Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  ‘You’ll have to wait for the next stop,’ the driver said.

  Xiaohuan thought, of course we’ll have to wait for the next stop, otherwise we’ll have to walk a long way in the sun.

  ‘Does this bus of yours do a return journey?’ Xiaohuan asked.

  ‘Of course it does,’ replied the conductor.

  ‘Then you have to give me and my sister here a lift back.’

  ‘Sure – on February the thirtieth. Wait, if you think you can hang on that long,’ the conductor said.

  ‘Then you’d better give me back the money for both our tickets!’

  ‘You come with me to the company offices to get the money back!’

  As the two of them were arguing pointlessly back and forth, the bus pulled in at the stop. Xiaohuan got off, dragging Duohe along with her, pinching her hand hard. Once the bus had disappeared in a rolling cloud of dust, she said with a laugh: ‘That saved us two yuan. We spent two jiao to come all this way!’

  The labour reform camp did not have an official visitors’ room. Xiaohuan and Duohe were taken to the prisoners’ canteen, which was full of low wooden-plank benches, set out as if in readiness for an official report. Xiaohuan pulled Duohe to sit down on a bench in the first row. Soon, a snaggle-toothed pair of glasses came walking in, and said that his name was Zhao. Xiaohuan remembered that the girl had told her the quartermaster was called Zhao, and immediately drew a multipack of cigarettes from her bundle. Quartermaster Zhao asked how Xiao Tang was getting along outside, and Xiaohuan praised Xiao Tang as a lovely girl, pretty as flowers and jade, and invited Quartermaster Zhao to go and meet Xiao Tang when he had time, to eat Japanese food and drink Japanese tea, Xiaohuan’s treat.

  When Quartermaster Zhao first came in he was all defensiveness, but Xiaohuan’s easy familiarity quickly put him at his ease, and he said to Xiaohuan that this was not a convenient place for talking, he could have the guards take her husband to his office. Xiaohuan immediately said: ‘It’s perfectly convenient, it’s fine! An old married couple like us, we used up all our inconvenient words years ago!’

  Quartermaster Zhao had never had such a jewel of a relative on a prison visit before. He forgot his position and smiled broadly, exposing his unruly riot of teeth.

  Xiaohuan had been making her own internal calculations. Quartermaster Zhao was capable of helping out in a big way, so she had no intention of accepting the small favours he handed out. If she was going to owe him, then let the final bill be an astronomical sum.

  After Quartermaster Zhao left, two guards carrying rifles escorted Zhang Jian in. He had just passed through open country in powerful sunlight, and when he came in he stood dumbstruck in the doorway. He clearly needed a moment to see who was there to receive him.

  ‘Erhai, we’ve come to see you!’ There was a prickling, constricting feeling in Xiaohuan’s throat, and it cost her a lot of effort to force out this approximation of a cheery voice. Duohe, meanwhile, stood in front of the low benches, not daring to be sure that this white-haired thin black shadow was Zhang Jian.

  ‘Duohe!’ Xiaohuan called out, turning her head. ‘See how sturdy he is!’

  Duohe took a step forward, and suddenly bowed to him. From her expression, she still seemed to be stuck in the process of recognising him.

  The guards made the two women sit on the front row of benches, and Zhang Jian sit on the back row. That’s no good! We can’t hear each other speak! Yes you can, when the high-ups read out documents, all the convicts sitting down below can hear! But this isn’t reading out documents! Documents or no documents, that’s where you have to sit! The clock starts from now, whether you can hear or not! Visiting time is set at one hour, after that they have to serve lunch in here, and after lunch they’ll be reading documents!

  Xiaohuan and Duohe were looking at Zhang Jian across rows and rows of benches. The windows were small and high up, and in the dim light that came through them Zhang Jian appeared dark and faintly smudged.

  The guards present were separated from them by another dozen benches, so they talked about things they might just as well have left unsaid: ‘Everyone’s well back home’, ‘Erhai writes often’, ‘Girlie writes often too’, ‘Everything’s fine!’

  Zhang Jian only listened, sometimes he said ‘Oh’, and sometimes he would give a snort of laughter. Although his silence had not changed, Xiaohuan thought that the nature of his silence was different from before. It was an old man’s silence, nattering and scolding away in his heart.

  ‘People in the factory are putting up posters about Xiao Peng. They want to kick him out of office, they’re calling him a white brick.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’d be good, if he got thrown out.’

  Zhang Jian was silent. But in his old man’s silence, Xiaohuan could hear him nagging away: What’s so bloody good about that? Does any decent person become an official these days? You old women, kicking up a fuss over stuff you know nothing about, what’s so good about that?

  Xiaohuan thought, to think that he was three years younger than her: he had already begun to nag and scold in his heart. Only a person who did not believe in anything, and who had lost his taste for everything, could have a heart full of nagging like this.

  ‘Did you hear what I said? As soon as that Xiao Peng is out of office it’ll all turn out right, for certain,’ Xiaohuan said.

  Let those two guards exchange suspicious glances, she was not afraid, she had to make him recover his lost appetite for life.

  He sniggered. He had understood, it was just that he did not think things would get better.

  Xiaohuan thought that in Duohe’s memory Zhang Jian had remained not even the way he was before he was arrested, but from earlier still, the way he was when they used to creep into the little wood, and climb the wall into the primary school. The way he had been backstage at the club. As for the present Zhang Jian, she feared that she, Xiaohuan, was the only one who did not reject him.

  Xiaohuan stood up slowly, the joints in her body creaking.

  ‘Erhai, don’t hoard your clothes and food, who’s to say that we won’t get another chance to visit you, and bring you some more, eh?’

  She asked one of the guards where the toilet was, and then walked into the heartless July sunshine. She would give Duohe and Zhang Jian some time alone. She resented her bitter fate; bitter because she was tied up together with two people whose fate was more bitter still. No one wanted either of them, no one cared for them, and so all of this fell on Xiaohuan’s shoulders, didn’t it? What were the odds of meeting such a pair of ill-fated lovers in a whole lifetime?

  On the road back, the two women both stared at their own scenery. After the bus had gone five or six stops, Xiaohuan asked Duohe whether Zhang Jian had said anything. Nothing at all.

  In Duohe’s serenity, Xiaohuan could see her own wisdom. She had been right to leave the two of them alone together. A part of his life belonged to Duohe, which could only come out when Xiaohuan was not there.

  By the time they got home it was the middle of the night. They had had nothing to eat all day but a few dry mantou. Duohe hurried into the kitchen and put two bowls of hanging noodles on to boil. Duohe was deeply tranquil, much more serene than before they went. She and Zhang Jian must have talked about something. What important words had these two people who no one wanted and no one cared about said to each other, to make Duohe so serene?

  Xiaohuan had left Duohe and Zhang Jian behind her in the room, and had gone out alone into the cruel midday July sun. All the cicadas were bawling out at the tops of their voices. Several rows of benches and a guard lay between Zhang Jian and Duohe. She said a sentence which an outsider would struggle to follow. She had to talk over the shouting of the cicadas, so her words were shouted too. She told him to think of her every evening at nine o’clock, and she would be thinking of him at the same time. She and he would be thinking of each other, concentrating all their heart and will, and in this way they could see each other every day.


  His half-closed camel’s eyes widened for a moment, and settled for a while on her face. She knew that he had understood. He also understood that she regretted falling out over two years before: if she had known then that the next half of their lives would be spent with one of them inside the prison wall and the other outside it, she would have treated him well, spent every day with him, every hour. Now she repudiated all her accusations against him.

  ‘Erhe …’ She was gazing at the floor.

  He was looking down too. They did this: looking at the floor, or the sky, or some place in their minds, and yet it was each other that they saw. It had been like this right at the very beginning too. A fleeting glance, then turn the eye away immediately; then magnify the thing they had seen in their minds’ eye, and examine it closely, over and over again.

  Her first glimpse of him was from a white cloth sack. The white cloth had become a layer of fine, closely woven white fog. They had put her on the stage, and he came walking towards her through the white fog. She was curled up in the sack, and only looked at him once. After that she closed her eyes, storing that image of him, so she could look over and over again. He was tall, true enough, but when he moved his movements were not as loose and sloppy as most big-bodied men, and his head and face were perfectly proportioned. He picked up the sack in his arms, so that her chest was pressed against his chest. He carried her, forcing a way through the black crowds of filthy feet, and she was suddenly no longer afraid of these feet, or of the quacking laughter emitted by their owners. Then she was carried into a courtyard. Through the clouds of white fog, she saw it was a fine courtyard. The house was good too. A very good family. They passed through a door, and it was like they had gone from a snowy day straight into summer. The air was crackling with warmth, and very soon she fell asleep. When she woke a pair of hands was untying the knot of the sack, which was at the crown of her head. The sack fell down all around her, and she saw him. This, too, was just another fleeting glimpse. It was only after that that she took time to look slowly at what she had seen so fleetingly: he wasn’t bad-looking. No, he was very good-looking. A very masculine type. And not just that, his eyes were half closed, because his goodness and tenderness were making him embarrassed and uncomfortable. Then … he picked her up in his arms again, and laid her down on the kang …

  She often recalled this beginning. Sometimes she suspected that her memory was not accurate. But then again, when they had got to know each other in such a way, how was it possible for her not to remember accurately? It was only twenty years, no more. Even if it was fifty years, or sixty, she would still not be able to forget this beginning.

  At this moment one of them was a prison visitor, the other a prisoner being visited. He nodded to her invitation to meet. Let the guards hear her invitation: Every evening, nine o’clock, think of Duohe. Duohe will also think of you. So you and Duohe, meet.

  From then on, every evening at nine o’clock, Duohe always thought of Zhang Jian with all her mind and heart. She could feel him keep the appointment, right on time, right in front of her, his eyes exhausted like a camel’s, indifferent to human slaves. Even if she was in another world, he would still arrive at the meeting on time.

  One day, Duohe felt amazed: the notion of suicide that she had never been able to dismiss from her mind was suddenly not there any more. There was Xiaohuan, every day shouting ‘Make do’, smiling ‘Make do’, complaining ‘Make do’, and the days muddled on by. And she was muddling along with her. According to Duohe’s standards, if things could not be done perfectly and elegantly, then she would prefer not to do them at all, yet Xiaohuan mended a stitch here, did a little repair there, one eye open and one eye closed, and anything could be dragged along, sloppily and grubbily. This was not living well, but she could still make do and not live too badly. In the blink of an eye she had muddled her way through a month, and in another blink a summer had passed. Then she had muddled her way into autumn. It turned out that ‘making do’ was not unpleasant at all. Once you were used to it, it was actually extremely comfortable. Duohe in the early autumn of 1976 found to her great surprise that in all this making do the last faint spark of suicide had been extinguished without her even realising it.

  She learned to find excuses to carry on living, just as risible as Xiaohuan’s. Duohe’s excuse was that she could not miss her assignation; she had an appointment every day with Zhang Jian at nine o’clock, and she could not stand him up.

  In October, propaganda trucks were driving all over town, gongs and drums were beating to shake the heavens, and the loudspeakers were bawling all over the place, celebrating that a new director of the Revolutionary Committee had assumed office. It turned out that Director Peng had been kicked out, and had become a new enemy. Xiaohuan laughed and chatted away at her sewing stall. ‘They’ve got themselves another new enemy, and they beat gongs and drums to celebrate?’

  The new enemy’s old accounts were going to be settled again. The new enemy’s old enemies were going to be reviewed one by one. Before long the police, public prosecutor and law courts re-examined Zhang Jian’s case, and changed his suspended death sentence to twenty years’ imprisonment.

  Xiaohuan said to Duohe: ‘We’d better make the most of it and get Zhang Jian out before this new director has changed into a new enemy. Who knows if some person mightn’t drag down this new director, and bring the score back to where it was.’

  She and Quartermaster Zhao were already calling each other ‘Sister-in-Law’ and ‘Little Brother’. Quartermaster Zhao was still taking Xiaohuan’s gifts, but slowly he started to give gifts to her. Like all of Xiaohuan’s dubious friends, he felt that Xiaohuan had some sort of magical power that could not be put into words, and was delighted for her to make use of him. It was his good fortune that she could get something worthwhile out of him. Every time Xiaohuan’s family came to visit, sesame oil, sausages, dried mushrooms and bean noodles would appear on the tables of the officers’ dining room. He had long since forgotten that his original intention in getting close to Xiaohuan had been to get close to the girl Xiao Tang. When he saw the people surrounding Xiaohuan’s sewing table, fawning on her, competing eagerly, scheming and jockeying for position, resentment arose in his heart. ‘Who do they think they are? Are they fit to contribute their efforts to Sister Xiaohuan? They bring along a packet of turnips in sauce and think they can spend the whole afternoon with her!’

  There were more pickings to be found under Quartermaster Zhao’s fingernails than if those people emptied out their entire purses. He got Dahai a job teaching PE in a small, locally run school. Dahai moved into the school, and that was the end of his anti-Japanese resistance in the home.

  Throughout all this Xiaohuan never mentioned the possibility of Quartermaster Zhao using his connections to have Zhang Jian’s case reviewed. She still had to wait for the right moment. Her grasp of the way to lay her psychological groundwork was always superb. She did not plan to open her mouth until after Spring Festival, by which time the Mao suit she was making for him out of pure wool gaberdine would be finished.

  A few days before Chinese New Year, Erhai came home. To Duohe’s and Xiaohuan’s surprise, he had grown big and burly. He came in through the door, drank a cup of tea and ran outside again. Xiaohuan asked him where he was going, and he did not speak a word, he was already on the stairs. Leaning on the rail of the communal walkway, Duohe and Xiaohuan saw a bedroll containing all his personal effects lying at the foot of the building. When Erhai came up with the bedroll, Xiaohuan asked him why he had moved all his possessions back, wasn’t he just here for the new year? He pursed his lips without replying, smiling at Blackie who was following behind him.

  He carried the quilt and cotton padded mattress to the balcony. Blackie put his paws on his chest, the dog’s mouth splitting open from ear to ear with happiness. Erhai shook the quilt and beat it crisply. Blackie’s paws landed on his back.

  ‘Why’re you making such a fuss of me, silly? I’m home and I’m not going
away again!’

  It was only now, thanks to Blackie, that Xiaohuan and Duohe found out about his long-term plans. If he was not going back, his only choice was to be an idler, like the ones who clustered round Xiaohuan’s sewing machine all day long. These young people who resisted pressure from their schools, Neighbourhood Committees and families started out being regarded by others as loafers, and in due course became loafers because no other choices were available to them. Xiaohuan looked at Erhai’s hands, covered in chilblains, his fingers swollen red and translucent like carnelian, and thought to herself: If he has to be a loafer then so be it.

  On the night of Spring Festival Dahai came back too. At the dinner table, he tipped the rice that Duohe had dished out for him back into the pot, took a new bowl, filled it with rice and sat down again. Everybody pretended not to see. Erhai spoke to Duohe, saying that he had met an old man who had a genius for playing the erhu, and that he had spent his year north of the Huai River under his instruction.

  Xiaohuan knew that Erhai was drawing up battle lines between himself and Dahai: If you’re going to ignore Auntie, then I’m going to be friendly to her, so there! She thought: We’re finished, that’s the end of peace in our family. Before the Spring Festival dinner the two brothers had actually exchanged a few words, now they were back in bitter conflict. A problem emerged when it was time to sleep. Dahai made the corridor his bedroom, and announced that no one was permitted to cross his room on the way to the toilet.

  Everybody ignored him.

  Xiaohuan said with a smile: ‘It’s even more fuss than the puppet government in the North-east, old Manchuria as was. They had the Japanese Army, the puppet government’s army and the Anti-Japanese United Army!’