Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  She thought that now she had brought him some business the shopkeeper would answer her question. She pointed to the name of that city, and to I go. The shopkeeper still shook his head, but at the same time he raised his voice and called something out. Duohe could hear a voice replying from somewhere. A hole opened in the ceiling to reveal a young boy’s face, who said strings of words that Duohe did not understand; but also told her: that place is a long, long way away, you have to take the ferry! The hole in the ceiling closed up again.

  The shopkeeper repeated: Take the ferry! This time his language was a bit easier to understand; when he said it the second time Duohe nodded vigorously.

  Duohe thought, it plainly was not a ferry that had brought her and the watermelons to this place. She wrote again on the paper: train? The shopkeeper conferred again with the boy in the ceiling, they both thought that it would be possible by train too.

  The shopkeeper hailed a rickshaw for Duohe. After half an hour, the rickshaw pulled up at the doors of the station. Duohe did a quick calculation: that big pastry had cost five fen, so a rickshaw puller probably earned twenty pastries in a day. The price of ten pastries ought to be a respectable payment. Sure enough, the rickshaw puller gave her a smile full of crooked teeth as he took her three jiao.

  When she passed her pile of big and small notes over at the small ticket window, a woman’s voice said that her money was not enough.

  She pressed her face close to the little window. She thought she had misunderstood. By thrusting herself closer she could see the ticket seller’s fat body and half of a face. The woman asked, was she buying a ticket or not? If she wasn’t, then let the people behind her buy them.

  ‘I buy!’ This was her first time to speak Chinese so loudly and forcefully.

  ‘You haven’t enough money!’ The ticket woman’s face appeared, sideways on.

  ‘Why?!’ she asked. Her voice was even louder and coarser, and she pronounced it with a strong North-eastern inflection, in perfect imitation of the Zhang family. In fact she was saying, Why can’t I go home? Why can’t I go back to be with my daughter and my sons? Why are my two breasts swollen enough to burst while my children are crying with hunger?

  All this made Duohe’s ‘Why?’ sound full of violence. She was going to Ma’anshan, and she had to have a train ticket, never you mind why.

  ‘Why?’ The sideways-on woman’s face at the hole disappeared. With a clatter the whole window opened, as her finger came slashing down. ‘You ask all those people behind you why. You’re missing more than half the money! Can’t you read the price list? Ticket prices are set by the state! You’re not Chinese!’ The crowd of onlookers was getting bigger. A pair of bare feet, a head of long, messy, dirty hair, a dress soaked in watermelon juice and then in rain caused the distance between the crowd and Duohe to increase too.

  A small child asked her something in a loud voice. The people burst out laughing. Those words ‘You’re not Chinese’ had served as a warning for Duohe. She had to leave. As she was turning round, that child seized his opportunity to scurry up, seize a fistful of her hair from behind, and then run away again, screeching happily. And so it went on with her walking, and him grabbing. Finally she won; her utter lack of reaction made the child lose interest in his game.

  In the waiting room she bought a map of the national rail network. On it she found the Yangtze River, and Wuchang, which was where she was right now. Then the tip of her index finger stopped at that little town on the south bank of the Yangtze. What roundabout route had she and the watermelons followed to reach this place? In fact that city and Wuchang were connected by the same Yangtze River!

  Now she had that map she could go back to Girlie, Dahai and Erhai. Even if she had to walk. Her two sons had no milk to drink, she would get back even if she had to crawl. She spent slightly over one yuan on a pair of shoes in a shop near to the station, the cheapest kind. She needed an umbrella too, but she could not bring herself to spend more than one yuan.

  She slept for a while on a bench in the waiting room. When it started to get dark, she set off on foot along the railway tracks, heading eastwards. The rain slackened, but it was very cold. The buildings and telegraph posts went from dense to sparse and then to none at all. She walked into a small station. A short while later, a goods train drew in, and she climbed aboard, to find that the train was loaded with wood. Every time the goods train passed through a station, she kept a careful lookout for the station name, and compared it with the name on the map by the lights of the station.

  At midnight she jumped off the train carrying wood. Because this train had turned off at a junction. She waited outside a little station for the next goods train, but no other train pulled in.

  The little station had no waiting room, only wooden railings with a shelter tacked on. She went to sleep on a bench under the shelter. The sun had just risen, and the fields and farmhouses were extremely peaceful beneath the green mountains tinged with blue. Even the buzzing of the bluebottles was part of this peace. The flies gradually increased in number, landing on a piece of sweet melon skin on the ground until it was a greenish black. Duohe, lying on her side, watched all those threads of smoke rising from the houses, and the sky and mountains reflected in the water of the rice paddies. If she let her eyes drift out of focus, the scenery became more familiar; since Duohe had left Shironami village, she had always been looking for things similar to Shironami and Sakito. Now the distant village scenes resembled her home in the September sunshine that used to come after the rain. And so Duohe slept deeply, despite the hordes of buzzing flies.

  She slept for over ten hours at a stretch, and when she woke she had forgotten what she was doing in the shelter attached to this little station. But she knew that while she had been sleeping, nothing had touched her apart from flies.

  It took her until the fourth day to find another goods train to climb aboard, this one carrying fertiliser. But two hours later she was discovered. In the course of the questioning she came to understand that fertiliser was worth money, so people would often sneak aboard to steal it. She came to see how suspicious she was in the eyes of her interrogators. She had already realised that the more she spoke, the greater their doubts, so she let them ask anything they wanted until they lost their tempers. Gradually, she saw that in their eyes she was no longer suspicious, but disabled. Deaf and dumb and mad.

  From then on she didn’t dare to steal onto trains. She walked back home, stepping over the sleepers, it was much safer that way, and more peaceful. She would rest her feet in every station along the track, and sometimes the rain got heavier, so she would take shelter there. Train stations really were good places, there were always benches for her to sleep on, and cheap food. There would be passengers hurrying by, but just as their vigilance and interest was aroused, they had already passed her. Even though she only ate one meal a day, she started to run out of money. On the last leg of her route she ate raw maize, raw sweet potato, stealing and eating whatever came to hand.

  She didn’t notice when the dress was torn ragged, or when her shoes fell apart on her feet. Those cheap shoes had been cheap for a reason: they had cut corners with the soles, which were nothing but cardboard inside. She only noticed her chest, which was losing weight every day, and was no longer full like before. She walked like a woman possessed. What was the matter with these weightless breasts? Were they drying out? Would she end up giving dried-up breasts to her famished children? Just like the mothers of Shironami village, whose dried, cracked nipples could no longer block their children’s wailing.

  When she finally reached the city, Duohe had imagined herself losing her way in the crowd of identical buildings, but the reverse was true, and she headed without hesitation towards one block amid all those uniform red walls and white balconies. She had become a mother dog, drawn in by a mysterious sense of smell towards her sons and daughter.

  When she gathered up her two sons, smelling pungently of urine, she discovered that her milk had dried up. T
here was a stabbing pain in her left nipple: Erhai had bitten her! That Chinese pair had come between her flesh and blood. They all said in Shironami village that the Chinese were sneaky and full of guile, and this was indeed the case. A pair of hands came up and lifted Erhai away; they were Zhang Jian’s hands. A voice, rather hesitantly, told her that her two sons were already used to eating rice porridge and soft-boiled noodles, and just see how well they’re growing. They hadn’t lost even an ounce of flesh. The voice was Zhang Jian’s. What was he trying to say? Did he mean that having lost mother and milk, lost a heaven-sent guiding link, her sons were living just the same, and growing just as well? Did they have any uncertainty about who their true mother was?

  In the blink of an eye, she was lashing out at Zhang Jian. She hung from Zhang Jian’s big, broad shoulders, flailing random blows at his head, cheeks and eyes with one fist. Her feet had grown claws that raked with all her might at Zhang Jian’s feet.

  Zhang Jian was carrying Erhai, and he hurriedly retreated into the big room, for fear that the child would get hit. Duohe blocked the door with her body, and did not let it close fully. She and he were locked in a stalemate for several minutes, each on one side of the door, until Duohe suddenly dodged out of the way, and the door flew open with a clang.

  Duohe had given up. She suddenly felt that any attempt to punish him was too base, too small a matter.

  Over five hundred villagers of Sakito village were good Japanese, dying together as they had lived, several generations all together under one roof. The blood of several generations had flowed into a mass, you can imagine how thick that must be. It had worked its way through cracks in stone to form a ball, even bigger than the wine cups her father had used to drink sake. The ball of blood was trembling, with a delicacy of texture unique to things caught between solid and liquid, ready to break apart at a touch. The first thread of sunlight stretched out from the fork between the two mountain slopes. That was an extremely tender light. The light shone into the sphere of blood, and both the light and the blood ball quivered for an instant, but that horrifying beauty lasted for just the blink of an eye. After that, the sun came fully up from between the mountains, and it was delicate and tender no more. Several village heads who were straightening out the corpses passed by, one of them trampled on that blood ball, and it was not so fragile after all: it had set. Those feet moved out of the way, and it was smooth and round and bright and clean, just as before; it would seem that it had already acquired a history, just as amber and agate require a long, long history in order to form.

  Duohe let the hands that clutched at Zhang Jian fall away, her eyes opened very wide, but the glance was timid and full of fear.

  What need had she, Duohe, to come to blows with him in this way? A proper Japanese would not go to all this trouble; she would be able to make him understand that it was too late for everything without making a sound.

  Chieko was bent over her year-old son, her long, thick hair fell down to cover them both, a cover that no wind or rain could penetrate. The mother’s body, starved thin and frail as paper, folded in on itself. It was rolling into a snail shell, rolling the flesh of her heart up inside itself. Only a love for the child that was intense beyond all reason could produce such a movement. That snail shell twisted itself tighter and tighter, and the wails of the boy became quieter and quieter, sealed up in the shell. Chieko’s shoulder blades rose up in a terrifying way, and suddenly fell into repose. At that very moment, the child’s crying broke off. The snail shell broke apart to reveal a face that seemed to have been released from a heavy burden. She had chosen the best for her son among all the unendurable ends: let the person who gave him life take back his life, there was something fitting about it. In that instant, all the mothers around her saw the light, and with that they were relieved of their heavy burden. They could at least prevent their children’s pain from getting any worse; they could draw a limit to the exhaustion, terror and starvation their children were suffering. Chieko’s thumbs and forefingers had locked on the boy’s neck, and changed all the unknown suffering yet to come into something already known – in their situation, the torment of not knowing in itself was greater than the terror, exhaustion and hunger. Chieko with her long hair flying loose had not gone mad at all. She started to pursue her daughter, opening her soft embrace and her iron-hard forefingers and thumbs, from a wholehearted wish to let her three-year-old daughter Kumi enter into her eternal care as soon as possible. The women chasing Chieko gave up their pursuit. One by one the young mothers leaned against the trees, with dishevelled hair and dirty faces, clothing faded and worn, thinking about the final mother love that Chieko had taught them. They set off on the road again, wind and moonlight filtered down through the leaves and branches of the tall beeches, with occasional wails from wildcats. And so it was that the silent killing of the infants began …

  A hand pulled her into the toilet. It was Xiaohuan’s hand, as red and healthy as her face, and as dimpled. Duohe did not listen to what Xiaohuan was saying, she just watched that pair of rosy, smiling hands tip a pail of hot water into the wooden bathtub. What came next was all wrong: Xiaohuan started to talk about Girlie in a very everyday manner. ‘When you see her later on, make sure and praise her, eh? She’s been getting a hundred per cent in all her subjects, the teacher drew a five-pointed star next to the hundred per cent too! The only thing she’s no good at is craft class, they told her to do a paper cut-out of a cat, she brought it home, and got me to do it all for her!’ As she was speaking she dipped the loofah she was holding into hot soapsuds, and violently scrubbed Duohe’s back, causing her to lose her balance and lurch from side to side, scouring the skin and flesh of her back until they hurt as if they had been scalded, but it was an extremely comfortable pain, a very beautiful pain. ‘… D’you know how wicked that Dahai is?’ Xiaohuan was scrubbing so energetically that her ideas had lost all coherence: ‘… he’s a wicked little lad … he can play with his own winkle, just lying there! When I took them out, that naughty boy Erhai saw the neighbours had put out shrimps to dry, and he grabbed them and stuffed them in his mouth. Tell me this, how did he know that those shrimps were for eating? I remember when you were carrying those two, you really craved shrimps, is this kid a miracle or what? He can even remember what his mother likes to eat.’

  Duohe interrupted, blurting out that when she was little she too had liked to eat her grandmother’s dried shrimps.

  This took her very much by surprise. How had she got herself into a conversation with Xiaohuan? Now, just when she was making plans to perish together with her children! At that moment Xiaohuan yanked her from the water, lifted up one side of the bath and poured the dirty water into the toilet, tutting to herself, and saying with a smile: ‘Now there’s a pity, there’s enough in that water to fertilise two mu of fields!’

  Duohe looked at the grey layer of filth from her body on the toilet floor, and involuntarily laughed too. It had truly taken her by surprise, how could she be laughing? Wasn’t she just that moment considering the best way to make the three children pass away with her without the slightest pain or the least fear, to be good villagers of Shironami …?

  At this moment Xiaohuan suddenly thought of something, dropped Duohe and rushed out of the toilet, pulling the sheet-metal door behind her with a clang. It rang out with a cheerful sound, like a great gong. Not long afterwards there was another banging of gongs, and Xiaohuan opened the metal door, a little parcel of red cloth in her hands, which contained a red thread tied round a tooth. It was Girlie’s first milk tooth. Girlie had wanted to wait until Auntie had come back before she threw it onto the roof to make her teeth grow straight. Duohe ran a tentative finger over that little tooth that had passed back and forth over her nipple so many times, thinking, this won’t do, she might now not be capable of doing that beautiful deed that would take them from this world.

  That night, when Zhang Jian’s two friends Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi had gone, and Zhang Jian had left for the night shift,
Girlie sneaked into the little room.

  ‘Auntie?’

  ‘Ai.’

  ‘Have you got a himitu? Is there some secret you aren’t telling us?’

  Duohe did not speak. Girlie crawled onto her bed, so she crossed her legs, and Girlie sat down on them.

  ‘Auntie, did you go to get married?’ The seven-year-old face was looking directly into hers.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Get married?’

  ‘No.’

  Girlie relaxed. Duohe asked her who she had heard this from. Girlie changed the subject.

  ‘Auntie, marry our Teacher Wang. Teacher Wang is my form teacher.’

  Duohe burst out laughing. She had not imagined anything like this, that she could still chuckle out loud.

  ‘Teacher Wang is suburashii ne, just great!’

  Duohe asked in what way.

  ‘Teacher Wang gave me a milk sweet from Shanghai.’

  Duohe hugged her, rocking back and forth. The two bodies, one big, one small, rocked like a see-saw in an amusement park.

  ‘And another thing, I like Teacher Wang’s fountain pen.’

  Duohe held Girlie close. It was twelve o’clock at night. As she had originally envisaged it, she would already be dead, Girlie, Dahai and Erhai along with her. Duohe clasped Girlie to her, thinking that fortune had truly been on her side; if she had died, she could not have heard such amusing words from Girlie. She was actually being a matchmaker for her. A seven-year-old matchmaker. Girlie raised her head, and gave her a sweet, beautiful, gap-toothed smile. Duohe found that her Shironami villager’s enthusiasm for death had cooled completely.

  A month later, Xiaohuan told Duohe that Girlie’s class teacher, Teacher Wang, would be coming home for a visit. As soon as Teacher Wang walked through the door Duohe had to stop herself from laughing: this Teacher Wang who Girlie had wanted her to marry was a woman, with two long plaits. Girlie looked at Teacher Wang as she sat on the side of the bed in the big room, then she looked for a while at Duohe standing in the doorway, her eyes full of the smug satisfaction of one who had brought a romance to a happy conclusion. When Teacher Wang had left, Girlie asked Duohe if she was willing to marry Teacher Wang. Only then did Duohe collapse on the bed, waving her fists, kicking her legs and laughing out loud.