by Geling Yan
Without knowing why, Zhang Jian came to a halt, waiting for him to turn from the main road onto the smaller road in front of their building. He did not know what basis he had for knowing that he would turn this way. The air force soldier moved towards them, looking for the numbers on the buildings. Between smoke from fires and the giant posters only a few traces remained, and he asked Zhang Jian if he knew where number 20 was.
Erhai’s eyes immediately lit up, and he stared at the young air force officer.
‘Who are you looking for?’ Zhang Jian asked.
‘My name is Wang. There’s this girl called Zhang Chunmei – is this her home?’
Erhai could no longer contain his pride as the younger brother of Zhang Chunmei, and said: ‘Zhang Chunmei’s my sister! This is my dad!’
The man from the air force shook hands with Zhang Jian. He realised at once that Wang had brought news he was finding hard to break to the family. He stared intently at the young officer, he had to make him understand that his spirit was strong, he could bear anything.
‘Zhang Chunmei is in very good health, you needn’t be afraid,’ the soldier said.
Could it be that this man had seen his inner self-command as fear? So long as Girlie was still alive and in good shape, he did not care about anything else.
‘However, the matter is not quite that simple.’ The soldier was looking at him, with that fire shining in his eyes that one seldom sees outside the military.
Zhang Jian told Erhai to go back and tell his mother that someone had come from his sister’s school, and that she should get the tea ready.
‘Best if I tell you briefly first. Mothers tend to let their feelings run away with them. If you feel that her mother can bear it, there’ll still be time to go and discuss it with her, how does that sound?’
Zhang Jian was anxious, upset and confused: how come this soldier had such a womanish way of speaking? If you’ve got something to say then say it, if you’ve got a fart coming let it out! He flapped his hand savagely at Erhai, told him to take himself off, and squatted down himself. The air force officer squatted down alongside him, four-square and stable just like him; clearly he too had grown up squatting under the eaves of a house somewhere in the North-east, drinking porridge made from maize stalks.
Once Erhai had gone, the soldier offered Zhang Jian a cigarette. He waved it away. Was there ever such a sluggish soldier in the whole world?
‘Uncle, the reason I’ve come is to do some investigation into Zhang Chunmei’s early life.’
Where was her father supposed to start?
‘She was always a good child, from when she was small – pick any ten people, and all ten of them would praise her as a good child.’
‘Has she ever suffered from any kind of mental abnormality?’
Zhang Jian did not understand. Surely he couldn’t mean mentally ill?
The young officer smoked his cigarette as he began his tale. When she arrived at the gliding school everyone had thought Zhang Chunmei was a good girl too. The problem was with her personal file. There were several dozen young students in her group of new recruits, and three squads had taken the train from Nanjing. The person in charge of the group was responsible for managing the files for all the students. When they arrived at the school, Zhang Chunmei was the only one whose file had been lost. That did not matter, as a high-school student of fifteen or sixteen was unlikely to have any complex or difficult social experience or family connections, right? So they made her fill in a new form: she would have to recreate her own file piece by piece. When she had filled out the form, the personnel department put it into a new folder, and her life in the school started from this form, this one sheet of paper.
Nobody had a bad word to say about Zhang Chunmei. She was not afraid of hard work, and the first time she sat in a training glider she threw up, but she still did extra practice, just the same as usual. She was too young to join the Party, but she was very quickly singled out as a young woman of potential by the Party branch. And most of all she was popular, she related to people in a relaxed and natural way. That was what everyone recalled about her before the trouble started.
What trouble was this?
It was her file. Her file was completely faked. Because she knew that losing her file on her way to join the army was the perfect opportunity to make use of a loophole.
What did she fake in her file?
In the form she filled in, she said her father was a worker in a rural commune, so was her mother, and all her brothers and sisters worked the land. The family was extremely poor, and both her grandparents were bedridden. No one would have noticed the forgery, but she shared a dormitory with seven other girls, and sometimes one of them would wake the others talking in her sleep. One night a girl was woken suddenly by Zhang Chunmei. What language was that? There seemed to be some Chinese words in it, and also some foreign words. The following morning, in front of all the girls in the dormitory, this girl said: Hey, Zhang Chunmei, you were jabbering away last night, all this stuff in a foreign language! Zhang Chunmei said she was talking nonsense. The girl said, You wait, one of these days I’ll get someone to listen in with me, to prove it wasn’t nonsense.
Zhang Jian felt like an aeroplane was running in his own head, the noise was so frightful that he could barely hear what the young officer was saying.
… After a while, one of the other female soldiers noticed that Zhang Chunmei did not go to sleep at night; she would sit on the bed. Someone else noticed that she would take her quilt and go to sleep in one of the classrooms. When asked why she was breaking the school rules, she said that the other girls in her dormitory made too much noise, and it was impossible to get to sleep. They could not allow people to sleep in the classrooms, no matter what the circumstances. If there was an inspection the school would be blamed by their superiors for this scandalous thing. But it would be possible to put up a canvas cot in a room with two female teachers, and even if the teachers had something to say in their dreams, it would not be a babble of voices talking noisily at once. And so they moved Zhang Chunmei into the dormitory with these two female teachers.
When Zhang Jian had heard this far, he could tell already what was coming next.
One of the teachers heard Zhang Chunmei speaking Japanese in the dead of night. Although the teacher had not studied Japanese, she had worked out what it must be. She quietly got up, and shook the other teacher awake. The two women sat on their beds, and heard Zhang Chunmei come out with a string of muddled, unclear talk and laughter, interspersed with a series of Japanese words. They reported the matter to the school. Where could a peasant child from an impoverished family, living in the poorest part of the remote countryside, far from any other settlement, have learned Japanese? That was how the suspicions of her file and her birth began.
Zhang Jian thought to himself, how could Girlie, with her fine brain, have done something so stupid? She had faked herself a family of peasants: peasants weren’t as good as the working class!
The two female teachers did nothing to alarm Zhang Chunmei. They asked her casually, what crops do your family grow? How many rice crops do you plant every year? Do you keep pigs? Zhang Chunmei did pretty well, all told, and her accounts of farm work were all quite near the mark. At this time her classmates gossiped about her a lot: Zhang Chunmei isn’t a bit like a country girl, when she had a wash on first coming to school, there were still marks from a bathing suit on her body! Country girls’ hair was different, always dryish and yellowish at the tips, burned by the sun. Her classmates even thought she might be the daughter of some high-ranking army official; sometimes senior army officers were concerned that their subordinates would try to curry favour with them, and therefore would not subject the officers’ children to enough hardship, meaning their child would emerge from the experience still a privileged child of the powerful. The teachers borrowed a tape recorder, and when Zhang Chunmei started to talk in her sleep again they secretly recorded her. They found a translator for th
ese Japanese terms, which baffled them still more – sweet potato, potato, skirt, dog, auntie, pine cone, red-bean rice ball …
All these kinds of words, trivial things. Zhang Jian did not seem to be particularly disturbed.
Sometimes it was like a little child talking, with a child’s intonation and pronunciation. The school doctor had a word with Zhang Chunmei. He asked about her environment from when she was small, how many people there were in the village, and whether anyone in those few families had gone to university to study foreign languages. Zhang Chunmei gave a detailed reply: the village was very small, just twenty households, and on one side was a mountain, which they had terraced for fields. When she went to high school she had to walk for more than two hours before she could catch a bus. The doctor said, Your family’s so poor, and they still sent you to school? She said all the families sent their children to school, there was a very positive atmosphere in that village. You see, all those details, the way her story pretty much hung together? She had taken her tests in the Nanjing region, and one of the examiners from the school remembered very clearly the clothes Zhang Chunmei had worn the day she was tested: a very smart red wool coat, with a black fur collar and gold-rimmed buttons, clothes that could not conceivably belong to a country girl. The school security office, alarmed, spoke to Zhang Chunmei, and the true state of affairs came out. Why would she want to fake her family background? She did not speak. Not speaking would be severely punished! She still did not speak. Could it be that this was a case of parental cruelty? She shook her head, vigorously and sadly, as if to say Trust you to think up something like that.
‘So where’s my girl now?’ said Zhang Jian.
‘You know that in the army fabricating a file is a criminal act; she will receive her punishment through the military court.’
‘Where will she be punished?’ So long as Girlie came back alive, any punishment would be all right.
‘They have temporarily suspended her from classes, and sent her to hospital for a spell to see how she gets on. Delusional psychosis can be cured. First they’ll try her with a course of medicine.’
Zhang Jian’s grief-stricken face turned towards the ground. What medicine were they using? Let them not be turning a perfectly healthy girl into an idiot! A file of ants were cheerfully crawling along the ground, some of them carrying a moth’s wing between them. Weren’t ants supposed to be ‘bringers of good news’? His little girl was being treated as a madwoman and shut up in the mad hospital, his heart was pierced through with agony, and the ants were still bringing their good news, just the same. He could not hear what the young officer was jabbering on about. He would go to the hospital and bring Girlie back: Forget about the army, if there was any dying to do, they’d die together, as a family!
‘… the school told me to go and talk to her parents, to take a look at the environment in which Zhang Chunmei lived. The experts in the psychology department thought that Zhang Chunmei’s case was unlike other people: her delusions were not at all that kind of … For example, suppose she were to say she had been born into a general’s family, that kind of delusion would be understandable. Do you see what I mean?’
Zhang Jian nodded.
‘I also visited your factory. The local Neighbourhood Committee spoke quite highly of her mother too. However you look at it, everything about the environment in which she grew up was very good. Before she came to the gliding school, she had always been an excellent student – I have seen all her teachers. Could I have a word with her mother now?’
By this time, the balcony of the communal walkway had become a viewing platform, with a row of people leaning on the railings. Everybody was watching the stage to see what kind of drama a soldier from the air force of the People’s Liberation Army and Zhang Jian were going to act out. The air force comrade must certainly have told Zhang Jian something very upsetting: he was squatting with his back hunched and his neck drawn in, and you could see at a glance that it was as upsetting as upsetting could be. Something must be the matter with his Girlie. What had happened? Couldn’t be anything good! Let her not have become a revolutionary martyr, another Auntie Lei Feng!
By this time a couple of female neighbours had dragged Xiaohuan to a place on the communal walkway where there was a gap between the banners hanging from the roof of the building, pointing out to her the two people squatting at the bottom of the building.
‘Has something happened to our Girlie?’ Xiaohuan called out.
Zhang Jian turned his head and found that everyone in the entire building had arrived on the scene. Even if there was nothing the matter with Girlie, she was already on public trial. He saw that Xiaohuan’s words had brought Duohe over too, her startlingly white face was looking first at him, then at the officer.
He hurriedly came to a decision. For the moment he would keep the child’s mother in the dark. He, the head of the family, would take responsibility for when to tell her, and how to tell her.
The officer was a little surprised by this sudden display of dogmatism. He stood up, and Zhang Jian raised his face and waved. As he walked onto the main road, he could still see him squatting there. He thought this was such a simple, honest working man, he had even forgotten the courtesy of inviting him in for a cup of tea, and he had been so hard hit by the shock.
The neighbours saw Zhang Jian get to his feet and stand for a while, dizzy and half blinded, then walk to the entrance to the staircase, his back and legs like those of an old man. The dozens of bicycles in the stairwell were as old and broken as the building itself, and he knocked several of them over, with a noise like a pile of scrap iron collapsing. Zhang Jian made no attempt to pick up the bicycles, but went slowly up the stairs. He said to the mother and aunt of his children when they came to meet him on the second floor: ‘What’ve you both come running down here for? Nothing to see here! Girlie’s sick and in hospital, isn’t she, that’s all!’
The audience on the balconies all heard clearly and whispered in each other’s ears: ‘What d’you think’s the matter with her?’
‘Look at Zhang Jian, he’s old with worry!’
Zhang Jian continued to berate Xiaohuan and Duohe loudly, looking over at the neighbours too: ‘Go home, the lot of you! You just had to come out and join the fun, didn’t you?! You won’t be content unless something bad’s happened, none of you!’
The people whispered quietly among themselves: ‘Listen to that, something has happened after all!’
They did not hear Xiaohuan ask urgently in a low voice: Just what disease has Girlie caught?
They walked to the fourth floor, and Zhang Jian experienced a surge of dread. They would have to pass all the way along the communal walkway, surrounded on all sides by concern and questions, before they could reach the door of their home. The curious eyes lining the corridor would suddenly notice the oddness of this family with its one man and two women. This Great Age had no place for oddity.
Zhang Jian stiffened his resolve, put a peaceful, unperturbed expression on his face, smiled at the concerned neighbours lining the way, and said to Xiaohuan: ‘The comrade from the air force was here on business, and brought us news since we were on his way. Girlie isn’t in good health, she’s being treated in hospital.’
The corridor of neighbours was still not entirely satisfied. But as soon as they saw that Zhang Jian was only talking to his wife, and was not inclined to pay them any attention, they had no choice but to go their separate ways.
All the neighbours managed to find out was that Zhang Jian had not bought a train ticket until five days later. There was a power struggle going on over one section of the line, two factions had come to blows, and no trains ran for quite a few days. Zhang Jian was going to see his daughter. She was not seriously ill, she just could not sleep, as Xiaohuan reassured the neighbours, household by household. Nothing the matter at all. Xiaohuan went out visiting, to console the neighbours a bit, and herself as well. Twenty neighbouring families had the wool pulled over their eyes.
/> Only Auntie Duohe, invisible and unseen, sensed that matters were not so simple.
More than a month later Zhang Jian came back, dried up and thin. Like a camel that has walked for dozens of miles on short rations and no water, his eyes had become two little patches of desert. The neighbours wondered, what could have put him in this state?
Zhang Jian had no account to give of whether Girlie had managed to go to sleep, whether she had returned to her lessons, or whether she was flying in the sky in the training glider once more, or playing basketball for the girls’ team at school. The neighbours would have to wait for Xiaohuan to give them a proper account, one at a time. Leaving the neighbours without a proper account was unheard of, not one family, upstairs or down, had had any business that was left hanging without a proper explanation.
But not a sound came from the Zhang home, and no one came out to ease their minds over Girlie. Xiaohuan came and went, but surprisingly did not mention her daughter. In the beginning when Girlie had gone to the gliding school, hadn’t they all been so sad to see her leave? The neighbours started to become dissatisfied with the Zhang family. You’re going to need more than a few red-bean rice balls to hoodwink us, Xiaohuan.
Xiaohuan continued with her jokey nature, just as usual, going upstairs with a bunch of leeks in her hand, saying with a laugh to anyone she met, These old leeks smell horrible now, but when I’ve made them into dumplings they’ll smell just great. Come up and have some, won’t you?
The Zhang family’s Auntie Duohe was quieter, standing, all white and clean, at the corner of the stairs, to make way for people coming up. Sometimes when people were carrying things in their hands or carrying a bicycle upstairs on their shoulders, there she would be, standing soundless in the dim light, like a white shadow. It could give you quite a shock. Duohe’s excessive politeness, her silence and the way in which she had consistently not given any bother for more than ten years, now were starting to become troublesome. In the eyes and minds of the neighbours, she was a source of doubt and suspicion, one for which the Zhang family had never given a proper account. They suddenly felt like the Zhangs had been keeping them in the dark for years over the matter of this mysterious maiden aunt. How could this be? There was no keeping back anything from the families in the building, in their going up and coming down, going out and coming in, not of their motive, aim or destination – ‘Going out?’ ‘Yep, off to buy some salt.’ ‘Are you cooking? What’re you making?’ ‘Steamed cornmeal bread!’ ‘Carrying your bike upstairs? Are you going to repair it?’ ‘That’s right, the brakes are loose!’ ‘Where are you off to so late?’ ‘I’ve been nagged to bloody death, it’s driving me crazy!’ This aunt came and went with never a word, rushing off who knows where, to do things that she never disclosed to them. At the very most she would ask with a half-bow: ‘Come off work?’ but you could tell just by looking that she did not plan to give you a chance to detain her any further.
