Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  In Duohe’s slow listening and understanding, the discussions gradually came together: Erhai had fallen from the fourth-floor balcony. He and Dahai had been flying paper planes off the balcony, and somehow he had gone right over the railing, and straight down.

  Duohe paid no attention to anything. She squeezed her way once again to Xiaohuan’s side and called out: ‘Jirchan!’ Nobody understood what she was shouting, her secret Japanese name for her son. Her two ore-dust-stained hands became sharp claws, as she caught hold of Erhai’s arm, still shouting: ‘Jirchan!’ She was unable to stop, and Erhai’s eyes which had been closed throughout unexpectedly opened.

  In an instant Xiaohuan came to a halt, two lines of tears dropping rapidly onto Erhai’s face. The deathly, staring eyes had a little life in them now.

  Erhai closed his eyes again.

  Xiaohuan sat down with a bump on the road, rocking the child in her arms, crying and calling: ‘My Erhai! What’s wrong with you? Where does it hurt? Tell Mummy!’

  Try as she might, Erhai did not open his eyes, and his greyish-white little face looked like he was sleeping. There was not a speck of blood on him or on the old blue shirt, bleached almost white with frequent washing, whose sleeves had been lengthened with another, much fresher strip of blue, and patched at the elbow in black. This was a child from a poor family, but from a very neat and self-respecting poor family. The patches were done so ingeniously, the clothes pressed with an iron into knife-sharp creases.

  Xiaohuan said to Duohe: ‘Call him again!’

  Duohe called out to him, twice. She called Erhai by his official name, ‘Zhang Gang’.

  This time Erhai did not open his eyes.

  ‘Call to him the way you did just now!’

  Duohe stared dully at Xiaohuan: she did not know what it was she had said.

  At that moment a man came over pedalling a flatbed tricycle. Xiaohuan climbed aboard, with Erhai in her arms, and Duohe got on as well. The closest clinic was at the factory headquarters. On the trike, Duohe stretched out a hand at intervals to feel the pulse at Erhai’s neck; it was still beating. Every time she took her hand away, Xiaohuan would glance at her, and she would nod once, to show that Erhai was still alive. Xiaohuan was chivvying the driver along: ‘Big brother, be quick! All our three lives are in your hands, mothers’ and son’s alike!’

  When they arrived at the clinic, the emergency doctor examined Erhai, and said that the child did not seem to have been seriously injured. Not a single bone had been broken, there were not even any signs of internal bleeding. There was only one point of uncertainty, and that was his head.

  Just then a nurse brought a jar of fruit for Erhai. She opened it, and fed the syrup to him a spoonful at a time. There was nothing wrong with his swallow reflex. Could a child fall from such a high place and have nothing the matter? Xiaohuan asked. It looks like there is nothing the matter; if he had sustained internal head injuries, he would not be able to eat. Who falls from the fourth floor and has nothing wrong? You can only call it a miracle. Perhaps the child’s weight was too light, and the evergreen trees at the bottom of the building broke his fall a bit. What to do if there was a problem? Going by all the results, no problem could be found.

  The doctor told Xiaohuan and Duohe to take the child back home, and come back if there were any new developments.

  ‘What developments might there be?!’ Xiaohuan got up from the chair along with the doctor.

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘You don’t know and you’re telling us to go home?!’ Xiaohuan grabbed a fistful of the doctor’s white coat.

  Like the scholar in the popular saying, who is left unable to express himself when faced with a crude, uneducated soldier, the doctor looked at this North-eastern woman. When she turned savage, her lips clenched, and there was no sweetness in the deep dimples on her cheeks, rather they emphasised her malevolence. The doctor became fierce in his turn. ‘You, take your hands off me!’

  ‘Just tell me, what kind of developments might there be?’ Xiaohuan grabbed a bigger handful of white coat.

  ‘How would I know? Be reasonable, can’t you?!’

  ‘I will not!’

  The doctor turned his head and shouted to the baffled female nurse: ‘Nurse Ding, call for someone to take her away! She’s causing a scene!’

  Now Xiaohuan was lying on the ground, nobody knew how she got there. ‘He pushed me! That little bastard pushed me!’

  All of the ten or so people in the clinic came running over. The female nurse testified that the doctor had not pushed Xiaohuan. Xiaohuan accused her of a cover-up. The head of the clinic had to step in, and the result was that the clinic would provide an ambulance to take the little boy and the two adults to the People’s Hospital for a thorough check-up. They were experts there, and had more equipment.

  That doctor wiped his hands on the front of his white coat, scrunched up into a dishcloth by Xiaohuan, muttering: ‘What developments could there be? He ate all the syrup from a whole jar of loquats!’

  The emergency doctor at the People’s Hospital was a woman. She pressed and manipulated here and there on Erhai’s body with light, gentle hands, and when she had done with her prodding and twisting, she nodded her head and smiled at the two women who were craning their necks to see. Her smiling face behind the big white face mask was extremely gentle. After that she wheeled Erhai into the X-ray room. She carried on examining him until ten o’clock in the evening, and only then did she walk over to the desk, sit down behind it and start to write.

  Xiaohuan watched her with bated breath. Duohe looked at Xiaohuan and took hold of her hand, not knowing if it was to console her or seeking consolation from her. Xiaohuan’s hand seemed to be utterly without feeling, with none of its usual strength. Duohe felt that hand give an involuntary twitch, then twitch again; it seemed that every stroke of the lady doctor’s pen was writing in Erhai’s book of life and death. Rather, it was writing in Xiaohuan’s own book of life and death. Xiaohuan was utterly absorbed, she had even forgotten to close her mouth, and you could see a faint gleam from the gold tooth. Duohe on the other hand was more composed than Xiaohuan. After all, she had been to middle school and, judging by all the test results, Erhai was not in danger.

  The woman doctor pulled down the face mask, to reveal all of her smiling face.

  ‘The child has no injury. Everything is normal,’ she said, as she rose from the desk.

  Somehow Xiaohuan was back on the floor again. This time she fell to her knees at the doctor’s feet, clasping her legs through a layer of white coat as she burst into noisy sobs.

  ‘Oh, Doctor! Thank you!’ she howled.

  The doctor was bewildered by her, both frightened and rather put out. ‘What are you thanking me for? There was nothing wrong with the child in the first place …’

  Xiaohuan, however, paid no attention to anything except clutching her legs and weeping: ‘The Goddess of Mercy came down to earth … Brought our child back from the dead … Such goodness and kindness!’

  The doctor tried to lift her to her feet, but in the end Duohe had to lend a hand before they could pull Xiaohuan, dissolving into a puddle of tears, upright again. The doctor handed several prescriptions to Duohe, and told her that the child was anaemic and should eat pig’s liver. The medicine on the prescriptions was to prevent internal bleeding, and should be taken for three days; if everything was normal they could stop the medicine. Xiaohuan, her face swollen with tears, agreed with the doctor: ‘Ai, ai.’ Very much to Duohe’s surprise, everything, from Xiaohuan’s appalling behaviour to her ignorance, was taking her further and further away from her thoughts of finding a good rope.

  The door to the emergency room flew open with a crash, and Zhang Jian came in, in oil-stained overalls, a safety helmet on his head and a towel round his neck. You could see at once that he had come straight down from the crane. He had been on the evening shift that ran from four o’clock until midnight, and a neighbour had come to the workshop with the n
ews.

  He rushed straight over to Erhai, who was lying on a trolley. Erhai was the apple of his eye. You might say that he had no reason to have a preference between his two identical sons, but he always felt that there was something intangible about Erhai that charmed him. Sure enough, Erhai, who was full of surprises, had performed another miracle.

  He hugged and kissed Erhai. The child feebly opened his eyes to look at him, and then closed them again. The doctor said that the child had had a great shock, it might take him a while to get over the damage to his nerves.

  Once they were back home Zhang Jian flew into a silent rage at the two women, glaring fearsomely at them both. In Xiaohuan’s words: this was his mule’s temper coming on again. When he looked at people in that way it was exceptionally unnerving, like at any moment he might grab one of the half-bricks they used to pen in their coal to hit you, though in reality he would be more likely to hit himself.

  He looked at the two women until their hearts were prickling and chilly with fear.

  At last he spoke: ‘Can neither of you keep a proper eye on the children?’

  ‘Who told the Neighbourhood Committee to start up a canteen?’ said Xiaohuan. ‘If Duohe didn’t go out to earn that five fen, we wouldn’t even have pig’s lard to eat!’

  Zhang Jian smoked for a while in brooding silence. Finally he announced his decision: Duohe would immediately resign her job. If they couldn’t get pork lard they would eat the cheaper fat from pig’s innards, if they couldn’t afford cotton-seed oil then they would eat no oil at all; they could not keep dumping the children on Girlie. Girlie had been hiding, terrified, in a neighbour’s house ever since Erhai was taken to the hospital. Her mother Xiaohuan had three phrases for her: ‘I’ll strip the hide off you!’, ‘I’ll beat your bum ragged!’ and ‘I’ll pierce your mouth with a big needle!’

  Xiaohuan was now standing outside the neighbour’s door, shouting at the top of her voice: ‘Hide in other people’s houses for your whole life if you think you’ve got what it takes! I’ll have your skin when you come home, see if I don’t!’

  Duohe tugged Xiaohuan’s arm from behind. Although Xiaohuan’s methods of managing her children were no different from all the other families in the block, it embarrassed Duohe. There were many things that Xiaohuan was not afraid of, of which the most notable was losing face. She pulled Xiaohuan back towards their own door, overturning a low table as she did so, and a chess set laid out on it went flying, sending some of the pieces straight through gaps in the railing to fall in the gutter at the foot of the block. The owners of the chess set cried out, saying there were two pawns missing. Xiaohuan’s mouth paused in her scolding to yell at them: ‘You’re only a couple short, aren’t you? Just carry on playing, make do!’

  Duohe did not move. Why find a good rope? Just carry on living, make do!

  8

  BEGGARS WERE STARTING to appear on the streets in increasing numbers. No household dared to open up when there was a knock on the door, for fear that they would find one standing there. Sometimes you would get three generations of beggars all at once.

  Duohe no longer went to the ore site to earn her five fen an hour. The canteen closed down too, and Xiaohuan went back home with a ‘Thank heaven, thank my lucky stars, and thank Chairman Mao as well’, and reverted to her lazy life of late nights and lie-ins.

  These days when Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi happened to drop by for chess and a chat, she would not bind her apron around her narrow waist, saying briskly that she’d make them some food. Now all she had to offer them were gold and silver rolls, using sweet-potato flour instead of maize flour, and maize flour in place of white. Dahai and Erhai would be seven soon; Girlie was already starting to look like a big girl, all large eyes, her four limbs like straw stalks, forever waking up hungry in the middle of the night.

  Before their visits, Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi would often fill the pockets of their work overalls with green beans or soya beans, bought at a high price on the black market. Xiao Peng had gone back to technical school for another year, and had returned to the workshop as Technician Peng. One day he went to the Zhang house to play a card game they called Chase the Pig with Xiaohuan and Xiao Shi. Duohe came into the room to top up their tea, and backed out once she had finished. Xiao Peng rolled up the clean white sleeves of his work clothes, and said in a loud voice: ‘Thank you, Little Sister.’

  The others were all startled by the sudden rise in volume. Duohe flashed a baffled smile in his direction too. Then Xiao Shi let out a guffaw, grabbed hold of Xiao Peng’s left wrist and held it up high: ‘New watch! Shanghai brand! How come none of you saw it?’

  Xiao Peng’s face flushed the colour of pig’s liver, but he did not hit Xiao Shi, just swore at him angrily: ‘So what if it’s a new watch? You little bastard, ogling away!’ At the same time he shot a glance at Duohe, and Duohe gave him another smile.

  Duohe’s smiles never held anything back, and she made men like Xiao Peng harbour a mistaken belief that he was the man who had amused and pleased her the most that day. For all these years, Xiao Peng had tried to figure out how Duohe was different from other women. He always felt that she had a background that was somehow inscrutable to him. She was different from ordinary women, and the differences were so subtle, so slippery, that by the time you got a hold of them, they had long since slid away.

  ‘Duohe, you come and play a round or two, I’m off to buy something to eat,’ Xiaohuan said, stretching out one foot to search for her shoes underneath the bed.

  Duohe smiled again, briefly, shaking her head. Xiao Peng noticed that when Xiaohuan spoke to Duohe she pronounced every word carefully, with none of her usual quickness of speech.

  ‘Sit down, sit down, we’ll teach you!’ Xiao Shi said. ‘Even people with brain fever can play this game!’

  Duohe watched him shuffle the cards. The children were still at school, she had washed the clothes and ironed them, and there was a while before supper time. She sat down hesitantly. When picking cards from the deck, Xiao Peng’s hand kept brushing against hers in passing, and he would glance fleetingly at her. If Xiao Shi was not talking he was humming songs, or he was boasting and bragging about how good his cards were: Xiao Peng was going to lose his shirt to him, and every other stitch he had on too.

  Duohe was struggling to understand Xiao Shi. She would lose half a sentence, understand half a sentence, and then the meaning of another would come too late. Before Duohe had learned the card game, the children were home from school. Girlie, who was in her first year of middle school, came running in with Dahai and Erhai, now in the second year of primary school. Duohe hurriedly got to her feet, bowed in farewell to the two guests, and told them to carry on playing, while saying to the children: ‘Wash your hands!’

  The three of them walked unwillingly into the kitchen. At once, Girlie shouted out: ‘Erhai’s sneaked some pan to eat!’

  Erhai came scurrying out of the kitchen, carrying four twisted steamed rolls in his hands, though it was hard to say if they were made of chopped onion rolled into steamed bread or breadcrumbs rolled into onions, as he scattered a trail that was more onion than flour in his wake.

  ‘Put down that pan!’ Girlie shouted, chasing after him.

  Girlie was a Three-Good Student, she had good morals, good grades and good health, and she was like a little mother to the two boys.

  ‘I’m going to count to three, and you stand still!’ she ordered. ‘One, two, three!’

  Erhai came to a halt, and Dahai took his chance to snatch the steamed rolls from his hands. The flour was not sticky enough in the first place, and a lot of onion had been mixed in, so that as soon as they left his hands they fell apart. Erhai was on him in an instant, wrapping both hands around Dahai’s neck, and biting down on his shoulder.

  ‘My pan! Give me back my pan!’ Erhai shouted.

  Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi could see that they were no longer play-fighting, but fighting in deadly earnest, and hurried up to pull them apart. Then they a
sked Girlie what pan was. Girlie told them: It’s just pan. Where do they say that? What dialect is it? I don’t know – that’s what my auntie always calls it. Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi exchanged glances: How come this word doesn’t sound like Chinese?

  After supper, Zhang Jian and Xiao Peng played chess, and Xiao Shi sat watching, ready to take over from the loser. Xiao Shi asked Zhang Jian: ‘Where is Auntie Duohe from, exactly, and how come she talks about huajuan like it’s in a foreign language?’ Zhang Jian knitted his eyebrows and stared at the chessboard. Nobody found it strange that he did not respond.

  But Xiaohuan called out from the sewing machine where she was mending clothes: ‘What did his sister-in-law say that you didn’t understand?’

  Xiao Shi said with a smile: ‘See what sharp ears Sister Xiaohuan has! She manages to listen in when we’re talking, even over that noisy sewing machine.’

  Xiao Peng said, laughing: ‘Sister Xiaohuan, we really don’t understand the words his sister-in-law says.’

  Xiaohuan said: ‘Really? Then I’ll tell you – that’s how they talk in the Land of Gibble-Gabble! My little sister’s been to the Country of Gibble-Gabble!’

  Xiao Shi and Xiao Peng both laughed and said that the language of Gibble-Gabble was so difficult, almost as bad as the language of the Jap devils.

  They often went on like this, nobody much caring whether they were talking nonsense or not, provided it kept boredom at bay. Duohe sat on the bed in the big room knitting socks for the children, topping up the three men’s hot water at intervals. There had been no tea to drink in the Zhang family for quite a while now. All the money for tea leaves had gone on grain. In the autumn Duohe would often go to the outskirts to gather a kind of grass seed, which could be fried over a slow heat until it turned yellow, then brewed into a fragrant tea. But by now it was early summer.

  It was Xiao Shi’s turn to play chess with Xiao Peng. Zhang Jian went to check on the children, who were doing their homework in the other room. Out of the corner of her eye, Duohe saw Xiao Shi give Xiao Peng a kick; he did not move, but Xiao Shi did. He stood up, took a drawing pin from the picture of Chairman Mao above the dining table, and set it down on Zhang Jian’s chair. Zhang Jian came back, and was about to take his seat, when Duohe suddenly understood. She let out a shrill cry. Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi had never known that soft-voiced Duohe was capable of such a powerful soprano: ‘Erhe!’