Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  The second day she went again to the factory headquarters. The Revolutionary Committee Chairman’s Office was still locked, and when she asked why, they said that Director Peng had gone to a meeting in the provincial capital. A month passed, and she went again, this time she was told that Director Peng had gone to Beijing for a meeting. Duohe thought that there was something odd about this, and found an out-of-the-way place to wait. Not long after she saw Xiao Peng leave the building, and stride into the grey Volga. She hurried over. There was an intense expression on her face: Hide if you can! Born liar!

  ‘Do you have business with me?’

  ‘I want to talk!’

  She had already plucked open the car door, and that was how she made her demand, one foot planted in his car, allowing no room for doubt.

  ‘I’m too busy, I don’t have time for this,’ Xiao Peng said coldly. ‘Drive on!’

  With one hand Duohe held onto the back of the driver’s seat, her foot hooked firmly under it. Before the car had lurched five metres, it was dragging Duohe along on the ground.

  The car was forced to stop. Duohe still did not get up. She knew that as soon as her foot relaxed its hold, the car would drive off and leave her in the dust.

  Xiao Peng was afraid that people would see him with Duohe, so he told her to get into the car to talk. This was Duohe’s strategy: to let people see that Director Peng’s car had come close to killing someone.

  Xiao Peng had no choice but to agree to take her to his home to talk.

  Xiao Peng was still living a bachelor existence. His home was like an office, hung with big photographs of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and with various editions of Mao Zedong’s works on display, furnished with government-issue furniture. When the two of them were alone together, Director Peng became Xiao Peng once more. First he brewed a cup of tea for Duohe, telling her that it was Maofeng tea from Huangshan.

  The two of them sat on the government-issue three-piece suite, Xiao Peng on the central sofa, and Duohe on the easy chair to the left. He asked just what it was she wanted. She said that it was Xiao Peng who had put Zhang Jian inside, so he had to find a way to let her see Zhang Jian once more.

  ‘It’s not fair to say that.’ Xiao Peng’s face darkened.

  She spoke another sentence.

  After a bit of mental effort, he understood what she was saying: that he knew in his heart whether or not he had done right by Zhang Jian.

  ‘Oh, so if I cover up the crimes of a criminal, then I’m doing right by him? Then how can I do right by Xiao Shi, the victim?’

  Duohe did not speak again. The truth of the matter had been twisted too far out of shape, and she had not come here to invite Xiao Peng to get his thoughts in order. There was nothing she could ask of him, she just wanted to see Zhang Jian, and have a decent, final parting. Her tears beat on the patched legs of her trousers, pattering as they fell.

  Xiao Peng remained silent, he seemed to be listening to the sound of her tears. Suddenly he stood up, walked to the window and wheeled round.

  ‘Are you still thinking of him?’

  She stared at Xiao Peng. What kind of strange question was this?

  He walked back to the sofa, sat down, and then patted the place beside him. ‘Come on, sit here.’

  Could it be that he wanted to finish what they had started in the tree nursery? If he would arrange matters afterwards and let her see Zhang Jian, this was a price she was prepared to pay. In any case she had already made up her mind to kill this fleshly body.

  She sat down next to him.

  He tilted his face towards her, with a slightly mysterious smile, examining her features.

  ‘Your father must have killed a good few Chinese, right?’

  She said that her father’s unit had been in South-East Asia.

  ‘There’s no difference – in any case he was the enemy.’

  There was nothing Duohe could say. He was very close to her.

  ‘Suppose you were to think that I framed Zhang Jian on a trumped-up charge because I envied him. Then that would make me as base as you two women and Zhang Jian,’ he said.

  Duohe thought, the reason she had been infatuated with him for a time, and they had nearly become lovers, was precisely because she had seen him come so very close to a semblance of nobility.

  ‘There’s a scent to your body.’ There he was again with that mysterious smile. ‘Could Zhang Jian smell it?’

  She found him slightly alarming, as if a cold wind had blown over the pores of her skin.

  ‘He never noticed it.’ He leaned his head back against the sofa, and closed his eyes, seeming to be inhaling that scent with all his heart and soul. ‘The year I was twenty, the first time I came to your house, you were putting tea beside me, and out it came from a gap at the back of your collar, a fragrance came floating out …’

  Was he hysterical?

  ‘At that time I didn’t know you were Japanese. So I thought, this woman is certain to be mine one day. That scent of hers makes me … oh, bloody hell. After that I had my suspicions about your relationship with Zhang Jian.’

  His finger rubbed lightly over her hair.

  ‘Xiao Shi couldn’t smell this scent either. How could he? He clearly was so … let’s just say, this scent was clearly emitted for me alone. That Zhang Jian couldn’t smell it just proves that he is a pig, a mountain pig, he can’t appreciate a delicacy! And he’s the one who’s always on your mind.’ He turned towards her, staring neurotically. ‘Is he always on your mind? But someone like me, who appreciates you so much, how can I not be on your mind? Eh?’

  Duohe thought, if there were no empty words at all, just a quick battle to be fought to get a quick result, get it over and done with, she would not mind so much, but if he planned to make her say that he was always on her mind, she would rather die than say it.

  But those were the words he was waiting for. Like a desperately thirsty man waiting for water from a pipe that had rusted solid.

  She slowly shifted towards the far end of the sofa, and when she was most of the way there, she stood up all at once and rushed for the door.

  ‘What the hell are you running for?’ He picked up an ashtray and hurled it over.

  The ashtray shattered, but she was unharmed.

  ‘Fuck it, would I go to bed with you? I’m not a pig, and I’m not that stupid!’

  She continued to scrabble hastily at the door.

  ‘You listen to me, he’s a convict under suspended sentence of death, I don’t even know where they’re keeping him. I’ll have to go and make enquiries first. Wait and you’ll hear from me!’ he said from behind her.

  She was already in the corridor. Once she was out of the door she was safe. She had been prepared for anything, but not to hear a madman talking about love. It had been over two years, what had driven him out of his mind? Did he not have power and position? Where had that young boy gone, king of his army of children, who had once led the fighting from the rooftop, and had encircled her with his overalls? How could such an overpoweringly sinister monster have occupied the shell of Xiao Peng’s body?

  By then Xiaohuan’s sewing stall was doing a roaring trade. Shortly after, Duohe was fitted with a white armband, and was kept extremely busy every day, cleaning and rinsing everywhere. In a flash a year had gone by.

  One day at the stall, she was suddenly taken aback at the thought of the decision she had made by the stony pool, it was like a dream. One of Xiaohuan’s idler friends, a girl, said, What’s so difficult about visiting prison? She could get in touch with the quartermaster of the labour camp any time. The quartermaster was actually more powerful than the governor of the labour camp, he could speak directly to the criminal’s brigade leader and the thing was done. There’s this to be said about big revolutions, they create a lot of very useful loopholes. Xiaohuan asked this girl whether she had a special relationship with the quartermaster. Naturally the girl knew what Xiaohuan was implying. She said that the quartermaster would be hap
py enough to have one; when she had been inside he would grab a handful here today, tweak a handful there tomorrow. For the sake of her Auntie Xiaohuan, she would establish a ‘special relationship’ with him right away.

  Before many days had passed, the prison visit was all settled. Xiaohuan repaid the girl with a pair of trousers made exactly the way she wanted. A few years previously the loafers’ trousers had encased the legs tightly, but in recent years they had taken to copying the People’s Liberation Army, favouring the loose-crotched trousers of a soldier.

  In those hot summer days, it felt like the entire city was being forged into steel. Spend more than a few minutes outside and you would feel sick and see stars. Xiaohuan took Duohe all over the town making purchases, preparing the things to take to Zhang Jian when they visited him in prison. There was a severe shortage of food products, every family was short of coupons for cake, and the cakes in the glass cases of the department store had gone mouldy for want of a buyer. Xiaohuan spent all the coupons she had collected from her dubious friends on a kilo of cake covered in a faint layer of green moss. The things she was most satisfied with were two big pots of fried bean sauce, containing pork skin, pork fat, dried tofu and soya beans and generously salted, so that it would not go off even if the weather became hotter still. In this way, whether you were eating rice or sweet-potato cakes, noodles, slabs of boiled wheat dough or thin rice gruel, this sauce would always make for a good dish.

  The old man who popped rice and corn filled a sack of popcorn for Xiaohuan. The shoe mender gave her a pair of newly made cloth shoes. The ice-lolly seller gave her a set of toothpicks whittled from lollipop sticks.

  In the evening, as Xiaohuan and Duohe packed each of the articles into a bag, the outside door opened, and Dahai came in. His head was covered in blood, and his clothes were soaked through with it.

  Duohe hurried over and took his arm to support him, asking what the matter was. He shoved her out of the way.

  Xiaohuan looked at Dahai, and saw at once that he had shaved his eyebrows. She knew what was going on. Several days earlier Dahai had asked her where the tweezers were which the family used for pulling out pigs’ bristles. She had said that they’d had no pigs’ trotters to eat for years, who could still remember a thing like tweezers? Now she understood how he had solved the problem of his heavy, dark eyebrows: by shaving off the greater half with a razor, leaving two thin, asymmetrical lines and a strip of bloody wounds. The hair on his lip and on his temples had also been shaved. He had made himself over into a little old granny. Looking further down, he had run the knife over the sparse hairs on his chest too, and the hair on his legs was shaved clean away until they were almost like those of a girl. Xiaohuan felt both sorry for him and sickened by him. She could imagine how hard it must be for him to spend his days as a hairy Jap brat, and how dangerous. She could imagine him facing the mirror, grinding his teeth at that handsome lad with his heavy eyebrows and elegant eyes, delicate skin and white flesh. Those naturally red, glossy lips would be bitten white, bitten purple and finally bitten ragged. The only small mirror in the house was hanging on the water pipe in the toilet, and he would tug at his head of unreasonably thick, heavy, black hair, hating that he could not pluck it out by the handful, like weeds. But you would never be done weeding out something like this, because there were also those Japanese hairs on his legs and chest. He had stopped going to the public bathhouse because of this. Finally, he made up his mind to take a knife to himself. One ferocious swipe of a blade after another, willing to drive the knife in deeper still if he only could cut the Japanese half of himself out of his body. Did anyone else in the world detest themselves like this? Was there anyone who hated themselves so much that they would lay violent hands on their bodies like this young boy? See how viciously he had treated himself. His eyebrows were so ridiculous now, like strokes from a poorly wielded calligraphy brush. They were exactly like bodged pen strokes that had been rubbed out and rewritten, but rubbing out had only made things worse; a whole series of seemingly smart moves that just left him looking foolish. And he had had the nerve to take his young granny’s face out of doors. If it had been Xiaohuan who saw such a face, she would have catcalled and beaten him too.

  Duohe brought mercurochrome. With a great effort Xiaohuan kept herself under control and did not betray his shaving of his eyebrows and body hair. She said as she washed his wounds: ‘Let them call you a Jap brat, your flesh won’t drop off just because they call you a few names in the street! What’d we do if you got yourself beaten to death?’

  ‘Better to be dead!’ He drew his voice out in a long sigh.

  ‘And then they’d be satisfied.’

  Xiaohuan threw the facecloth into the blood-red washbasin and did a brief mental calculation: there was a total of three injuries on his head.

  ‘You’ve got lung disease – is it easy for you to produce all that blood? How much meat-bone stew and fish-head soup are we going to have to feed you to get it back again? Look at the state of you – call this a head? I could chuck a bit of oil in the pot and fry it up as meatballs!’

  ‘You should see their heads after I’d finished with them!’

  ‘If you have to fight, wait until we’ve come back and take Blackie: when you’ve got Blackie you’re not going to get beaten into such a state, and they’ll be the ugly ones!’

  Once Dahai’s wounds were salved and bandaged, Duohe came out with two pieces of mouldy cake. She put them on a little saucer, and carried them over to Dahai’s bedside.

  ‘I’m not eating that!’ Dahai said.

  Duohe said something briefly in explanation. What she meant was that the cakes had been steamed, so the specks of mould did not matter.

  ‘If you can’t speak Chinese, don’t talk to me!’ Dahai said.

  Without turning a hair, Xiaohuan whipped out the broom and rapped Dahai twice on the thigh. Afterwards she carried the cakes back to his hands again.

  ‘Anything a Japanese has touched, I won’t eat!’

  Xiaohuan took Duohe by the hand, walked out of the room, and slammed the door shut. Then she shouted at Dahai inside: ‘Well, Auntie, as of tomorrow, you’re in charge of the cooking, eh? I won’t even set foot in the kitchen. So the little swine isn’t eating anything Japanese have touched now? If he had what it takes he wouldn’t have suckled on a Japanese nipple before he was even weaned! If he’d been such a brave hero back then, an Anti-Japanese Resistance Baby, that’d have saved me the bother of putting rat poison in his food, wouldn’t it?’

  At one point she had even considered getting Dahai to come with them to visit his father, but judging from this, Xiaohuan could see that he would not acknowledge him. In these years disowning one’s parents was all the rage. If you got lucky you could even use turning your back on your own flesh and blood to find a job, or join the Party and rise to become an official. Now Erhai had gone down to the countryside, Dahai had the right to stay behind. To use his gross lack of family feeling to get a job in the city; to join the Party and rise to become an official by his determined anti-Japanese resistance to his aunt at home. Xiaohuan looked at that tightly closed door, and a bleakness such as she had never experienced before welled up in her heart.

  The following day she and Duohe got out of bed before daybreak, and walked to the long-distance bus station. The sky did not start to get light until they were on the bus. Duohe was turned towards the window, and in the sunlight the paddy fields had become fragments of a broken mirror. Xiaohuan knew that Duohe was still upset about Dahai.

  ‘These trousers are a good material.’ She fished out a trouser leg from inside the bundle. ‘They’ll last him three years, or maybe five, even if he does hard labour every day. Have a feel, this is Dacron khaki, there’s more wear in it than sailcloth.’

  Look at her, riffling through the bundle, full of satisfaction. Since she started to prepare things for Zhang Jian, each day she would rub her hands over all the clothes, trousers and shoes, and admire them, and get Duohe to join
her in fondling and admiring them. She would be in excellent spirits: it was often only after she had said ‘they’ll last him three or five years’ that it would occur to her that these might be years he did not have. But she thought again that she had to buy things to last, regardless of whether he actually had that long. Things changed quickly in times like these – a few months were a dynasty. Weren’t there people once again sticking up posters attacking the head of the Revolutionary Committee, Director Peng? The posters called him a ‘white brick’, someone only good in his area of expertise, saying that they should choose a ‘red brick’, a revolutionary expert, to sit on the director’s throne.

  The next stop was the labour reform camp. Xiaohuan suddenly shouted out: ‘Stop the bus! Stop! I want to get off!’

  The driver instinctively hit the brakes, and a busload of pedlars carrying chicken eggs, duck eggs and musk melons all cried out together: ‘My eggs …’

  The conductor said with a forbidding scowl: ‘What d’you think you’re doing, howling like a ghost?’

  ‘I’ve gone past my stop!’ said Xiaohuan.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  Xiaohuan named the second stop after the long-distance bus station. The ticket she had bought was only good for two stops, and now they were at the twelfth stop. The conductor checked the tickets at the door at every stop, to save her the bother of clambering over the hens’ eggs, duck eggs and melons.

  ‘What’s wrong with your ears? I called out the stop – are you deaf?’ The conductor was barely twenty, but took the tone of a grandmother chastising her grandchild.

  ‘Eeee, we don’t understand that accent o’ thine! You’ve been weaned for a while, how come you’ve not learned to talk like a decent human being?’ Xiaohuan stood up. You could tell at a glance that she was the kind of middle-aged North-eastern woman who cared nothing for face when quarrelling, and nothing for her life when she got in a physical fight. Seventy per cent of people in the city were North-easterners, and the southerners took care never to cross swords with them directly. ‘I told you to stop the bus!’