by Ma Jian
‘I’m going back to Guai Village,’ Meili says. Last night she told Liu Di the reason she ran away.
‘Good for you! As the saying goes: “However far a hen might stray, she will always return to the coop one day.”’ Last night, Liu Di revealed to Meili that her husband often beats her up, then let out a stream of curses to release her pent-up anger.
‘I’m just worried that my smell will give me away,’ Meili says. Although she’s grown so accustomed to the stench of the landfill site that she can no longer detect it on her skin, she went to Sunlight Bathhouse with Liu Di yesterday and stood under a shower for an hour. Her clothes, however, have a rotten stench that no amount of washing could remove, so all she can do is douse them with a pungent perfume, which she also plans to spray onto her neck before entering any crowded place.
The mad dog comes to sit at Meili’s feet. She wonders what she should do with him. Since he heard her wail the funeral lament on the hill last week, he’s trailed her every step, gobbling up whatever scraps she tosses onto the ground. She has already cut off his tattered waistcoat with her shoe knife, and before she leaves today, she wants to give him a good wash and see him emerge from the dirt as spotless as a lotus from a muddy pond.
KEYWORDS: state crematorium, gates of hell, charred and mangled, earthen jar, merciless beast.
MEILI SEES KONGZI’S eyes widen in disbelief, redden, then become as vacant as still water. Nannan stays sitting on the bed chewing her fingers, not daring to look up at her.
‘Come here, Nannan!’ Meili tries to shout, but the words come out as a soft whisper. She sits down beside Nannan and wraps her arms around her.
‘You died, Mum,’ Nannan says, tears welling in her eyes.
‘No, I didn’t die.’ Meili missed the long-distance bus yesterday, so she had to spend the night in Dexian station, huddled up on a metal bench.
‘You’re dirty, and you stink,’ Nannan says, sniffing Meili’s neck. Before she left the landfill site, she took the mad dog to a petrol station and scrubbed him with soap and water. By the time she’d finished, the dog was as white as snow but she was splattered with mud. The dog waited with her by the roadside for hours. After a truck finally pulled up and gave her a lift, he chased after it for as long as he could, then gave up and shrank into a tiny white speck.
Unable to control his anger any longer, Kongzi jumps to his feet, slaps Meili across the ear and shouts, ‘So, where the hell have you been these last four weeks? We’ve all been worried sick. When your grandmother heard you’d gone missing, she had a heart attack and died.’
Meili slumps onto the floor, buries her head in her hands and weeps. ‘I was arrested,’ she cries out. ‘Taken to a Custody and Repatriation Centre. It’s a miracle I’ve made it back.’
‘And what are you doing dressing like a prostitute?’ Kongzi barks, veins bulging from his neck.
‘You merciless beast! I’ve suffered ten thousand hardships to get here, and this is how you welcome me . . .’ The only sparks of light on Meili’s drawn face are the tears in her blue-black eye sockets.
‘I sent people to check every custody centre in the county, but you weren’t there. Your brother’s been with us for two weeks, and has gone searching for you every day.’ He sits back down on the crate of beer, his temper subsiding a little.
‘When did my grandmother die?’ Meili asks, wiping snot and lipstick on the bed sheet.
‘October the 9th – your birthday,’ Kongzi replies, taking out a cigarette.
Meili bursts into tears again. Nannan jumps off the bed, crawls into Meili’s arms and starts weeping too. The bamboo hut is shaken about so much that dried mud falls from the walls.
Kongzi goes outside. The last segment of the sun is reflected on the surface of the duck pond. A car moves below the black hills in the distance, leaving a thin trail of light. Through the reeds, he sees Meili’s brother returning from the village, and waves to him. They enter the hut together and find Meili lying on the floor like a wounded creature, howling at all the miseries and wrongs inflicted on her, her cries beating through the mud, the swamp and the cold autumn wind.
A few hours later, calm finally descends. The kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lights up the four faces in the hut, leaving everything else in darkness. Meili’s brother looks just like her, but his eyebrows arch downwards, giving him a crestfallen air. ‘I should leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t easy getting time off from the mine.’ Nannan is lying asleep at the end of the bed. Meili’s eyelids are swollen from weeping. She bites into a cob of sweetcorn and chews slowly. When Kongzi turns his face towards the lamp, he looks much older. The tobacco smoke streaming from his mouth makes even the darkness seem sluggish.
‘There’s a detergent factory downriver, a vinyl factory, a fire retardant foam factory,’ Kongzi says to the brother, the reflection of the lamp’s flame flickering across his pupils. ‘They’re all looking for workers. Why not stay here and get a job in one of them? I met a guy the other day who used to be a miner. He told me there was an explosion at his mine last year. The director didn’t want news of it to leak out, so he immediately sealed up the mine and refused to let rescue workers winch up the trapped men.’
‘Yes, coal mining is treacherous,’ Meili says. ‘Accidents happen all the time.’ Now that she’s washed off her make-up, she looks more awake than the two half-inebriated men.
‘No, I couldn’t live here,’ the brother says. ‘The smell is too foul. Look at the rashes that have broken out on my skin.’ He scratches the red patches on his hands. He’s wearing a blue down jacket with a grease-stained collar. His chin and neck are ingrained with coal dust. The conversation dries up. Nannan rolls onto her side, making the hut’s bamboo walls creak.
‘Dad, I need to wee,’ she says, waking up and rubbing her eyes.
‘Go and do it by yourself,’ Kongzi says.
Meili walks over to her, takes her by the hand and leads her outside. ‘Do it by that tree. I’ll stand here and watch over you.’
‘She wet her bed almost every night while you were away,’ Kongzi whispers to Meili. ‘The foam mattress stinks of urine.’
Nannan returns, holding up her trousers, and climbs onto Kongzi’s lap. ‘Go back to bed,’ he says impatiently.
‘Tell me a “Once upon a time” first. A long one.’
‘No, it’s too late for that. Go to sleep. If you’re good, I’ll catch a frog for you in the morning and roast it on the fire.’
‘You know I don’t eat meat,’ Nannan whines, snuggling against his chest. ‘Meat is pink. I like pink.’
‘Go on, let Mummy put you to bed,’ he says.
‘No, I don’t want Mummy!’ Nannan cries. ‘Mummy smells bad. I miss my grandma.’
‘You were only two and a half when you last saw her. How can you miss her?’
‘Grandma gave me peanuts. She had white hair.’
‘I thought about you every second I was away, Nannan, but you didn’t miss me at all,’ Meili says, rubbing her ear, which is still sore from Kongzi’s slap.
Nannan wraps her arms around Kongzi’s neck and nuzzles her face into his shoulder. ‘I like you, Daddy. You’re warmer than the sun.’ Meili pulls her away, carries her to the bed and tucks a blanket around her. ‘I didn’t miss you a bit,’ Nannan says to her, closing one eye angrily. ‘Give me my red-dress doll.’
‘What an unlucky year this has been,’ Kongzi says, tapping his packet of cigarettes. ‘First your grandmother died, and now this week I heard my father’s fallen ill . . .’
‘I miss home as well,’ Meili says. ‘I want to go and see my parents. I don’t care if the authorities arrest me and bung an IUD inside me.’ She remembers glancing out of the window this morning, and seeing grey sunlight fall on a tarpaulin shelter in the middle of an empty field. The desolate scene made her pine for Nuwa Village, her family and her parents’ house with the osmanthus tree in the garden.
‘The village authorities don’t just arrest family plannin
g criminals now,’ the brother says, cracking a sunflower seed between his teeth. ‘They confiscate their cash, and all the money in their accounts, and put it straight into the pockets of the county officials. There’s a farmers’ market now, near Nuwa Temple. It attracts many visitors. The authorities have set up an inspection post at the village gates, and everyone who passes through has to show their family planning certificate.’
‘I’m not afraid of those officers any more,’ says Meili. ‘It’s the custody centres that terrify me. They round up peasants and kick us out of the cities saying we ruin their image. But not everyone in the cities is rich and well dressed.’ Her mind suddenly returns to the pregnant woman who was kicked in the fields of the labour camp for daring to speak back to a policeman.
‘Well, I saw a notice up in Guai Village today forbidding landlords from renting their property to family planning criminals, so you won’t be safe here either for much longer,’ says the brother, cupping his mug of rice wine.
‘You’re right,’ says Kongzi. ‘And besides, this isn’t a healthy place for a family to live. I don’t want Meili to give birth to another handicapped child . . .’ He turns his eyes to Meili, who stops cracking the sunflower seed between her teeth and looks straight back at him. As soon as she thinks of Waterborn, her body seizes up with rage. She longs to know where Kongzi took her, but hasn’t the courage to ask him. She feels guilty for having run away, and can’t help seeing her grandmother’s death as some divine punishment for her irresponsible behaviour.
‘What about that place, Heaven Township, you were talking about?’ the brother asks, then spits onto the floor. ‘How long would it take you to sail there?’
‘Two, three weeks, at least. And God knows how many inspection posts we’d have to pass through on the way and how many fines we’d be forced to pay.’ Kongzi spits a small bone onto the floor and wipes his mouth.
‘Where has Grandmother been buried?’ Meili asks her brother, looking up at him just like a mouse that’s fallen into an earthen jar.
‘Don’t ask him,’ Kongzi says, rubbing some dirt off the back of his hand. ‘He’s so furious about what happened, he says he wants to blow up the county crematorium. Nuwa authorities have ruled that all corpses must be cremated. So now, after someone dies, the family has to pay the state crematorium two hundred yuan for a hearse, a thousand yuan for the cremation and five hundred yuan for the urn. The authorities want to make as much money as they can from the dead before they allow any funeral to go ahead.’
The brother stares down at his feet. ‘Yes, we knew we couldn’t afford to get Grandmother cremated, so Dad secretly buried her body in the garden, under the shed where we keep the straw. We tried to keep quiet, so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear us, but Mum couldn’t stop herself from crying. A neighbour peeked over the wall, saw what we were doing and reported us to the police. All tip-offs are given a hundred-yuan reward now. The next day, officers from the municipal court turned up, searched the garden, found the grave and dug out Grandmother’s corpse. They couldn’t be bothered to take it to the crematorium, so they doused it in petrol and set fire to it, right in front of us. Then to cap it all, they demanded we pay a fine for illegally burying a body. We didn’t have enough cash on us, so they confiscated two of our pigs.’
‘Those fascists – have they no conscience?’ Mother cries out, then winces in pain as her tongue brushes against the large ulcer that’s formed on the inside of her cheek.
‘These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’
‘After the officers left, we wanted to give Grandmother a proper burial. Her body was so charred and mangled by the fire, we couldn’t put a white funeral robe on her, so we just laid it over her charred remains, then wrapped her in a big cloth and buried her under the peach tree.’ He wipes his eyes, spits onto the floor again, then grinds the saliva into the ground with his shoe.
‘What day did they burn her?’ Mother asks.
‘Three days after she died. October the 12th. I hadn’t returned to the coal mine yet.’
Mother feels her hair stand on end. Three days after my birthday? she mutters to herself. That’s the day I set fire to the nightclub, and Grandmother’s face appeared before me crying: I’m burning, burning . . . After a long pause, she looks up at her brother and says, ‘There’s a photograph at home of Grandmother when she was twelve, with a flower in her hair, standing in front of the entrance of Nuwa Temple. Make sure it’s put in a safe place . . .’
The brother pours himself some tea and changes the subject. ‘The Nuwa County authorities are giving tourism a big push,’ he tells Father. ‘The reservoir near Kong Village is a pleasure lake now, with three barges, a small pier and a ticket office. Cao Niuniu designed it. He’s the son of that guy, Old Cao, who did the mural for you, isn’t he? Well, Niuniu’s a successful painter now. He has a studio in Beijing’s 678 Art District. He even has an American girlfriend. He drove down to Kong Village last year in his expensive jeep, followed by TV crews and packs of journalists. He’s bought the hotel you both worked in, and has got a hundred young locals to live there and churn out copies of Western masterpieces: Lunch on the Grass, The Last Supper – or is it The Naked Lunch? I forget the names. So, Kong Village is now a famous artists’ colony!’ The brother’s eyes light up.
‘So, is Old Cao still living in his son’s apartment in Nuwa County?’ Father asks.
‘I don’t know. But I have some other news from your village. The local police uncovered a secret plot to subvert state power. It was all over the Public Security Evening Post. The ringleader was a guy called Kong Qing. He had some gall, that man. But he’s behind bars now, serving an indefinite sentence. He formed a secret cell of three hundred peasants who called themselves the China Fertility Freedom Party. Every member wore a yellow thread around their left arm. They planned to take over the County Family Planning Commission on National Day, and declare a Fertility Freedom Law which would grant the Chinese people the right to decide how many children they have.’
‘Oh, Kong Qing?’ says Father, glancing nervously at Meili. ‘I don’t know him very well. He was an artillery soldier, I think. His wife was given a forced abortion before we left, and she never got over it. Who knows, if we hadn’t escaped the village when we did, perhaps I too would have started an uprising.’
KEYWORDS: dark road, waste channel, semicircle, river dragon, Heaven Township.
‘ARE WE THERE yet?’ Meili calls out from the bow. She stands up, takes a deep breath and feels the tart, bitter, sour night air slip down her throat like a foul medicinal brew. Yes, this is just the kind of air that could kill sperm, she thinks to herself. ‘So, this must be Heaven Township, where no woman need ever worry about falling pregnant!’ she says out loud. Afraid that Kongzi might have heard her, she closes her mouth, then inhales deeply through her nose, expels the air through pursed lips and feels the toxins stream into her blood. With a rush of excitement, she gazes out at the ragged river that is leading them to their new home.
‘Careful of that wreck!’ she shouts. The crumbling frame of a boat lying half-beached among the reeds on the right looks like the skeleton of some mythical river dragon. Above it stand two dilapidated, roofless houses. Kongzi proceeds cautiously downstream, his hand over his mouth to block out the chemical stench. The river narrows sharply. There are recently built tiled villas on both sides now, interspersed with ancient grey houses. A few tall pine trees stab into the night sky like masts of a ship.
‘No, this can’t be right,’ Kongzi says. ‘This isn’t a river, it’s a waste channel. We must ask for directions before we go any further. I’ll try to stop over there.’ He turns off the engine, crouches down and shines his torch over the bank.
A girl is squatting in the mud, scrubbing clothes on a stone slab. There’s a red p
lastic bucket beside her. A semicircle of river in front of her has been cleared of floating rubbish.
‘Is this Heaven Township?’ Kongzi shouts out, his torchlight falling on her yellow rubber gloves. She lifts her face and lowers it again. Her gloved hands continue to dunk the clothes in the dark water and rub them against the stone.
‘This must be it,’ says Meili. ‘Look how peaceful it is – almost other-worldly.’ She takes the torch from Kongzi, lets the beam wander over the buildings then rest on a whitewashed wall with a blue notice that says: USING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY, OUR DEVICES MAKE YOUR ENERGY METER TURN BACKWARDS INSTEAD OF FORWARDS.
‘Well, I can’t moor here, there’s too much rubbish in the way,’ Kongzi says. He starts the engine again and keeps going, leaning over the side of the boat to check that the hull isn’t scraping against the riverbed.
A stone bridge appears ahead, with two boats tethered beside it. At one end of the bridge is a kiosk lit by a naked bulb. Meili sighs with relief. This must be the River of Forgetting, she says to herself, and that is the Bridge of Helplessness. Old Lady Meng is probably waiting beside it with her five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia.
Once they’ve sailed under the bridge a vast lake spreads out before them. Lights twinkle on buildings reflected around the margins. The water is as tranquil as a womb. As they breathe the sulphurous stench, Meili and Kongzi feel they’ve been banished from the sky and the earth and have slipped into an underworld city, a peaceful haven where they can safely settle down and put an end to their floating life. Meili’s face glows with joy. She coughs into her sleeve and hugs Kongzi’s thigh. ‘We’re in Heaven at last – we’ve found it!’ she cries. ‘The only place in China where women can never fall pregnant!’ As soon as these words come out, she bites her lip, taken aback by her daring.