Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  None of this frightened me. When I told Mr Mou the news, however, he was devastated.

  We decided that I should get an abortion, but I was afraid to go to the hospital. I was fifteen years old, but I looked closer to twelve because I was so short and petite. Mr Mou told me that I would have to try to look older, at least twenty. To this end, he bought me a loose blouse, a tight black skirt and a pair of high heels. With lipstick, I just about passed for a young woman who had graduated from school. But Mr Mou said I still looked too young. My expression, he said, was that of a child.

  We did not dare to go to the village hospital, where all the doctors would know us. Instead, Mr Mou bought a bus ticket at the station and made a trip to another village to look at the hospital there. Perhaps because Mr Mou was a teacher, a well-respected and educated man, the old stationmaster did not ask him where he was going or why. The hospital was a long bus ride away through tunnels and over mountains. When Mr Mou returned, he assured me that nobody would know us there. The hospital had an obstetrics and gynaecology department that performed abortions. I could even register under a false name, he said.

  We decided to leave that Saturday at noon. On Saturday morning, I donned my regular clothes, placed my disguise in a bag and went to school as usual. Although I felt terribly uneasy, I somehow managed to get through the morning’s classes without incident. Mr Mou was not teaching that morning. He had gone to borrow some money for the abortion, but we had arranged to meet after school, at the school gate.

  When the bell rang at noon, signalling the end of classes, I trailed after the crowd of students rushing out of the school gate. The sun was shining brightly, high in the sky. I craned my neck, looking for Mr Mou, but he was nowhere to be found. I waited and waited, as the sun went from being a ball of light to some blood-red thing, a creature with a wide crimson mouth and tongue of flame. It seemed as if all the world were as red as fresh-spilled blood. I stood at the gate of the schoolyard unblinking, staring at the sun, and began to feel faint. I could see the shape of the child in my belly … he was lovely … but his four limbs were covered in blood. I felt that I had seen that blood before, perhaps on the floor of a rowing boat, somewhere in the waters off the coast of the Village of Stone. It was the fresh-spilled blood of death. But it was not the blood of a child, no … it was the blood of a mother giving birth. Yes, I could see things more clearly now. My child was blameless. He didn’t deserve to die. I couldn’t let a part of myself die. I couldn’t bear to kill something that I loved.

  My mother had died, Boy at Last had died, my grandmother and grandfather had died. I did not want to be responsible for bringing any more death into this world. I did not want my baby to die.

  Then I saw Mr Mou standing with his backpack by a hardware stall down the road. I saw him frowning in the sunlight. He seemed more helpless than me. As he walked towards me, I shook my head and told him, ‘No. I don’t want to go.’

  We did not keep our appointment at the hospital that day.

  After midterm exams were over, things grew more difficult for Mr Mou. My bouts of nausea were more serious and I stopped attending class. Not just chemistry class this time, but all of my classes. At school, I had come to be considered something of a delinquent so nobody yet guessed my secret. But it was only a matter of time.

  Mr Mou told me that if I didn’t have an abortion soon, we would both have to leave the school. This wasn’t just about me, he said. It affected him too.

  I looked Mr Mou in the eye and told him that the school could go to hell as far as I was concerned.

  For a long time, neither of us was willing to compromise. But in the end, I was the one who capitulated.

  We decided that we would follow our original plan, but this time Mr Mou was adamant that we should meet at the hardware stall, to avoid being noticed. The sheets of metal, hammers and nails displayed on the hardware stall gleamed in the sunlight. The young proprietor stared at us openly, as if he knew our secret, so we hurried away as quickly as possible to avoid his accusing gaze. I had brought my ‘adult clothes’ along in a bag so that I could change into them later. When we arrived at the bus station, the place was deserted. Though we had been told that a bus departed each day at noon for the neighbouring villages, there was no sign of it anywhere. Mr Mou went into the station office to talk to the old stationmaster, who informed him that the bus had broken down and would be in repairs all afternoon. Mr Mou was alarmed by this news, although he was careful not to say as much to the stationmaster. The stationmaster must have sensed something, however, for he asked Mr Mou if his trip to the neighbouring village was urgent. ‘If it is,’ the stationmaster offered, ‘I can help you hitch a ride on a tractor. There’s a tractor over at the cold processing plant that should be leaving the village any minute now.’

  When the old stationmaster emerged from the office, he noticed me standing in a corner by the front gate. He said nothing, just glanced at me quickly and limped out of the gate and over to the cold processing plant to ask about the tractor.

  As I’ve always said, the stationmaster was a kind man.

  The tractor took us down the coast and through the long mountain tunnels. We travelled far away from the village, until the sea was no longer visible and the salt breezes had dissipated. When we arrived at the hospital, Mr Mou offered to help me register for the operation. If I liked, he said, I could use an assumed name so that nobody would know who I was. ‘Why would I use an assumed name?’ I asked him. ‘Nobody knows my real name, anyway. They’ve always called me Little Dog. I’ll just use my real name.’

  Mr Mou did not press the matter further. I went to the obstetrics and gynaecology department and registered myself under my real name, Coral Jiang.

  I was led into a cramped, rather dirty little operating theatre. As I lay, spread-eagled and naked from the waist down, upon the cold, narrow table, I saw the female doctor take up a sharp instrument. From the region between my legs, I heard the sound of cutting, vacuuming, the clang of metal instruments, and then something else. It was the sound of my own flesh, my baby, being tossed into a white surgical pan.

  When I had lowered my legs and was sitting, pale and exhausted, on the edge of the surgery table, I saw the doctor holding a surgery pan filled with something that looked like a chunk of raw meat. He – or she? – was hardly formed yet, nothing more than an indistinct lump of flesh.

  In a voice completely devoid of emotion, the doctor told me, ‘That’s it. We cut out half, and had to vacuum out the other half.’

  The doctor’s voice was exactly like the surgical instruments she had used. Cold and sharp.

  I was exhausted, my hair damp with sweat. But I had not cried once.

  I dressed slowly, putting on my clothes one piece at a time. The oversized shirt, the stretchy black skirt, the pair of white high heels … the doctor gazed at my sweat-stained face for several moments before she finally asked, ‘How old are you, really?’

  I made no reply.

  I turned my back to her and began to leave. As I was walking towards the door, she spoke again, this time very slowly. ‘It’s possible that you may not be able to have children after this …’

  I stumbled out of the surgery, my head reeling, and made my way towards Mr Mou, who had been waiting for me outside the door. In his panic-stricken eyes, I saw my shame reflected, a flame rising around me from all sides. It was a shame I recognised, a shame I had come to know well. Somehow I had expected that growing up was the one thing that would cure me of that shame. Apparently I was wrong.

  After leaving the hospital, we hitched a ride back to the village on another tractor. My face was drawn and pale, my hair askew, one hand resting limply in Mr Mou’s grip. I had little energy for the journey back home. Mr Mou clutched my hand tightly, as if he were afraid that if he loosened his grasp in the slightest, he would lose me entirely. The ride was a bumpy one; each time the tractor shuddered, so did we. Neither of us spoke during the ride. As the horizon of the ocean came into view
and we drew nearer to the Village of Stone, I knew that we were both feeling the same grief, the same emptiness. I was so sad that I thought I would burst into tears at any moment.

  But I didn’t cry that day.

  My body felt hollow. My baby was gone. I had seen him fly up and away, into an ocean of sunlight overhead. He had the strangest shape. At first he was lovely, but as my vision grew clearer, I saw that my baby’s eyes, the eyes of my dead child, were not eyes at all but huge dark caverns, enormous black holes that looked as if they might swallow the world at any moment. His skin was so pale, so translucent, like an egg stripped of its shell. He floated through the air, spotless and pure, every bit of him an angel. But when I looked at his fingers and toes, I realised that there was something wrong with my baby. His hands and feet were webbed, like a newly hatched duckling that had just broken its way out of its shell. His fingers and toes were still connected, as if waiting for the knife that would cut into them, make them separate at last. His white belly gave him the appearance of a float attached to a fishing line, or a drowning child. My baby was turning, changing shape before my eyes. One moment, he was Boy at Last, drowning in the seaweed beds; the next, he was me at the age of seven, being held captive in a pit underground, surrounded by darkness and violence. Then he was shrinking, smaller and smaller, transforming himself into a little brown bottle that took me a moment to recognise. I realised it was the bottle of DDV that my grandfather had swallowed. My baby had become a terrifying thing, an object of fear and loathing. No longer was he something lovely, flying through the air. He had become a blot upon the sun, a black birthmark, a dark cloud from which sunlight could only seep around the edge, make its way around his massive bulk.

  Mr Mou and I returned to the village and to school, where we behaved as if nothing had happened. But while we had been away at the hospital, something had changed. Someone had managed to find out our secret and had, in turn, informed everyone else at school. Before long, the entire village knew, and had formed a hostile and united front against us. There was no way I could go on living in the village after this, not as a woman of ill repute. Every detail of my difficult lot in life had become the stuff of village gossip, fodder for the neighbours’ wagging tongues. One day I was told that the headmaster wanted to speak to me. I was led to his office. I could not help but notice that the loudspeaker in the school courtyard was right outside the office window. I managed to tear my eyes away from the loudspeaker long enough to focus on the principal, who was saying:

  ‘Coral Jiang, we simply cannot allow a student such as yourself to continue at this school.’

  As I walked out of the principal’s office, I knew that the loudspeaker would soon be broadcasting the news of my expulsion.

  At the time, I thought that I must be exactly what people said I was: a black stain on the reputation of the Village of Stone.

  But what was the sea, if not a wide black stain on this earth?

  I made no attempt to defend myself, or to go on living in the Village of Stone. I was truly an orphan now, in every sense of the word.

  That year, I left the Village of Stone for ever.

  I had been living in Beijing for several years when I received a letter from Mr Mou. It had somehow been passed between the many different addresses I had inhabited in those early years, and had found its way into my hands. The letter was as logical and orderly as one of Mr Mou’s chemical equations.

  Dearest Coral,

  Hello. I hope you don’t find it strange that I am writing to you so suddenly, after all these years. I wonder whether you still recognise my handwriting. You must always have known that I would write to you some day.

  When I think about love, I realise that in my life, I have known two rays of light: yours, and the one that illuminates my life today.

  Love, you see, is like a ray of light. It cannot bend, nor can it travel round corners. All it can do is reflect and refract until it loses its radiance. I think that now perhaps the time has come for our light, that ray that has persisted between us for so long, to fade away.

  Rather than say that love is like a ray of light, perhaps it would be better to liken it to an organic life form, a living organism. The more elements contained within an organic life form, the more quickly it decomposes, the more powerful the scent it emits. Yours is a scent that has lingered with me all these years, even to this very day.

  The other light in my life these days is changeless and eternal, more like an inorganic form of life. If buried, it will never break down into the soil, nor will it turn to coal. Yes, I am married now, Coral, and I am happy.

  I am still teaching at the Village of Stone middle school, and have been promoted to form master, a job which keeps me quite busy.

  The jasmine trees are in full bloom, and the entire village is being mobilised for this year’s typhoon prevention activities. The typhoons will soon be upon us.

  I wish you every happiness, Coral. May you have a wonderful life and a beautiful future.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mr Mou

  30 June, 3.00 p.m.

  I read Mr Mou’s unexpected letter over again and again. I must have read it a dozen times. At first I wanted to write back to him, to tell him that I still loved him, even after all these years. Suddenly, his love seemed to me like something that had happened only yesterday, something that I had only just lost. But when I read the letter again, I realised that it was not the sort of message that required an answer. There was not a single sentence about me. He had not even bothered to ask me about my life or about how I was faring. It was as if our connection had already been severed. The letter was nothing more than Mr Mou’s final farewell, his official declaration of goodbye.

  I put the letter away and decided that I would never read it again.

  That is all there is to the story of Mr Mou, the man I loved, and the baby I never had. I have buried them at the bottom of my Marianas Trench. Now and then, I might hear the sound of an infant wailing, a voice rising from the darkness of the trench, but these are soon swallowed up in the black vortex, drowned in the abyss of my memory.

  Red, you know nothing of this Marianas Trench. You have not yet penetrated its depths, nor have you any clue to the stories buried eleven thousand and thirty-four metres below its surface.

  19

  I WAKE AT eight o’clock, just in time to catch the sunlight, but the weather refuses to cooperate. The sky outside remains overcast, as dark and gloomy as my mood. Red is not lying beside me. I hear water running in the bathroom and Red singing to himself in the shower. He is humming a tune by the Taiwanese pop singer Zhao Chuan: I’m just a little bird who wants to fly / but I never seem to get too high / I’m still searching for a bit of sky … I glance at the clock. Why is my little bird up so early today?

  Then I remember: it is the Frisbee tournament today.

  A while later, Red comes back into the bedroom, a towel slung around his neck. Still damp from his shower, he rummages through the wardrobe for a pair of blue shorts and a white T-shirt.

  I sit up in bed. My body feels sluggish and heavy.

  I glance over at Red, who is pulling on a pair of white sports socks. He looks so relaxed, as if he has not a care in this world. Maybe it is true that a man has to enjoy his carefree years while he can, to cling to them so that he will have something to remember after he hits thirty and finds his life complicated by other responsibilities. I can imagine exactly the way Red will look today, playing Frisbee on a field of green grass.

  I hear the burglar-proof metal front door closing, and then the sound of Red’s footsteps receding down the hall. I am alone in the apartment now, and my bad mood has not improved one bit. I get out of bed, throw on a flimsy negligee and go into the bathroom to give myself a chrysanthemum facial mask.

  I have just smeared white paste all over my face when the doorbell rings.

  Who can it be? I guess it must be Red, coming back for something he has forgotten. Without even bothering to throw anyt
hing over my negligee or wash the mask from my face, I run to the door and throw it wide open.

  The man standing outside my door is a complete stranger.

  My first reaction is to try to cover myself by placing my hands strategically over the more revealing portions of my skimpy negligee. But even more embarrassing than my attire is the white mask I am still wearing on my face.

  The old man standing outside my door – I say old man, for he appears to be quite elderly – is looking at me intently. There is something strange about his gaze that I cannot quite put my finger on, but it makes me uncomfortable.

  With the wet, sticky mask still clinging to my face, I must look like a madwoman. All I want is to put an end to this awkward moment as quickly as possible. The man must have come to the wrong house, I imagine.

  I keep hoping that the old man will speak so that I can get rid of him, but he just continues to stare at me in silence.

  Unable to contain my annoyance any longer, I ask him rather rudely, ‘Who are you looking for?’ After all, I have to say something to break the awkward silence.

  Very slowly, the old man asks, ‘Are you … Coral?’

  I am too surprised to do anything but nod my head. This man is a stranger, yet he seems to know me. I find it odd that he has addressed me so casually, without even bothering to use my last name.

  ‘So you are Coral Jiang?’ He seems excited by the news.

  Struggling to maintain my composure, I size up the man standing outside my door. He appears to be in his mid-fifties, although with his head of white hair, he could be closer to sixty. There is something about his eyes, his mouth, his manner of speaking that is oddly familiar, and yet I am sure that I have never met him before.

  I am struck by a sudden premonition, a premonition so powerful that I tremble at the very thought of it. Oh god, I think, please oh please don’t let it be true.