Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  People gradually noticed that Duohe was a bit slow on the uptake. You would call out to her: Duohe, bring that pot of green-bean soup over here, would you? Puffing and wheezing from the strain, she would move over an enamel bucket that it took two people to lift. You could say to her: That path’s horrible underfoot, level it out with a shovel while everyone’s resting, and she would pick up the shovel and get to work, without so much as a hint of a question: While everyone else is resting? Aren’t I part of everyone too?

  When the dependants got together, they would always be discussing who beat his wife, and which family’s wife and mother-in-law were locked in a psychological battle. One day somebody shouted to Duohe as she was coming down from the single-plank bridge with the empty bucket on her back: ‘Zhu Duohe! Your big sister’s so clever, she knows everybody, how come she hasn’t found a family and got you married off?’

  ‘That’s right! Zhu Xiaohuan’s been a matchmaker for so many people!’

  ‘All the people Xiaohuan set up end up getting married! Take the family next door, the husband’s got a younger brother with a harelip, and it was Xiaohuan who introduced him to a wife. A peasant, from the outskirts, her family grows vegetables. She met her in the market, and she’s not bad-looking either!’

  ‘Back in the old days, Xiaohuan would be coining money!’

  ‘Then what’s she playing at, leaving such a pretty snow-white girl on the shelf? She’ll grow old in the home at this rate.’

  Duohe looked from one to the other. Their speech was too quick, and some of them were southerners, all speaking together in a gaggle, two or three at a time. She had not understood any of it.

  ‘I’m talking to you, Duohe, how old are you?’

  This time she understood. She first held up two fingers, then put her hands side by side and held up nine. Her expression and movements were absolutely sincere, like an idiot showing that she knows her numbers. After that she gave that smile of hers, the same big, sincere, unchanging smile she used with everyone from strangers to people she knew very well.

  Everyone gave a start. There was no warmth in their relationship with Duohe; when they were with her they could not breathe freely, they felt held back and suffocated.

  ‘Why don’t I introduce you to a husband tomorrow?’ a woman from South China said. ‘I’ve got a cousin in the Nanjing Chemical Engineering Institute, he’s well into his thirties, just a little bit bald on top. By the time you get to your thirties, you want someone gentle and refined, and white and tender, just like Duohe.’

  ‘Duohe, how come you never tan?’

  Duohe had already filled her bucket with ore, and was walking away towards the rail track.

  ‘Do you powder your face?’ a woman from the North-east said. ‘The Japanese face powder they used to have back in my home town was ever so good, it’d make any face white and fine. After the Japs surrendered you could find that powder all over the street.’

  Duohe did not even hear what they were saying. She had only just pieced together the southern woman’s words into sentences. By the time she had tipped the stones into the wagon, she understood what her speech had meant. She wanted to introduce her to a bald man in his thirties. Chemical Engineering Institute. Liked pretty women. With soft skin and white flesh just like Duohe.

  Everyone wanted to marry off Duohe. Including Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan. If she could give up her children, if she could fabricate a believable life history, they would probably already have married her away.

  Over four months ago she had watched from the grove of elms behind the club as a crowd took Zhang Jian away. By the time Zhang Jian appeared in front of her again, she knew that everything had changed, beneath a surface layer where everything remained the same. That day he switched shifts from the night to the day, so he had a whole day free. In the past he would have guarded this whole day with his life: he would be able to take Duohe a long way away, as far as the riverside where he had once abandoned her. But that day he went straight to sleep after the night shift, and Duohe did not even hear him going to the toilet or washing his feet. He slept right through from eight in the morning until six in the evening. Duohe had the two boys settled at the table eating their supper when she saw him come out of the big room, his nose dark and face swollen from sleep, dragging his feet as if through a swamp on his way to the toilet. It was like he had not seen Duohe at all. When his sons called out to him he ignored them too. When he emerged from the toilet and the boys called out again, he turned round, leaning on the door frame, as though he had slept himself into paralysis. Now standing, he was a heap of mud propped upright, and if he did not lean against the door he’d be certain to collapse.

  Duohe called out to him. Duohe called him in a very special way: Erhe, second river. She had called him this for more than ten years. Ehe, Ehai, Erhe. Xiaohuan had corrected her many times, but later she said with a smile: Let him be Second River, then. Duohe worried that she was saying his name wrongly, so she took pains not to say it out loud too often, and when she did, it proved that she was forced to do so by the pressure of circumstances, as a matter of great urgency.

  He leaned there, a mass of wrinkles piled high above his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m worn out,’ he said.

  She looked at him in shock. Had he been tortured? What punishment had he suffered? There was so much pain in his eyes. At that moment the door was unlocked, and Xiaohuan came in, bringing back mantou bread made from mixed grains, and rice porridge. She was grousing away in a towering rage: There’s no bloody advantage to working in the canteen at all, unless you count never getting short measure. Call this crap fried aubergine? Every single bloody aubergine’s eight months pregnant, a bag of seeds! Xiaohuan was just the same as normal, full of sarcastic remarks about the canteen that was struggling to keep going. It was like nothing had changed. Zhang Jian went straight back to the big room, and went to sleep again.

  Another week passed; Zhang Jian was still sleeping unusually heavily and long, as if he wanted to recover all the spirit and physical strength he had spent in his assignations with Duohe. When he occasionally spoke to Duohe, it was to say: Dahai can really eat, he’s just five and he can eat two two-ounce mantou! Or: Is Erhai peeing down the stairs again? Just now someone was cursing away below! Or: You don’t have to iron my work overalls! At the factory you have to crawl everywhere, they’ll be a right mess in no time!

  Duohe was always looking at him. He had never pretended to be confused, or not to understand all the words in her glance: What are your plans? Didn’t you say you loved me? You’ve taken away my heart, now you’ve poured it back, but my heart has gone wild with ambition, it can’t be contained in such a small place!

  He no longer gave her hints about meeting. She sent him secret signals, and he pretended not to see. She sent him signals because she wanted to speak to him face-to-face, so he could give her just a few words to set things straight. What had they done to him in the factory? Did Xiaohuan know? Was this the way he would be from now on, returning to a state of casual acquaintance, to their relationship that was neither one thing nor the other?

  That spring came very early, the quarry was green on every side. Duohe sat in the middle of a crowd of rowdy dependants, listening to them offering to match her up and making enquiries about the secret of her skincare. Duohe always took forever to get a rough idea of what they were talking about. By the time she more or less understood that one of the women was talking about face powder, that woman was already there right in front of her, and by the time she understood what she meant to do, it was too late, that woman had stretched out a finger to rub her face, then examined her fingertip. Only then did Duohe understand: these women had a bet that Duohe had powdered her face.

  Duohe looked dumbfounded at that crowd of women, all in their thirties.

  The dependants all scolded the woman who had stretched out her hand. It was not a proper rebuke, but a joking one, siding with the guilty party, saying that she had taken liberties because s
he could see that Duohe was honest and a bit dim!

  That woman said, ‘Aiyo, so soft! Come and stroke Duohe’s face if you don’t believe me!’

  The others asked Duohe if they could stroke her. Duohe was thinking, they wouldn’t go that far, surely, but the women had already approached, each with a hand out. Duohe saw all those different mouths speaking, all saying nice things. Duohe herself briefly rubbed the places they had touched. Once she had walked away, the dependants said: There’s something not quite right about her – ask to stroke her face and she just stands there all respectful and lets you do it.

  Duohe was the first to clamber aboard the truck back to the dependants’ quarters. The women’s behaviour just now had made her feel lonelier than ever. She was wearing a straw hat just like theirs, and as old and battered as theirs after a year of being blown by the wind and shone on by the sun; she was wearing canvas overalls identical to theirs, their husbands’ cast-offs, so all of them were bulky and oversized, but they would always see something different about her.

  The truck started up. With every rut and pothole it flung her together with all the other women, so close that you were forced into profound intimacy, but she could feel the antipathy of their bodies towards hers. Before she and Zhang Jian had loved each other, she had never thought that she would want to blend into a society of Chinese, or want Chinese people to recognise her as their kind. She had not even felt alone. She had her children; her own flesh and blood that she had given birth to and was raising for herself – flesh of her flesh, the blood in their veins was half Takeuchi family blood. She had once thought that so long as they surrounded her, the village of Shironami would surround her too. But all of this had changed. She had fallen in love with Zhang Jian, and placed her life in his. It seemed that whether or not he was the father of her children was of no real importance, it was an irrelevance, the crucial point was that on the soil of this foreign nation, she had fallen desperately in love with this man from another country. How many times had the two of them run away together in the course of those two years? She could no longer return to where she started from. The Shironami village she had built up in secret was destroyed. And she was the one who had destroyed it. Because she had hoped that this land which had birthed Zhang Jian would take her in, would assimilate her unconditionally. Because by falling fatally in love with Zhang Jian, she had accepted his motherland without reserve.

  All the dependants in the truck were screaming with laughter. She had missed the joke. She could never blend in with them.

  Zhang Jian’s love for her, breaking out so suddenly and so suddenly extinguished, had turned her into the loneliest of people. The truck came to a stop, and the women got out like bees from a hive, pulling one another, the first off waiting below to catch the others, shouting to the last ones: Jump, I’ve got you! Duohe slowly shifted her way towards the end of the truck. What was the hurry? Zhang Jian was not waiting to welcome her with burning kisses. When Duohe finally got off the truck, the other dependants were already far away.

  Duohe walked up the big slope, but did not turn off at the small road that led to her home. She walked all the way along the slope, until the sound of bicycle bells could no longer be heard behind her. Increasingly dense green bristlegrass rose up ahead of her, further on still came pine trees. Following the steepening slope beneath her feet, the scent of the pine trees became ever more humid, cool and dark. On the rocks, moss and lichen formed layers of grey, green and white. Behind her, she could hear the hooting of the little train. The moss on the stones, the long call of the train, the scent of the pine trees, what more did she need than this to take her back ten years and more, back to Shironami which was gone forever? These few things were enough. Dr Suzuki had come on a small train, and a small train took him away again. The sixteen-year-old Takeuchi Tatsuru did not know whether she was the only person who wanted to jump onto the train with Dr Suzuki. It was not so much that she had seen clearly the hopelessness of their situation; she just wanted to do something to let Dr Suzuki, who had always been so gentle and courteous, cool his anger a little, to let him feel that he had not done all that talking in vain, that there was still a girl of no particular importance who was willing to take the train with him. She also wanted him to see that she was not one of the blank-faced villagers he was cursing for fools. She had already pulled her mother and younger brother and sister up to the door of the train, when her mother suddenly realised that the hand that had been pulling her, dragging her out from the community, belonged to her daughter Tatsuru. Her mother shook her arm vigorously. At that moment there was a difference in height between her and her mother, brother and sister: her foot was resting on the footplate of the train, and Dr Suzuki’s artificial leg was just another half-metre away. A dozen thoughts came into her head. She did not realise that she had got down from the footplate. It was only once the train had pulled out that she had the time to order her thoughts.

  And right up to that moment years later, she had still not ordered her thoughts. The scene around her which had sparked her idle fancies brought her back to Shironami in earnest, and it suddenly occurred to her that when she stood on the footplate of the train, looking at Dr Suzuki’s artificial leg, she had wanted to form a connection with that mysterious limb. Of all the mysterious things about Dr Suzuki, this was the most mysterious of all. She had wanted to spend some time very, very close to it.

  The scent of the pines got weaker for a while and then strengthened again. The wind in the trees was moist, as it rubbed on her forehead and cheeks. What did that mean? That the young girl Tatsuru had wanted to spend her life taking care of Dr Suzuki? If her mother’s arm had not shaken her away from the train and she had taken another step up, instead of down, she would have been a different Tatsuru. A Tatsuru whose heart would not have been shattered for the sake of a Chinese man.

  The pine trees up ahead were getting increasingly dense. She grabbed hold of a branch and sat down on a rock where the moss grew thick. Her feet were not that far away from the stone flood drain. The days were getting longer, and it was not yet dark. This city never got completely dark; if steel was not being tapped here, iron was being tapped there, or else they would be rolling out a big piece of iron somewhere. So there was always one miniature sunrise or sunset after the other.

  Duohe slowly made her way home down the slope. It was only now that she felt her legs were so heavy she could barely move them forward, and her knees were wobbly, giving way with every step. Carrying stones on her back really was very hard work.

  Duohe suddenly stopped. She saw herself as a young girl.

  The young girl Tatsuru was attracted by a remarkable spectacle: a mass of blood flowing from a finger-thick crack in a stone, flowing towards the rising sun, gradually congealing beside the stone into a ball: a ball of blood the size of a melon, half transparent, and gently quivering. The blood of several generations under one roof was so dense, so thick, flowing into this thing between solid and liquid. Several generations had lived under one roof, so close they could not tell who was who, body temperature, pulse beating, convulsions, at the last became a ball of blood. When the young girl Tatsuru heard the village heads’ final plan for the inhabitants of their own villages, she fled the village, and ran towards the fields. Stacks of sorghum came towards her, one after the other, then slipped past and were left behind. She had never run so fast. In the wide-open spaces her running raised up a wind; there was stubble from the sorghum under her feet, each stem wanting to pierce her, to transfix the sole of her foot. Her hair was full of her running, her clothes were full of wind too. The wind went from cold to hot, to a roiling boil.

  How could the young Tatsuru have imagined that she was running towards this crowd of hundreds of identical red-and-white blocks, towards the arms of a Chinese man whom she had won and then lost again? Running towards this night.

  It could all be made very easy. Find a tree, right here on this mountain, hang up a rope and tie a noose. She would need to find
a good rope. All decent Japanese used good knives and good bullets for this kind of thing. Ceremony was more important than anything else, because how many weighty ceremonies of this kind would a person have in their whole life? She had missed out on marriage, the most important ceremony for a woman, but for this ceremony she could not just make do. She had to find a good rope.

  When she was nearly back at her own building, Duohe saw a crowd surging out from the staircase. From far off she heard Xiaohuan’s smoke-and-oil voice: ‘Somebody, go and borrow a cart for me!’

  The waiting crowd drew closer. Duohe saw that Xiaohuan was carrying Erhai in her arms. Someone in the crowd said: ‘Oh, his auntie’s back!’

  Duohe squeezed past these people who were not helping at all, just adding to the confusion. All the way she could hear people discussing it: It seems he’s not dead! But how could he be alive? By the time she had squeezed her way closer, she saw that Xiaohuan’s eyes were staring straight ahead of her like a blind woman’s as she clasped the child in her arms, coming over with stumbling but very rapid steps. All she could see was the crown of Erhai’s head. Xiaohuan’s tightly fitting knitted cotton top had ridden up from carrying the child, creeping up as far as her chest to reveal a strip of long, narrow waist. Xiaohuan was utterly unaware of this, she had not even noticed that she was wearing one wooden slipper and one cloth shoe on her feet.

  Duohe finally got close to Xiaohuan, stretched out her arm to take Erhai from her and at once got hit by Xiaohuan’s elbow: ‘Get out of the way!’ It was such a sharp elbow, sharp enough to chisel through her arm.