The Dark Road

by Ma Jian

  ‘No, Kong Guo knows about it. He’s been arrested, and is bound to give us away.’

  ‘Why are you wearing that black armband?’ She has only just managed to doze off, and her eyes are heavy with sleep.

  ‘The police beat two villagers to death last night. We were so outraged, we hitched rides to Hexi and joined the protests outside the Party headquarters. There were thirty thousand peasants surrounding it. Can you imagine? They’d come from villages all over the county to protest against the crackdown. The police cordon was four-men thick, but we still managed to set light to the building. The Family Planning Commission nearby had already burnt to a cinder. If the One Child Policy isn’t repealed soon, there’s going to be a revolution.’

  ‘Is that blood on your hands?’ asks Meili nervously.

  ‘No, red paint. I wrote some slogans on the wall. If you weren’t pregnant, I would have gone to the county police station today and tried to rescue Kong Guo and the others.’

  ‘Subversive slogans? Are you mad?’ Meili runs her fingers through the tangles of her hair which still smell of the musty quilt.

  ‘All I wrote was: “Bring Down the County Party Secretary and Execute the County Chief”. I didn’t dare write “Bring Down the Communist Party”.’

  ‘Trying to show off your talent for calligraphy again! How could you be so stupid? You could get five years in jail for that.’

  ‘They won’t be able to pin it on me. The whole county is in revolt. But we must leave today, or the baby won’t survive. The officers are prowling the village with bloodshot eyes, carrying out abortions in broad daylight. I’ve just been told about Yuanyuan. She left our dugout last night and went to hide near the reservoir, but the family planning officers hunted her down. They pushed her against the bank, pinned her arms down with their knees and injected her belly with disinfectant . . . My parents have guessed that you’re pregnant. They would want us to leave. Did Nannan sleep at their house last night? Well, we can collect her on our way, then. Let’s pack our bags. We’ll return once the baby’s born. Hurry! We’ll need our residence permits, the birth permits, our marriage certificate, cash . . .’

  ‘But where shall we go? To your brother in Wuhan or your sister in Tibet?’ Kongzi’s older brother works for a construction team in Wuhan and his younger sister runs a souvenir shop outside a monastery in Lhasa.

  ‘No, we’ll go to Dark Water River, sail down to the Yangtze and stay with my cousin in Sanxia. The town’s being pulled down to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project. The place is in chaos, so the family planning policies won’t be strictly enforced. We’ll be safe there. Quick, get our things ready.’ He feels behind the wooden cabinet and pulls out a large hemp sack.

  There’s still no scent of spring shoots in the cold February air. The young poplars growing in the roadside ditch seem like railings driven deep into the earth. The icy breeze blowing down the concrete road to Hexi raises no dust, but when a truck or bus drives by, the shreds of plastic bags littering the ground fly up and swirl about.

  A passing cyclist stops to tell them that a police checkpoint has been set up on the road ahead.

  Kongzi has pulled his blue cap low over his face. His glasses steam up when he exhales. His right hand is thrust into his trouser pocket, gripping Meili’s forged birth permit.

  Squinting into the distance, he sees a police car approach with a red light flashing on its roof. He jumps into the ditch, taking Meili with him, and they crouch on all fours until the car has passed.

  ‘What did you put in there?’ Kongzi asks, glaring at the huge sack Meili has brought.

  ‘Not much. Just a few clothes, two flannels, a bar of soap, Nannan’s shoes and pencils—’

  ‘Nannan! Oh God, we forgot to pick her up. I must go back to my parents and fetch her. You wait for me here.’

  ‘While you’re about it, pop back to our house and get my address book, and my sewing patterns in the top drawer of the cabinet, and your woollen long johns as well . . .’ In her clean white down jacket and red scarf Meili looks like a tour guide, not an illegal mother on the run.

  After Kongzi climbs back onto the road and disappears into the village, Meili feels a spasm of morning sickness. She leans over, retches and, like a cat, covers the vomit with soil. Then she cautiously rises to her feet and looks around. On the snow-covered field to her left she sees the grave of one of Kongzi’s distant relatives. Only a few paper petals remain on the bamboo wreath that was laid during the Festival of the Dead. Behind it, dry stalks arch down onto the snow like strands of black hair on a man’s white scalp.

  On the other side of the road is a fodder-processing plant. The huge white slogan – RATHER TEN NEW GRAVES THAN ONE NEW COT – which Kongzi was commissioned to paint last year is still visible on the red compound wall. The two osmanthus trees in front are smaller than the one in her parents’ garden in Nuwa Village, but they produce beautiful white blossom in spring. She picked a few branches last May and arranged them in a green bottle with some bamboo leaves, and they stayed fresh for two weeks.

  So, I’ll be leaving Kong Village now, Hexi Town, Nuwa County, she says to herself. Apart from their brief honeymoon in Beijing, Meili has never travelled more than ten kilometres from her place of birth. On television, she’s seen images of southern Nuwa, with its forested mountains and prosperous towns where the men dress like high-level cadres and women like hotel receptionists, but she has no idea what lies beyond the county’s southern border. There’s no need to worry, though. Kongzi will lead the way. As long as they can find a safe place for the baby to be born, everything will be fine and she’ll make sure she never falls pregnant again.

  In the distance, she can just about make out the two-storey building where she and Kongzi first met. Teacher Zhou came down from Beijing to build it and named it the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel. Four years ago, Meili travelled from Nuwa Village for an interview, and soon became not only a room attendant but the wife of Kongzi, who was working as hotel manager at the time. She remembers Teacher Zhou turning up with a busload of tourists from a distant town who were dressed even more smartly than the people of southern Nuwa. On the first evening, the guests swam in the pond, and two of the women dared strip down to their underwear . . . She notices smoke rise from a village on a hill to the east and wonders whether its residents have set fire to their family planning office as well.

  Looking to the north again, her gaze follows a line of telegraph poles that become shorter and shorter until they vanish into the ground. Beyond them, Nuwa Mountain stretches along the horizon. At its foot is Nuwa Village, where Meili’s parents still live. Meili knows she is a mother now only because three years ago she climbed to Nuwa Cave and rubbed the sacred crevice of Goddess Nuwa. A few days later she fell pregnant with Nannan. After Nannan was born, Kongzi said that their next child must be a boy. When he found out that she was pregnant again, he paid a Taoist priest to write an ancient spell on a piece of paper, which he then placed inside a longevity locket and buried beneath the date sapling, saying, ‘This is where the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius will be born.’

  A propaganda van draws near. From the large loudspeaker strapped to its roof a voice blares out: ‘The County Family Planning Commission has dispatched officers to our village. This morning they will visit every household to fit women of childbearing age with an intrauterine device, and to provide information on reproductive health and fertility management . . .’ A truck follows closely behind, its open back packed with pregnant women whose legs are tightly bound with rope. Meili spots an old friend from primary school among them and looks away. A minute later comes the purple minibus which Kongzi’s cousin Shan uses to deliver materials to local factories and ferry villagers to the county town to sell their vegetables and eggs. His fares are half the price of the public buses, so his service is very popular. Meili clambers back onto the road and waves him down. The minibus stops briefly, drives on, then reverses and screeches to a halt. Justice Wang,
the corpulent president of the Hexi law court, steps out followed by two policemen who seize Meili by the arms. ‘Let go of me!’ she shouts, kicking at the door as they try to shove her inside. ‘I have a birth permit! I’m allowed to fall pregnant so I don’t need an IUD!’

  ‘The family planning officers will want to check whether you’ve conceived yet, then,’ says the taller of the two policemen.

  ‘He’s my husband’s cousin,’ Meili says, pointing at the driver. ‘Shan, tell them I’m not pregnant!’

  ‘She can’t be pregnant, Justice Wang,’ says Shan, hunching his shoulders against the cold. ‘She had a daughter two years ago and had an IUD inserted straight after the birth.’

  ‘Well, the officers will need to confirm that the IUD’s still in place,’ the other policeman says. ‘Now, get inside.’

  Suddenly Kongzi reappears, with Nannan following behind him. ‘Let go of my wife or I’ll set fire to the minibus!’ he shouts, flicking his lighter and holding the flame to a cotton shirt he’s pulled from his sack. ‘You can’t go around arresting people for no reason. Have you no knowledge of the law?’

  Shan sticks his head out of the window. ‘Don’t set fire to my minibus, cousin,’ he implores, the wind blowing his fringe right back.

  ‘Me want to pee, Daddy,’ Nannan whines, tugging at Kongzi’s trousers. The red quilted jacket she’s wearing is three sizes too big and almost reaches her ankles. ‘Do it yourself in that ditch,’ Kongzi snaps.

  ‘Family planning efforts aren’t bound by the law,’ the tall policeman says, switching on his electric baton and staring at the blue sparks dancing over the tip.

  ‘Bloody traitor,’ Kongzi snarls, eyeing Shan coldly.

  ‘Meili flagged me down,’ Shan replies, his face colouring. ‘I wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. The Hexi family planning squad has commandeered every vehicle in the county. They’re paying us sixty yuan a day.’

  ‘We’ll let her go for the time being,’ Justice Wang says, then he turns his fiery gaze to Kongzi. ‘As for you, Kong Lingming – if you attempt to obstruct our efforts again, I’ll slam you in jail, and not even your revered ancestor will be able to save you then.’

  The three uniformed men climb back into the minibus. As it drives off, children who’ve run out from the village hurl clods of earth at its windows, and a scruffy yellow dog chases after it until it disappears from sight.

  Seconds later, a man called Scarface marches onto the road, one hand waving a kitchen cleaver and the other gripping a rope which is tied to the wrists of his three crying daughters. Kongzi tries to stand in his way, dodging his swinging cleaver. The two elder girls are his pupils.

  ‘Out of my way!’ Scarface shouts, the burn mark on his forehead turning bright red. ‘I’m taking my three daughters to the County Chief. Let him tell me which one is surplus, and I’ll kill her there and then, right in front of him.’ His youngest daughter is only three years old. Noticing that her shoes have fallen off, her older sisters stoop down and try to pick her up with their bound hands.

  Nannan crawls out of the ditch. As Meili crouches down to hug her, her face suddenly creases with alarm. ‘Oh God, Kongzi, I’ve wet myself. I’ll have to go home and get changed.’

  On a cold night, nine years ago, following a failed morning escape, Father leads Mother and Nannan out of Kong Village and across the snowy fields to the banks of Dark Water River. Here, they board a small boat and, leaving whirlpools and diesel smoke in their wake, head south in search of a safe place for their second child to be born. The infant spirit drifts away from them and continues along Dark Water River, following it upstream all the way to its sacred source in Nuwa Cave.

  KEYWORDS: seasickness, testicles, tangled string, crimson lipstick, boiled frogs, custody centre.

  THE PITCH-BLACK Yangtze River lies supine along the base of the steep limestone gorge, curving round the sinuous banks. The passenger boat moves over the water, leaving a trail of white foam which stretches hopelessly into the distance. Juddering violently, the diesel engine spews out fumes that fill each corner of the boat then leak into the night sky. Most of the passengers have come out onto the top rear deck to escape the stench of vomit and excrement in the cabins below. Meili is squashed against the railings, next to a woman wearing crimson lipstick who comes from a town only ten kilometres from Nuwa Village. When she came onto the deck and saw how ill Meili looked, she gave her a seasickness pill. She’s travelling to Fengjie, a town downriver where she works in a hair salon. She tells Meili that the river towns along this stretch of the Yangtze are being torn down before the dam is complete and the valley flooded, so demolition work is easy to find. She confides that her husband has just had a vasectomy. ‘Three days after he was snipped, the wounds became infected and now his testicles are the size of carrots. He spends all day drinking liquor, moaning about the agonising pain, saying he wishes he could murder the family planning officers who botched the operation.’ The woman is smoking a cigarette. When she speaks, her white teeth sparkle.

  ‘Men hate the idea of losing their manhood,’ Meili says. ‘You should press the Family Planning Commission for compensation.’ She has grown used to this woman’s high-pitched voice, and is now staring at the gold ring on her finger, wondering whether it’s real or gold-plated. Meili has a wedding ring as well, but she keeps it inside her bag as since she fell pregnant her fingers have swollen and it no longer fits.

  ‘He did demand compensation, but they gave him only 1,200 yuan – not enough to pay for even a week of hospital treatment. We asked for a copy of the follow-up examination report, but they refused to give it to us in case we lodged an official complaint. We tried to sue them, but the district judge told us that family planning authorities are above the law. If we took our case to Beijing, we’d be arrested for “illegal petitioning”.’

  Meili pulls a bunch of bananas from her bag and offers one to the woman. Kongzi is lying fast asleep at her feet, a whiff of alcohol rising from his mouth. A few minutes ago, he stirred from his drunken slumber and bellowed a line from Confucius’s Analects: ‘If my path comes to an end, I will board a raft and drift towards the sea . . .’ A group of migrant workers are crouched beside him gulping down bottles of beer.

  ‘No, no, I’m not hungry,’ the woman says, taking a banana nevertheless. Meili breaks one off for herself, tosses the peel overboard and watches it disappear into the white waves that cut through the centre of the black river. ‘I have an eighty-year-old mother at home to support, and a two-year-old child as well,’ the woman says. ‘The wages I bring back to them vanish in a day.’

  Meili shifts Nannan’s head further down her lap, wriggles her numb toes, then stares at the woman’s careworn face and contemplates her own predicament. I’m only twenty, she says to herself. I won’t let myself age as badly as her. I’ll get a job, earn some money and buy myself a nice dress and leather shoes. Kongzi once said that my toes are the most attractive part of my body, and since then, I’ve kept them covered. But one day I’ll buy some elegant leather sandals and paint my toenails red . . .

  ‘Come on, tell me – you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ the woman says. ‘You’re on the run from family planning officers.’

  ‘How did you guess? Yes, I’m over three months gone. Nuwa County is clamping down on family planning violators. We would’ve been allowed to have a second child when our daughter is five, but I’ve fallen pregnant sooner by mistake.’

  ‘You want a son, don’t you? To continue the family line.’

  ‘My husband is a Kong, so of course he wants a son. He keeps quoting that line from the Analects that goes, “Of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst,” or something like that.’

  ‘How did you avoid getting fitted with a coil? Your family must have a lot of influence. I bet you’re the only woman in this boat who doesn’t have an IUD inside her.’

  ‘No, my parents are ordinary peasants. My father works in a coal mine now, and my mother looks after the
fields. But my husband’s father is a war hero and a former village head, so he was able to pull a few strings.’

  ‘He must be a teacher, your husband – quoting from the classics like that. Just look how thick his glasses are!’

  Meili smooths her hair back and smiles. ‘Yes. Everyone in the village calls him Kongzi, after the great sage. Our neighbours often ask him to choose names for their children or write rhyming couplets to hang outside their doors.’ The two women stare down at Kongzi, who is now flat on his back, snoring loudly.

  ‘If we edged our way over there, we’d be able to see the television in the viewing lounge,’ the woman says, pointing behind her with her chin. Then, looking over at the migrant workers swigging beer, she murmurs a Cantonese song: ‘As the night grows darker, I drink myself into a daze. Softly you approach my broken heart. Be careful what you say, because as everyone knows, I’m a woman who’s easily hurt . . .’ The boat approaches a bend in the river and the engine’s growl deepens.

  ‘You speak Cantonese, then? Have you been to Guangzhou?’ Meili knows the song. She sang it at her interview at the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, and impressed Teacher Zhou so much that he gave her the job on the spot.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been to Guangzhou a couple of times. You need to speak Cantonese to find a job there, especially in the hair salons. But the men in Guangzhou are loaded. I can earn more in a day there than I do in a year back home. You could make a fortune there. Such smooth skin, delicate features, long neck. What man could resist you? I’d move there myself, but it’s too far away. I have to go home every week to give money to my family and see my child. If it were up to me, I’d never go back to that damn village.’

  ‘I’d much prefer to be at home. The thought of travel frightens me.’ Meili remembers seeing Yuanyuan hobbling back from the school the day they left. Her mother-in-law was beside her, one hand supporting her round the waist and the other gripping the aborted fetus by the arm. Yuanyuan went into labour as soon as she was strapped to the school desk, but by the time the baby was born the disinfectant had already killed it. The family planning officer dropped the dead baby into a plastic bucket, but it was so big it toppled out. It lay sprawled on the ground for hours. No one bothered to pick it up. When her mother-in-law came to fetch her, she scooped it up from the floor and refused to let go of it.