The Dark Road

by Ma Jian

  But tonight, Kongzi doesn’t explode. He goes into the yard, sits down on a chair and pulls out a bottle of beer from under the pile of plates beneath the gas stove. Since his mouth was electrocuted by the police, his ulcers have become so chronic that he’s almost given up smoking and can only eat small amounts of food.

  ‘Mum, I’m hungry,’ Nannan whines, crawling sleepily onto Meili’s lap.

  ‘I’ve got some delicious steamed pork with sticky rice and hot-sour noodles for you.’

  ‘But I only want fish and chocolate.’

  Meili pulls the table over to the bed, opens the cartons she brought back from the restaurant, empties the contents into two bowls and calls out to Kongzi. ‘Come inside and eat . . . Are you still sulking about your sister’s baby? Don’t worry, his name won’t be entered in the Kong Family Register. And anyway, she can’t be the only Kong in China who’s had a child with a foreigner. You should learn to move with the times.’

  ‘Mum, how come your baby still hasn’t come out?’ Nannan asks, swaying from side to side as she tucks into the food.

  ‘Perhaps it’s afraid it will be as unlucky as Happiness was, and be strangled before it takes its first breath.’

  ‘When I grow up I want to live in a country that doesn’t kill babies.’

  ‘Well, if I make enough money, you can go and study abroad when you’re eighteen,’ Meili says. ‘Look, even your little green caterpillars know they need to find the right place to live. When we’re all tucked up in bed, they’ll climb out of the cup, crawl over to that nice bush out there, weave themselves into chrysalids, then ten days later they’ll turn into butterflies and fly away.’

  ‘If I lie down on this bed long enough, will I turn into a boy?’ Nannan asks.

  ‘It’s not so bad being a girl. When you grow up you can wear earrings like mine, and necklaces and nice long dresses.’

  ‘Mum, Daddy said that after Heaven is born we can go home. You’ll have a son and a daughter, and everyone will be happy.’

  ‘But we don’t have a home to go back to,’ Meili says. ‘That’s the price we had to pay to bring Heaven into the world.’ Meili feels a sudden sense of pride that for three years, her belly has given Heaven a safe refuge. She wants to blurt out that Heaven is a girl, but stops herself. During the day, she pushes Heaven to the side so that it hugs her hips, making her bump much less visible.

  After Nannan falls asleep, Meili pours herself a glass of beer and lies down on the bed. A man on the television sings, ‘Let the moonlight bring you peace, let the sunlight bring you joy . . .’ and is then abruptly interrupted by an advert for Wahaha children’s sausages. She switches off the television, lies in the dark, and suddenly sees an image of Weiwei’s tortoiseshell glasses. That encounter happened years ago. How come her thoughts still return to it? All he did was stroke her in the dark. She remembers the sudden downpour that fell that night as they lay in the cabin, and the sound of the rain battering against the canopy, then forming a swishing pool above her that crashed onto the stern when the boat rocked to the side. But she knows that memory can’t be right. The canopy always leaked, so if it had been raining, water would have dripped down the rusty pipes of the cabin’s frame and seeped across the wooden deck all the way to her thighs . . . In her dream, she sees a banana tree tilt under the weight of its heavy fruit. She runs towards it and dissolves into a swarm of butterflies. She enters a desert cave, climbs up a sand dune and hears a voice whisper, ‘You’ve returned to your place of birth . . .’ Then she raises her head and sees herself looming above like a steel tower, her iron legs planted firmly in the ground and her vagina arching through the blue sky like a rainbow.

  KEYWORDS: deep well, foreign blood, index finger, telephone booth, pink blossom, tiger and dragon, paper women.

  AS MEILI IS about to kick off her high-heeled shoes after returning home from a long day at the shop, Cha Na rushes in and says: ‘I’ve just heard that Kongzi’s lying blind drunk outside the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour. You’d better go and rescue him. Nannan can spend the night with us.’ Meili grabs an umbrella and heads for Hong Kong Street where, sure enough, Kongzi is lying conked out in the rain below the massage parlour’s entrance, his head resting on the front step. His drenched clothes seem to be weighing him down, because though he’s not a heavy man, Meili is unable to lift him onto her back. She tries dragging him along the pavement, but his bare feet become bloody as they scrape against the concrete. The girls in the massage parlour stare mockingly at her through the window. Summoning all her energy, she grabs his hands, swings them over her shoulders and with a flick of her hips manages to shift him up onto her back. Like a farmer carrying a pig to market, she lugs him to the end of the street and hails a taxi home. It’s her birthday today. Tang wanted to invite her to a French restaurant in Foshan, but she persuaded him to take her for a simple dim sum lunch in Heaven instead. She knew Kongzi would forget that it’s her birthday, so she’d planned to tell him she wasn’t up to cooking supper, and suggest that they go to a Cantonese restaurant called Lured by the Fragrance, You Dismount your Horse. She thought she’d be brave and order dog hotpot, and ‘tiger and dragon fight to the death’, a local speciality of fried cat and snake meat which is believed to help rebalance the body’s yin and yang.

  Back in the house, the room fills with a sickening stench as she removes his vomit-soaked clothes. When she pulls off his trousers, she sees his shrivelled penis is sheathed in a condom. She freezes in horror and her scalp tightens. Her first impulse is to chop off the penis or set fire to it. She screams and pounds his head and chest until his cries become an echo of her own.

  Kongzi pushes her off, sits up and sees the condom lying on the ground. Sperm has escaped and formed a yellow stain on the white mat. Meili grabs her shoe-cutting knife and, as her mind returns to the nightclub boss who raped her, she shouts: ‘You depraved bastard! You ugly, festering lowlife! If you have any balls left, show them to me, come on, pull them out and let me chop them off!’ She raises the knife high in the air then swings it down straight onto her left hand, severing her entire index finger. Her blood splashes onto the mat near the pool of sperm. She drops the knife, flings the door open and rushes blindly out into the rain.

  For an hour she walks round the lake in utter despair. Then, feeling that the sky is falling on her head and the earth crumbling beneath her feet, she makes up her mind to go to an empty graveyard and hang herself from a tree. I’ll never trust Kongzi again. The fraud! Going to work in a suit and tie, pretending to be a man of virtue . . . She sees a telephone booth and steps inside to shelter herself from the rain. The bloodied stump of her index finger hurts so much she’s tempted to chop off the whole hand. Listening to the rain smashing onto the plastic roof, she picks up the receiver and considers phoning Weiwei, or Tang, but every man seems tainted to her now. She puts the receiver to her ear and imagines Suya picking up on the other end. Do you hear the rain here in Heaven Township, Suya? It’s pelting down. You celebrated my birthday with me, and the next day you vanished into thin air. You too were attacked and defiled. But I set fire to the man who raped me, to avenge that crime, and all the crimes that other men committed against you. You were right – this is no country for women. It’s pointless forgiving men and expecting them to change. They never do. They’re filthy scum, every one of them. Where are you now? Can I come and stay with you? I’ve nowhere left to go . . . Noticing a figure standing outside waiting to use the phone, she puts down the receiver and leaves, concealing her left hand in the crook of her right arm. The rain washes the blood from her wound. What hope is there left? she mutters as she wanders down the deserted street. She feels she’s been born into the wrong time and the wrong place, and is descending into a spiral of misery where the only escape is death.

  By the time she reaches the graveyard, the rain has stopped. Through tear-filled eyes, she stares at the rows of granite tombstones and the funeral offerings arranged below them: oranges, apples, sodden cardboard cars an
d paper women labelled MISTRESS in black ink that has blurred in the rain. She presses the bony stump of her finger and a sharp jolt of pain races straight to her heart, then blood begins to pour from it again like water from a tap. She rips off her sleeve and wraps it tightly around the wound to stem the flow . . . My life is dripping away from me. This is where I will say goodbye to the world . . . When she married Kongzi she persuaded herself that although he might not be rich, he was descended from an educated and illustrious family, and that together they could lead a contented life. She never asked for much. She agreed to abandon their village and live as vagrants in order to give him the male heir he yearned for. But over the years, his obsessive desire for a son has blinded and warped him, and he sees her now only as a creature of reproduction. She’d hoped that once little Heaven was born, she could return to Kong Village, open a shop, look after her mother and live in peace. But this hope has vanished. Yes, she should walk straight to the end of her life and step over the edge . . .

  Glancing down at her feet, she sees an imitation wedding certificate with a magazine snapshot of the beautiful film star Gong Li pasted next to a photograph of a wizened old man. Didn’t Kongzi once say that when he reaches the netherworld, he too would like to marry Gong Li? Perhaps in that faraway land, all dreams really can be fulfilled. This isn’t the burial place she’d imagined for herself, but what does it matter? In the end, we must all return to the earth, and one patch of soil is no different from another. She remembers, aged seventeen, sitting in a black car on the way to her wedding, her face caked in thick, itchy make-up. Attached to the roof were gifts of folded bedcovers and a warm, musty-smelling basket of ducklings. Kongzi turned to her and said, ‘Once we’re married, you’ll belong to me, and I’ll be making all the decisions in the family. Don’t even think of spreading your pink blossom over the garden walls.’ He put his hand on hers and she felt sick with shyness. As a child, she loved to hear her grandmother tell her the story of the cowherd and the celestial weaver girl, who crossed the Milky Way once a year on a bridge of magpies just to spend one night together, and she hoped that one day she would experience a love as passionate as theirs. Meili walks to a tree and leans against it. She has no idea what it’s called. It has leaves as large as her hands and smooth, snake-like branches. All she needs to do now is pull her belt off and strap her neck to a branch . . . Although Tang and Weiwei showed her affection, she has never been unfaithful to Kongzi. To save him distress, she never told him about the rape, and avenged the crime herself. Glancing at her feet, she sees a fat-bellied frog crawling through the grass and feels an urge to stamp on it. Her left hand has gone numb. Blood is dripping from the wound onto the wet, corpse-filled earth. She regrets that her efforts to help Kongzi preserve his family line prevented her fulfilling her duties towards her parents. For years, she’s denied herself luxuries, scrimping and saving so that they can send money home, but most of it goes to Kongzi’s family. She knows her mother would never contemplate drowning herself, as Weiwei’s mother did. She remembers how her mother hugged her with trembling arms the day her friend jumped into a deep well with her four-year-old daughter strapped to her back after finding out that her husband had slept with another woman. Am I afraid of death? Meili wonders, reminding herself that in a few minutes’ time she’ll be hanging from the tree. No, I’m not afraid. I shake with terror at the sight of a family planning officer, but when I look death in the eye, I feel perfectly calm. She pulls off her leather belt. Perhaps she really does have foreign blood in her veins. She remembers hearing how her great-grandmother slashed her wrist after giving birth to a fair-haired child, and wonders whether a tendency for suicide runs in her family . . . Her brother has been slaving down the mines seven days a week, leaving her father to look after the fields on the weekends, but between them they still can’t afford to pay for the imported drugs that have been prescribed to her mother to keep her cancer at bay. Her brother was considered to be the clever one, and Meili had to leave primary school early so that her parents could afford to send him to high school. But he failed his exams and never made it to university, so their sacrifices were in vain . . . If she dies in this graveyard, where will she be reincarnated next? All she knows is that if she does hang herself, she’ll never see her parents or Nannan again, and little Heaven will die as well . . . My baby is still growing inside me. I can’t let it die. I should at least wait until it’s safely born before I end my own life. Oh, this is all Kongzi’s fault! Why should I have to condemn myself to another reincarnation because of his sordid infidelity? Her muddled mind begins to clear. Yes, he’s the one who should be hanging himself from a tree, not me.

  On a weed-covered grave below, two mice stare up at her, reminding her of the two children she has lost. If she gives birth to Heaven, she will leave Kongzi, save enough money to pay the family planning fine, then move back to Nuwa Village with her two daughters. But if she wants to make enough money to have a comfortable life, she must never fall pregnant again, and the best way of ensuring that is for Heaven to curl up tight and stay where it is. She must become an independent woman, a person who not only has a body, but also a mind capable of thought. She shouldn’t have to punish herself for her husband’s crimes. She can sense that there is a woman asleep inside her who is slowly coming to life. She stands up and wraps her arms around herself . . . Yes, Kongzi can go to hell! I’m twenty-eight today. My best years are still ahead of me. I’ll struggle on and make my way back to my place of birth, like the sturgeon that swim up the Yangtze. I won’t let you die, Heaven. Whatever the future holds, we will withstand it together . . .

  Meili staggers out of the graveyard. The long road stretching through the darkness before her shimmers like a river of shattered ice.

  KEYWORDS: wild grasses, urinal, escalator, complex characters, fast food, worm-like, missing girl.

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, Meili, now with only nine fingers, is still living with Kongzi, but they’ve moved to a place further away from the hair salons of Hong Kong Road. Misfortunes always seem to come in pairs. The day Meili was hospitalised for blood poisoning when her unhealed stump became infected, she heard that her brother had got into a fight with the coal mine director over unpaid wages and had been arrested and sentenced to two years of reform through labour. Her family has sunk to rock bottom. Her mother’s cancer has returned and her father has had to give up his job in the mine to look after her. Meili is now her family’s only lifeline.

  Meanwhile, Kongzi’s temporary position at Red Flag Primary has come to an end, and he’s taken up a permanent post as deputy head of the migrant school Nannan attends. In the evening, he puts on his glasses with an even greater air of authority as he sets about correcting homework. A few hours before he made his fateful visit to the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour, he went online and read a telegram the Red Guards sent to Chairman Mao after they’d destroyed the Temple of Confucius. They told their leader that they had burned ten thousand ancient books, smashed six thousand engraved stone tablets and a thousand gravestones, and toppled the statue of ‘Kong the Second Son – that so-called Teacher of Ten Thousand Generations’, so that the radiance of Mao Zedong Thought could shine over the temple grounds once more. Kongzi told Meili that the telegram threw him into such a frenzied rage that he swallowed a full bottle of rice wine, and he has no memory of what happened next, or how he ended up lying on the steps of the massage parlour. The girls in the parlour told Meili that he asked for a ‘fast food’ service. When they’d finished, he said he didn’t have any money on him, so they had no choice but to throw him onto the street. Meili had concealed a hammer in her jacket, and was planning to smash the parlour up, but when she saw the girls in the back room lying asleep on camp beds, she felt sorry for them and changed her mind. She imagined all the days Suya spent on a bed in a similar, sour-smelling room, being treated like a human urinal as one nameless man after another pulled down his trousers and emptied himself into her.

  She’s had little time to think about
her injured hand. When she returned home from the graveyard, she picked up her severed finger and wrapped it in a cloth, telling Kongzi, ‘I’ll keep it until we go home, then bury it in my parents’ garden where I too will be buried one day. A body must enter its grave complete, after all.’ After the turn of the year, her spirits lifted, and she felt that at last her run of misery had come to an end. The sight of Kongzi consumed by his work, reading and marking late into the night, has allowed her to recapture the pride she used to feel as the schoolteacher’s wife in Kong Village. Although the migrant school is as illegal as the children who attend it, and his salary is miserable, Nannan is now able to study there free of charge. Their lives are back on track. Meili has asked Cha Na to run her children’s shop, and has started work as general manager for Hugo Electronics. She no longer allows Tang to hold her hand. While she was in hospital, he visited her every day and warned Kongzi that if he ever dared sleep with a prostitute again, he’d have him arrested. He lent Meili a laptop so that she could surf the internet from her hospital bed, and when he appointed her general manager, he not only gave her half the shares in the company, he set up its bank account in her name. She knows that she can’t give him anything in return other than friendship and support.

  Tang has rented an office in a smart block near a components warehouse in the centre of town. Since Meili first stepped on the escalator that leads to the first-floor office, her joy has been tinged with anxiety. She is not afraid that the company won’t make money. The success of her children’s shop has convinced her that her business instincts are good. She has helped to create a website which has attracted great interest from traders in the north, and has researched the latest developments in electronic machinery. Last month, she happened to hear that computers made in China will soon be installed with CD drives that can record as well as play, so she immediately slashed the price of their soon-to-be-defunct drives and managed to get rid of them in one day. Her anxiety stems from insecurity over her peasant background. She often feels like a scruffy partridge that has wheedled its way into a modern chicken pen. She has bought herself many clothes, but is never sure which ones to wear. (Fortunately, when she’s in the office, little Heaven curls up so tightly that her belly shrinks to half its size.) She is self-conscious about her appearance, and also her lack of culture. When Tang showed her his extensive collection of CDs and foreign novels, she felt like an ignorant child, and was determined to fill some of the huge gaps in her knowledge. She’s bought pirated discs of Beethoven, Puccini, Gershwin and Miles Davis which she listens to through earphones late at night, and is reading her way through translated editions of Les Misérables,A Christmas Carol, Light in August and A Brief History of Time which were selling for half price at a government-run bookstore. She feels that there’s so much to discover, she has no right to remain ignorant. Every day she tries to increase her vocabulary, but when she comes across text on the internet from Hong Kong or Taiwan which is written in complex characters, she still has to ask her colleagues for help. When everyone has left the office at the end of the day, she remains at her desk flicking through journals and magazines and talking quietly to little Heaven. Since Kongzi begged for forgiveness and vowed on bended knees never to visit a massage parlour again, she has felt that it’s now safe for Heaven to be born. She knows Kongzi will be disappointed to discover the baby is a girl, but is confident that as he’s in such disgrace, he wouldn’t dare attempt to give the baby away. She’s told Heaven that it can come out as soon as it wants. Everything is ready.