Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  Through the steam, she started to tell the two shadowy faces that she planned to launch an appeal against Zhang Jian’s wrongful conviction. Her lies completely convinced her audience, and from the sounds of their eating she could hear their sense of taste gradually returning, and their appetite gradually reviving. When Erhai was helping himself to his fourth bowl of soup, Xiaohuan intervened, telling him not to eat until he was sick. The leftover soup could be used to boil up a pot of mixed-grain ‘cats’ ears’.

  Sure enough, the next day a big pot of ‘cats’ ears’ appeared. Not even Xiaohuan had realised that when she was not being lazy she was actually a fine household manager. She had no intention of repaying the four jiao she owed to the fish stall.

  She went to the local police station, talked her way into a business licence and set up a sewing machine at the foot of the Neighbourhood Committee building, mending clothes and tailoring simple new pieces. She brought Duohe along with her, to do the buttonholes and sew on buttons. In fact she did not feel easy leaving Duohe on her own, in case she took to thinking mad thoughts again and started wanting to take herself off to join the rest of her Japanese village in some strange underworld.

  After Spring Festival Erhai set off to join a production team in the countryside north of the Huai River.

  But after the festival Dahai came home. The factory’s Revolutionary Committee had been regularised, and underage volunteers like him had been sent home covered in glory. The Red Guard basketball team had also been regularised; some of its members had been incorporated into the army garrison basketball team, others had been organised into a city youth team. Dahai was already too old for the youth team, and the army team physical had identified a pair of exceptionally flat feet, which meant that he was not a good long-term prospect. All they could do was encourage him to go back to the school to play amateur basketball. The day Dahai returned home, Erhai was just preparing to leave. Dahai called out affectionately to him: ‘Erhai!’

  Erhai watched him walk up casually, wearing his outstandingly tatty running shoes which looked like they must stink to high heaven, and immediately said: ‘How come you’ve not taken off your shoes?’

  Dahai appeared not to have heard.

  ‘Take your shoes off!’ Erhai was seized by a fit of stubbornness and blocked his brother’s way.

  ‘Shoes off? Bollocks to that!’ Dahai suddenly turned hostile.

  Erhai turned hostile in his turn. From then on he did not mention so much as his brother’s name in his letters. At home and at school, Dahai affected the high and lofty attitude of a genius whose talents were unrecognised. Although he retained his good looks he kept losing weight until at last he fell ill, and a medical examination revealed that he was already in the second stage of tuberculosis. He would often say to Xiaohuan that there were too many regrets in his life, and the greatest of these was that he had inherited this pair of exceptionally flat feet, from who knew where. Perhaps his uncle or his grandfather had planted rice sprouts, brought in the harvest and gone to market in Shironami village on identical flat feet, Xiaohuan thought.

  14

  THE SEWING STALL Xiaohuan had set up at the bottom of the Neighbourhood Committee building was proving a big headache for the female cadres. In the past they had been on good terms with Xiaohuan; now she was the wife of a condemned criminal, staying on good terms with her was out of the question, but they still had to pass by her sewing machine every day. Fortunately Xiaohuan was a late sleeper, and it took her until ten every morning to get her stall set up, so they could slip in and up the stairs while it was still early.

  One day Duohe had swept up the ends of thread and scraps of fabric that could not be pieced together into a pile; she could not find the dustpan anywhere, so she went upstairs and took a dustpan from there, meaning to borrow it for a while and return it later. She had just picked it up, when a female cadre from the Neighbourhood Committee started shouting: ‘What are you doing – stealing our things?’ Duohe was so anxious that she kept shaking her head. The female cadre said: ‘No wonder things are always going missing around here!’

  Xiaohuan, who had heard every word, yelled loudly: ‘Who’s nicked a piece of my twill? Me and my sister had just nipped out to the loo, how come it just disappeared?’ She had remembered that the female cadre was wearing a pair of brand-new twill trousers.

  ‘Zhu Xiaohuan, you can’t go spreading vile slander like that!’ The female cadre came rushing down from upstairs, her fingers fiddling with the legs of her trousers. ‘Is this stolen from you?’

  ‘That’s between you and your conscience,’ Xiaohuan said. ‘I bought a strip of blue twill, I was going to make a pair of trousers to sell.’

  ‘Don’t you make false accusations!’ the female cadre said.

  ‘You know very well whether the accusation is false.’ Xiaohuan chatted away, leisurely and casual, watching the woman fly into a foot-stamping rage. It was plain to see how furious she was.

  Since Xiaohuan had lost her friends among the dependants and female cadres, she very soon made herself a crowd of friends with no status at all: pot-menders, people who exchanged eggs for flour coupons on the black market, makers of popped rice, women who had been paraded through the street for a loose woman with broken shoes around their necks, people who ran rat-poison stalls, all of whom worshipped her as a goddess. All the hoodlums on the street with their dark glasses, zip-up shirts and big sideburns, all the educated youths who stubbornly resisted being sent down to the countryside, would run Xiaohuan’s errands for her, always respectfully addressing her as Sister Xiaohuan. The cadres in the Neighbourhood Committee maintained that Zhu Xiaohuan had become degraded to an elderly social butterfly, flitting among the dregs of society.

  In the beginning the cadres had enquired of the provincial and municipal Public Security Bureaus how they should deal with a Japanese like Zhunei Duohe. Neither the province nor the city had handled such a peculiar case, so they sent people to Heilongjiang to see how the public security organs there had dealt with the Japanese women who had been sold into Chinese families. The investigation found that all of this group of Japanese women were still the daughters-in-law, wives and mothers of Chinese families, still doing the heavy work of Chinese peasants and the heavy chores of the household. Apparently they had not found any punishment that was heavier than the work in a Chinese family. There was just one Japanese woman who had quarrelled with her neighbours and been declared a Japanese spy, and her punishment was to make her carry on with her usual farm work and housework, but they also gave her a white armband, on which was written her name and her crime. The female cadres had been dithering for some time over whether to make a white armband for Duohe, and when Xiaohuan suddenly turned hostile, they immediately set to work, then delivered the white armband to Xiaohuan’s sewing stall. On the white armband was written: ‘Japanese spy Zhunei Duohe’.

  Xiaohuan shot a glance at the armband, and said to Duohe, who had not yet had time to react: ‘They’re making you wear it, so you go ahead and wear it. Look at that needlework, I could do better with my toes. Put it on, make do.’

  Duohe still did not move.

  ‘Or else I could give it a frilly border?’ Xiaohuan said, poker-faced. She took up the white armband in her hands, looking it over, and then picked up a strip of blue-striped fabric from the ground, comparing them from all angles. ‘How about this colour for the frill? Could you make do with that?’

  In the blink of an eye, the frill was attached. Duohe slowly fitted the armband onto her arm, and Xiaohuan pinned it in place. When the female cadres saw it, they reproached Xiaohuan loudly, and asked what she thought she was doing.

  ‘Don’t you know she’s Japanese? Over there in Japan all the white armbands they wear are frilly.’

  ‘Rip it off!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Zhu Xiaohuan, you’re sabotaging and making trouble!’

  ‘Where’s the central Party document or latest instructions from Chairman Mao that says th
at a white armband can’t have a frill? If you can find it for me, then I’m sabotaging and troublemaking!’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing? Is this a proper way to go on?’

  ‘Don’t like the look of it? Keep on looking, make do, eh?’

  The next day, the female cadres announced that from then on Zhu Duohe had to sweep clean the stairs, offices and toilets of this building three times a day. And if they found a fly or a maggot in the toilet, Duohe’s crimes would be increased by one level of magnitude.

  ‘If they’re making you sweep, then sweep,’ Xiaohuan said. ‘Just think of yourself as a zookeeper, mucking out the pigsties.’ As she spoke she raised her eyes from the sewing machine.

  Wherever Duohe went, Blackie went too, so Xiaohuan was not afraid that she would get picked on, or that she would take some new notion of killing herself, for Blackie would report to Xiaohuan at any time. There was just one thing that worried and irritated her: Duohe did all her work very earnestly, without a hint of dawdling or slacking, and washed the toilet as clean as the one in her own home. She made a special trip to the toilet in order to teach Duohe how to cut corners in her work: not to start sweeping until she saw the female cadres coming through the holes in the pierced concrete wall. She also said to her: the Neighbourhood Committee get their water for free anyway, so splash it out by the bucketful, and you won’t even need to sweep. She told her not to forget to bring a bucket of water home with her when work was over, to save on their own water bill.

  Not long after Xiaohuan set up several folding chairs and a folding table outside the Neighbourhood Committee, on which she laid out a pot of tea made from fried seeds, drawing in those dregs of society that the cadre ladies would rather die than approve, who clustered around, chatting and laughing. Her business promptly began to boom.

  ‘How’s the tea?’ Xiaohuan kept asking.

  ‘Really tasty!’ Her dubious friends praised it extravagantly.

  ‘Japanese tea!’

  ‘Really? Well, no wonder.’

  Then Xiaohuan would call Duohe over, and say that she could make Japanese food, only they did not have any red beans or glutinous rice. The following day, the hoodlums would come bearing rice and red beans. Xiaohuan got Duohe to make rice balls at home and then bring them to the sewing stall. Having enjoyed this Japanese hospitality, the hoodlums brought out even more of their shadily acquired things to eat for Xiaohuan. They were all around seventeen years old, precisely the age to appreciate an auntie like Xiaohuan, with her charm, her skill and her belly full of barely suppressed ‘wickedness’. They included Duohe in their generous treatment: ‘Auntie, how can you do stuff like rinsing down toilets? You’re an International Friend! Leave it to us!’ All the long-haired loafers, boys and girls, helped Duohe to sluice out the toilets three times a day, singing revolutionary songs in the sleaziest way imaginable. The female cadres forbade them from helping the enemy redeem her crimes, but they would say, cigarettes dangling from their mouths: ‘And you think you can keep me in order, do you?’ One day a cadre threatened to send Duohe to the Public Security Bureau. The loafers said: ‘Go ahead, send her, and after that there’ll be plenty of people to put holes in your bike tyres! You’ll need new glass for your windows at least once every two days! And your children too, we know where they go to school.’ Then the female cadre threatened to send the loafers to the Public Security Bureau. A tall hoodlum said: ‘I’d just finished raping this woman, and she dragged herself back up and said: thank you, see you next time!’

  Everyone around him told him he was vile, some roared with laughter, others cursed and laughed at the same time.

  Duohe had not understood all of it, but she started to smile along with them. She found to her surprise that she was smiling from inside to out. A few months ago, sitting beside the stone pool, how could she have thought that she would still be able to lift her head and laugh out loud; that, having written herself off as hopeless, she could continue to muddle her way through each day?

  The public sentencing had indeed come dangerously close to reuniting Duohe with the people of Shironami village. That day, as she went down the road with Blackie on his lead, the streets were full of the excitement that comes with killing people. It flooded the space like electricity, it hit her as she walked until her whole body was numb. The loudspeaker tirelessly read out the names of the condemned, and the names did not dissipate in the air, but congealed in the chilly, damp winter of the Yangtze delta. Zhang Jian’s name condensed on top of Duohe’s head, covering her.

  She walked to the mouth of the air-raid tunnel, and ordered Blackie to wait for her at the entrance. Blackie understood that whenever her hand gently pressed down on his bottom, she was telling him to sit. Normally telling him to sit meant telling him to wait. When she went into a shop to buy a packet of tobacco or salt, or to the grain store for rice or noodles, she would always give his bottom a push, and he would sit down at once. Once she had shaken off Blackie in the air-raid tunnel she had walked to the side of the pond halfway up the mountain slope. The sky was an afternoon sky, greyish-white layers laid out evenly as far as the eye could see, and through the layers of cloud the dazzlingly white sun shone through.

  How many times had she come here with Blackie to be at peace, and to chat to the dog in the language she spoke with the children? They were all grown up now, and were getting out of practice at this babyish language that was neither one thing nor another. She could only speak it with Blackie now. She talked and talked, and after a while it was like she was talking to the three children.

  This black dog was a link between three people: Xiao Peng, Erhai and herself. Xiao Peng had bought Blackie in order to make Erhai happy. How important Erhai’s happiness had been to Xiao Peng in those days! Because he knew that Duohe would give him a few smiles just for making Erhai happy. Xiao Peng had no way of knowing that Duohe spoke more to Blackie than anyone else. She could see that the dog was worried to death about her; he saw that the notion of suicide was forming in her mind. When a person is in a state of utter despair, there is a smell to them. There must be, otherwise how had Blackie sniffed it out?

  She sat down on the stone, looking at the water, so clear that you could see the bottom. Any one of the jagged stones would be fine, it would be a help to her when she threw herself in head first, shortening the time of her struggle.

  She had not chosen a different method, such as hanging or throwing herself under a train, because this pool resembled a pond in the neighbourhood of Shironami village which had also been created by blasting a mountain to make a railway. Going into this pool, she would enter that one too.

  It was a pity that they had not yet started to construct the air-raid shelters and that this pond did not exist at the time of her secret meetings with Zhang Jian. This place was so clean and tranquil. She could never forget those days even now, and whenever she saw a place with pleasant scenery she could not prevent herself from thinking of Zhang Jian, and of when she might be able to bring him there. Even that time when Xiao Peng had taken her to the tree nursery, she had dreamed afterwards of visiting the place with Zhang Jian.

  She sat next to the pool until she was chilled to the bone. She made up her mind that she would put an end to herself immediately. It would not be hard; at this moment both her race and her family gave her courage, resolution and strength.

  She got to her feet. She had forgotten what month and what day it was. She thought: how could she not even know the date of her own death? How could she be certain that Zhang Jian would be able to find her in the netherworld? The underworld was bound to be bigger than the world of the living; if you did not have a date for your death it might be like being unable to find your household registration.

  She stood on the stone, and finally recalled the voice from the public sentencing on the radio: today was a Sunday. Very well, Duohe would meet her death on a Sunday early in 1970. It had been two years since she and Zhang Jian had spoken. Over two years. Because she had been car
rying a heavy tool bag on the slope and he had ignored her, and because he had been standing on the balcony with Xiaohuan, shoulder to shoulder. And she was actually going to leave without making up with him. Would they still be able to make up when she reached the underworld? Possibly not.

  With hurried steps, Duohe went down the embankment of stones. It was too dangerous, she had almost gone without breaking her sulky silence. She had to find a way to see him once, for a reconciliation. The only person who would be able to arrange this was Xiao Peng. He was bound to have a lot of very important connections, which would mean she could see him as soon as possible and then finish what she had started today. She was certain that she would be able to kill herself; just now there had not been any turmoil in her mind, only impatience to see her father, her mother and all her kin.

  Duohe went from the pond to the steelworks. She found Xiao Peng’s dormitory, but the door was locked. She waited for hours, but when someone finally came back it was not Xiao Peng, but a young married couple. They told Duohe that Director Peng had moved to the house of the former factory head, but they did not know the address.

  She went back again to the main factory administration building, and found the Revolutionary Committee Chairman’s Office. All the doors were locked because it was Sunday, and also because everyone had gone to watch the condemned criminals being paraded through the streets. She went to the guest house at the foot of the building to borrow a pen and a piece of paper, on which she wrote ‘Meet with you tomorrow. Duohe’.

  She went back home, and Xiaohuan returned shortly afterwards with Erhai and Blackie. She did not know why, but by the time she had finished eating Xiaohuan’s fish-head soup, she rejoiced inwardly that she had not jumped into the pond today. Erhai was going north of the Huai River, whatever else happened she still had to celebrate New Year with the child, and see him on his way before doing away with herself. That last time she and Xiaohuan had quarrelled it had been very heated, and if she left like that Xiaohuan would be certain to think she was partly responsible. She did not want Xiaohuan to feel guilty for the rest of her life.