up to you whether you are accustomed to something or not!

  For a suspicious person, even biological needs can seem suspicious. Looking out of the window, she could tell from the height of the white poplar trees that her ward was on the first floor.

  She stealthily got down from the bed, her eyes scanning the room in search of her shoes. She had been wearing a pair of sandals, with uppers made from white cloth, to which soles made out of rubber tyres had been added at the shoemaker’s stall, so you could walk soundlessly in them. But they were nowhere to be seen. Once a suspicious person was without her shoes, she was easier to keep a watch over.

  She shook out her sour-smelling balled-up dress, and rapidly changed out of the uniform pyjamas. Once again she felt the banknote in the little bag.

  The hardest bit was getting the glass window open without any noise. It was even harder than jumping to a branch of the white poplar tree and from there sliding down to the ground – Duohe’s two slightly inward-facing soles were not ideally suited for walking, but they were perfect for trees. There had been four wooden poles at the gate of the Village Committee of Shironami for the children to climb, and Duohe had often beaten the boys. The hospital building was old, and the wood had warped, making friction between the window and the frame inevitable. Opening the window was bound to be very noisy.

  But this window with its cracked paint was the only exit, the only way that led to Girlie, Dahai and Erhai. With her hands, she exerted a gentle pressure on the join between the window and its frame, causing the hinged windowpane to gradually come free. After that she stood on the bedside table, grasped the handle of the window, and pushed up, using the weight of her body to control it, and to muffle the sound. She had pushed the window open. The noise was like a thunderclap to her senses. She turned to stare at the door. The door did not move, and there was silence from outside. Perhaps she had not made any noise after all. The soles of her feet were already on the bricks of the windowsill. With one more step, she was facing the white poplar tree.

  Could she span the gap to the tree with one leap? Would the fork of the tree be sturdy enough? There was no time to be too particular, she had to jump, even if she was jumping to her death.

  When she slid do
wn from the tree, a woman in a white apron carrying two buckets of water on a pole was watching her. She ran right in front of the woman, causing her to start back violently, splashing out slops from the two big buckets. Backing off in that way must mean she was scared of her, Duohe thought as she ran. It would appear that suspicious people made normal people afraid. Perhaps she was a madwoman in her eyes.

  Duohe was running, with no thought for direction, north south east or west had no meaning for her at all. Her only direction was one that could put as much distance as possible between her and the hospital. A line of rickshaws was parked at the side of the road. The rickshaw men poked their faces out through the gaps in their awnings, watching this woman with loose, wild hair and bare feet walking rapidly by, but no one dared to call out to her for custom.

  An oil lamp was shining in a dimly lit general-goods shop. She strode in, and the proprietor straightened up from behind the counter, and said some words to her that she did not understand. The language was polite, but the look in his eyes told her that he did not regard her as a normal person. She asked for paper and pen. Paper and pen came. She wrote down the name of that small town by the banks of the Yangtze River. The shopkeeper shook his head. She also wrote down: I go. The shopkeeper had never had such a peculiar communication with anyone in all his fifty years. He shook his head again.

  Duohe pointed to one of the pastries on the counter. The shopkeeper immediately took out the pastry as requested and put it in a paper bag, and when he raised his head a sodden, ragged five-yuan note was lying on the counter. The shopkeeper counted out many notes of all sizes, and put them one at a time in front of her, saying words she did not understand as he set each one down. But she knew he was counting out numbers. One note was marked with ‘2’, two notes were marked with ‘1’, the remainder was a pile of smaller notes, all marked with different numbers. A quick calculation told her that she had spent five fen on this pastry. That was to say, she was in possession of a considerable sum of money.