Mulberry and Peach

by Hualing Nieh

  A bizarre world.

  I am walking down the long hospital corridor. The lights are glaring. At the end of the corridor is the morgue. I walk halfway down the corridor and then turn right. Past the patients’ rooms. In a window of the building opposite a woman is crying.

  I am standing in the doorway of Room Number Four. Aunt Ts’ai is propped up in bed. I am calling to her. She doesn’t answer. She stares at me as though she is looking at a ghost.

  I pick up a brush from the table next to the bed and brush her hair. I smooth down her hair with my hand. I braid her sparse hair into a pigtail.

  She reaches out to feel my face. Arm. Hand.

  She says she can feel me, so I must be real. As she says this, she squeezes my finger hard.

  I tell her it really hurts.

  My life splits in half. Daytime in the attic. Night-time at the hospital.

  Chia-kang is lying on his tatami mat. His heart is racing. Head aching. He has a pain in his side. Back hurts. All his muscles are sore. Constipated. He says he’s not going to make it.

  He wants me to give him an enema. He squats over the spittoon. He wants me to look between his legs at his bottom. Has it come out? Has it come out yet? He is asking over and over. I want to turn around and vomit. He wants me to stick it in again. Stick it in. Stick it in. He shouts at me.

  He blames me for destroying his whole life. I wasn’t a virgin, he married ‘a broken jar’. His illusions about me have been shattered. His illusions about everyone in the world have been shattered. That lousy bastard Ts’ai has hidden us in his attic, just so he can make believe he is God. Then Chia-kang brings up the subject of Refugee Student in Chü-t’ang Gorge.

  Sang-wa wants to know who he’s talking about.

  That son of a bitch who raped your mother, says Chia-kang.

  SANG-WA’S DIARY

  Papa and Mama both have identity cards. Mama says that an identity card proves that you are a legal person. I’m already ten, but I still don’t have one yet. Mama says that people in attics don’t need identity cards. Only people on the outside need them. If they don’t have identity cards, they will go to jail. I hate it when Mama goes outside every night. Papa says she goes to look for men. She wants to get rid of us. I want to tear up her identity card.

  I hate my stepmother . . . She buys new dresses for her own daughter but I have to wear dresses made from grey flour sacks. I run away, Papa will beat her to death. Papa is an ugly old sick man. He lies on the tatami mat and always wants to hit us. I hate him, too. People on the outside hang their identity cards around their necks and let them swing back and forth on the chains. That’s really neat. One chain for each person’s identity card. Even cats and dogs have identity card chains. I don’t have one and I’m afraid. I don’t want to go to jail. I run back home. Papa and Stepmother are dead. I’m an orphan. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have run away.

  Little Dot has an identity card. She is legal so she can go outside. She comes back and tells me lots of funny stories. People on the outside who have identity cards can even eat people. They grab pretty girls and plug up their butts and stick water hoses into their mouths. Their stomachs blow up like watermelons. Then they eat them. A watermelon that breaks open by itself tastes better than one cut with a knife. I lick my lips and say ‘How sweet.’

  Mama goes outside every night. Papa says, ‘Oh that woman. She goes out to eat men.’ I ask him if she eats someone so she can get his identity card chain. Papa doesn’t understand what I mean. Mama brings back a whole trunk full of identity card chains. I make lots of dolls out of the grey flour sacks. Each doll has an identity card chain. When Mama finishes eating all the people on the outside, she’ll eat Papa and me. But I’m not a boy so maybe she won’t eat me. I want to run away and elope with someone. I don’t want to eat anyone. Little Dot says people’s meat is like watermelon, red and sweet, but I think people’s meat tastes bad. I bite my own finger and it’s salty.

  Mama says Aunt Ts’ai is dying. I don’t know where people go when they die. She says they go to paradise when they die. People are very happy there. They aren’t afraid. Whatever they want they can have. When offerings of paper servants and paper coins are burned, they go to heaven and become real. I ask if paradise has attics. She says no. I ask if people in paradise wear identity cards. She says no. I ask if people in paradise eat people. She says no. I don’t believe her. Papa says Mama tells lies.

  Aunt Ts’ai is dead. When it gets dark Uncle Ts’ai and I take her burial clothes to the Ecstasy Funeral Parlour.

  A white curtain hangs in the morgue. Outside the curtain is an altar with two burning white candles. There’s a strong pungent smell of antiseptic.

  He pulls open the curtain. His wife is lying on the stone table. A gauze bedspread is hanging on the wall. We stand on either side of the stone table.

  Her eyes are wide open. He closes the eyelids. The eyes are still wide open.

  He suddenly chuckles. He says they slept together for more than thirty years, but only now does he realise that she doesn’t have any eyebrows. She painted her eyebrows on when she was alive.

  The mortician comes into the morgue. He drops a bundle of burial clothes on the legs of the corpse. He picks up one shroud after another and places them inside each other. Red. Yellow. Green. Blue. Purple. He removes the white sheet which covers the corpse.

  The nylon rustles as it glides over the naked corpse. Her hair has fallen out, except for a little tuft of pubic hair between her thighs. I look at Uncle Ts’ai. He is looking at the gauze bedspread on the wall. The mortician wipes the corpse with a large towel. The breasts quiver.

  Uncle Ts’ai walks out of the morgue. He chats with some people from the funeral parlour in the yard.

  The mortician throws the towel in a corner. Some yellow pyjamas with black lace are piled in the corner. A dragonfly buzzes over and lands on them. The mortician lifts the upper half of the body to dress her in the burial clothes. The body is stiff. The clothes make a ripping sound. The seams of the sleeves are splitting.

  Uncle Ts’ai walks in and says the burial cap should have a few pearls on it. He wants to go home to get them. He asks the mortician to wait awhile.

  The mortician lets go of the body. It falls back on the stone table with a thud.

  Forget it, he says. Anyway, the body is going to be cremated.

  No, no, no, says Uncle Ts’ai. Not cremation. Burial. The coffin will be taken back to our old home on the mainland someday.

  All right. The mortician’s mouth twitches in a smile. I’ll wait.

  Someone lifts up the curtain and asks when the corpse will be taken out. A child has died. There aren’t any empty tables. They’re waiting to bring the child inside.

  The mortician looks up at Uncle Ts’ai. Uncle Ts’ai motions to him to continue. The pearls aren’t necessary.

  The mortician slaps creme haphazardly over the face. Then powders it. Finally, he draws two thin lines for eyebrows and puts on the cap without pearls.

  Fine. It’s finished. Do you want that pile of clothes? He points to the lemon yellow pyjamas with black lace in the corner.

  No, says Uncle Ts’ai.

  The mortician picks them up and goes out.

  We leave. We are silent all the way home. We go immediately into Uncle Ts’ai’s bedroom.

  I tell Uncle Ts’ai that I would like to live a normal life: going out during the day, coming home at night. Coming home to the attic.

  He says it’s not feasible. If I go out during the day, I am a threat to everyone I meet. I’m the wife of a criminal.

  But it’s only fair, I tell him. I live all my days threatened like that. They should feel threatened, too.

  He asks me, am I innocent or guilty.

  Both, I say. And neither. You could call me an innocent criminal. He says he doesn’t understand that. An innocent person should live outside the attic entirely. A criminal should hide during the day and go out at night. Then he told me a story about a criminal.
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  A murderer named Chu escaped from the prison. During the day he hid in a cemetery. At night he went out begging. No one noticed him. He hid in the cemetery for twenty days. But he couldn’t go on hiding there. One night he went to a gambling joint. He won lots of money. He went to Taipei and rented a room.

  He was a master of disguise. He passed as a policeman, a scholar, a business manager, a reporter, air force pilot, university professor, American Ph.D. graduate. He swaggered into dance halls and bars. Finally, pretending to be a writer he began living with a bar girl. He wouldn’t allow her to go back to the bar. She wanted to marry him, but he didn’t want to. She got pregnant. He wanted her to get an abortion. She didn’t want to. They had a fight. Then he wanted to go to bed with her. She didn’t want to do that either. He beat her up and went out gambling. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and killed herself. In her room the police found a photo of him wearing a doctoral mortarboard. It was the man on the wanted list: Chu.

  Chu won some more money at the gambling den. He felt the others were cheating him. He pulled out a gun. No one was frightened. He fired at the sky. Still no one was frightened. He fired at the window. Someone happened to be walking by the window. The bullet hit him in the chest. When the police arrived, Chu had already gotten away.

  These two incidents were added to his record. The police put several detectives on the case.

  Chu fled to T’ai-p’ing Mountain. He hid in the mountain for two weeks. He saw fireworks in the sky. He wanted to celebrate New Year too. He wanted to play some mahjong. He went back to Taipei. During the Spring Festival, every family was playing several games of mahjong. He pretended to have gone by mistake to the wrong house for a New Year’s celebration. He was admitted into a house on Nan-ch’ ang Street. He pretended to be an overseas Chinese just returned and played dominoes with the housewives. He went there for three days. An undercover policeman in the area became suspicious. On the fourth day the policeman recognised him from a photo. They frisked him and found a knife.

  Uncle Ts’ai says that Chu’s mistake after escaping from prison was that he forgot he was a fugitive. He had tried to live like an innocent man, but he just set a deeper trap for himself.

  I say that my situation isn’t the same. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t carry around weapons to murder people with. I don’t go on explaining. I just want him to know the facts and I want to prove to him I can live a normal life outside the attic. But at night I will stay in the attic to hide from house checks.

  Uncle Ts’ai is having a few guests over for a party. I disguise myself as a servant, the kind that is resigned but still proud. I invent a good story. My husband was a government official. I escaped from the mainland to Taiwan with my four children. He is still trapped on the mainland. I am working as a maid to support my four children.

  I hesitate for a long time in the kitchen before I make my entrance to the sitting room. Right now they are discussing the case of a certain Communist spy.

  Three years ago a passenger jet crashed en route to the south of Taiwan from Taipei. All thirty-four passengers died. One of them was an overseas Chinese leader who had gone to Taiwan to talk with government officials about financing an attempt to reconquer the mainland.

  A week earlier, Ying-ying, a singer at the Central Hotel, had disappeared after singing her last song on the programme. It was rumoured that she was caught and shot by the Security Police. She was the leader of a Communist spy ring. The crash was her doing. While accompanying the Chinese leader to the airport, she put a bomb in his luggage. A Mr Yin, who had lived with her for three years, reported her to the Security Agency. After she was shot he died in a car accident.

  The guests are discussing the rumours. What was Ying-ying really? No one could say. They supposed she was a Communist. Then who was Mr Yin? There were several possibilities.

  The first: Mr Yin was a Nationalist spy. The Security Agency sent him to live with Ying-ying. After he reported on Ying-ying’s work as a Communist spy, the Security Agency ran over him with an army jeep to keep him from talking.

  The second: Mr Yin was a Communist spy. Ying-ying had fallen in love with a Nationalist. Mr Yin reported to the Security Agency that Ying-ying had revealed his identity, so he committed suicide by running out in front of a car.

  The third: Mr Yin did not belong either to the Nationalist or the Communist party. He was simply a jealous lover. Ying-ying had another lover, so he reported to the Security Agency that she was a Communist spy. Afterwards, he felt such remorse that he lost his mind. He died in a car wreck.

  There are still other possibilities. No one knows for sure who he really was.

  At that moment I step into the sitting room. Uncle Ts’ai is surprised. It is the first time I have shown myself to so many people at once. I ask him, Sir, when do you wish to eat. He immediately informs the guests that I am Mrs Chiang, just arrived. One of the guests asks me where I’m from. I say Szechuan. We begin to chat.

  I say that my husband, before his death, was deeply in debt. I took my daughter to prison with me and served in his stead. My poor daughter died in prison. When I got out I came to work for the Ts’ais. I say whatever comes to my head with great confidence. It’s completely different from the story I had prepared beforehand.

  He introduces himself to me as Chiang. My name is also Chiang. He says I look familiar. My eyes and eyebrows remind him of his father’s concubine. He says his father died in the war. The concubine became a Buddhist nun.

  I burst out laughing. Mr Chiang, you are really confusing me. Which war are you talking about? The campaign against the warlords, the war of resistance against Japan, or the war between the Nationalists and Communists?

  He doesn’t answer, just stares at me as if in a daze.

  Oh, Mr Chiang, I gesture toward him, don’t stare at me so. If you keep staring at me like that, I’ll turn into a Buddhist nun. If you go on staring at me, I’ll turn into that concubine. Monkey could transform himself eighteen times. I really believe such magic exists.

  All the guests laugh.

  Chiang asks me when I left the mainland.

  April 1949.

  Where on the mainland.

  Peking.

  Chiang claps his hands. He also escaped from Peking in April 1949. Maybe we met on the way.

  I murmur, uh. Was it possible? So many people were trying to escape then. Like ants in a hot frying pan, scurrying in all directions, not knowing which way to turn. I came from Peking, Tientsin, Chi-nan, Wei County, through no man’s land.

  Chiang claps his hands again. That’s right. That’s right. He escaped from Peking, Tientsin, Chi-nan, Wei County through no man’s land.

  Please have a cigarette, I interrupt and offer him a Long Life cigarette.

  I light it for him.

  Uncle Ts’ai says I should win an Oscar for the best performance by an actress. The name of the motion picture is The Woman in the Attic; the role is Mother Chiang.

  I begin a new life. I go out during the day. Back to the attic at night. Uncle Ts’ai gets used to it.

  I am now Uncle Ts’ai’s maid, housekeeper and mistress.

  Chia-kang sleeps twenty hours a day.

  He bitches four hours a day.

  When he isn’t bitching, he masturbates under the covers.

  SANG-WA’S DIARY

  Mama goes out every day to eat people. When they get someone they first smoke him with nice-smelling grasses, then smear pig’s blood over his body and barbecue him. The fire is burning hot. A big fire is burning all around the attic. They want to roast me and eat me, too. I have a way to get out. I draw lots of bird feathers on my flour sack dress. I look pretty in bird clothes. They are down below and laugh when they see the fire in the attic. They say I can’t get out. The attic is on fire. The fire is so hot. I stand in the window and flap my wings at the sky. I turn into a bird. I fly away from the window.

  The sun is so hot and burning. They want to use the sun to roast me and then eat me. I turn
into lots of little bugs and fly in the sky. The little gold spirits in the sky come to help me. They all turn into little bugs flying in the sky and cover up the big sun. The sky becomes dark. The sun goes out. It can’t roast the attic anymore.

  The typhoon is coming. It is raining so hard. They want to hurt the attic with the wind and rain. They’ll turn me into a wet chicken. They want to drink soup with people’s meat in it. I draw a dragon on my flour sack. I wear dragon clothes then turn into a dragon girl. The typhoon breaks the attic window. Rain comes in. When the rain hits me I become a dragon and swim out the window. The more it rains, the happier I am. I give out silver rays as I swim in the sky. They lose again.

  The sun roasts our attic every day. It’s so unfair. I’ll bet it’s the people who eat people who do it. They tie the sun on the roof of the sky. The sun can’t move. The little gold spirits help me. They make a branch come down from the sky. It dances in the window like a snake. I grab the branch and climb up on it and go up into the sky, then cut the rope off. The sun falls down with a boom. It turns into a big ball of fire. The earth catches on fire. The people who eat people all burn up and die. Ha, ha, ha. I laugh up at the sky. I pick up the rope with the sun tied on it and drop it into the sea. The sun goes out. I kick the sun like a rubber ball.