Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  It was at times like these that Jinyi did all he could to try not to think about Yuying and their children, to stop himself wondering whether he had let them all down, utterly, completely. The words of their promise echoed around his head. That’s the peculiar thing about mortals, if you ask me – stick them in the shittiest place on earth, make their lives a misery, and instead of trying to cheer themselves up they’ll go out of their way to make themselves feel even worse.

  To calm himself Jinyi clung to his own logic: China is such a vast country, he reasoned, that everything that happens probably has a counterpoint or alternative in another town in another province. If I am suffering here, then others must be happy and content. If I am hungry, somewhere else others must be stuffed full. If I am cold, others must be warm. What other reasoning could there be for sending so many city people to the fields, for showing them the obverse of their lives, if not to prove this syllogism of opposites? For each and every action there must be an opposite action occurring in another place. If it is hell here, he thought, then that only proves that somewhere else might be heaven … please let it be where my wife is, where my children are.

  ‘He’s got a pulse. And I think he’s still breathing,’ Jinyi reported, though none of the villagers seemed interested.

  ‘Then we wait,’ the old man replied. The sun was bubbling under the line of houses at the top of the slope, the frost bristling and itching for another night in which it would consolidate its two-pronged attack, inching further down the hill and climbing further up the cracked walls.

  People spend their lives waiting for things that never happen. This, though, was inevitable. Jinyi wondered how Turkey had known what to call the sudden spasm and collapse; he himself had heard the phrase ‘heart attack’ before, and knew what it entailed. In another century, he mused as the four villagers bent close and muttered amongst themselves, we might still have believed in the terrible fiction that there is no end – then I might have whispered in his ear, told him who to look out for. My parents, my aunt, my father-in-law, my two small sons; the corpse I saw on a dirty track somewhere between my youth and my marriage; the dead man whose face I shaved when I was still a teenager; half my friends now, gone or as good as. Better this way, though, better to keep them as memories, nothing more. You can keep memories safe, even if you cannot always control them.

  ‘Shouldn’t we try to do something?’ Jinyi finally snapped, interrupting the low murmurs of the villagers.

  They stopped talking to stare at him. Finally the old man reached over and cuffed him round the ear. Jinyi bit his lip till he drew blood, not wanting to enflame the situation, knowing he would be blamed for whatever happened since his name was already tarnished.

  ‘You’re here for an education, right? Well, listen up. We don’t tolerate any of that intellectual crap round here. You ought to know that by now. Raising the dead, that’s beyond even the power of the great Chairman, so it certainly can’t be done by the likes of you.’ The old man paused to hock up what sounded like a larynx full of flotsam, and spat out the ball of sticky phlegm with a look of satisfaction. ‘Magic. Immortality. Those stories are dangerous, young man. Best to just keep your mouth shut.’

  They sat in silence, Jinyi’s ear reddening in the dusk chill. It was hard to tell exactly when Lard died, to measure out the last of the spasms, tremors and gases that the limp body expelled, to record the moment when the heart shuddered down to the slow closing beats of an ellipsis at the end of a sentence. They checked and rechecked, pressing ears to the fat man’s lips and chest, until they were finally satisfied and the sour smell of death and loosened bowels assailed them, at which point they rose and shook themselves off – come on, time for bed, busy day tomorrow. Jinyi held back and, when the others were not looking, rearranged the dead man’s hair into something resembling a side parting, then folded his pale hands across his defeated chest.

  And if you are wondering what we gods know about death, then I am afraid I cannot tell you. I get different reports all the time, and, frankly, none are trustworthy. My own experience was of waking up and finding myself transformed into a god – this, however, is a rare occurrence and probably should not be expected by the majority of people – I do not want to be responsible for any false hope. My department has always been responsible for watching, studying and reporting, and owing to the intense rivalries between departments up here, it is hard to know what is currently happening in other, more shadowy areas. Let me just say this: life, in all its manifest forms, is complicated – why should death be any simpler?

  Lard’s dead eyes stared out from the hastily constructed funeral pyre the next day; strips of wood and scraps of hacked-down evergreen formed a squat bed for the impressive girth of the dead rightist. Despite not wanting to waste a day when more important jobs could be attended to, the locals had been cajoled down to the valley by the cadre and stood with their arms folded while he made a speech. Jinyi, Turkey, Bo, and the twenty others sent from distant worlds for their spirits to be stripped away and remolded, hung their heads, each aware that it might be them next.

  The cadre cleared his throat. It was current practice for the Party to pass judgment on a person’s life after their death, and this was exactly what he intended to do, despite not only knowing nothing about the man’s life prior to his arrival in the village seven months ago, but also not remembering his real name.

  ‘Our comrade here has reminded us of the work we still need to do. Everywhere are imperialists, capitalists, intellectuals, followers of Liu Shaoqi. Together we can strike them down; we can change their polluted minds and set their hearts aflame with the spirit of Mao Zedong Thought. Dare to criticise, dare to fight! Though there are many men like him, clinging to the old and corrupt world, together we can kindle the flames of this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and transform the whole of society, the whole of our mighty country. The toll of revolution is blood and sacrifice. Each of us must work harder, do more, strive and steel ourselves – or die.’

  The cadre cleared his throat once more, and pulled out a polished silver lighter, embellished with a picture of Chairman Mao, rays of light jetting out from behind his moon-shaped face. He clicked it once, twice, three times and, sparking a flame, crouched to start the fire. As his flesh began to crackle and brown, Lard became one of the lost and forgotten.

  It is difficult to estimate how many people disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, how many never made it back home. The number would have to include not only the first wave of the bourgeois, rightists, moderates, intellectuals, writers, artists, Soviet-followers, actors and politicians who had in some way aroused the envy or petty jealousy of Jiang Qing (Mao’s second wife), and even Party members themselves who dared criticise the government, but also the second wave of teachers, businessmen, doctors and professionals, and finally the third wave consisting of the Red Guards themselves, finally deemed too dangerous to be allowed to form large networks and therefore dispersed to the countryside to embark on an alternative schooling. Countless numbers fell prey to dysentery, diarrhoea, flu, tetanus, TB, malaria and other germs they were not used to; heart failure, malnutrition, scurvy, broken bones, torn ligaments, sustained violence, strokes, epilepsy, breakdown, rape and suicide claimed countless more. Take Yuying’s youngest sister, Chunxiang. On that very same day she collapsed in a field in Anhui, broken by sunstroke and the memory of having been raped and beaten by boys young enough to be her children. It is not known how many hundreds of thousands never found their way home from the blind spots of the map, for the majority of those who did survive the Cultural Revolution wished never again to speak of those bitter years.

  At every turn, survival seemed to demand a suspension of rationality. I am reminded of Zhuxi, a renowned philosopher during the Song dynasty. Seeing his fellow philosophers and teachers worshipping the spirits of their ancestors, he came upon an idea: it is not for others, even the dead, that we cling to these primitive beliefs, but for ourselves. These spirits, he
argued, do not exist; the practice of worshipping them, however, is important, as it forms an elaborate act of remembrance, a collective recognition of the unstoppable tide of history in which we struggle to swim. We make ourselves believe what we cannot fathom.

  Legend has it that, late one night after returning from his work as a government official, Zhuxi sat down to write out these ideas, but as he picked up his ink brush a breeze blew out his candle. He relit the candle and rubbed the ink stick in a thin dish of water, yet as soon as he brought the darkened tip of the brush to the crinkled paper, the candle blew out once again. Zhuxi called for his servant, but no one came. As he reached down to light his candle one last time, he heard a low moaning sound, and the shuffle of feet.

  When he looked up, Zhuxi was characteristically unimpressed. Though the apparition in his room appeared to be a skeleton, with reels of flayed skin and rungs of muscle hanging from the exposed bones, with red eyes staring from a misshapen, bearded head, Zhuxi, as a politician, was used to the impossible happening.

  ‘Good evening, honourable Master Zhuxi. Your peerless learning and incomparable scholarship is renowned even in the next world. Please accept the greetings of the Lord of Ghosts.’

  With that the apparition bowed to the seated philosopher. However, Zhuxi was also used to dealing with sycophants. He raised an eyebrow and said impatiently, ‘I see. What business do you have here?’

  ‘I have come to beseech you, on behalf of my people, not to write this tract,’ the ghost replied hesitantly, before making another awkward bow.

  ‘Why would you wish to do that?’ Zhuxi asked.

  ‘As I said, your wisdom is without equal, and your opinion is respected above all others throughout the country. If you were to prove that ghosts do not exist, then no one would doubt it,’ the ghost stuttered.

  ‘And this would inconvenience you, perhaps?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, we are not sure what would happen to us. What becomes of you if no one believes in your existence? Perhaps we will fade away completely, consumed by the ether. Perhaps our voices will disappear, our bodies too, while only our thoughts and memories remain. Perhaps our entreaties to the human world will only be met with laughter and mockery. I cannot say. But I beg you not to write that we do not exist.’

  Zhuxi considered the question for a few minutes, but the ghost began to grow impatient.

  ‘Watch!’ he cried, and shook his bony hands. They both suddenly found themselves standing outside, on the mountain that overlooked Zhuxi’s house, a lone red lantern on the porch stirring the darkness of the valley. ‘See. Our powers are great, beyond even your great knowledge.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that. But we are of different worlds, the yin of day and the yang of night, and our knowledge itself is defined by its boundaries,’ Zhuxi argued.

  ‘That is true. We are shadows that speak, glimpses in mirrors, possibilities not yet considered. That is why you must not destroy us.’

  ‘You have transported us from my house in an instant. Tell me this: can you transport my heart from my body, that I might understand the workings of my own life?’

  The ghost shook his misshapen head. ‘Even we are bound by certain laws.’

  ‘Then there is hope for you yet, for everything must take its place in the great principles of nature, of which we yet know so little. Take me home, sir.’

  Suddenly they were back in the dimly lit study. The ghost smiled, put his blood-stained finger to the candle and watched it leap into flame. When Zhuxi looked up from the jittery light, the apparition had disappeared.

  He stirred the ink, flicked at it with the tip of his brush, then began to bite the slim wooden end as he turned over his thoughts. Finally, he began his essay: ‘If you believe in something, it will be. If you do not, then it will not.’

  If a whole country believed that it could rip apart four thousand years of history in an instant and begin again, then who could stop it? Temples were smashed down to splinters and firewood, mansions burnt to the ground, parents turned in by their own children. We do this not for yesterday or even for tomorrow, we do it for today, they chanted as they booted the bleeding heads of capitalist dogs; they screamed and shouted as millions of teenagers in identical shirts and caps lined up in Tiananmen Square, wetting themselves for a glimpse of an old man waving his short, dumpy hands from a shaky podium.

  Yuying had been contemplating the same undulating wave of bracken for longer than she could remember. Each year she grew stronger, feeding on her experiences, scrubbing away some of the taint of her bourgeois past. She believed, in her heart, that she was becoming a better citizen, and this lessened the feeling of homesickness and the worries for her children far more than she had expected when she first arrived. They would be safe, because they were together. It was her husband she saw every time she closed her eyes, mouthing a promise again and again. She tried to push him to the back of her mind. She could not.

  She bent over in the field, tugging up vegetables by the roots just as she had done when staying with her husband’s aunt and uncle, and she felt the mistakes of the past slowly being shed. She found herself absentmindedly keeping one eye on the track that descended past the fields towards one of the offshooting tributaries of the Yangtze, arching like a half-moon around the village, marking the boundary they were not allowed to cross. If she blotted out everything else she could hear its rush, the terrible force of the places it had surged through.

  Yuying stooped, picked up the crammed-full wicker bag and hoisted it onto her back, then shambled carefully between the rows of carrots. Who was she now? The question rolled around and around her head, picking away at her certainties. The sum of her parents, sisters, husband, children? She found solace in the vastness of the landscape, the horizon line of flat fields and bracken broken only by the squat wooden houses and the occasional truck or horse-cart plodding down the slim, stony road to the east. It rendered her small, her past negligible. She gave in to it, let it take her over and remould her for whatever tasks the future might ask.

  They were ascetics there, she had convinced herself, looking into the calm eye of duty, stripping away the self until only the country and all its mercies remained. At night, sitting around a fire in the small village square, the women reminded each other how they were changing the world for the better, and sang songs approved by the cadres. This was how it should be, this was the meaning of her life: she understood that now.

  She let the bag slip down her aching back to the floor of the storeroom, then tipped the contents out for inspection.

  ‘Bian Yuying, that is enough for today. Well done, you have been doing well. You may return to your room,’ Comrade Hong said as he glanced over the scattering of carrots. His voice was clipped, his mannerisms shaky and measured, especially when compared to the gruffness of the second cadre, Comrade Lu. He waved an effete hand towards the door, his pencil moustache twitching above his tiny, pursed lips.

  Yuying looked out at the pink glow where the clouds dissolved at the edge of the sky; there was still at least an hour of workable light. ‘I am happy to keep working, comrade. I want to do my fair share.’

  ‘Of course, we all want to do our best for the revolution. But haven’t you heard that your daughter has come to visit you? We must remember, Bian, that sometimes we must let our hearts have reign.’ Comrade Hong was beginning to warm to the sound of his own voice, to his chosen sermon. ‘It is, after all, our hearts that store the words and honourable example of Chairman Mao, and it is our hearts that stir for a better world. If we ignored our hearts, we would be like the Americans or the English, loving money and caring only for capital. Go and see your daughter, and be sure that the revolutionary zeal is burning in her heart too. I am sure she has travelled a long way.’

  Yuying was dumbstruck: why would her daughter be here? Panic fluttered up through her stomach, but she pushed it back. She trod around the borders of the plots, then skirted round the back walls of the lines of houses, where old men and
women were already out and tossing rice in large trays, separating the grain from the stalk. The lazy flicks of their wrists sent the grain dancing over the trays; as it jumped and fell she thought of rain and the footsteps of quick mice, the lightest of timpani, the music of sunset and hunger.

  ‘Ma! Hey! Ma!’ Yuying turned the side of a house to see her middle daughter standing awkwardly beside the stopped supplies van. Liqui’s face was painted with a mixture of sweat and dust, stray hairs leaping out electrically from the confines of her long plait. She was thinner than her mother remembered, underdeveloped for her age; her faded jacket hung loosely from her scrawny shoulders. She was swinging a dirty rucksack in her hands. It was hard to keep track of time there, since the only language used was of sowing, harvesting and storing, but a quick tally of the seasons led Yuying to calculate that Liqui was now fifteen, or near enough.

  ‘My, Hou Liqui, you’ve grown!’ Yuying said. They stood and faced each other, both hesitant to reach out and touch. It had been three years since they had last met. An awkward silence began to develop as they studied each other, each of them too uncertain to dare step forward.

  It took them ten long minutes to begin to feel comfortable in each other’s company. Yuying wanted to say she was sorry, but couldn’t. Liqui wanted to tell her mother to come home, but didn’t.

  In the end, they went inside. Liqui followed a few steps behind, watching Yuying totter toward one of the frail wooden shacks. She too was thinner than Liqui remembered, her hair knotted tightly into a bun and betraying her age with a few lone whites snaking through the blacks. Her arched back pulled her body up into a curve, her round face stretched tighter over her cheekbones.

  ‘Is this where you sleep?’ Liqui asked as they ducked under the laundry drying over the roof to enter the poky room, the floorboards divided into sleeping areas, the walls and low-jutting rafters stained with smoke and dead insects.