Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  There was no need to say anything more now. Xiao Shi had been having him on: Duohe was blameless where Xiao Shi was concerned. And Xiao Peng cared about this blamelessness, even though he was not planning on marrying her, which made his infatuation with Duohe still harder to explain. There were a dozen or so top technicians, and he was the one with the most potential to be groomed for leadership: because his family had been poor peasants for several generations, he was a Party member, and he had represented the technicians when he had gone with Chairman Mao to the mouth of the furnace. What reason did he have to be so hung up on a woman like Duohe who couldn’t even speak properly?

  The following afternoon Duohe came to the cinema. She had deliberately done herself up, her hair washed until it gleamed, and wearing a pleated cotton skirt with a round-necked knitted cotton top. The top had been dyed black, and a cord threaded through the neck, with a pompom dangling from each end. The skirt was a black-and-white check. Duohe did not have Xiaohuan’s alluring waist, full of charms both in motion and repose; her figure had no obvious curves or straight lines, she was all vague transitions. Viewed from behind she appeared thoroughly clumsy and dull. However you looked at it, there was no way she could be Xiaohuan’s little sister.

  So who was that woman called Zhu Duohe really?

  At the door to the cinema, Xiao Peng pointed to an enormous poster and told her: This is a new film, it’s called Bitter Flower, they say it is full of ‘fight’. ‘Fight’ was the word young workers used to describe intense war films.

  Duohe’s expression changed, becoming extremely anxious, as she looked from one film still to the next. Finally she stared at the picture of a Japanese Army officer for a very long time.

  In the cinema Xiao Peng found himself in an awkward predicament: Duohe’s hands were clasped together in front of her chest, and he could hardly touch her bosom in order to steal a hand away. She seemed to have immersed herself completely in the film: when the plot and music reached a moment of crying or shouting, she came close to crying and shouting too. Xiao Peng was about to make a move and take that hand which was blocking her mouth. This was a good opportunity: the woman was heartbroken, so he could enfold her in his arms as naturally as water flowing downhill, and let her give way to her heartbreak in comfort. Without this step, none of the other steps could be taken. Xiao Peng was getting ready to brace himself, Do it!, when he suddenly heard Duohe say something. He pricked up his ears, and heard her say another word. As though she were copying the Jap devils in the film and speaking Japanese. No, it sounded more like she was correcting their language. Perhaps it was neither of those things, and she was speaking without meaning to. A Japanese word. An authentic, fluent Japanese word.

  Duohe was Japanese. Duohe? He should have guessed long ago that this was no Chinese name.

  Xiao Peng’s deduction gave him such a fright that he sat there paralysed. How could Zhang Jian and his family ever have had the nerve? Harbouring a Japanese woman, for more than ten years, and giving birth to a litter of Jap whelps. Take a look at the Japanese people on the screen – could you call them human? They were devils, gabbling away in their strange language, killing without batting an eyelid.

  His hand, which had been itching throughout, was paralysed too, and lay flaccid on his thighs, as his sweat slowly seeped into the legs of his work trousers. Why did Duohe have to be Japanese? Anything else would have been fine. He, Xiao Peng, was sitting with a Japanese woman in a dark cinema watching a film, about to knead her hand with the hand that had shaken the Great Leader’s?

  When he and Duohe left the cinema, he slowed and followed behind her. He saw clearly that beneath her peculiar surface layer a Japanese woman was concealed; in fact there was nothing peculiar about it now. She came from the same stock as the Jap devils in the film. Xiao Peng understood the mystery surrounding Duohe now: no matter how polite and reserved she was, there was also a part of her that could never be tamed. No matter how earnestly she smiled, there was something unnatural about it. And this lack of fluency showed through in Erhai: his cold, cold ardour, his listless obstinacy, his barbarian affection and rage towards certain people and certain things, this was where they came from.

  Outside it was getting dark, a drizzly autumn dusk, a clichéd kind of weather suitable for lovers. Xiao Peng led Duohe through the drizzle to his dormitory. His room-mate was cooking a meal for himself on a kerosene stove in the corridor, but as soon as he saw that Xiao Peng had brought back a woman, he hastily said that he would go to a fellow Sichuaner’s dormitory to have his meal there.

  Xiao Peng asked Duohe to sit down at his desk, and found a few film magazines for her. Then he brewed her some tea. The water in the Thermos was not particularly hot, and the tea leaves clogged up the mouth of the cup like floating rubbish.

  ‘You’re not Chinese, are you?’ He gave her a look. That same look fell on the dirty socks his room-mate had left soaking in the washbasin.

  But Duohe did not turn pale with fright as he had predicted. A Japanese woman in hiding whose secret had been exposed, he would have thought she would be on her knees in front of him begging for mercy.

  ‘I found out a long time ago,’ Xiao Peng said.

  Duohe put the cup down on the desk, and smoothed the creases on her skirt.

  Xiao Peng thought, What is she thinking? Does she assume she can avoid the question and that’ll be the end of the matter? Will I let her off as lightly as that?

  ‘How did you come to stay behind in China?’

  Her lips repeated his words silently for a moment, making sure she had understood.

  ‘Sold.’ Her simple, direct response once again was far from what he had anticipated.

  He saw her eyes start to glitter again, without any attempt at disguise. Don’t cry, don’t play games with my heart, Xiao Peng silently reproached her.

  With the greatest of difficulty, she began. She would come out with a sentence and then halt; sometimes she could not get her intonation right, and had to try again using different tones, until she saw a flash of understanding on Xiao Peng’s face, at which point she could continue. She gave the bare bones of the story, everywhere there were gaps, but Xiao Peng was still stunned by what he heard. Three thousand refugees, women and children, blood all the way, dropping dead, death and cruelty to themselves and each other, it did not seem like a story of human beings. And what human could bear to go on listening to it?

  And Duohe was the one who had survived this great calamity.

  Xiao Peng had not known that his heart could ache over things that had nothing to do with him. Perhaps Zhang Jian and Xiaohuan had gone through the same kind of heartache?

  Duohe got to her feet. Her bow was deep and prolonged, and he came over to stop her – this kind of bow was a flaw that could give her away, people might grope their way along this flaw, and finally destroy her. But his gesture of restraint changed halfway into a not particularly romantic embrace. As he held Duohe’s slightly resisting body, he felt the pain recede a little. He gripped her more tightly, in order to make the pain in his heart clear up completely. If he could just avoid thinking about his own wife and child back home, or about Zhang Jian or Xiaohuan, he could be romantic.

  He took Duohe back to the Zhang family’s building on his bicycle. When they parted he said that he had always loved her, otherwise he would not have kept coming to this building. In the space of eight or nine years, how many ruts had the wheels of his bicycle made on this road from the factory? These ruts were the proof. He was afraid she did not understand this technical student’s language of love, pedantic phrases from the printed page, spoken as slowly and effortfully as promises to love until the mountains crumbled and the seas ran dry.

  Duohe understood. She bent double in another deep bow. He took a hasty step forward, and she just happened to straighten up at that moment, so that his hand connected with her face.

  ‘I’m no Zhang Jian. You’re not a slave to be a concubine for me or to give me children either, so don�
��t do that.’

  Duohe turned round and walked into the pitch-black stairwell.

  He thought how he was a young man who had attended a high-level technical school, studied Russian, had spent time with the Great Leader, and despite the wife back home whom his aged parents had married him to, his relations with Duohe could nonetheless be very much part of the New Society. If all else failed, he would risk killing his old father with rage and his old mother with weeping, and put aside his country wife, who had been gone from his memories for some time.

  He turned his face into the drizzle and headed towards the factory, pedalling his bicycle in the rhythm of a march. The wind grew stronger, the rain grew fiercer, and the rhythm of his pedalling changed to a sea shanty. Duohe had had three children – so what? She was quite a few years his senior – what of it? Everything that was out of the ordinary just made him prouder still, because only exceptional people could have an exceptional romance.

  The factory lights in the rain appeared unusually bright. Every raindrop became a tiny lens, reflecting multiple images of the heavens and the earth, multiplying the light of the lamps countless times. Rain could only create this soft sound and atmosphere when falling on the hubbub of somewhere like the noisy factory area, just like Duohe’s tears as they fell onto the broad embrace of that hard man Xiao Peng. With that boy’s body that still lacked a man’s final steadiness, Xiao Peng jumped off his bike, and stood in the bustling, busy, magnificent light of the lamps that stretched as far as the eye could see, standing in the slow rain of 1962 which had just left famine behind.

  The following day, Xiao Peng received a note from Zhang Jian. A slip of paper in Zhang Jian’s forceful handwriting: ‘Wait for me at lunch.’

  Just as Xiao Peng had expected, the first thing to come out of Zhang Jian’s mouth was: ‘How was the film?’

  ‘Pretty good.’ He stared at Zhang Jian: you dog fucker, are you trying to keep me under your thumb?

  Zhang Jian walked towards the meeting room, a lunch box of rice piled with fried shallots in his hands. The room, full of piled-up stores and tools, only had two keys; one was for the section leader, the other for the group leader.

  As soon as Xiao Peng entered he sat down on an empty oxygen cylinder. Otherwise Zhang Jian would have asked him to sit and he would have lost the upper hand.

  But Zhang Jian remained standing, the man and his shadow towering above him. ‘What are your plans for her?’

  So this was going to be all interrogation, with one of them high and one low. Just as he went to stand up, Zhang Jian pushed him back again, telling him, ‘Sit down to talk.’

  ‘Can’t say that I’m planning anything with her.’

  In an instant Zhang Jian’s face darkened. ‘What else do you want to do?’

  ‘Go to the pictures.’

  After this all his awareness was centred on Zhang Jian’s suede boot as it came hurtling towards him: the sole had parted company with the upper, and had been sewn back on, leaving a half-circle of brilliantly white new twine at the front of the sole, and the back heel was made of two black chunks of rubber tyre.

  ‘What’re you doing?!’ The kick sent Xiao Peng rolling underneath the oxygen cylinder, his knees bent at an angle that fitted it exactly.

  ‘What am I doing? Kicking you!’ Zhang Jian said. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a man who shirks his responsibilities. You get together with her, that’s fair enough, so go and get rid of that woman of yours back home.’

  Xiao Peng discovered that Zhang Jian, who would not usually say boo to a goose, could speak pretty fluently and had plenty to say for himself. He was still more surprised to find that, for all he could spend a whole day without a word, he was able to worm out people’s secrets like they were in the palm of his hand – how had he discovered the business of his wife and child back home?

  ‘Then why don’t you put aside Sister Xiaohuan?’ Just as Xiao Peng was thinking of getting back up, Zhang Jian lashed out again with his foot.

  ‘Donkey fucker – put her aside?’

  There was no sense to his words, no logic of cause and effect, but his peremptory firmness left no room for argument, and Xiao Peng felt that he had lost another round in the debate.

  ‘If you can’t put aside your wife, then you put an end to it right here and now, don’t ruin her.’

  ‘What gave you the right to ruin her?’

  Zhang Jian was at the door, his hand already on the lock. He played deaf again to Xiao Peng’s fatal question.

  Xiao Peng was in so much pain that he could not stand up. He thought that he should expose Zhang Jian and be done with it, let the Public Security Bureau take him away for a bigamist. But then Duohe would be taken too, and vanish from this place forever. In the heart of the twenty-eight-year-old besotted lover Xiao Peng, all the world could vanish, so long as Duohe did not disappear.

  From then on, whenever he had spare time he would lurk at the foot of the Zhang family’s building. Occasionally Erhai would come out with his black dog, and he would ask the boy a few questions about how his auntie was getting on. Erhai’s black eyes would look him up and down without blinking, and once Xiao Peng did something that he immediately cursed himself for: he took Erhai in his arms, and kissed him on his eyes.

  By the time he had mounted his bicycle and fled the scene, still reproaching himself bitterly, tears were flowing. He, Xiao Peng, was part of the first group of technicians trained up by the New China, and now what demon was tormenting him into this state?

  After he had suffered this lack of control with Erhai, Xiao Peng, filled with self-loathing, had a struggle with his conscience. He had to make a final decision: either go home to put aside his wife (sending her fifteen yuan a month just as before) and marry Duohe, or else forget completely the good times he had spent in Zhang Jian’s home for the last eight years.

  That day in the factory, Xiao Peng walked between the lights from the spot welding and oxyacetylene torches. A face appeared from behind a welder’s shield, then immediately hid again behind the mask. Like he could hide his whole body behind a face shield. Xiao Shi was hiding from him. He moved on several paces; on the criss-crossing rail tracks of the iron foundry trains were coming and going carrying steel ingots. Xiao Peng thought, how could heaven be sending him such enlightenment: it was clearly Xiao Shi, who had been like a brother to him, who had told his secret! He was jealous of Xiao Peng and Duohe; he had prised out the secret of Xiao Peng’s wife and child back home in the North-east, and had told Zhang Jian.

  He waited until a train had passed, and stormed over the tracks. Xiao Shi had just finished a job, and was knocking fragments of waste away with a hammer, when Xiao Peng walked up and said: ‘I’ll give you hunger, you little bastard! No way is that flesh like sticky rice balls; it’s like pig’s lard that’s been melted and then set again, it melts at the touch of your tongue!’

  Xiao Shi continued to put on his air of total indifference, shaking and swaying his head and smiling.

  ‘Did you tell the secret? Do you even know what a secret is? She told all of her secrets to me!’ Xiao Peng was walking on the sheet iron, and the noise was deafening.

  ‘What secret?’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you, not even for ten big packs of Da Qian Men cigarettes, that’s how secret it is!’

  ‘Oh, that secret. Of course …’ Xiao Shi looked around him. There was an ear-splitting racket of metal hitting metal, to which was frequently added the noise of the trains in the factory as they went past, and the whistles of the cranes. Even if they had been yelling at the tops of their voices, the people next to them would still not have been able to hear.

  ‘What secret do you know?’ Xiao Peng was fully alert now, and he stared at Xiao Shi.

  ‘You’ve only just found out about that secret now? I’ve known for ages, from that year and more when you weren’t visiting Zhang Jian’s!’

  So this woman had been confiding her life’s history of blood and tears to everyone,
and Xiao Peng had never received any special treatment. He was overwhelmed for a moment by a feeling that he had been snubbed. Xiao Peng thought how his ardour had been so foolish. Xiao Shi and Zhang Jian must have been laughing themselves sick behind his back.

  He sat down on the railway tracks, pondering his role as a romantic clown, a tragic loser. Perhaps he was the only one whose heart had broken over Duohe’s life story. He had become a laughing stock.

  Everywhere there was a confusion of glaringly bright welding torches; the sound of metal beating on metal was more powerful and magnificent than a thousand drums and gongs. In the middle of the New Society, Xiao Peng sat curled in on himself, heartbroken, at the intersection of several rail tracks. Everyone was celebrating as if for a festival amid the fireworks of the sparks of the welding and the drums and gongs of iron and steel, but Xiao Peng the laughing stock sat there, with no sense of north, south, east or west, and with no idea of his next step.

  The clanging sounds of the metal were beating against his heart, lungs, liver and guts, his spine and his skull. The sounds belonged to an age of greatness, to an age where magnificent festivals were everywhere to be found. Suddenly several wagons came reversing over the rails. Xiao Peng got to his feet, intending to cross over to the other side of the railway, to get out of their way.

  But someone grabbed hold of him.

  ‘Where are you going, you bastard? Tired of living?’ Xiao Shi pointed to a train coming from the other end, which at that moment was intersecting with the reversing wagons.

  If Xiao Peng had crossed to the other side of the track, he would have been squashed dead by the train: he had come very close to being ground into sausage meat beneath its wheels.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he murmured, brushing aside Xiao Shi’s hand. Brotherly feelings like his and Xiao Shi’s did not allow for tears of gratitude.