Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘I swear, I am being honest. There are no riches: my wife’s father was wealthy, I admit, but he squandered his money just like the rest of those filthy bourgeois, without a care for anyone else. But that was before I joined the family,’ Jinyi said.

  ‘And I bet that annoyed you, didn’t it? Because you did all that work, sucking up to the rich, kissing arse – yes sir, no sir, of course sir – to wheedle your way into a bourgeois family, only to find that you weren’t going to be as rich as you thought you were going to be. Yes, Comrade Yangchen told us everything. You must have craved wealth pretty badly, to give up your home, your family, your noble peasant’s way of life, even your name, all to get your hands on a little gold. What kind of man are you?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. Before the Chairman and the great revolution, life was difficult, it was unfair. I had to leave the countryside because of the landlords and the corruption, so –’

  ‘That is no excuse. Members of the Party were risking their lives at that time, for all of us. Why didn’t you join up if life was so hard for you?’

  ‘I, well, I wasn’t sure how to. Who could I ask? If I went up to someone on the street and said, “Are you a Communist?” they might have attacked me, or else suspected me of being a Nationalist spy.’

  Jinyi’s mind was rushing forward, trying to stay a few steps ahead of his mouth. Yet he was painfully aware that his words sounded less believable out loud than when he had practised them in his head.

  ‘There’s nothing in any of these.’ This time one of the girls spoke, turning to the leader from the pile of boxes and cupboards in the corner. As she turned, a single plait whipped across her shoulder, hanging limply from her cap. Two beady, blinking eyes stared out from her equine face, searching for further instructions.

  Jinyi knew what they were looking for. Only last year Mao had announced that although the bourgeois had been defeated in the revolution, their ideas had not. Books, antiques, portraits, poetry; anything that looked suspiciously like the culture of imperial China was not to be trusted. Like most families in the neighbourhood, Jinyi had, at that time, gathered together all their books, old paper banknotes, photos and relics from the restaurant era, vaguely colourful clothes and whole generations of school notebooks. He had stuffed these down his trousers and tucked them under his jacket and had then walked with a false, play-acted calm through the busy alleyways until he had reached the bonfire outside the university where two teachers had been killed and twelve others hospitalised the week before.

  The leader seemed to have read his mind. ‘Of course there isn’t. They may be bourgeois, but they aren’t completely stupid. They probably destroyed anything they shouldn’t have. They’re sneaky, crafty, liars, the lot of them. You should know that, Comrade Weiwei.’

  ‘Yes, Comrade.’ Weiwei returned to the group which now encircled the table where Jinyi was sitting, his hands folded in front of him.

  ‘Listen, Comrade.’ Jinyi knew this was a dangerous tactic, speaking directly to them, but he was worried that their contempt for his wrinkles and grey tufts, his forty-something years lived without revolutionary activity, would soon brim over, and he felt he had to do anything he could to try and placate them.

  ‘When I was born, there was nothing but struggle. We didn’t call it class struggle then, but we did everything we could to survive. Struggled to eat, struggled to live. Struggled not to get shot by the Japanese. I didn’t have my own pair of shoes until I was almost thirty, and a married man.

  ‘Listen, I even stole, only ever from the rich though, you understand: a bit of bread in a mansion’s window or swiped from the kitchen of a posh restaurant. Life was bought and sold, and so was my marriage. It wasn’t done for my benefit, let me tell you – Old Bian already controlled an empire of restaurants, and I was just someone he could boss around. It was as simple as that: he gave an order, and you did something. There was no other choice back then: he was one of the most powerful people in the city, and if I wanted to work or eat or even take a shit in this city again then I had to do as he said.

  ‘Comrade, I am grateful for the revolution. It’s made this country fair, and I thank Chairman Mao every day that things are different for my children, for my brothers in the fields, for my comrades in the countryside. But I am an honourable man, and I got married, and there’s no turning back from that.’

  The leader shook his head. Jinyi felt his mouth fill with saliva, the sour taste of jittery nerves.

  ‘Honour, uncle, is serving your country, is helping your comrades, is fighting for the revolution. You’re just a typical rightist.’

  Jinyi became aware of a drop of sweat snaking into his eyebrow, and resisted the urge to wipe it away. A rightist. There, it had been said, and it could not be taken back. They had labelled him, and with one stroke repainted his skin, resculpted his life into something he could not quite recognise.

  The other boy, bug-eyed and pudgy, then took a turn to speak. ‘Why is it that you turned your back on your country, on your comrades? Your generation had the chance to change the world, and you failed.’ He spat, a large gob of yellowy jelly.

  Jinyi was unsure whether they were really trying to fathom his life or were simply toying with him, enjoying the build-up before the real action began. He let his eyes run over each of them in turn.

  And in a flash Jinyi began to understand the enraged hunger in their eyes: he had been the same when he was young, wanting to redraw the boundaries between knowledge and possibility. Yet they truly believed they possessed the ability to split the world into black and white, to take this bulging, rippling, monstrously overgrown country and hold it in the palms of their hands, to strip down millennia of formalities and rituals into a list of rules that could be flexed by a fist.

  ‘Well, what’s your answer, Comrade?’ the leader leaned forward and hissed through the gap where his front teeth should have been.

  ‘Why did you neglect the Party, turn your cowardly back on revolution and class struggle when others like you were on the front line? Tell us,’ and here he allowed himself a smile, ‘what you really think of the Chairman.’

  Jinyi tried to remember when the whole mess had started. Was it on the day the furnaces were shut down amid the famine, the day mistakes were first admitted? Was it in the middle of the previous summer, in 1966, when the newspapers announced that all rightists, intellectuals, nationalists and imperialists (among others) had to be purged? Was it when the Cultural Revolution Group of the national government had decreed, ‘The proletariat must continue the struggle, must change the very minds of society, must criticise and crush and destroy those following the capitalist road, those teachers, artists, bureaucrats, intellectuals and all others weakening the foundations of the revolution’? Or was it the day Jinyi’s stomach gave in to the new climate of fear and left him sprinting urgently to the fetid public toilet six or seven times a day?

  No. It had begun earlier than that. Jinyi remembered the day when the plague of locusts and flies and mosquitoes descended from the mountains and took over the fields on the outskirts of the city. A huge black whirring buzz had swept over the houses, a fog of flitting insects storming in through every crack or gap in the walls. That must have been a message from the gods, he thought, a warning of dark times coming.

  Jinyi’s skin itched just remembering the days when he could not open his mouth to speak without insects diving in. The government had previously declared that sparrows were to be considered an enemy of the people, since they were responsible for the great famine. Everyone was encouraged to drive them away with sticks and spades, to beat pots and woks to keep them in perpetual flight so that they would die of exhaustion. It was only a few months after the order that the cloud of insects had covered the country with their colossal shadow.

  As the leader lunged and shoved Jinyi’s chair to the floor, Jinyi listened out for sounds of movement in the bedroom; even as his knee hammered into the bare floor and his hands scraped out to support his fall, half h
is attention was trained on making out his daughters’ voices through the thin walls. His leg sung with a throbbing pain, and he pushed up onto his hands and knees, hoping they were still asleep or, even if they heard the sudden thump, that they had the sense to keep quiet.

  ‘You’ve had your last chance, so why don’t you just admit what you’ve done? Hand over the money and it can go where it belongs, to the people whose backs were broken while the family you were sucking up to were getting rich off their misery.’

  ‘If they still had some,’ Jinyi said, trying to pick up both the chair and himself in a manner that would not offend the uniformed teenagers, ‘then they never told me.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’ve been married for what, nearly twenty years? Even if we are to believe your flimsy excuses about being made to marry – which I must admit, uncle, don’t impress me – then you can’t also expect us to believe that you didn’t get your hands on anything you could. Rightists are always thinking about themselves.’ The leader pronounced the last sentence to the others as if it were a profound truth that he was deigning to share with them.

  Jinyi felt the sting spreading through his cheek. It was nothing compared to the pain that squeezed his chest every time he thought about where his wife might be. Yuying, he muttered under his breath, as though her name was a prayer.

  ‘He’s lying. Comrade Yangchen told us he would. It must be hidden somewhere,’ the tall girl added.

  ‘Perhaps his wife took it all,’ the chubby boy said. ‘She was a traitor after all.’

  The leader nodded.

  Jinyi weighed the idea up. What would she do, if she were here? Anything to protect her children, he thought. ‘Yes, my wife –’

  ‘Your wife! Your wife is a dog, a fucking whore. That’s right: a whore. A traitor.’ The leader was now really beginning to enjoy himself, and his curled lip suddenly reminded Jinyi of the dumpy-legged pure-breeds that guarded the mansions before the revolution, letting loose low rumbling growls if you even so much as thought of walking on the same side of the street as their masters’ lavish homes.

  ‘Yes. She learnt Japanese, that’s true, and stowed away money, but I thought she would change, what with a new husband, and a new China to believe in. All the rest, though, the stuff that came out in the public denunciation, I knew nothing about it, I swear.’

  As soon as the words left his mouth, Jinyi felt sick. He imagined her standing beside him, asking in sobs why he had buried her name in lies.

  ‘A good husband would have kept his wife in line. Chairman Mao has told us to protect the interests of women and children – but sometimes people need to be protected from themselves. Sometimes people need to be taught right from wrong.’

  The leader stretched his hand above Jinyi’s face, holding out his pristine fingers, free from the burns, blisters and calluses of Jinyi’s own. ‘You do know how to use one of these, don’t you, uncle?’

  Jinyi nodded tentatively, trying his best not to cower. ‘But I –’

  ‘Perhaps you need some help. Let me remind you.’

  The leader swung it suddenly down, the smack of knuckles sending Jinyi’s head reeling back.

  The chubby boy looked at the shorter of the two girls, whose nervous hands were worrying her plait. ‘Remember,’ he whispered across to her, quoting from the book, ‘to be rid of the gun, it is necessary to first take up the gun.’

  Jinyi forced himself to speak through the smarting pain spreading below his eye. ‘You’re right, of course, you’re right. But listen, I’ve always been treated like a servant here – people would stop talking when I entered the room, they’d whisper about me behind my back. I’m just a peasant trying to look after his family in the city, that’s all.’ Jinyi was starting to stutter. ‘The revolution saved my life, made me equal, and I will be grateful forever. And, and, I am a … er … a good citizen: I help others at the factory … I always eat less at the food halls … I have never once doubted the wisdom of the Party. That’s the truth.’

  ‘After all the chances we’ve given you to confess, uncle, why do you have to lie to us? You’ve had a hundred chances to help your country, and you turned your nose up at all of them, just like you are turning your nose up now. All you had to do was admit your failings – admit you’ve let the country down, let the revolution down, let your comrades down.’ The leader’s voice was straining, reaching towards a pitch that the stars of Beijing opera, in the days before all the theatres were burnt down, would have been proud of.

  ‘Is it that you hate your country or just the people in it? You’re no peasant – you’re a traitor!’

  The leader gripped the edge of the wooden table, and shoved it over. It hit the floor with the noise of a phonograph needle ripping across a record, jumping scratchily from a familiar tune to yelps of fuzzy feedback and violins played with teeth: the sound of the future. As the teapot and unwashed dinner bowls and tea cups smashed, as chaos was unloosed and Jinyi lost all sense of time amidst the boots and – he thanked his luck – battered plimsolls that thudded into him until he was nothing but a jangling bag of joggled bruises and broken bones, as the leader shouted, ‘The Chairman is the burning sun in our hearts!’ and those of the group not spitting at, kicking, stamping on or throwing things at Comrade Hou Jinyi began tearing down the shelves and crushing everything on them under their feet, amidst all of that, Jinyi closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his wife.

  Stepping back from the fury of their companions’ feet, the two girls pulled open the cupboards and drawers before smashing these too to the floor.

  Yuying’s reading glasses were stomped on; ornamental chopsticks emblazoned with a pair of cranes, a wedding gift, were snapped in two; letters were torn up; bowls smashed; the chunky radio (a gift from Granny Dumpling) thrown against the wall; photos flung from albums; ink sticks broken.

  Jinyi sank under the welts, bruises, cuts, breaks, blows; his mind slipped in and out of the room.

  The sun slunk under the door, shyly nudging up to the bloody body curled amidst the broken wood and shards of china.

  ‘Manxin?’ Jinyi called hoarsely. Yet he found his voice was a low groan that would not reach the bedroom. With one eye half open, one swollen shut, he looked about the mess of the room. The Red Guards were gone. He had a mouth full of loose teeth, the copper taste of blood buzzing about his tongue.

  ‘Liqui?’ When he drew breath, his chest rattled, the curved bones wringing out his lungs. This must be why they call it a cage, he thought. He pulled his legs up beside him, lying where they had left him beside the broken tabletop, and waited.

  His daughters were awake on the other side of the door, their hands clutched together under the sweaty bedsheet, though their eyes remained squeezed shut in the topsy-turvy logic of fear that convinced them that anyone searching the room would then quickly retrace their steps for fear of waking three sleeping girls. They had stayed that way until dawn, blotting out their father’s groans, just audible despite the girls’ combined heavy breathing, not daring to leave the room even though the yelps and scuffles and clattering smashes had stopped some time ago.

  While he lay curled on the concrete floor, Jinyi counted the times in the last months when he had heard his son in the night, lying face down and muffling the quiet wheezy sobs with his sheet, thinking everyone else was asleep. More than his wounds or bruises, Jinyi thought of where Dali might be, and when he would return home.

  ‘Aiya! Pa! Are you all right?’ Manxin had ventured out of the bedroom with the buttery sunrise. She did not wait for him to respond before continuing, ‘Let’s get you up, then. Here we go.’

  Manxin and Liqui, her long plait bobbing around her red eyes, managed to pull Jinyi’s slouching body to the next room and help him up onto the still-warm kang.

  ‘Thank you.’ Jinyi reached an arm out for his skinny middle daughter. ‘That was quite a fall I had,’ he said, and tried a smile. It came out as a mess of burgundy gums, and was met with silence.

  The two older
girls began cleaning the main room, neither of them daring to refer to the night’s events. Instead they would clean and mend and sweep and bin and hope until the room had been rearranged to exclude the past. Little Xiaojing moved towards the bottom of the bed and, despite her fear and confusion, was soon asleep.

  Jinyi lay there, letting the room swim around him, until he could no longer bear it.

  ‘Girls,’ he called weakly. The two of them gathered round the bed, handing their father warm water but not looking him in the eye. Manxin was stocky and almost assured, Liqui lithe and fidgety. ‘I think I should go to the hospital. I know you’re busy, but can one of you help me?’

  They exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps if you get some rest you’ll feel better later, Pa,’ Manxin said.

  Had they heard him talking about their mother? Did they think he had betrayed them? He wanted to say that he did it for them, so that he could stay and keep them safe – their mother had already been sent away, but there was still a chance for the rest of them. Two parents with bad names, two adults sent to the countryside, where would that get them? But he did not say any of that.

  ‘Are you hungry? A good meal and you’ll soon be feeling all right,’ Manxin continued.

  ‘No, no, you’re right, I just need a good rest.’ Jinyi turned away onto his side, suppressing a groan as the pain coiled and juddered like broken springs in his chest. His daughters were too afraid to take him out, to admit the truth of what had happened. They were ashamed of him. He could not blame them. He was ashamed of himself.