Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  ‘New songs! An army representative wrote them.’

  If she were to ask him ‘So when are you performing?’ again he would be certain to give no response. So Xiaohuan adopted the same dismissive tone of voice, saying ‘What are you always rehearsing then? It’s not like there’ll be anyone watching!’

  ‘Who says? We’re performing next week in the City Government Auditorium.’

  Xiaohuan nudged Duohe’s knee with her leg. Life returned to Duohe’s eyes, which alighted briefly on Xiaohuan’s face, then on Erhai’s. Xiaohuan’s meaning had been transmitted to Duohe: You see? I’ve wormed out the boy’s secret. Let’s go together to the City Government Auditorium to see the show!

  When he had finished eating, Erhai pulled out five yuan from his pocket and left them on the table.

  ‘What’s this – dinner money?’ Xiaohuan looked at the neatly folded notes, smiling broadly.

  He did not say anything, just went to put on his shoes.

  ‘Next time you’re stealing money, steal a bit more. It’ll be worth it, even if you do get caught!’ Xiaohuan said.

  ‘Rice is free in the Propaganda Troupe, and they give out a subsidy of 1.2 jiao per day for the rest of the food!’ Erhai was bristling with rage. He gestured to Blackie, and two shadows, one horizontal, one vertical, left by the dimly lit corridor.

  Duohe did not fully understand what he meant, and looked at Xiaohuan. Xiaohuan’s mouth opened slightly, then she decided to let it go. Best not to interpret for her, why make both women sick at heart? It was enough that this fine young man, who was eating just plain rice at every meal, saving the money for meat and vegetables to give to his family, made Xiaohuan alone feel painfully ashamed, she didn’t need to drag Duohe into it. But Duohe had caught up. Her eyes were lifeless again and her expression abashed, she seemed to be examining her conscience, questioning whether she should have eaten a whole bowl of noodles just now.

  The following day, bright and early, Xiaohuan slung a vegetable basket over her shoulder and set off for the farmers’ market. Most people got here before seven o’clock, and the more people there were the greater the advantage to Xiaohuan. The dependants all went before work to buy vegetables. Xiaohuan’s bamboo basket was not big, but it was deep, shaped like a wooden barrel. Duohe had bought the bamboo herself one summer, chopped it into thin strips, and woven this oddly shaped basket. Her handiwork was both dense and delicate; you could fill it with rice, shake it and not a grain would leak out. It was also impossible to see from outside what you had put in the bottom once she had wedged an enamel bowl inside. Practically everybody buying food did this, just in case they came across tofu, mince or anything of that sort that you could buy without ration coupons, as there would be no time to go off looking for a container. Occasionally the food-processing plant would be selling off egg yolks by the ladle (she had no idea what they did with the whites, so very much inferior in taste to the yolks), and if you did not have a bowl a great opportunity would pass you by. Xiaohuan wandered up to a three-wheeled goods tricycle selling eggs. This was the distribution point for the Egg and Poultry Company. Quality was not guaranteed with any of the eggs, and often there were customers standing by the side of the three-wheeler, cursing loudly for all to hear, saying that when they cracked the eggs they had bought at home, out came a moribund chick or duckling. If they met with a salesperson in a good mood, he would educate you: slit open the chick’s stomach, and you could get half a spoonful of egg yolk that had turned into chicken giblets. But most egg sellers would say in exasperation, Well, what were you doing earlier? Didn’t you hold the egg up to the light? So the Egg and Poultry Company’s sales outlet was surrounded on all sides by people picking up eggs, and holding them up to rays of light that streamed in horizontally and vertically through the gaps in the reed matting. There were a lot of eggs and not much light, and Xiaohuan’s pair of knife-blade shoulders came into their own as she nudged aside the crowds and made her way directly to the holes in the matting walls. At this moment someone would shout: ‘Oi, lady, how come you’re standing in my light?’ She would say, ‘Sorry, sorry, I didn’t know your family had bought up all the rights to this light,’ at which point an argument would become inevitable. While engaging in her verbal battle, Xiaohuan would return rejected eggs one by one to the stall’s big basket, but actually she would have already sneaked four or five eggs underneath the enamel bowl. The sales assistant would dart a brief look towards her basket, taking in everything inside it at a glance, but apart from a white enamel bowl printed with ‘Glorious Model Worker’ there would be no eggs there at all. Once people had seen their fill of the performance, they would slip past the peculiar basket on Xiaohuan’s arm, and carry on checking eggs.

  Other times she would go hunting at the cooked-food stall. The state-run stand was just a stall, but it took as many liberties with the customer as a big shop would. Behind the signboard were several greasy chopping boards, a row of rectangular aluminium dishes filled with red-cooked pigs’ heads, hearts, liver, lungs and different types of tofu, and a big fat lady who ignored everyone. Every dish of meat products was covered by a piece of gauze that had started out white but was now a dark reddish brown. When a buyer appeared, the lady would say on the third time of asking, ‘Got meat coupons?’ If the answer was ‘yes’, she would slowly heave herself to her feet, saying: ‘Yesterday’s.’ She meant this as a warning: the meat products had come out of the pot a day earlier, eat them if you’ve a mind to, but if you make yourself ill you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. She had a disturbing habit of looking all around her while she was working, even when chopping meat. This made people think that she might have been a model worker in the past, so effortlessly practised that she could do it with her eyes shut. Going on the hunt there could not be described so much as requiring skill as needing magic. Because of the big fat lady’s habit of looking all around her, the best Xiaohuan could do was to whip a hand under the gauze covering a lump of meat, grab it and whisk it into the basket when her face was turned, and then stuff the meat under the enamel bowl as she sneaked away. The enamel bowl was gradually exchanged for other bowls in ever larger sizes, because the things they had to keep covered kept on increasing in number. One time Xiaohuan found someone selling pullets, and she wanted to buy a few to take home and raise. When they had grown up they would lay eggs, and so she changed the enamel bowl for an aluminium cooking pot. There were so many uses for an aluminium pot; sometimes she could open it up to reveal all kinds of things: several heads of garlic, a lump of ginger, four eggs, a pig’s ear …

  The day of Erhai’s performance, Xiaohuan chopped up a dish of pig’s ear, and wrapped it up, ready to take backstage, to give him some extra nutrition.

  When she and Duohe arrived at the gate of the City Government Auditorium, they saw a rabble surrounding the main entrance. It was a joint gala performance by the army and civilians, and no ticket was required, all you had to do was enter with your work unit. Before long Xiaohuan and Duohe had muddled their way through. Inside, the chaos was terrifying: male hooligans and female loafers, separated by neat columns of the People’s Liberation Army, flirted, catcalled and threw sweets, summer radishes and rice cakes. The PLA were singing song after song in hoarse, tuneless voices, conducted by a soldier right at the front, who was digging and scooping away like he was frying food in a giant wok, first with one hand, then the other.

  Xiaohuan saw a little stand in the foyer selling melon seeds. She bought two packets, and stuffed one into Duohe’s pocket. Duohe stared at her, and she said with a laugh and a grin: ‘Our son gave us this filial gift of five yuan, we’re hardly going to eat ourselves out of house and home with a few melon seeds!’ But she felt a pang of shame: she was being a wastrel again. Her son had not even been able to eat a proper lunch to save this money, and she couldn’t wait to bring it out and waste it.

  After the performance was over, the loafers and hooligans all retreated from the scene, and the army left too, still singing th
eir tuneless songs. A short fat officer in the second row beckoned to the students on the stage, and everyone gathered together at the front. Xiaohuan and Duohe’s eyes looked over each one in turn, but they could not find Erhai.

  The senior officer said: ‘Who was the one playing lead erhu just now?’ He spoke Mandarin with a heavy southern accent. ‘How many of you were playing the erhu? Put your hands up!’

  Four hands went up at once. A young man who looked like a teacher dragged up another hand from beside the curtains, and held it high. Xiaohuan gave Duohe a poke with her elbow.

  ‘That’s the one!’ the senior officer said.

  Xiaohuan turned to Duohe, and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Hey, I’ve got something to ask you! When you play the erhu, why d’you have your bottom facing the stage?’ The senior officer walked up in front of Erhai.

  To their surprise, Erhai did not bother to reply to the officer.

  ‘There were people dancing on the stage, and you turn your back on them like this, with your bum pointing at them, is that a proper way to behave?’ the officer asked again.

  Just like his father, Erhai did not respond.

  ‘I was listening to you offstage, and your playing is great! So I went into the auditorium, and the first thing I saw was this lad fiddling away, watching the performers dance through the back of his head! I’m asking you, why didn’t you look at the stage?’

  The senior officer’s face was full of interest, and he turned from Erhai’s left to his right, like he was looking for a cricket in a crack in the stone.

  ‘Are you dumb?’

  Unable to stop herself, Xiaohuan said: ‘He’s not dumb! He’s just not much of a talker!’

  The student performers on the stage laughed, and they all started talking on Erhai’s behalf. This one said that Erhai was extremely feudal, so when his female classmates were dancing onstage he turned his back on them. That one said: If a girl cracks a joke, he goes on strike. A pair of teachers, one male and one female, came out to say that Erhai’s erhu was effectively leading the ensemble, everyone followed his rhythm, and if he stopped playing performing became impossible, so let him have his back to the stage if he wanted to.

  The senior officer was even more intrigued. He clasped his hands behind his back and studied Erhai in detail.

  Xiaohuan started to be afraid: what did this senior officer have in mind for Erhai?

  ‘What else can you do?’ he asked.

  Erhai looked at the senior officer, and nodded to indicate that there were a great many things he could do. The officer asked the students around him: ‘What else can he do?’

  ‘Accordion, Beijing-style erhu …’ the male teacher said.

  ‘Swimming, ping-pong,’ a male student added.

  ‘Wrestling,’ Erhai suddenly said. Everyone, including the senior officer, gave a start and then laughed.

  From her seat below the stage, Xiaohuan said urgently to Duohe: ‘Now the cat’s out of the bag!’

  ‘What kind of wrestling?’ asked the officer.

  Erhai’s face was purple with suppressed emotion. ‘The army has a Reconnaissance Unit, don’t they? That kind of wrestling.’

  The officer said: ‘Wrestling? That’s good. We have a Special Operations Unit. How about I find an arrest and capture specialist to give you a competition some day?’

  Erhai was silent once more.

  The senior officer walked off the stage and then looked back, smiling to himself, his face tilted towards Erhai. Xiaohuan watched the man and a crowd of soldiers walk down the aisle and out of the door, and said to Duohe: ‘The little wretch! If that officer’s memory is any good, and he really finds someone to compete with him, he’ll get himself wrestled to mincemeat!’

  That evening Erhai returned home with his mother and aunt, in a rage all the way, blaming them for turning up without an invitation, and sneaking in to watch him perform. This time it was Xiaohuan who did not speak. She had got what she wanted, so there was no need to say anything. She was puzzled: when people meet with disaster they think they can’t carry on, but after a while they discover that’s just the way things are, and you have to plough ahead. When Zhang Jian had been locked up, she had thought that she would never again be happy, the way she was today, not for the rest of her life.

  That army officer was the head of the Military Control Commission. He was known as Division Commander Hao, and he had an unusually good memory. Over a month later he really did find two experts in capture and arrest in the Special Operations Unit, and sent to the Red Guard Propaganda Troupe for Erhai. The wrestling competition was held at dusk before New Year. The division commander made his people spread a layer of special sand on the empty ground beneath the building where he lived, and he leaned on the railings of the second floor spectating.

  The first capture specialist announced that he was withdrawing from the competition after a couple of rounds. He said that Erhai did not even understand basic footwork, and was just lashing out at random.

  The senior officer gave a wave of his hand, and summoned the second capture specialist. This man had a long face and a bulky frame, and when he came into the ring he pulled the peak of his cap, which was already worn crooked, to the back of his head. Erhai watched him without moving a muscle, legs crossed, the upper half of his body bent very low. The capture specialist did not attack, but shifted his way gradually to Erhai’s left, who moved along with him, a fifteen-year-old boy, with a great bundle of wrinkles piled up on his forehead. The man started to move to the right, and Erhai followed him, but with smaller and more stable movements.

  The senior officer’s wife walked out from their flat onto the balcony, glanced at the scene below and said in a loud voice: ‘Ooh, what’s going on down there?’

  The brawny capture expert immediately glanced upwards. Erhai remained motionless, as though he had not heard.

  The big man was losing patience, and threw himself on Erhai. He had unusually powerful legs; Erhai attacked him three times without bringing him down, so he very quickly fell into lashing out at random. The result was that the big man won two bouts, and Erhai won one.

  ‘The way I see it, the little devil won today,’ the senior officer said. ‘By fighting at random he drove one away, and still won a bout with the strength he had left. Besides, you say that he doesn’t know the basic footwork, but he beat you into this state without that knowledge. If he’d known, would you still be alive?’ The senior officer started to clap for Erhai.

  Erhai remained still and expressionless. He thought that the big man had won by a narrow margin. If he had not wasted so much energy on him, he might actually have won.

  ‘Do you know why the little devil beat you?’ the officer asked the competitors and spectators down below. ‘He concentrates. Didn’t you see the way he was concentrating? His eyes could have bored holes in a stone!’

  The senior officer’s wife responded with a chuckle, ‘I think this little devil’s a handsome chap – if I didn’t have any sons I’d adopt him as my godson!’

  The onlookers heckled: ‘So you can’t take him as a godson if you have a son?’

  ‘I’d have to ask his parents. Little devil, stay for supper, hey?’

  Erhai shook his head.

  The senior officer had not finished his commentary on the wrestling match. He pointed to Erhai and said: ‘Moreover, the little devil fought with style. Just now, when my wife called out, his opponent lost focus. That was the perfect moment for him to attack, and he let it go, because he was not willing to take advantage through trickery, and win when his opponent was off his guard.’

  Having failed to get Erhai to stay, the commanding officer’s wife seemed even more kindly disposed towards him, and left him a phone number and an address, telling him to contact her if he found himself in any kind of difficulty. She had come to this city to visit her husband whose regiment was here in support of the Leftists; normally she and her mother-in-law lived in the division headquarters, several hundred k
ilometres from this city. All her children had joined the army. She walked with him all the way to the main road before taking her leave.

  Afterwards Erhai heard that the commanding officer’s wife had visited the Red Guard Propaganda Troupe, but by then he had already been expelled. When it became known that Erhai’s father had been given a suspended death sentence, they whispered about him all day, and he kept knocking down the people who whispered about him, laying them out flat.

  The big public sentencing was held in the city sports ground. Xiaohuan went alone, without telling Duohe. There were three long rows of people to be sentenced to death or to be given the chance to reform through a suspended death sentence, and Xiaohuan was sitting towards the back. All she could see of Zhang Jian was his silhouette. They always had to drum up a big batch of people to kill in the run-up to Spring Festival. The people in the front row were dragged off, crammed into trucks, and after being displayed to the whole city would be taken to the execution ground unless the sentence was suspended. Zhang Jian was one of those in the first row. Xiaohuan’s hands were pinching at her thighs, wanting to pinch herself awake from this nightmare. When she was little she had had similar nightmares, where the Japanese had tied up her father or brother and were going to kill them, and she had been watching in just this way, unable to make a sound.

  When they read out Zhang Jian’s sentence, Xiaohuan could hear nothing, apart from something falling down her throat with a great gulp. Afterwards she realised that heavy thing was her own saliva, mixed with blood. She did not know if it was her tongue she had bitten, or her lips. It had been close to six months since Zhang Jian had been put away, and she had not seen him once. His head had changed from a black chestnut to a white one – more than two centimetres of hair had grown back since they had shaved him bald in a convict’s haircut, as they probably lacked the manpower to shave their heads clean again before sentencing. A couple of decades ago, Zhang Jian, with his chestnut head of black hair, had been the kind of young man who could make a woman love him! After the matchmaker had left all those years ago, Zhu Xiaohuan had shamelessly written a note and had it taken in secret to Zhang Jian, telling him to meet her at a restaurant, as she wanted to measure his feet to make him a pair of shoes. Zhang Jian, who at that time was still Zhang Erhai, had turned up with two young men from the village. Similarly, Xiaohuan had brought a sister to the meeting: with more people there they could let themselves go, and say anything, proper or improper. Zhang Jian had barely had a word to say for himself, but by the time everyone had finished eating and asked for the bill, they found that he had already settled up. And later, in the instant when he had pulled aside Xiaohuan’s red wedding veil, the thought had come to Xiaohuan that she would be certain to grow old with this man who was so reluctant to open his mouth you would think he was carrying gold in it.