Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  Zhang Jian turned, but by then Duohe had run over and was holding up the drawing pin that should already have jabbed into his bottom, her face as red as blood.

  ‘Go! You, go!’ Duohe said to Xiao Shi.

  Xiao Shi kept sniggering with embarrassment. ‘I was just having a bit of fun with him …’

  Duohe grabbed a fistful of Xiao Shi’s sleeve, yanked him up from his stool and hauled him towards the doorway.

  ‘You, go! You, go!’

  Xiao Shi was stunned. He had never seen Duohe lose her temper, nor had he known that she possessed such stubborn strength. Both Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan held her back, but she did not relax her grip on Xiao Shi’s sleeve. There was no shortage of people in the work section who enjoyed making Zhang Jian the butt of their jokes: some put sand in his shoes, others stole cotton gloves from his toolbox. When it was time for political study, often someone would draw a picture of an ape or a comical figure from legends on the back of his chair in chalk. When Zhang Jian was caught backstage at the club, these people who were already so fond of taking the mickey out of him became even more lively and energetic. Perhaps it was only Xiao Peng who understood that Zhang Jian was not as gentle and kindly as was generally supposed. His silence was because he would not bring himself down to their level; he seemed to have more important matters on his mind.

  But what matters were these? Xiao Peng could not even begin to guess.

  Xiaohuan and Zhang Jian finally rescued Xiao Shi from the onslaught. Xiao Shi was grinning cheekily, bowing and scraping left and right. Xiao Peng thought, who knows when this silence of Zhang Jian’s that keeps him aloof from the world might explode, and who knows which poor bastard will suffer damage from that explosion.

  It was also clear to Xiao Peng that Xiao Shi had hoped to attract Duohe’s attention with his little joke. But the two of them were always covertly competing, striving for a smile from Duohe, even a wordless smile. Could it be that the two of them wanted to court her? Xiao Peng was shocked by this notion: how could he marry a woman who was quite a few years his senior? Besides, there was the marriage his parents had arranged for him back home when he was still a child; he could not dodge his responsibilities. He was twenty-six now, how much longer could he put it off?

  Xiao Peng did not even know if he liked Duohe. It was just that lingering charm of hers, so different from his female colleagues, that made his heart itch. He looked at Xiao Shi, still slimily justifying himself and professing brotherly affection for Zhang Jian, and suddenly it became clear to him – Zhang Jian and Duohe were lovers. Small wonder that one drawing pin could transform her into a leopardess, springing up to tear with her teeth at anyone who harmed her leopard. Everything was clear now: Xiaohuan had been covering up for them in that incident at the club, and Xiao Peng could see who had given birth to the children.

  Xiao Peng thought that he had soiled himself by associating with this shameless, dysfunctional family for all these years. When he and Xiao Shi left the Zhangs’, he decided not to go there again. But he was back the next day, and every day after that, more regularly than in the past. He did not know why. He did not mention his conjectures to Xiao Shi; he despised Xiao Shi’s chattering, gossiping tongue, and the fact that he could not see more than five centimetres below the surface.

  One day in August after work, he bathed, washed his hair and changed into a short-sleeved sailor’s striped shirt with holes under the armpits that he had mended with sticking plaster. He arrived at Zhang Jian’s building, just in time to see Duohe coming down the stairs with a wooden bucket on her back. He asked her where she was going, and she pointed in the direction of the grain store. He said, ‘I’ll help you carry your grain, shall I?’ She smiled. He immediately turned his bike around.

  When they reached the door of the grain store she pointed ahead again, into the distance. ‘There.’

  Xiao Peng followed her. She had a very interesting way of walking, with small, shuffling, but very quick steps. This close to her, his feeling that she was unlike other women intensified.

  ‘How much further is it? Come up on my bicycle.’

  Duohe gestured to the huge wooden bucket on her back. ‘Bucket,’ she said with yet another smile.

  Xiao Peng thought for a minute, and told her to take off the bucket. He watched her unfasten it, feeling that there was something very peculiar about it, that it was not like the utensils used in normal homes. He picked up the bucket with his left hand, held onto the handlebars with his right, and set the bicycle in motion, wobbling as he went.

  By the side of the road, a crowd of people was picking over something that turned out to be a pile of newly harvested peanuts, a lot more mud than nut. One of the neighbours had passed on the news that there were peanuts for sale around the building, and Xiaohuan had borrowed five yuan from another neighbour and told Duohe to go and buy some. The children were undernourished, and Dahai had been suffering from a swollen liver for the past six months.

  Xiao Peng and Duohe grubbed in the mud with both hands, and scraped up three or four kilos of peanuts. Duohe was just about to tip them into the basket to be weighed, when Xiao Peng held her back, poured the peanuts out of the bucket, and picked away the thick layer of mud that the peanuts had been rolled in. He smiled at Duohe. Duohe understood, and squatted down to pick through them with him. Xiao Peng thought, at her age, how can this woman not understand how much cunning there is in the world? If not for him, would she have spent the money on mud?

  The peasant selling peanuts pointed over with the long stick he used as a balance for weighing, almost jabbing Duohe in the face with it. He shouted: ‘No sale, no sale! I won’t sell to anyone who starts picking and choosing!’

  Xiao Peng seized the balance stick in his fist, telling him to stop poking people with it. The peasant said he had already made it clear beforehand, there was to be no picking and choosing! Xiao Peng and the peasant fell into a tug of war over the balance stick. ‘So if we pick them over then we deserve to get poked in the face with your stick? And a female comrade’s face too – you can’t just go jabbing away whenever the fancy takes you! What if she’s blinded, whose fault would it be then?’ ‘I never blinded her!’ ‘Oh, this bastard doesn’t care even if he puts her eye out!’

  The peasant was a simpler soul than Xiao Peng. Xiao Peng’s first words of accusation had shifted the topic, but he unquestioningly followed the flow of Xiao Peng’s logic.

  ‘Her eyes aren’t blind, they’re just fine, aren’t they?’ the peasant said to his panic-buying customers.

  ‘That’s just because you don’t have what it takes to carry through your evil intentions! Did you all hear that? Our nation is going through hard times, and these crafty peasants are taking this opportunity to suck the blood of the workers, their elder brothers!’

  Xiao Peng seized the stick in his hands, and the peasant stamped his feet beside him, begging him not to go baton-twirling with his scales, he was going to break it.

  ‘They’re a black-hearted lot, those peasants from the outskirts! Taking advantage of us when we’re short of grain and oil, raising the market price for all their life’s worth.’

  ‘That’s right!’ voices replied from among the buyers.

  A North-eastern dependant, mud smeared all around her mouth, said in a loud voice: ‘These peasant brothers of ours are so ungenerous, they sell us these few little peanuts, and even plaster them with thick mud first!’ Just now she had taken advantage of the tug of war to shell the muddy peanuts and cram them into her mouth at top speed. She wanted to fill her belly, that would mean one more meal saved for her children.

  The deep-seated and bitter grudges which had built up over many years between the workers’ dependants and the peasants from the outskirts exploded. The peasants knew that the workers from Shanghai could not do without fish and shrimps so they inflated their price until it was as high as Shanghai prices. When they sold greens they soaked them in water, and if you confronted them they would quibble: What do you m
ean too much water? That’s just softening it up! It’ll melt in the mouth!

  Brandishing the stick, Xiao Peng said to the dependants: ‘We workers are the proletarian class. When famine strikes all we can do is carry on, though our bellies are empty, but they still have their private plots of land! They’re the propertied class!’ Xiao Peng cared nothing for whether the great principles of which he was speaking were in fact principled, or whether they were persuasive, but he cut a fine figure, and even the peasant was beginning to suspect his own motives.

  Xiao Peng swished the balance stick about as he brought into play his stage voice from the amateur drama group, educating the peasants from the propertied class. His eyes kept glancing at Duohe. Duohe was wearing a white-and-blue-checked shirt; the white was very white, the blue faded until it too was almost white, the original long sleeves had become so tattered they could no longer be patched, and had been cut into short sleeves, but that cleanliness, neatness and smoothness made her very eye-catching in a crowd of workers’ dependants. Duohe was watching him, round-eyed, seemingly astonished by his suddenly revealed talent. Whether it was his talent as a rabble-rouser or his talent as an amateur actor made no difference, the light in her eyes was illuminating him all the while.

  Duohe gave a chuckle, and Xiao Peng felt as though two ounces of spirits had shot straight to his head. He certainly could not immediately abandon the stage which he had just built up. He heard a crack; the stick which was as thick as a sapling snapped in his hand, and jabbed painfully into his knee. He paid no heed to the pain, as he led the working class to throw off their oppressors. He divided the peasant’s peanuts into equal portions, everyone would produce three yuan, and he declared to the peasant, as if proclaiming the will of Heaven: if that’s not enough for you, you won’t even get that three yuan.

  The peasant cursed them roundly for bandits.

  Xiao Peng did not get angry, he laughed heartily, and said that in the old society the landlords and idle rich had cursed the Communists in just that way.

  After that people crowded joyously around Xiao Peng, as though he really was leading a great uprising. Xiao Peng nodded and waved to the dependants, but his senses were all focused on Duohe. He wanted Duohe to see: What is Zhang Jian compared to this? Is he possessed of such splendid eloquence? Does he have this crowd-pleasing charm?

  At the technical school, Xiao Peng had read several novels. He was certainly not like Shao Jianbo towards Xiao Bai Ge.fn1 Nor was he like Jiang Hua with Lin Daojing.fn2 To him, Duohe was a strange creature with vast, mysterious powers of attraction. Her unclear, halting speech, her odd footsteps, and her astonishing naivety were all just parts of what made up her allure. Sometimes he had speculated with Xiao Shi that her intelligence was stunted, but as soon as you saw her eyes, that suspicion promptly dissipated: not only was she in full possession of her faculties, she was actually rather sensitive to the feelings of others.

  He strapped the half-full bucket of peanuts onto the crossbar of his bicycle, and walked with Duohe. The summer sun was very late in setting, and the metal that was being turned out of the blast furnaces added another sun to the city. The uprising he had just led had left him sweating all over, the sailor shirt was sticking to his back and chest, and the sticking plaster he had used to patch the holes was soaked through and had curled up and dropped off during his arm-waving, foot-stamping performance. Each one of his vehement, impassioned gestures had made the holes a little bit larger, exposing unruly armpit hair.

  Duohe glanced at him from time to time, and gave him a smile. Her lack of words was lovable too. How was it that ordinary women had so much to say when they hit their thirties? Finally, Duohe spoke.

  ‘Clothes broken,’ she said. Her eyes were so earnest, although she was still smiling.

  He had talked of novels, songs and poetry all the way, and her response was ‘Clothes broken’.

  ‘Here.’ She pointed to her own armpit.

  There was a very small patch under her armpit too, which was now saturated with sweat. For some reason, Xiao Peng found himself aroused by this mend she had made and her armpit soaked with sweat.

  He came to a halt. She stood still too, without knowing the reason why.

  ‘Mend it for me.’

  She looked fixedly at him, a layer of sweat like fine droplets on her nose, and her thick fringe damp with sweat. She understood that the words coming out of his mouth made little difference to anything, they could just as well have been blown away by the wind. There was no need to say the words that did make a difference.

  Tears suddenly welled up in her eyes.

  He became afraid. If she took things too seriously, then it might well be too difficult to pick up the pieces later.

  They walked back to the flat, and Xiao Peng said breezily to Xiaohuan that he had helped Duohe to carry her things, and Duohe had agreed to mend his clothes for him. Duohe’s tears left him disturbed all evening. If she were to take him as her saviour that would be a nuisance: she would throw herself at him, body and soul, and drag him into domesticity. Had he stooped to pick up Zhang Jian’s leftovers? Was he really that cheap? At that moment Duohe was washing his sailor shirt clean and ironing it dry, then she took it to the sewing machine and patched it for him. Listening to the tapping of the sewing machine he thought: Look at her, already she wants to drag you into spending your life with her!

  That evening Zhang Jian and Xiao Shi were both at work, so Xiao Peng was the only one there, and he was no match for Xiaohuan’s banter, all he could do was listen to Girlie reading out the essay she had written. Girlie had a big book full of fine, stirring sentences which Xiao Peng and Xiao Shi had copied from newspapers, magazines and books. Every time Girlie wrote a composition, she would look through it. So when she wrote of bumper harvests it was all ‘golden sands flowing through the village’, ‘you would think that white clouds had fallen onto the cotton fields’, ‘beating the jujube tree with staves, fruit falling like a rain of carnelian’ … Everybody thought these sentences were first-rate; only Xiaohuan said as she listened: ‘Then how come we’re still so hungry? How come our Dahai’s liver’s all swollen up? How come their dad’s as skinny as a praying mantis?’ Or she would say with a chuckle: ‘No wonder – the village is full of golden sand. You can’t cook sand into a meal! Carnelians falling out of the jujube trees – can you eat those? That’s why there are beggars dead of hunger outside the door of the department store every day.’

  Sometimes Girlie was unable to write by the time Xiaohuan had finished her tirade, so she called her backward, with rightist tendencies.

  Xiaohuan said: ‘So what if I’m rightist?’

  ‘Rightists have to sweep the toilets, if they won’t do sweeping they climb up the high chimney and jump off!’ Two engineers in the factory had been made rightists, and had swept the toilets for a while. One after the other they had jumped off the fifty-metre-high chimney.

  By the time Girlie had finished reading her essay, Duohe had mended Xiao Peng’s sailor shirt. She handed it over to him, and he gave her a piece of paper, written hurriedly under the cover of Girlie’s essay, an invitation to watch a film, the afternoon showing at half past four.

  But the film finished and Duohe had not come. At first, he had been making something out of nothing, in search of a little extra secret tenderness, but getting stood up by Duohe made him suddenly turn neurotic. She was cold-shouldering him? She had the nerve to make him waste the price of two cinema tickets; one ticket had bought an empty seat, the other an empty shell – throughout the film his spirit was with Duohe, and he had been unable to follow the story. Was she looking for death? Did she dare to arouse his anger? He knew what was what, he could have exposed the filthy tangle of relationships between the Zhang family to the security office! Was she keeping herself pure for Zhang Jian? This woman was so faithful despite everything he had put her through, and Zhang Jian thought he deserved her?

  When Xiao Peng next went to the Zhang household, he did not go up th
e stairs, but waited around for Duohe to come down. He knew that Duohe often went to the vegetable market near closing time, to gather up the old outer leaves of the vegetables. Sometimes she went to the meat stall too. After a day’s worth of meat had been cut away, the skin would be sold off cheap just before they shut up shop, and Duohe would queue in the great crowd of dependants to try her luck.

  He saw her walking away from the meat stall carrying a piece of skin, curled at the edges, which had been hung up all day for the flies to bite. He went up to her.

  Duohe backed off a little, but immediately gave him a very big smile.

  ‘Why didn’t you come to the film?’ he asked.

  She smiled again briefly, and shook her head. What was it about that childish air of hers? Had she eaten rice for thirty years and more for nothing?

  She was still smiling and shaking her head.

  ‘It’s nothing – friends going to see a film, it’s perfectly normal.’

  She was watching his lips, her eyebrows scrunched up. Xiao Peng recalled the tone of voice Xiaohuan and Zhang Jian used when speaking to her, so he slowed down and repeated his words.

  ‘It’s not,’ she said.

  Her ‘it’s not’ could mean any number of things. He sensed that he was becoming neurotic over his relationship to her. He was afraid that her ‘it’s not’ implied: ‘You’re getting too emotional over something that’s all in your head.’ He did not know how it had come about, but he knew what it meant to feel pain.

  That day he did not go back home with Duohe. The pain was starting to devour him. But avoiding Zhang Jian’s home and not seeing Duohe made the pain worse. Regardless, he ignored Xiao Shi’s goading and his cruel mockery, and was determined to stay away from Duohe. At the turn of the year, Xiao Peng returned to his home town, where he married his fiancée. On the marriage bed he vented his fury on his new bride, saying to himself with every move, ‘I’ll give you pain! I’ll give you pain!’