Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  When Zhang Jian had been disciplined, his wages had been reduced by 30 per cent, and the family needed Duohe’s temporary job in order to make ends meet. Cutting serial numbers was a technical job, and so beyond those rowdy, gossiping dependants; Duohe’s colleagues now were young, single women, most of whom had been to middle school, not like those dependants, with their endless, persistent attempts to marry people off all day long. Duohe felt she was lucky to have been given this time of peace. She would bend over to cut a character or number, and when she had straightened up, an hour would have gone by. She could cut out seven or eight of these in a single day. Temporary workers got their wages once a week. By the third week Duohe was earning half as much again as in her first week, because her daily rate of production had already risen to ten or more. Just as in the days when she had worked breaking ore, on returning home she would take the banknotes from the pocket of her work overalls and place them in Zhang Jian’s hands.

  The day of the accident, Duohe had been lighting the stove with Xiaohuan. Xiaohuan was very good at tending to stoves so that they would not go out once all winter. However, that day they had got up in the morning to find that the well-prepared stove had gone out. As they were cutting kindling and searching for waste paper, the two women saw Zhang Jian coming back. Xiaohuan thought the person following him looked familiar, and looked again: it was that official from the security office. The officer said briefly that someone had been crushed. Injured? Was it bad? Dead …?

  Xiao Shi had died on the spot. Zhang Jian’s white canvas overalls still bore the marks of Xiao Shi’s bloodstains. He had taken him in his arms, calling out to him.

  Duohe and Xiaohuan watched the security officer escort Zhang Jian into the big room. The neighbours were surrounding the Zhang flat in a half-circle, elbowing each other out of the way. The security officer told the two Zhang women that the factory was in a competition with brother factories, but they were bound to lose now: Zhang Jian’s accident had lost them too many points.

  ‘Did anybody see how that thing fell?’ Xiaohuan asked.

  ‘Only Xiao Shi and Zhang Jian. There aren’t that many people about on the night shift in the first place,’ the security officer said.

  Zhang Jian had sat on the edge of the bed, one of his suede boots, trampled in machine oil and blood, pressing down on the other. Duohe knelt on the floor, and carefully undid the shoelaces made into dead knots by the blood.

  Before the security officer had left he had spoken with Xiaohuan. Afterwards Xiaohuan passed on those words to Duohe: Keep an eye on Zhang Jian’s emotions, try not to let him go out alone.

  Zhang Jian had slept through the midday meal, and through supper as well. At midday on the second day, Xiaohuan carried a spring-onion pancake and a bowl of rice porridge into the big room, but he was still fast asleep. The children went in and out, heads down, the black dog had his tail between his legs and his tongue out, following the family throughout their funereal days. The children had heard classmates at school talking about how their father had crushed a man to death, news that was very soon supplemented by the neighbours’ children: the man who had been crushed was their uncle, Xiao Shi, the one who often visited. Dahai did not want to go to school, because the other children in his class were avoiding him. In the past there had been a child in the class whose father was a rapist, and all their classmates had avoided him in the same way.

  On the evening of the second day, Zhang Jian got up. He called Xiaohuan and Duohe together, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid, the children are big now.’

  Duohe saw Xiaohuan’s eyes suddenly redden with unshed tears. She had not yet fully realised what it was in these words of Zhang Jian’s that had provoked Xiaohuan. Zhang Jian bent down, groping among all the shoes under the bed, and finally pulled out an ancient silk purse from a pair of cloth shoes, from which he produced a pair of gold earrings, a gold ornamental lock and a bank book.

  ‘My parents meant these for the children,’ Zhang Jian said.

  The old couple had somehow skimmed off over two hundred yuan from their elder daughter-in-law’s household, which they had kept back for the three children.

  ‘There’s been only a few seriously punishable incidents like this one in the factory since it was set up. You’d better be prepared.’

  The two women were watching the lofty mountain on which they had depended crumbling into rubble.

  ‘Xiaohuan, take this money and open a little tailor’s stall, you’re pretty good at making clothes …’

  He kept his eyes half closed, doing his best to appear calm and ordinary as if nothing was wrong, forming the words languidly with his parched lips.

  ‘Take these bits of jewellery and pawn them.’ This mountain, on the verge of collapse, was taking charge of the women for the last time. ‘Find a state-run pawn shop. They were my mother’s dowry …’

  The notes were old and dirty, bound with a piece of elastic into something that looked like a refugee’s bundle. The two women’s tower of strength was now this bundle of notes and these few pieces of gold. Zhang Jian was racking his brains to find the words, for a way to lay out the situation that might come to pass as tactfully as possible.

  ‘That radio set is getting awkward to use – you’d better buy some spare parts and I’ll mend it for you, otherwise later on you’ll have to spend money when you take it outside to mend.’

  ‘Mend what? We’ll make do the way it is,’ Xiaohuan said. ‘If we don’t have a radio we can listen to the neighbours’. What are you worrying about?’

  ‘Then there’s the bike. If it was done up you could sell it for a fair bit …’

  Xiaohuan got to her feet, smoothing the creases out of her clothes.

  ‘Give it a rest,’ Xiaohuan said. ‘Have something to eat.’

  She dropped the silk purse carelessly on the bed on her way to pick up the apron from the bed rail, and tied its strings on her way out. Then the radio came on with a hissing noise, and a mob of children started to sing in rustling voices, evoking Ho Chi Minh: ‘Look to the north, oh look to the north, Remember, oh remember Uncle Ho’s words.’

  Xiaohuan set out the sausages and fried peanuts she had made yesterday. She also brought out a bottle of Daqu sorghum liquor, clamped down on the metal bottle top with her gold tooth and jerked upwards with her lower jaw, so that the cap was held on the point of the tooth, then she spat it out onto the tabletop, and took the first mouthful for herself, straight out of the bottle.

  ‘That’s good wine!’ She filled up their three cups.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ After his first glass of Daqu, Zhang Jian had come back to life, and looked around him.

  ‘Off visiting their classmates,’ Xiaohuan said.

  They ate their meal very peacefully; nobody spoke. The wine had been heated and was hot and fragrant, and they popped the peanuts fried in oil into their mouths one by one.

  In the month that followed, Zhang Jian spent far more time asleep than awake. Each of these big sleeps ground down on his face, squeezing out more wrinkles. By the time his punishment was announced, he had become a little old man. Duohe spent a long time watching him sitting alone and hunched up on the balcony.

  Duohe, who went to work on foot, felt that the road between the factory and the family quarters was getting shorter and shorter. She had enough thoughts and worries to think about all the way down the road, and enough nameless gratitude as well. Judging by the facts, the accident was pure coincidence, but Duohe felt it had brought Zhang Jian another layer closer to her. That it had been Xiao Shi, and no other, who was crushed to death had a certain inevitability about it. For a man to love a woman until he loses all control, and then to eliminate danger for him and for her, to kill a man for her, was entirely natural in the eyes of this woman from Shironami village. If it had been a man from Sakito or Shironami in his place, a brave man of her race, striking down with a samurai sword a man who had defiled her with his hands and was attempting to trick away her purity, was that not as
natural as could be? What were words and objects of love without a little blood?

  Dressed in big, baggy old work overalls, a peak cap on her head, Duohe walked this cracked asphalt road into the cherry-tree-lined lanes of Shironami village. Her knight loved her so desperately: a love that was without embraces, or kisses, or making love, yet could be aroused to murder. The bulky overalls became glorious raiment, a kimono; the peak cap a jewelled headdress; her knight’s love for her was something that she alone knew. His punishment, his lost good looks, the strong build he no longer had, all made her love him more.

  The red sunset of steel gradually expanded, until it had filled half the sky. Duohe tilted her head for another look, and watched until her cap fell off.

  Her face flushed unnaturally red, Girlie started to shout from the communal walkway: ‘Ma! Auntie!’ She burst in, and came to an abrupt halt, realising that she could not enter the room until she had taken off her shoes, but unable to check the momentum built up in her headlong dash, she almost tumbled in. ‘Ma! Auntie! I’ve been accepted!’

  Xiaohuan had seen her running from the kitchen, and at once turned off the tap and came into the corridor rubbing her hands. Girlie was on tiptoe, balancing on one leg stretching out her body and her arms, making a bridge of herself to straddle the distance between the door and the table to reach the teapot. She waved a hand – ‘I’ll tell you once I’ve had a mouthful of tea –’ and clasped the teapot, put her lips to the spout and started to drink.

  ‘Shoes off!’ Xiaohuan said.

  When she had drunk her fill, Girlie said that she had to go out again to her class teacher’s house, to let her know that she had been accepted, so she had no time to remove her shoes. She put down the teapot and walked on the tips of her toes towards the small room, taking off her schoolbag, which was hanging askew, as she went.

  ‘Oi, where do you think you’re going? Shoes off! Look at those great mucky hooves!’ Xiaohuan held her back.

  Only then did it occur to Girlie that she had been keeping her mother in the dark the entire time. She drew out an envelope from her pocket, pulled out the letter inside, and handed it to her mother, but before Xiaohuan could unfold it, the girl threw both arms round her neck.

  ‘I’ve been accepted by the Air Force Gliding School! Ma, you can’t imagine, I’ve been suffering so much the last few days not knowing, every day I wanted to go up the mountain and hang myself!’

  There had been so many hangings on the mountain during the past six months that any child who ventured into the deeper parts of the wood was liable to find themselves bumping into a pair of dangling legs. Work teams had come to the factories to clean out the landlords, rich peasants and historical counter-revolutionaries who had come to hide in their children’s and wives’ families after Liberation, and they would often take themselves off for a stroll to the mountain and hang themselves there in despair. It was not a big mountain, but the fame of its hangings had spread beyond the city, and a fair few counter-revolutionaries, landlords and rich peasants from the surrounding area would climb the mountain especially to go and hang themselves. So much so that when the neighbours were quarrelling, one of them might say: ‘And if I’m telling you a lie I’ll go up the mountain and hang myself!’

  Now Xiaohuan opened the letter, to see a sheet of paper stamped with the seal of the Air Force Gliding School.

  Girlie’s face was wreathed in smiles. She was the only girl in the whole city to have been accepted. The examination candidates all had to have good grades, good health and a good moral character. None of the others could equal her for physical condition, and how can you fly in the sky if you don’t have good health? She was going to fly? How was she going to fly? In a glider. What was a glider? A flying machine that was smaller than a plane.

  Xiaohuan thought to herself, you’d never have known to look at her that Girlie could take the initiative and plan ahead, or how good she was at keeping her own counsel. A while back she had borrowed a wool coat from one of the neighbouring girls, and when asked why, she had said she was going to wear it to have her photo taken, when actually it had been to wear to the exam. You couldn’t look down-at-heel for an exam. Xiaohuan felt a pang as she thought how sensible and considerate Girlie was, and that she had never had any decent clothes to wear, and she hurried off in search of the small bundle of banknotes Zhang Jian had saved. She had to buy real wool for Girlie, to make her a real woollen sweater. She turned over the shoes under the bed, looking in each one, as Girlie followed after her, telling her about the exams, and saying that with her dad in such trouble, she had thought that the air force was not going to take her. Her dad was awaiting disciplinary action while she was waiting for the notice of acceptance; these last few days she’d wanted to go up the mountain and hang herself every morning.

  ‘Give it a rest.’ Xiaohuan straightened up, looking at her daughter, whose eyebrows had run off her forehead with excitement. ‘Did your dad get into trouble on purpose? If the air force hadn’t accepted you because of that it would have been their loss!’

  After Girlie came back from visiting her class teacher, Xiaohuan and Duohe had both made something to eat. Xiaohuan brought out the family’s entire stock of food: half a bottle of oil, one bowl of peanuts and four eggs, and told Duohe to make something Japanese and tasty. There were no fish or shrimps, so she had to make do with deep-frying sweet potatoes, potatoes and lantern peppers together to make ‘temperer’. Duohe had not been so lavish with oil for a very long time, she had lost her touch, and used it all up when she was just halfway through, so Xiaohuan went tripping off down the walkway to borrow oil from the neighbours. She had borrowed from three families in succession before Duohe had fried up a shallow basketful of ‘temperer’.

  In the evening the whole family sat down to a spread of seven or eight dishes, listening to Girlie talking them through the process of the testing over and over again. She said her eyes were the most tip-top pair of eyes in the whole city: the end of the eye doctor’s nose had touched the tip of her own, almost choking her with his garlic breath, but even that hanging light of his hadn’t turned up any problems with her eyes. Her face alight with excitement, she was chattering away like a magpie; sometimes she stood up to gesture with her hands, with their stubby, utterly childish fingers. Zhang Jian shot a glance at Duohe. It was unnerving – those hands could have been turned out from the same mould as hers.

  Girlie brought laughter to the family for the first time in several months. Girlie also got Xiaohuan out and visiting of her own volition, which she hadn’t done in ages. As soon as Xiaohuan put down her rice bowl, she went to take Girlie out to buy knitting wool, but she spent half an hour walking around the building. There were four families on every walkway, and she did not let one of them escape, knocking on every door and saying: ‘Ai, now Girlie’s in a special relationship with you, the Army to the People, eh?’ … ‘Our little air force pilot has come on a tour of inspection!’ … ‘Look, our Girlie’s such a little thing, and she’s going to be flying planes, d’you think they’ll let her old mum come after her to wipe her nose?’

  Her two younger brothers held their heads up again too. They stood flanking this future air force pilot, one on the right and one on the left, and from time to time they would give the tips of her plaits a tug. The Zhang family was going to bring forth an Auntie Lei Feng. The neighbours were a mass of noise and confusion, a great mass that grew and grew the further it rolled.

  Finally the babble receded, retreating down the stairs. Duohe gave Zhang Jian a smile. He could see how satisfied she was. Although she did not understand every single sentence, she understood ‘the best eyes’, ‘the best health’, and this pleased her, because half of them had come from her.

  She cleared away the empty dishes into the kitchen, and he carried in an empty cooking pot. The dim light of the kitchen bulb made his wrinkles appear deeper. She turned round, and their eyes were only fifteen centimetres apart. She said she had seen him smile: when eating supper h
e had laughed out loud. Laughed out loud? Yes, she hadn’t seen him laugh like that for a very long time. Girlie had made something of herself, at least they’d brought one of them up successfully.

  ‘What?’ said Zhang Jian. He saw that her eyes were looking directly at him.

  She said a few words.

  Zhang Jian could roughly make out what she was saying: for her sake, he had come close to losing his smile. Just as he was about to ask what she meant, she said something else. He knew that she used more Japanese words when she let her feelings run away with her, and her lips and tongue would be more likely to trip over each other. He told her to take her time. She said it again. Then he understood. She said that now she believed he cared about her so much that he would fight tooth and nail for her. His eyes opened so wide that his heavy eyelids creased up, making it look like he had an extra pair of lids. She was still talking. She said that he had done away with Xiao Shi for her sake, which was the same thing as fighting for her.

  Zhang Jian did not know when Duohe left the kitchen. The matter could be understood in that way too. Her words had slowly opened his eyes, and shown him that he had had the mind to kill Xiao Shi. Xiao Shi was not the only person he had wanted to kill either. That old fraud, the factory Party secretary, would often visit the workshop, bringing a bucket of sour plum juice against the heat of summer, and he got so fed up with him he was ready to murder him too. Because whenever the Party secretary brought sour plum juice, that meant he would have an hour’s worth of beautiful but meaningless words to say, which in turn meant that they would have to do overtime to catch up on the work they had missed. Xiao Shi was not the only one who deserved to be killed. In the free market they had caught a young beggar stealing, and everyone crowded round to beat him. The beggar’s skin was torn and his flesh hung in shreds as he rolled around, a man made of blood and mud, but fists and hands were still raining down on him from the crowd. It was like anyone who could not get in a blow had been unbearably wronged, like when emergency grain was distributed in the famine, everyone had to have a share or it would be unfair. He wanted to kill all of the people who had lashed out with their fists and their feet. When he was young there had been yet more people he wanted to kill: that old doctor who had delivered Xiaohuan’s baby, and asked him whether to keep the mother or keep the child; how could he not deserve to die, asking something like that? Heaven should have struck him dead for pushing such a dilemma onto a husband and father! And then there were those four Jap devils who had chased Xiaohuan … From then on whenever he’d seen a Jap going about his business alone, he would meditate on how to kill him – should he hack him into tiny pieces or bury him alive, or thrash him with a cudgel? How many people had he killed in his heart? Too many to count.