Under Fishbone Clouds
Page 30
As he curled up on the bed, waiting for his daughters to disappear, Jinyi found himself wishing that the factory had not been temporarily boarded up following a Red Guard demonstration against the manager last month, so that he would have somewhere to go, someone to be.
His daughters left the house to spend the day marching through the city and combining violent denunciations with earnest community volunteer work in their own groups of Red Guards and the Red Guard Youth Movement, to which Liqui took her bewildered little sister.
Jinyi waited a little after their departure before heaving himself out of bed and hobbling out into the street. Every step sent erratic shocks through his body, and it took him an hour to walk a few hundred metres, people crossing as he neared them, looking away from his blood-stained jacket, his lumpy pomegranate face. Even the crooked streetlamps, which were installed at every corner two years before and had worked for three weeks before the power shut down, shook heads at him. You should be ashamed of yourself, the bicycle bells pringed and the washing lines sang. I know, he answered. I know.
A quick glance in the hospital waiting room gave Jinyi the suspicion that most of the patients had arrived far too late and were already dead. Only the vivacity of the wounds, the ruddy baked-clay redness of fresh gashes and the plush Martian purples where flesh had been mangled, bruised or crushed, convinced him that the people crowded into the small waiting room were still hanging on. Jinyi surmised that even if life was evidenced by the barely stifled groans escaping from the bodies – as each patient attempted to balance the stoicism expected of good citizens with a desire to make it known that their ailments were in need of more urgent attention than the people around them – the smell of the room was of death. There were three wooden stools and close to thirty people, slumped at the base of walls, leaning, lying or folding themselves into the smallest of free spaces nearest the door to the main hall. Jinyi squeezed in and nudged his way to a corner of wall, to lean and pant with the rest of them. He fished in his pocket – he knew the order of admittance: first those who knew a doctor in some way (a distant relative, a business contact or an old classmate); next, those trading in a favour; then those with a significant-enough gift for the hospital, and finally those like Jinyi who had scrambled together a few mangy grease-stained banknotes to spread across a couple of palms. The walls bore testament to whole days spent waiting and swatting the greedy legions of mosquitoes that swamped the summer.
The queue of patients looped into the closet-sized exam room, and the harassed and chain-smoking doctors made no attempts to lower their voices. Mould blotted one of the windowless walls, fat blotches and abstract shapes in pre-school green.
In the afternoon, Jinyi did a quick headcount of those before him in the makeshift line. The man at the front, limping on a mangled leg, settled onto a stool, coughed into his hand and then said, ‘I had a nasty fall, Doc, must be getting old. Is there anything you can give me for it?’
The women were being sent to the only other spare room; half of the nurses had disappeared and the recent glut of power cuts had left the operating surgery a risky last resort. Jinyi clutched his sides, trying not to groan. He was now second in line, watching the battered man ahead of him lean in close to a young doctor and say, ‘Sorry to trouble you, doctor, but I had a bad fall.’
Jinyi’s turn came with a doctor about his own age, clean-shaven and swapping pen and lit cigarette between his lips as he nodded and scribbled on a pad of cheap lined paper.
‘Good afternoon, doctor. Well, I fell over last night and I’m in a little pain,’ Jinyi said, as quietly as possible.
‘Where?’ the doctor replied wearily, making it clear that he had little interest in the answer.
‘Oh, here. My chest. And my head, a little.’
‘The head is just bruises, perhaps a little concussion. Both are trivial. Now let me see your chest.’ The doctor rose and, tucking his cigarette behind his ear, prodded at Jinyi’s upper body.
‘This hurt? I see. This? Right. You’ve got a couple of rib fractures. Nothing serious. From the sound of your breathing, the jagged edges of the breaks have not punctured your lungs. Count yourself lucky.’
The doctor sat back down and began writing. Jinyi was unsure whether or not this was the end of the consultation, whether or not he should say any more. He wondered what Yuying would do.
‘Is there a cure?’
The doctor stopped writing, and his eyes met Jinyi’s for the first time. ‘Rest, and take plenty of deep breaths.’ He beckoned the next patient. ‘Be thankful that your injuries are so slight: that is the cure.’
Jinyi’s quiet thanks were lost under the inventory of the next man’s symptoms. As he limped through the waiting room, forcing back a cough and all the stabbing tremors that would accompany it, he overheard two men discussing a box that could photograph the inside of a man’s body.
‘They have one here, I swear, hidden away in the basement.’
Jinyi shook his head. People will believe anything. Didn’t they know that this type of talk was dangerous, especially now?
How can one man turn the tides of history? The first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, spent the last decades of his life searching for a way to become immortal. As well as building an immortal terracotta army to replace his soldiers made from less durable flesh, he sent his chief alchemist, along with five hundred boys and five hundred girls, to the seas off the eastern coast to find the Isle of the Immortals. Instead of returning with news of their discovery, the alchemist and his charges are said to have found and populated the islands of Japan. The emperor himself is reported to have died, just like a Ming emperor some thousand years later, from an overdose of mercury, which he drank daily in the belief that its ingestion would stop his body from ageing.
Chairman Mao, however, had found a better way of achieving immortality: through books, badges, banners, posters, newspapers and threats. For a few years after the failure of the Great Leap Forward he had been forced by critics to take a backseat, but soon the need to renew the revolution, to mould the country according to his vision, became overwhelming. He hit upon a plan: he would manipulate the will of the people to purge the Party. After all, he still had his myth – he was the father figure who symbolised a nation’s struggle, the figurehead of revolution istelf.
It had started with a swim in the river. The sexagenarian stripped to his underwear and let his pale stomach sag out as he pottered into the Yangtze River on a spring afternoon in 1966. He managed a light backstroke and a lazy bobbing crawl, later rewritten as a vigorous aqua marathon. A camera crew had been invited, as had reporters for the state-controlled broadsheets. He fought the current, then let it drag him easily back to where he started. After close to five years behind the scenes, allowing others to attempt an economic overhaul to fix his previous spate of bad planning, he had had enough. Enough of the government’s veering to the centre and diluting his policies; enough of the new generation of leaders letting things slip; enough of local bureaucrats using Party membership as a stepping-stone to power and notoriety; but most importantly, enough of hiding in the wings. He nodded to the cameras as he trod water, but did not smile. This swim was to prove that he was still alive and well, was still fighting fit and filled with fire. Within months of his dip the newspapers were crammed with Mao’s speeches and proclamations calling for young people to form groups of Red Guards, to criticise the failings of the old ways, to rise up and fight to make the socialist utopia a reality.
After the schools had closed, Manxin and her siblings had joined various Red Guard groups. This is real education, they were told, not something silly from stuffy old textbooks. Dali held out as long as he could when the groups were being established, but the sheer sway of the phrase ‘You are either with us or against us!’ and the mathematics behind it soon convinced him of the necessity to manufacture an outward veneer of commitment to the new cause.
‘Unite and arise! Unite and arise! Forever forward with the revolution!’
‘Dare to struggle! Dare to win!’
There were around thirty teenagers in lines of four or five, thirty peaked caps bobbing as they pushed forward, thirty medals glinting with the silver visage of the Chairman.
‘Smash the counter-revolutionaries!’
‘Rise up and join the class struggle!’
‘Destroy the old to create the new!’
At the front was a middle-aged woman, with frazzled grey hairs escaping from her tight bun as she was pushed forward by a straggle of competing hands. She had a sandwich board of neatly written criticisms strapped over her shoulders, and was doing her best to keep her eyes to the floor. Her mouth was a muddle of blood and burning holes where her teeth had been wrenched out. It had turned her face into a leer. She was a shopkeeper known for taking bribes and saving the best wares for special customers. That day’s parade was in her honour. She was shoved forward, and tripped, the sandwich board knocking against her chest and sweat squelching in her armpits, dribbling down the inside of her jacket.
‘If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? The People must rebel. Find the traitors and rip their skin off, smash their skulls!’
Their group was called the Scarlet Guards, while Dali belonged to the Young Red Soldiers. Each rival faction sewed their names onto their armbands, and avoided contact with others, believing that theirs was the better way to uphold revolution.
Manxin caught her friend stealing a glance at a lanky boy with the first faint wisps of a moustache under his bulbous nose, and nudged her arm.
‘Come on, Liuliu!’ she whispered from the corner of her mouth. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to Chunhua?’
Liuliu nodded and turned back to face the front, adding her voice to the call and response of the catechisms from the Little Red Book.
Yet the truth was that neither of them was sure of what had actually happened to their classmate, Chunhua. The rumours were constant and contradictory, though they agreed on the following points: too many late night-strategy meetings between herself and the leader of the local group she had joined (the Red Youth); an envious cousin who alerted her family to a stick of red lipstick hidden among Chunhua’s books; the subsequent shame of the family and the disappearance of the girl herself. Muttered speculation suggested that she was now wading through back-breaking paddies in a province so far south that, in the summer, a thousand flies flitted under your clothes, seeking respite from the merciless sun.
As they marched through the residential areas, the families doing their washing in metal tubs on the pavement and the old men discussing imaginary pasts slipped into their houses. Doors were pulled to as subtly as possible, and crumpled wet sheets were left clumped in cooling water. Even half a year ago the procession would have expected to be confronted by an irate citizen, a local cadre worried about things getting out of hand or a begging apologist for the person being humiliated. However, having learnt that this only made them next on the list of capitalists, traitors and rightists to be denounced, people had begun accepting these marches as everyday occurrences.
Most people had few friends now anyway; with petty rivalries quickly spilling into official criticisms, it was difficult to find anyone to trust. Even the toothless shopkeeper’s family had stayed away, shunning her and the dishonour that contact with her might have brought. The world was finally beginning to see sense, the Red Guards told each other with slaps on backs.
Jinyi woke with aches knotting his body. He forced himself up, to find that his daughters had prepared shivering piles of tofu for him. It tasted of the first times they had called him Pa. He remembered when they were just gurgling and giggling and he had first announced his new name – ‘Pa’s home’ or ‘It’s all right, Pa’s here’ – savouring the short plump syllable, the glow of his new role at the centre of a little universe. He tried his best to nurture the memory, to make it last, before the present forced its way in.
He thought of the promise he and Yuying had made, that they would never be apart again. Jinyi had been counting the days since her disappearance. He would keep counting. He flinched as the door swung open.
‘I heard a great speech today, Pa,’ Liqui said to break the silence as the four of them sat around the clay kang, which now doubled as their dining table. ‘It won’t be long till everything is turned over, and everything will be fair. Isn’t that great? By the time Ma comes home everything will be better.’
Jinyi nodded pensively. ‘She’ll be happy to see our dreams come to life.’
‘Not just dreams, Pa,’ Manxin said. ‘Liqui is right. We’ve got a real chance now, with all the local leaders getting active, and no imperialists like Liu Shaoqi left in the government to stop us. The whole world is going to be looking at us, and following our example.’
‘I know. I only meant that it is important to be patient,’ he mumbled.
‘The time has run out for patience. Your generation sat around waiting for the world to be changed for them, and people Granny Dumpling’s age still remember being waited on hand and foot and deferring to corrupt emperors and relatives. It’s up to us now.’
Manxin was addressing her sisters, who followed her words carefully, while their father picked awkwardly at the dish. Her short pigtails swung out around her cheeks as she spoke, her cap set down in front of her. ‘Look at our dinner for a start. Only five years ago we would have had nothing but broth and stale husks, if we were lucky, and would have felt too guilty to eat them with all the news about hard-working peasants starving only a few communes away. But now we’ve got enough – now everyone is beginning to get their fair share.’
Jinyi nodded. His left ear was ringing, a dialtone buzz. It is strange how children remember things, he thought. They didn’t feel guilty back then: oh no, they ate till there was nothing left and then whinged and moaned and cried and sulked and stamped their feet. But then, he surmised, the past is even easier to change than the present. He thought of all the little treats: the sugar-coated crab apples and trips to the People’s Zoo, the homemade kite and the handcrafted holiday dumplings, the help with homework and comfort through countless nightmares, and the only thing they seem to remember from those early years was the time he had got angry and cuffed them round the head with the back of his hand. Jinyi shook his head. He could not even remember why he had got so upset.
‘What about you, Xiaojing?’ he said, trying to change the subject. ‘What did you learn today?’
Xiaojing waited a second before she spoke, and puffed out her chest, her short hair rowdy and electrified. She had taken to telling everyone she met that she was five, as if she had already raced through the next four months in her head and arrived there early. ‘Me and Weiwei and Shuxi learnt about the hardships of peasant life from some sheep people.’
Jinyi smiled. She had obviously spent a long time carefully memorising that phrase. ‘I see. Sheep people, yes, let me remember, they’re the ones with human heads and furry bodies and little hooves, right?’
Xiaojing was not impressed. ‘No, Pa. They’re dirty men with sheep. They smell funny.’
Jinyi and Liqui laughed, but Manxin scowled. ‘They’re called shepherds. And they are not dirty, they just don’t have the opportunities for hygiene that you are so lucky to have. They are noble, honest, warm-spirited people, just like all peasants.’
‘So what did you learn about their hardships?’ Jinyi asked his youngest daughter.
Xiaojing ruffled her nose. ‘Sheep are dirty!’
Before Manxin could step in again to correct her sister, the main door creaked open, and they all turned to see Dali slinking in. His eyes were trained on the ground in front of him,
and his short, scrawny body was caked in mud – it had dried in streaks across his dark jacket, clumps of dusty earth dropping from his cap as he squeezed it in his hands. Though at first he simply picked his way between the debris and mess that had been carefully brushed into neat piles by his sisters, he soon stopped and looked around at the main room, noticing the absence of the table and chairs as well as the shelves and everything on them, the scrolls and all the usual knick-knacks, and he tilted his head as a dog might when confronted with a punishment it cannot comprehend.
Jinyi did everything he could to resist the urge to ask his son where he had been for the last twenty-four hours. Finally he said what he thought his wife, had she been there, might have said. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have something to eat, Dali? You must be hungry.’
Dali shrugged, but crossed into the bedroom and sat down beside them on the wooden bed anyway. For ten minutes they ate in silence, mouths slurping and chopsticks snipping at the dwindling dish, padded out with small clumps of overcooked rice.
‘You look like a shepherd!’ Xiaojing said, keen to try out the new word.
‘Thanks. This is how we’re all supposed to look now, isn’t it?’ Dali replied, brushing dirt from his shoulder onto the sheets.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll confuse her,’ Manxin said.
‘No, I’m serious.’ He set down his chopsticks and looked at the rest of them. He was still shy and awkward, but with a gangly kind of grace that both surprised and unnerved his family. His lack of height was intensified by the way he hugged his shoulders into his chest, while even his prickly eyebrows skulked so close together that the gravity of his face seemed to shift downwards.