Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  Xiaohuan thought that she would be kept very busy in the two years of Zhang Jian’s suspended sentence: she would wear out iron shoes looking for a place where she could have wrongful cases reinvestigated. Zhang Jian had lifted Xiaohuan’s red veil, and she had silently pledged to him that they would stay together. She had to stand by her pledge.

  In the stadium, Xiaohuan squeezed her way below the stage, where convicts were being loaded, knees buckled and faces like death. Zhang Jian’s expression was darker than other people’s, but his knees and legs were like a dead man’s too. On such an occasion, any brave man who claimed not to be afraid had to be faking. Xiaohuan did not cry or scream. She was afraid that Zhang Jian would get distracted comforting her. She called out: ‘Erhai!’ She had not called him by his childhood name for many years. Zhang Jian raised his head, and promptly burst into tears. Now she was that big sister who liked to rumple his hair again, saying: ‘What are you crying for? Bear up, now! They even let Lao Qiu out!’

  Lao Qiu was their neighbour from the flats opposite. He had been sent to prison for the crime of communication with secret agents of the Kuomintang, his hands sticky with the lifeblood of underground Party members. He had originally been given a suspended death sentence, but somehow he had got out of prison.

  Xiaohuan followed the prisoners and their escorts, talking to Zhang Jian over the heads of three ranks of armed police. She said that everyone back home was well: Duohe was well, the boys were well, and Blackie too! They all told her to ask after him. Zhang Jian was much calmer now, and nodded repeatedly. The convicts’ handcuffs and leg shackles were very heavy, and got in the way of their hands and feet, so when mounting the trucks they had really become piles of freight to be shifted by the policemen. This gave Xiaohuan a longer opportunity to shout.

  ‘Daddy, they’ve notified me – once you’ve entered the labour reform camp, I’ll be able to come and visit!’

  ‘Daddy, we’ve had a letter from Girlie, she says she’s found a boyfriend, he’s a conductor on a train, she sent money last month, so don’t you worry, eh?’

  ‘Daddy, we’re all fine at home. I’ll send you another new pair of cotton padded trousers at Spring Festival!’

  She did not let up until the words she was shouting could have no longer possibly reached Zhang Jian’s ears through the great cloud of yellow dust and smoke from the truck. She had told her string of lies in a loud, strong voice, but now she started to cry. If only their life was like the lies. No one had notified her when she could visit the prison. Girlie had said in a letter that someone had introduced her to a man whose wife had died, a conductor on a train, but she had never sent any money. The only promise Xiaohuan might make good on was a pair of new padded trousers; she would get hold of a metre of new cloth even if she had to steal it. Now she understood how useful the knee protectors were; he spent all day kneeling and wore out the knees of his trousers. She was going to add a bit of extra padding to the knee area.

  From the city stadium to home there were more than twenty stops on the bus route, and tickets cost one jiao. On her way there, Xiaohuan had not bought a ticket, but stood directly in front of the ticket collector’s counter, like a worker who had spent half her life with a monthly ticket tucked away in her pocket. On the return journey, she forgot all about the bus. By the time she noticed, she had already walked halfway home. She just wished that the way was a bit longer. If she had a bit more time she would have another set of lies ready to tell Duohe and Erhai.

  Erhai had gone from spending all day outside to not setting foot out of the door once. School had started up again some time ago. He would go for a few days, then get sent home for beating up half his classmates. If his classmates shouted anything at him about his father he would knock them down, leaving them unconcious. It took a lot of classmates uniting together to finally bring him down and frog-march him back home. Two months earlier, he had gone out with the household registration book, and come back with a big red certificate of merit for ‘Voluntarily Going Up the Mountains and Down to the Countryside’. As soon as Spring Festival was over, Erhai would no longer be eating rations from the household registration book, he was off north of the Huai River to be a peasant. By the look of him, he could only make a little peasant boy of twelve or so.

  When Xiaohuan came back from the stadium, Erhai had not yet got out of bed. She said to herself: Don’t ask me what kind of sleep this is, last night’s sleep or a midday nap. He did not move a muscle, pillow clamped down over his head. The radio was on, though, scratchily playing the city radio station: how such-and-such an article in Chairman Mao’s latest directive had created an overwhelming tide of enthusiasm in such-and-such a factory. Something suddenly occurred to Xiaohuan, and she walked over and lifted up the pillow. Underneath was a face that had been crying all morning. He had plainly heard the sentencing meeting, and his father’s sentence.

  Xiaohuan hurriedly looked towards the balcony, then went to check the big room and the kitchen. Duohe was nowhere to be seen. Had Duohe heard the news on the radio too?

  ‘Where’s your auntie got to?’ she asked through the pillow cloth.

  Beneath the pillow, Erhai did not breathe a word.

  ‘Did she hear the radio too? Are you dead?’

  And indeed, it did look like a child revolutionary martyr was lying there under the pillow.

  Xiaohuan pushed open the door of the toilet, with its iron bucket full of half-dirty water for scrubbing the floor – water that had first washed the faces of everyone in the family, then washed their feet, and then washed the cotton socks of the day. There were no obvious traces to be seen of any abnormal behaviour on Duohe’s part. So what was making Xiaohuan so anxious and fearful?

  At this moment Blackie started calling to be let in with piercing howls. Xiaohuan went to the door. Since Erhai had stopped going out, taking Blackie for walks had fallen to Duohe. She would walk him once in the morning, then at noon and at dusk, and the length of the walks kept increasing. Once Xiaohuan had had many friends, wherever she went there were people to be friendly with, but now, although she affected a cocky, spirited air when she appeared in the corridors of the building and on the stairs, she did not even have a decent neighbour. Occasionally she would bump into someone and they would exchange a few words, but Xiaohuan knew that in no time that person would be telling other people: Oh, oh, I’ve caught that Zhu Xiaohuan in the act – the family’s eating noodles with an eggy sauce, looks like convicted criminals get by better than when they were drawing a wage! With friends gone, Xiaohuan started to pay attention to Blackie’s whereabouts, whether he was warm enough and getting enough to eat, and his joys and sorrows. Occasionally, when Duohe did not go out, they let Blackie take himself for a walk. By the looks of things Blackie had given himself a very good walk, for steam was coming off all over him.

  Xiaohuan saw that the patterned cloth bag that Duohe often carried was still hanging on the wall. She opened it, looked inside and found a wad of small change, the biggest note two jiao. Recently, she had observed that a pair of canvas gloves that Zhang Jian had used at the factory had been drying on the balcony from time to time, with the fingers slit open. She had asked Duohe whether she had been scavenging glass for the rubbish recycling depot, and if so she should disguise herself well, so the neighbours wouldn’t see the Zhang family lose face. Duohe had made a surly retort. It had taken Xiaohuan a long time to work out what she meant: in this building Duohe didn’t count as a human being anyway, what face did she have to lose? Now she looked at these notes, which confirmed why Duohe was spending more and more time airing the dog.

  By four in the afternoon, Duohe had still not returned. Xiaohuan took out two two-jiao notes from the pile, in order to go to the market to rummage for bits of vegetable in the bottom of baskets. Once she had got as far as the ground floor, she realised that Blackie had followed her, panting and whining away in his doggy language, but she did not know what he was saying. She said: ‘What did you come down for? Haven�
��t you been running about like crazy all day?’

  The dog whined and turned his head in the direction of a path to the left of the slope.

  ‘Get lost, I’m not taking you for a walk!’

  Blackie was still walking towards the path, whining. She went straight ahead down the main road, and Blackie followed her again. Xiaohuan thought: In this family, apart from the ones that don’t talk, we have the ones that don’t talk human language, and then we have the people who say things we don’t really understand.

  She entered the food market and saw that a big fish head had been set out at the fishmonger’s, the size of a small pig’s head. She went up and said, pointing: ‘Weigh it!’

  The fish head weighed in at six jiao, and she only had two. After she had used up her entire stock of flattery, the attendant agreed that she could bring the rest of the money the following day. As she walked out of the door carrying the fish head, her nose stung with tears: if Zhang Jian had been dragged straight out of that public sentencing meeting and shot, she would not be buying any fish heads. By stewing this fish head, she was giving the whole family a chance to celebrate that Zhang Jian had not been shot dead. This was such a wretched celebration. And she had splashed out all this money for fish-head soup to coax the family to be happy, to coax them all into believing that in the two years of the suspended death sentence there were seven hundred and thirty days, and each day had twenty-four hours, and in every hour things changed and chances were made for him to have his sentence commuted. She had to coax Erhai and Duohe not to take it too hard; however things turned out they had to carry on living a day at a time, and as they lived on they should eat fish-head soup when they got the chance. Even if Zhang Jian had been taken from the public sentencing meeting to the execution ground, if he knew that without him his family could still have fish-head soup to eat, would that not be the greatest comfort of all? In the evening when they were all eating the soup together, she would tell her lies to Duohe and Erhai: she’d found a way to get Zhang Jian’s case commuted. After Spring Festival she would get moving, and get his suspended death sentence changed to life imprisonment as soon as possible. And once it had become life imprisonment, it might not be an actual life sentence anyway.

  When she returned home Blackie was still whining away in his doggy language. Xiaohuan looked at the sky, confused in her mind and troubled in her heart. If Duohe was gathering glass this late, could she even see? If she got her finger cut off that’d mean still more money to go on medical fees!

  By half past six, the stewed fish head was already done. Xiaohuan suddenly felt that she understood Blackie’s dog language a little. She called to Erhai, and went down the stairs, Blackie walking in front and mother and son behind, shining a torch. Once they had left the stairwell, Blackie trotted towards that big slope in the road, where he waited for the others to catch up, and then hurriedly turned left.

  Following Blackie, they came to an iron door, half buried in the ground. Erhai told his mother that this was the air-raid tunnel that his school had dug together with another school. The door at the other end of the tunnel was inside the school.

  Blackie sat down outside the iron door, waiting respectfully. Xiaohuan thought, Duohe must have made Blackie wait for her outside the doorway, she had gone in and not come out again. Every hair on Xiaohuan’s body stood on end, and she picked up a fist-sized rock from the mouth of the tunnel. Erhai broke his silence, saying, ‘Ma, you’ve got me and Blackie!’

  More than two kilometres later, the three of them walked out from the tunnel. There was nothing inside at all but turds and condoms.

  ‘Your auntie must have gone to the toilet inside, and lost her bearings in the dark. She must have come out that door.’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she thought that this could not be right. Duohe did often lose her bearings, but to get herself lost in the way she had conjectured, she would have to be an idiot.

  ‘My auntie didn’t want Blackie to follow her.’

  Then what was she up to? An assignation? On an important day like today, when there was fish-head soup to be eaten? But still, if it was an assignation?

  They continued onwards, following Blackie. The dog seemed to know what he was doing. After half an hour, they arrived at the research institute of the iron and steel factory. The boundary wall had collapsed in many places, and they crossed it walking on shattered bricks. Blackie came to a halt, and looked at the two human members of the group, almost like he was explaining the situation to them. Here was a jumble of fire-scorched ruins: several months earlier a fire had started in a third-floor laboratory, and an entire building had burned down. Now and then a streak or a dot of brightness would appear on the ground, shattered test tubes and experimental bottles, buried under the bricks and soil.

  Xiaohuan and Erhai understood why Blackie had brought them to this place, and what it was that he wanted to explain but could not. He was showing them that this was the place where Duohe dug up her broken glass. Through Blackie, they finally understood why Duohe’s fingers had been inexplicably bound up in gauze or sticking plaster and why the gloves were slashed.

  They continued to let Blackie be their guide. This time Blackie took them to a place halfway up the mountain. Several years ago work had begun digging an air-raid shelter on the mountain that could hold hundreds of thousands of people; the stones that had been blasted out were piled up into another mountain, and rainwater had accumulated in the hollowed-out part to form a pond. Neither had expected to find a pool of such crystal-clear water in such a place. Erhai threw a stone into the pool, and they could both hear that it was very deep.

  Blackie had become the master now. He took them striding from rock to rock, to arrive at last on a very flat stone that protruded from the pile, and hung suspended above the water of the pool.

  Blackie sat down on the stone and turned his head to look back at Xiaohuan and Erhai. The two humans walked over. From where Blackie was they could see right into the centre of the lake. Now a star was reflected in there.

  Blackie often came here with Duohe. Their conversations were either strangely ill-assorted, or else entirely without words. In that case had Duohe used the air-raid shelter to prevent Blackie from following her, and come here by herself? The water was extremely still, it seemed so limpid that there was not a speck of life to it. In the light of the torch they could see the pale stones in the water, criss-crossed and interlocking like dogs’ teeth. Throw yourself in head first and your head would be split open like a melon. Xiaohuan walked with Erhai around the pond of stones. From time to time the beam of the torch illuminated the water. Had the news of Zhang Jian’s suspended death sentence caused Duohe to give up hope and become a new ghost for Shironami village? She asked Erhai how Auntie had reacted when she heard the announcement. He had no idea, the radio broadcast of the public sentencing had been bawling and bellowing in the street like lions and tigers, first the propaganda vehicles had passed by, then the convict trucks from the sentencing, for miles around the loudspeakers that normally played ‘The East is Red’ and ‘Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman’ were broadcasting slogans from the sentencing. He had buried his head in the pillow and even then the quilt was full of the sound of slogans. He did not know how his aunt had been. He did not even know how he himself had been.

  If she really had jumped in the pool they would not be able to fish her out before morning. Xiaohuan had no choice but to take her son and Blackie back home. They could see from the ground floor that the Zhang flat was in darkness. Duohe had not returned. And yet when mother and son and Blackie reached the second floor, Blackie darted up the pitch-black stairs. Erhai understood, and hurried up the steps after him, three at a time.

  By the time Xiaohuan arrived and pulled on the light cord, in the greyish light of the lamp they found Duohe sitting on the bench for changing shoes, wearing one wooden shoe and one cloth one. They did not know whether she was about to go out of the door or come inside.

  ‘I’ve sp
ent so long outside trying to find you that I’ve walked my feet swollen,’ Xiaohuan said, half smiling, half complaining.

  She promptly tied on her apron and busied herself about the kitchen. The fish-head soup was puttering merrily away. She chopped up a handful of coriander from a flowerpot, scattered it on top, and carried the pot to the table. ‘Don’t just sit there! Bring me that grass mat! Or else the heat’ll spoil the table!’

  Duohe was still sitting there, stupefied.

  Erhai ran into the kitchen to fetch the coiled grass mat to put underneath the iron pot.

  Xiaohuan doled out a big bowl of fish meat and soup for everyone, and began to drink. Duohe took off her cloth shoe, stepped into the other wooden one, and sat down very slowly at the table. The light in the corridor was just ten watts, and it was enveloped in the steam from the pot, so none of the three could see anyone else’s face clearly. Xiaohuan had no need to see Duohe; she knew that she had left that terrifying thought outside the door, at least for the moment.