Inside she held the bowl. Should she drink it or throw it away? Her body was wracked in pain from her contractions, her lungs ached from the dust, and she had to hold within herself all these pains and agonies without releasing them in cries and screams. All this she could manage and control. But the pain she could not control was her rage against her eldest daughter. What should she do? Should she smash the bowl as if it contained poison? Which it did. The poison of treachery and power. Who had persuaded her husband to leave their home, their land? To take part in this nightmarish journey which must surely end in their total extinction? She whose over-loving, foolish father had allowed to live when it was best she had been put out to die. She who had grown into a cripple, a constant drain on the family, and now whose waddling was slowing them down.
Five miles ahead of the Wei family the Japanese air force started to attack the refugee column. Bombs dropped, machine guns crackled and chattered like demented magpies. The horizon was lit with sudden flashes and flares and balls of flame rising into the sky where petrol-driven vehicles were hit. The ground shook. Wei stood watching it. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Wei looked round. All of the family still slept. He looked at the blackness beneath the cart.
Beneath the cart, so intense were her thoughts, Wei’s wife had not even noticed the raid. Should she throw away the wild pear and honey juice or drink it? It would strengthen her, bring another baby into the family. But she knew that the juice was formed among the bones of her husband’s elder sister, she who was the cause of all her husband’s foolish soft-heartedness and indulgence when it came to his dealings with his children. So she should throw it away? But the root of the wild pear tree also passed among the bones of her family’s ancestors. How would they feel that she had rejected their fruit? They were the important ones. They were the ones who decided whether she, an ignored outsider, was granted full recognition and honour within the family when her eldest son became the farmer of their land.
She breathed in, controlling her breath. Then breathed out, allowing no cries or moans. She could feel her baby’s head lowering into the birth canal.
In the darkness beneath the cart her thoughts turned even blacker. Her eldest son above all others had to survive this madness, had to return to farm their land. Nothing was of importance but that. That the land would continue having a Wei farming it. That was what the ancestors, on and on through endless generations, would praise her for. Would welcome her into their midst for, give her a seat of honour. Would rescue her from becoming forever a lonely, wandering ghost.
Her birth canal was on fire. The baby’s shoulders were now pushing their way into it. She knew birth was not far off. She gave half a groan before realizing it and suppressing it. This thing must be done. She lifted the bowl and its precious contents and drank them down – poison and all. Whatever the consequences the family must survive.
The head of the baby started to emerge from the lips of her vagina, it emerged fully from her vagina and she wrapped her hands around the baby’s head and pulled it out, first the head and then the body, her whole body screaming in pain. She looked at it. Then she strangled it.
She slumped, for a few moments she panted, then she hardened herself and summoned her foolish husband. He drew the curtain, asked her quietly what had happened.?
‘It is dead,’ she said, handing it to him, holding it by its ankles as a hunter would carry a dead rabbit.
‘It was a girl. So I did the right thing. I killed it.’
Wei, holding it, let the curtain fall back. For a few moments he could not stand up. Then he managed to. His dead child rested against his leg. Now it was his turn to be filled with black emotions, anger and dread. He glanced round his family, saw they were all still asleep. He took his spade and walked a few yards off. He knew what his wife had been thinking. That this baby would hinder his family and that his family’s survival was all. Because she loved his family and because that was her only way of gaining recognition from the dead. But…
He realized that he could not afford his emotion. He must eat his bitterness. His family must be protected.
He dug a small oblivious hole in the ground. He took his dead baby girl to lower her gently into it, but as he does did so, in the earliest light of dawn, he saw something. The baby was not a girl, it was a boy. That was how desperate his wife was to gain admiration among the ancestors by ensuring the family survived. Even if it meant murdering a son. She had probably calculated that they already had three sons – healthy and hard-working. Another boy could be lost. And she still had plenty of time to carry more sons. His heart choked with shame and despair that he had allowed his family to get to these straits. Then he stopped himself. In his deepest heart, ruthless as she was, he knew his wife had done the right thing.
He turned and walked back towards the cart.
From this moment, from the time when she killed their newborn son, power in the family started to shift away from Wei and towards his wife. But it would be a power which would kill her, poor bewildered woman.
7
By the time Wei got back to the cart his wife had buried her afterbirth, wiped her hands and body of the blood and gore, and put on her clothes.
She and Spider Girl were tidying up, Cherry Blossom and Second Son were rehanging the utensils and bucket beneath the cart, Eldest Son was preparing the donkey for the journey, and Grandfather and the two tots continued their sleep in the cart.
The children were informed that the baby had died in childbirth. Wei told Eldest Son to fall back and guard the cart from the rear with the spade and Second Son to go forward and lead the donkey on. A random bomb fell on the column a few hundred yards away. No one took any notice. The cart swayed and started.
Two others knew what had really occurred last night:. Spider Girl, who had overheard it and agreed completely with her mother’s actions, and Second Son, who was already desperately struggling to work out what was happening in this strange new world.
Wei, his mind still filled with last night’s events, suddenly realized his wife was walking beside him rather than riding in the cart and immediately lifted her onto it so she could rest, gave Baby Girl Wei to Eldest Son to carry and took Baby Boy Wei himself. She as quickly wriggled off and started walking again.
‘Why did you do that, wife? You need rest.’
‘I do not need rest. I do not wish Eldest Son and you to grow even wearier having to carry the tots. Put them back on the cart.’
They had a brief argument. His wife refused to get back on the cart. Wei hit her. She muttered curses but climbed back onto the cart with some alacrity. Wei had to smile at his wife’s artfulness. She wanted a rest in the cart but had to show herself willing to sacrifice her comfort for the good of the family. Her slyness was one of the reasons he liked her so much. Spider Girl also saw her mother’s cleverness and grinned too. Her mother saw this.
‘Why do we allow this monster to stay in the family one more second?’ she asked Wei, indicating she was talking about Spider Girl. ‘Look at her waddling along like some fat duck, grinning her evil grins. If it hadn’t been for her we’d still be safely at home, with our land all around us.’
‘Stop showing your ignorance,’ replied Wei, ‘if we’d stayed we’d all be dead by now. It’s because of Spider Girl we’re still alive.’
‘She made up all that stuff about her newspapers, just to scare us away. She’s a malcontent. She works to destroy her own family. Look at that hair on her lip. She’s the child of some devil.’
‘Are you saying you slept with a devil?’
‘I’m saying a good child listens to her elders’ words and obeys them. She has never obeyed them. She has made up her own words and got us to obey her.’
While this bad-mouthing was going on, Wei’s wife suddenly realized she had two tits full of milk going to waste and, without breaking off her verbal bombardment for one second, took Baby Boy Wei from the arms of her husband and attached him to one of them. Since it was a
t least a year since he had last been on her breast, Baby Boy Wei had forgotten some of the etiquettes of breastfeeding. His sharp little teeth bit into her tit. She cuffed him and cursed him. She also ordered Eldest Son to stop tiring himself and to place Baby Girl Wei on the cart too. Wei, worried by the extra weight on the weak wheel, checked it, and seeing the splints still firmly in place, permitted this.
While this was going on Wei quietly told Spider Girl to prepare another honey concoction for her mother with some added milkwort root to get her to sleep. Spider Girl moved to do this.
Wei’s wife, breastfeeding etiquette agreed with Baby Boy Wei, resumed her barrage.
‘Why’s she doing that?’ she asked, pointing at Spider Girl who was preparing to cut a honeycomb.
‘Because I told her to prepare a concoction for you.’
‘She’s trying to take my place in the family.’
‘I would never allow her to do that.’
‘She’s cleverer than you think.’
With that riposte, satisfied that she’d restored her position in the family hierarchy, Wei’s wife fell immediately into a deep sleep. Spider Girl hadn’t yet stirred in the milkwort root so instead offered the honey to her father.
‘Take it yourself, daughter,’ he told her. ‘How are you?’
‘I am alive, Father. And how are you?’
A grin twisted Wei’s lips. ‘I am alive also.’
On the cart Baby Boy Wei had finished his feeding and fallen asleep on his mother’s breast. Baby Girl Wei had also managed to worm her way into her mother’s rich warm body and was sucking, without biting, on the other tit.
*
Over and over as he lead the donkey, Second Son tried to work out in his small little head how parents could kill children. When they’d first left home, when he’d volunteered to go ahead in the darkness towards the bandits, he had seen this as a sort of game, like those he played with other children. He had heard at home stories of bandits killing people, so when he came across dead people killed by bandits it was horrible but no big surprise. But now, his mother killing a baby, his father accepting it, then them lying? Did parents have children in order to kill them? Would they kill him? Was this what this whole strange journey was about?
As he trudged on, trying to work all this out, he scarcely noticed the ground he was travelling across. It was littered with the ephemera and paraphernalia of everyday life – household objects, farm implements, articles of clothing – abandoned by the weary, desperate multitudes. He just steered his cart between them.
He passed amid rakes and hoes and pruning forks and crowbars and shears. Wind-up gramophones, bicycles without wheels, wheels without bicycles, spanners, hammers, sickles, neatly folded newspapers, tables, chairs, pots and jars, an axe, reels of unspooled film from some cinema, umbrellas, parasols (Cherry Blossom purloined one), hats, houseplants, dead pets, live pets, books, broken jars, flutes, abaci, drums of all shapes and sizes, votive tablets, dried flowers, mirrors reflecting nothing, cheap paste jewellery, knick-knacks, chamberpots, spittoons, a bust of Sun Yat-sen, tambourines, dragons’ heads, an immaculate mahogany calligraphy table, its raised board awaiting the scholar’s perfect brush stroke. All too heavy to carry by exhausted, dehydrating people, all discarded left right and centre.
And there were dearer, more intimate, more heart-wrenching objects left lying. Those objects sacred to family memory that people snatch up in their final moments before abandoning a lifelong home. Family photographs, locks of hair – sometimes from the most intimate places – grandfather’s old pipe, pieces of wood carved especially for a lover, statues of hearth and household gods who had shared every family meal for generations, letters, articles of intimate clothing.
Second Son wended the family’s way past dead men, women and children, dead cows and goats and dogs and dismembered pigs, favourite singing birds dead in their cage – all rank and stinking.
He came into the area which had been bombed and heavily machine gunned the night before by the Japanese air force while his mother was giving birth.
Burnt twisted bodies, wounded horses screaming, flames pouring out of blackened machinery and wagons, a bacchanalia of flies on every blood-drenched corpse.
And as he led the donkey through this he accidentally trod in a dead woman’s stomach. And stopped.
His father came forward to see why they had stopped. He saw what had happened and took the rein from his son. He looked into his son’s eyes and saw the suffering and bewilderment.
‘I am sorry I made you do this, son,’ he said. ‘Go to the back of the cart and sleep. Do not worry.’
‘Yes, Father.’
And as Second Son turned Wei gently touched his arm.
In the back of the cart Second Son covered his face and wept. And then he fell into a deep, deep sleep.
*
Wei walked on, in a sort of daze. He knew his body was very tired – but not much more tired than he would be at the height of harvest – and he knew his mind was exhausted by the constant need for vigilance, both in monitoring the difficulties within his own family and protecting them from the dangers from outside. He chastised himself for not noticing Second Son’s distress and bewilderment. He would speak to him and cheer him as soon as he had time. And he was worried by his father’s growing confusion and babbling and his habit of wandering off. His wife wanted to tether him – when he was inside the cart and when he walked beside it – but Wei vetoed this. His father was a dignified man.
What grieved and agonized Wei most was the killing of his newborn baby. It was his duty above all to serve and protect his family, every single one of them, whether alive or among his dead ancestors. His wife accused him of being soft because of the death of his elder sister, because he had ruled that Spider Girl, as an infant, should live and not die in a famine. But the killing of this latest baby, a boy, had happened and he had not foreseen it, and when it had happened he had accepted it. He had even agreed with the deed. He still agreed with the deed. This is what ate through his bowels like a snake.
Of course, all the time he was thinking this, he was also looking from side to side – at all the people and individuals and groups they were travelling among and through. He was checking on his family. Grandfather was demanding he had a shit and he stopped the cart briefly so he could. Cherry Blossom was proudly holding her blue parasol – her hedgehog asleep in its cage – and trudging along with Baby Girl Wei who was happy to be anywhere close to Cherry Blossom and laughing happily as Cherry Blossom twirled the parasol. His wife was walking behind the cart preparing a family meal on its tailgate. Eldest Son walked behind, looking around, carrying the spade. Second Son and Spider Girl slept. A Japanese reconnaissance aircraft whined far above them like a mosquito.
They were approaching a farming family with a cart that had stopped and lit a fire to prepare food, perhaps to boil water. Wei studied them. They looked respectable – or as respectable as any family could be in circumstances like this – and spoke respectfully to each other. Perhaps they would be prepared to share the fire in exchange for some of the goat, some fresh water, and the wax from the drained honeycombs. Maybe throw in the four iron hoops from the two buckets.
He stopped the cart. He woke Second Son saying he needed him to hold the donkey’s rein – to give her some feed and any piss there was in the bucket – while keeping his eye on what was happening in front of the cart. Spider Girl he left sleeping in the cart. He told Eldest Son and his wife to be extra vigilant.
Then, without carrying anything, he walked slowly towards the other family. The family turned round from the fire they were sitting around as he approached and stopped talking. A young man – he assumed their eldest son – had been standing guard holding an ancient blunderbuss. As Wei approached it he raised it and pointed it at Wei. Wei stopped some ten yards from them.
‘Good day,’ he said.
Silence.
‘I am a respectable man and father. I want to suggest a trade. You ha
ve a fire. I have a goat I should slaughter. In the exchange for a hind and a front leg of the goat, a gallon of water,’ the father of the family’s eyes flickered at this, ‘and some beeswax, you should allow us to boil a pot of water to cook the other parts of the goat and some vegetables. I repeat, we are honourable people. What do you say?’
The haggling commenced. Fortunately each family spoke a dialect recognizable to the other. Wei finally agreed to the whole of the hindquarters of the goat minus a leg, the beeswax, two gallons of water and two iron hoops in exchange for use of the fire.
Wei bowed to them. ‘I will kill the goat and return,’ he said.
He walked back to his family’s cart.
‘Get the large bowl, please,’ he asked Second Son, ‘and help me.’
As Second Son came back from the donkey he sent Spider Girl forwards to take the rein. Second Son was delighted to help his father. Ever since his father had told him to go and rest and had touched his arm so gently, Second Son had known that whatever insanity was happening in the world, his father would not harm him and that he would do his best to save him from all trouble
His father took out and sharpened his knife, then, upturning the goat, which kicked feebly, he rested the back of the goat against the cart’s tailgate, took the goat’s weight on his left knee and held down the head with the throat exposed. Second Son slipped the bowl beneath the head. Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl gathered to watch.
‘Hand me the knife,’ Wei ordered Cherry Blossom. She did this and came even closer.
Wei cut the throat precisely. The goat struggled weakly and feebly, its anaemic blood flowed out.
Second Son, holding the bowl and catching the blood, looked up at his father. His father’s face seemed so tired, dusty and lined. He was so proud to be his son. The blood fully drained and the goat was dead, Second Son carefully placed the full bowl onto the cart so his mother could make blood cakes. He covered it with a cloth to keep out the attacking flies.
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