The Dark Road

by Ma Jian

  At night, the river is tranquil, apart from the occasional dog bark or squealing of a baby. The roar that flows from the distant motorway makes the trees tremble but doesn’t stir the boats. Meili rests her head on a baby mattress she found on the dump and hugs a hot-water bottle, her breasts beneath her white shirt drooping to either side. The kerosene lamp casts an orange light over her neck and face. ‘Let’s moor by the sand island for a few days, Kongzi,’ she says. ‘This river is so broad and winding I’ve lost track of where we are.’

  ‘We’ve left the Yangtze and have followed the Gui River into Guangxi Province. This town is called Xijiang. Guangdong is just over there in the east. All right, let’s stay here and rest for a while. I can pick up some work and we can search the dump for things to sell. The shops here aren’t expensive. Peanut oil is four yuan a bottle, and rice is just 3.2 yuan a jin. Diesel and kerosene are quite reasonable too.’

  Although Meili can eat now, she still suffers bouts of acute abdominal pain. ‘The days are like water,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘They stretch out before me but I can’t hold them in my hands.’ Before supper, Kongzi poured some boiled water into a basin for her. She scrubbed her hands and face with soap and, for the first time since the abortion, washed between her legs as well then disinfected the area with potassium permanganate.

  ‘You mustn’t give way to despair,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘We’ll have another child. We won’t give up.’ He opens the bottle of rice wine he bought at a stall near the motorway and pours himself a glass. A white cruise ship passes in the distance, a red flag tied to the mast. A couple on the back deck stand locked in an embrace beneath a loudspeaker blaring out ‘Ode to our Motherland’: ‘Our beloved nation is rich and powerful. Signs of prosperity are all around us . . .’

  ‘Why don’t we just go home and hand ourselves over to the authorities?’ Meili says. ‘If we show them the abortion certificate, perhaps they’ll drop the fine. Life here is no safer than anywhere else. I’ve had enough . . .’

  ‘The certificate wasn’t stamped, so it’s not valid . . . Oh, it’s all my fault. We should have left Sanxia as soon as we bought the boat. Rivers are our country’s arteries. As long as we keep following them, we’ll eventually reach the heart – a mystical haven where we can live in peace.’

  ‘You think we’ll find anywhere more mystical than Nuwa Cave? As soon as I placed my hand on it, I fell pregnant with Nannan. Women from Nuwa aren’t destined to have sons. You’d better accept our fate.’ Happiness’s asphyxiated face suddenly flashes before her eyes. She leans over and extinguishes the lamp. ‘Besides, I can’t go through another illegal pregnancy and forced abortion. Do you want to see me die?’

  ‘Of course not. You’re my wife. But we have a right to try again for a son.’ Kongzi slaps his arm, trying to swat a mosquito. Then he stares into the darkness, at the mosquito’s fluttering wings, perhaps, or a remembered image of Happiness’s corpse.

  ‘We have no rights, you stubborn fool! Only the state can decide whether I have another child or not. Pull the curtains down. I’m cold.’ As the darkness thickens around her, Meili feels her heartbeat slow down and her hearing become more acute.

  Kongzi takes a last drag from his cigarette and says, ‘The bloody Communists have destroyed Confucius’s legacy. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom – all the values he upheld have gone. If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates. But if a woman gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal. What kind of country is this?’ He tosses his stub into the river then sits silently, his eyes darting about. When it becomes too dark to see a thing, he lowers his head and lets out a guttural cry of misery. ‘My son, my son! Make your way back to us. “Summer wildfires cannot destroy the grass, For in spring, soft winds will restore it to life . . .” I cannot believe that in this immense country there is no space for my male descendant.’

  Kongzi’s brother, three years his senior, also has one daughter, but didn’t register her in Kong Village in case they had a second child before she turned five. But a fellow villager who worked on his construction team in Wuhan reported him to the village police, so now neither his daughter nor any second child they might have will be granted a residence permit. Kongzi and his brother look almost identical. The brother left home ten years ago to work in Wuhan, and when he returned every Spring Festival with bundles of cash, Kongzi, the poorly paid school teacher, always felt inferior. The village school had so little money that parents had to buy the children’s desks and Kongzi had to provide his own. His brother paid for their wedding, spending five thousand yuan on a banquet for eighty guests and entertainment provided by the local song-and-dance troupe. He doesn’t enjoy conversation or reading books. When he returns to the village, he sits in front of the television all day, chain-smoking. Kongzi would love to talk to him now, but knows that if he mentioned the family’s need to produce a male heir, he’d be met with a blank silence. Kongzi is still convinced that only a son will bring him happiness. If his brother fails to produce one, the responsibility to continue the family line will fall on him. His brother’s wife is almost forty, so time is running out. Kongzi hasn’t dared phone his father and tell him that Meili was subjected to a forced abortion, and that the baby was a boy. Nor has he dared tell Meili that after they fled the village, his father was arrested and locked up for a week, and that because Meili didn’t turn up for her mandatory IUD insertion, his mother was forcefully fitted with one instead.

  Nannan rouses from her sleep, kicks off her blanket and crawls blindly onto Kongzi’s lap.

  ‘Go back to your mat, Nannan,’ Kongzi says, pushing her away.

  ‘I frightened of Sea Dragon – he hiding here,’ Nannan says, pointing to her head. Before she went to sleep, Kongzi told her a story about a fairy called Flower Girl who was imprisoned by the Sea Dragon and rescued by the Bodhisattva of Mercy.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Kongzi replies. ‘The Sea Dragon died a long time ago.’

  ‘You said after my brother dead, he wake up again.’

  ‘Come and sleep next to me,’ Meili says. She pulls her down onto her mattress. The boat rocks from side to side. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Kongzi? Lower the curtains – I’m shivering. Now go back to sleep, Nannan.’

  ‘I like sleeping next to daddies, not mummies,’ Nannan says, rolling back towards Kongzi who’s lying on a folded blanket, his head resting on three magazines.

  ‘The nights are so cold now,’ Meili says, tucking a jumper around Nannan. ‘If we don’t withdraw some cash from the bank tomorrow and buy a generator and an electric heater, Nannan will come down with a terrible illness. We can’t live like animals any longer.’

  KEYWORDS: deep-fried dough stick, sperm, mandatory sterilisation, shiny leather shoes, scorched poultry.

  MEILI IS WOKEN by distant voices shouting, ‘There’s a man in the town who’s threatening to leap from a five-storey building. Quick, everyone, go and have a look!’ As Meili sits up, a stream of Kongzi’s sperm leaks out from her and runs down her thigh. Grimacing with anger and disgust, she pulls some tissues from a box and stuffs them inside her knickers. That bloody condom must have split last night, she says to herself. If I fall pregnant, I’ll become an enemy of the Party again. During the eight months since the abortion she has fended off Kongzi, but last night she relented, and let him push his way inside her.

  Kongzi rolls over and says, ‘If you’re going over to take a look, buy me a deep-fried dough stick. I’m starving.’

  ‘Why would I want to watch a stranger jump to his death?’ Meili says. ‘I’m not far off from jumping into the river myself. You want a dough stick? What about those noodles left over from yesterday?’ Kongzi’s cigarette smoke rises straight into her nose. She stands up and coughs.

  They’ve set up home on the sand island. Meili has reared almost thirty ducks, and Kongzi has bought two egg-laying hens and a rooster which he keeps in the bamboo cage. When he isn’t hauling cargos of smuggled or fake goods, he scours the town and r
ubbish dump for junk he can sell. There are twelve other families living on the island, most of them fellow family planning fugitives.

  Meili dips a flannel into the river and rubs it over her face and body, flinching from the cold. Their neighbours Xixi and Chen are about to sail over to the town. They were the first family to arrive on the island. Last year, the river police pulled down all the shacks, but the islanders soon built themselves new ones with tarpaulin and wooden planks scavenged from the dump. A strong sense of community has formed among the families. Everyone rears chickens and ducks, so the air is always filled with the scent of roast meat.

  ‘Want a lift, Meili?’ Chen calls out. Meili says yes, but quickly changes her mind. ‘No, if a big crowd has gathered to watch the man jump, the town will be swarming with police. I don’t want to get dragged off to a family planning clinic and have some stranger push an IUD inside me.’ Meili has developed a fear of crowds, and has only visited the town three times.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ Kongzi says. ‘I told you, the head of the County Family Planning Commission is a reasonable man. We wouldn’t be allowed to stay on this island otherwise. You go into town, and take Nannan with you.’ Kongzi picks up lots of local information from other scavengers on the rubbish dump. Last week, he was told that a professor from Guangxi University was giving a lecture on Neo-Confucianism and Modernity at the County Cultural Palace, which he made a special effort to attend.

  ‘No, I won’t take Nannan,’ Meili says, stepping onto Xixi and Chen’s boat. ‘There might be child snatchers in the crowd.’

  ‘But those gangs only snatch boys,’ Kongzi says.

  ‘I don’t care. You look after her.’

  Once the boat pulls away, Kongzi wades into the river and feeds yesterday’s leftover noodles to the chickens in the cage.

  Up in the centre of town, after walking past the covered market and newly built Eastern Sauna House, Meili sees a large crowd staring up at a construction worker who’s threatening to jump from the top of a half-finished office block. When he waves his hands about he reminds her of an old school friend who now works for the governor of Nuwa County. Anxious to escape the crowd, she skirts its perimeter and enters a wide, empty street. In the clear morning light, the family planning banners strung overhead appear even larger. One side of the street has been recently covered with cement; the other side remains potted with holes. She walks on, following smells of dough sticks and fried dumplings which lead her to a small food stall outside a restaurant with blue-glass windows.

  Meili buys three dough sticks. Unable to resist, she opens the newspaper wrapping straight away and bites into one. Delicious. She sits on the restaurant’s concrete step and reads the slogan daubed on the opposite wall: ANY PERSON FOUND TO HAVE EVADED MANDATORY STERILISATION WILL BE ARRESTED AND FINED. For the first time since the abortion, she is able to read this familiar slogan without her stomach knotting with fear.

  She studies the blank expressions of the people passing by on their way to work, and feels frustrated. She too would like to stroll to work every day wearing a smart dress, shiny leather shoes, holding a handbag containing a hairbrush and make-up. But peasants are banned from entering tall office buildings which are warmed in winter and cooled in summer, and where staff are paid high salaries for sitting at their desks all day. Although Meili was born into a peasant family, she longs to live like the rich women in television dramas who own air-conditioned flats and air-conditioned cars and never have to set foot in a field. Once she has joined their ranks, she too will dress herself in a tailored suit, paint her nails red, fasten elegant sandals to her feet and stride into an air-conditioned jet or the carpeted foyer of a luxury hotel. She may be inadequately educated, but she has confidence and determination. She is able, after all, to perform a song in public having heard it only twice. She still dreams of becoming a pop star, and of travelling the country singing ballads in satin ball gowns. Before she married, she and six friends from Nuwa Village formed a group called the Nuwa International Arts Troupe, and toured local coal mines and rural markets, performing pop songs and belly dances. But she quit after a week when the manager of one village hall told her that unless the girls danced naked on the stage, no one would pay money for tickets. She’s always believed that women should be respectable and modest. Since marrying Kongzi, she has dedicated herself to their family and endured their poverty without complaint. But she feels now that the time has come to pull herself together, find a job and start earning some money. Even if they never manage to live in a city, she must at least make sure that they can build themselves a new house back in Kong Village equipped with all the latest electronic appliances.

  She walks back past the five-storey block from which the construction worker is still threatening to jump. The crowd has swollen. A man who’s set up a makeshift stall shouts through a megaphone: ‘For the best viewing experience, buy one of my telescopes and folding stools!’ People impatient to get to work cry out: ‘Hurry up and jump, will you? We can’t wait around all day.’ Without glancing up, Meili pushes her way through the crowd, managing to reach the covered market with the two remaining dough sticks intact. The smell of scorched poultry in the air is familiar to her. Since she got married, she has always been the one to slaughter the chickens, pluck them, then scorch the soft down from their skin. Glancing around at the busy stalls of the market, she thinks to herself, perhaps I could set up business here too. At least it’s sheltered from the elements.

  She turns to a stallholder and asks, ‘How much are the ducks today, sister?’

  ‘Three yuan a jin, and an extra yuan if you want it killed, plucked and gutted.’

  ‘I can pluck. Are you looking for assistants?’ Meili’s already contemplating selling their flock of ducks to raise money to rent a space and buy stock.

  ‘No, that guy over there is, though,’ the stallholder replies, raising her eyebrows in the direction of a tall skinny man who’s standing beside a fish stall.

  Meili approaches him and asks for a job. He fixes his large, protruding eyes on her and says: ‘I need someone who can gut and scale. I pay one jiao a fish. If you want to see how it’s done, sit here and watch.’

  Meili pulls over a wooden crate, sits down on it, and sees on the wall opposite her a notice that says: MILK POWDER WARNING ISSUED BY THE MUNICIPAL HYGIENE DEPARTMENT. TO SAFEGUARD INFANT HEALTH AND PREVENT DAMAGE TO THE WIDER POPULATION, A BAN HAS BEEN PLACED ON INFERIOR-QUALITY MILK POWDER . . . She remembers Kongzi mentioning that he delivered a cargo of counterfeit milk powder to some businessman who’d bought them wholesale for three yuan a bag and was planning to sell them on the streets at triple the price. At the time, she reasoned with herself that whether the powder was fake or genuine, it would at least provide more nourishment than the rice gruel most peasant women feed their babies. Infant formula is always in demand. She is sure that if she opened a stall selling baby products in this market she could make a good profit.

  After watching the fishmonger gut and scale for several hours, Meili realises that Kongzi must be hungry for the dough stick and is probably wondering what has taken her so long. She goes out into the sunlight and runs downhill. The June sun is scorching the dust on the pavement and the clumps of withered weeds growing along the kerbs. A hot wind chases her all the way to the river. She wades into the water, panting for breath, and scans the distant sand island, but sees no sign of Kongzi or their boat. Then, turning to her right, she spots their boat emerge from a huddle of rafts tethered to the jetty. The rooster stretches its head out of the cage and stares at her. Wiping the sweat from her face, she waves to Kongzi who’s standing behind the wheel wearing a vest and shorts and muddy flip-flops.

  He helps her onto the boat with the bamboo pole, frowning disgruntledly. ‘What took you so long?’ he barks.

  Nannan’s dress is sopping wet. She sticks her leg out, points her bare toes and says, ‘Dad said I can’t dance, Mummy!’

  ‘I was in the market, learning how to gut fish,’ Mei
li tells Kongzi. Sensing his disapproval of her independent attitude, she quickly changes the subject. ‘So, did that man jump in the end?’

  ‘I thought that’s what you went to see. No, no. He didn’t jump. The police dragged him away an hour ago. I withdrew a hundred yuan from the bank. There was no problem. It’s not connected to our branch in Hubei Province. We still have a thousand yuan left in our account.’

  Nannan hugs Meili’s thigh. ‘Mum, our rooster called Red. His long chin called Little Worm. Dad called Snake in Glasses. You called Big Eyes. You like my names?’

  ‘We need a stable income, Kongzi. I want a job. I want to work, even if it’s just on a market stall.’ Meili sits at the bow, her damp forehead and shoulders glistening in the sun.

  ‘Mum, this pee or sweat?’ Nannan asks, stroking Meili’s perspiring thigh.

  ‘So what do you plan to do?’ Kongzi sneers. ‘Sell fish?’

  ‘I’m a capable woman. You said yourself: I can do anything I put my mind to.’

  ‘Mum, my pee look like orange juice, but I no eat orange today.’

  KEYWORDS: shelter, happy birthday, wanton activities, Empress Yang Guifei, condom, red-fried lion heads.

  AS SOON AS the rooster crows at dawn, Meili gets dressed, crawls out of the shelter and checks that their boat is still anchored by the shore. A boat was stolen from the island a few days ago, so she and Kongzi have taken turns to sleep in theirs, but last night they both forgot. They’ve lived on the sand island for a year now, and although they haven’t made much money, life has taken a turn for the better. Kongzi has bought himself a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a gas stove, an electric fan and a tricycle cart which he uses to make local deliveries. He’s attached an extension lead from the mini generator on the boat, so the shelter has electricity as well. Meili’s bought a watch, a small black-and-white television and a singing cloth doll for Nannan. Although their shelter is a humble affair cobbled together from old doors and decking, it has a chipboard bed Kongzi made which is covered with foam cushions, so at least their nights are comfortable.