by Geling Yan
The neighbours noticed that she had put on her work clothes and peak cap again, shouldered her bag and gone down the stairs. The factory had returned to work. They were going to bring out the first steel for several months, which made it a matter of great moment, and gongs and drums and coloured silk were everywhere, spread over the heaven and covering the earth.
11
IN HER CANVAS work bag, Duohe carried the steel serial numbers that she had cut while the factory was out of action off to the workshop. There were more than fifty of them. There was a woman in charge of the workshop now, and she asked how she could carry so many. She smiled briefly and nodded. The workshop director said that some more workers had come, so Duohe’s workbench would be moved to under the tree outside the door. Once the workshop’s reed-matting shelter had been enlarged, she would get a good place. She nodded again. A few poles had been put up beneath the tree, with azure plastic sheeting stretched over them to keep out the rain. Duohe was delighted with her new surroundings.
Now it was the characters ‘Made in China’ that she carved the most every day. Because these four characters were hardest. Her work was never rejected: one character on each piece of steel, which were to be stamped onto wheel hoops for trains or sheet steel destined for Vietnam, Africa or Albania. Duohe’s unusually focused eyes and handiwork had been sent to three continents. The workshop director would call out to her occasionally when she needed something, and Duohe would raise her head from the workbench, but the director suspected that Duohe did not recognise her at all. Sometimes the director thought of telling her that the name Zhu Duohe should be on the list of commendations on the workshop blackboard, but because she never spoke out at meetings they had to pick someone else to commend instead. On the whole, the director reflected that this might be a step too far; if she did not make Duohe aware of it, she would have no idea of the existence of this ‘roll of honour’, so she just said ‘You’ve worked hard, well done!’ and dispensed with the rest of the guidance. The director reckoned that Duohe did not know the vast majority of her colleagues in the workshop; when she looked at their faces, all she saw was ‘Made in China’.
One afternoon in April, the factory’s new leader came. He had locked up the factory head and Party secretary, and after demoting them to the status of paroled criminals, had himself become leader. Director Peng of the Factory Revolutionary Committee, who had only just turned thirty, had no easy task ahead of him. He had to maintain the output of steel in the steelworks, while at the same time launching counter-attacks against a youth who wanted to be leader. That young man was the chief of staff of another big rebel army, which was organising general offensives every day, and attempting to snatch power out of Director Peng’s hands in a coup d’état.
Director Peng was just passing through, when he happened to glance sideways out of the window of the Volga car that had belonged to the old factory head, and immediately told the driver to pull over. He saw the sky-blue awning suspended between two trees, and the half-stooped figure beneath it.
When he had got out of the car and was walking towards that figure he regretted it a little: if the old things which he had already dealt with tidily and set aside were to become chaotic again that would be bad. But Director Peng was no longer the green Xiao Peng of those years, he was confident that he could seize the reins of two thousand workers who were in chaos and master them all, and if he allowed a little bit of chaos into his own emotions too there would be no great harm done. If he wished to master his emotions again he could do so at once.
He was surprised to find that Duohe was thinner and smaller than she had been in his memory. She raised her face, as if dazzled, and it took her roughly ten seconds to focus. Director Peng held out his hand to her, and she bowed to him, turning over two hands covered in steel filings to show Director Peng, as her face blossomed into a smile. There were threadlike wrinkles on her face when she smiled, but there was more life to it than to her former absurdly pale and clear skin.
Director Peng suddenly became the green boy Xiao Peng again; he pulled her hand over to the other side of the workbench and shook it vigorously. The old intimacy and warmth was still there, separated by just two layers of thin calluses and one layer of steel cuttings.
He became very chatty. And not one sentence of it was of an appropriate level for a man of his status: he said that he’d seen her from a very long way off, and thought she looked familiar, but did not dare to be certain it was her, it seemed that she had got thinner, nothing else had changed. His talk was no more elevated than that of the dependants.
As she was listening to him, she picked up a small steel file, and worked on the serial number clamped in her table vice, trimming a bit here, tidying a bit there. After a couple of strokes of the file, she stood up, and gave him a smile.
He thought, where else could I find such a good woman? At her work all day long, eyes fixed straight ahead, not nagging or fussing at all. Part of the reason he had been so fond of her in the past was her lack of words. His childhood and growing up had been too full of women who were good talkers, but there was no one who had such a talent for silence.
The workshop director came with a crude, mass-produced stool and invited Director Peng to sit. The stool was for workers to sit on, so it was not much lower than the workbench, and as soon as Director Peng sat down, he immediately got up again; when he sat his eyes and Duohe’s were no longer on the same level.
When he was about to leave he invited Duohe to drop by his place for a visit. The pounding of Duohe’s heart was audible even to him. How many changes had the nation and its people been through in the past few years? Could it be that his invitation was still exactly the same as a few years previously?
Duohe walked with Xiao Peng back to the Volga. The fact that Xiao Peng rode in a Volga must have left a very deep impression on her, and out of all the great matters this was one that was bound to register with her. Duohe was no longer as free with him as she had been at her workstation. A man who rode in a Volga casually asking her to drop by and sit for a while was no longer as straightforward as she had imagined, and the more casual he was, the less straightforward the situation became.
Although Xiao Peng had the status of a man who could ride in a Volga, he still lived in the same dormitory room as before. The difference was that the entire corridor had become a dormitory for Xiao Peng’s bodyguards. These days Xiao Peng’s safety was a matter of concern to a great many people.
Xiao Peng made the bodyguards give his room a good clean. They carried an old sofa over from the factory headquarters, but the cover was filthy, so he had them spread a blue-and-white-striped towel from the bathhouse over it. He thought that there could be nothing more offensive to Duohe than to make her ‘sit for a while’ on this squalid sofa, reeking of cigarettes and feet. The Party secretary whose power had been wrested away was so white and clean to look at, yet he often used to sit on that sofa picking at his feet. Duohe’s cleanliness and tidiness was the characteristic that Xiao Peng found most appealing – when he saw her in front of her workbench, her work overalls might have been so big they were like a blue sack of grain, but she had washed and ironed them in such an orderly, precise way. Although the whole gang of women had been wearing the same blue grain sacks, Duohe’s was still a beautiful grain sack.
Perhaps because she was Japanese?
The secret that Duohe was a Japanese woman had remained with Xiao Peng. Xiao Shi had been silenced by death. So long as Xiao Peng overlooked this fact, Duohe could probably occupy her fraudulent place among the countless women of China in safety, to the end of her days. Every time this secret floated up from within his mind, it horrified him, but at the same time it gave rise to an indescribable tenderness. She was a foreigner! She was a woman born of the enemy, one who had come close to breeding up more of the enemy herself. The taste of a daughter of the enemy must be a unique experience, it was sure to be a delicacy.
Sometimes his tenderness had its source in pity fo
r all she had suffered in the course of her life, sometimes in anger on her behalf at the unfairness of her life in the Zhang family, neither a wife nor a concubine.
Sometimes he was sentimentally attached to her, if only because he secretly sensed that they would never actually become a couple. Even if everyone in the world approved, he himself would not necessarily do so.
Sometimes he was confused and bewildered for a moment. He had endured heavy wrongs: for her sake he endured a blow to the face from his father, and no doubt betrayal by his own son, for as soon as he was an adult, the first thing he was going to do was expose his father Xiao Peng. For her sake, he had stood fast against his wife’s forgiveness as her tears flowed – his wife’s weeping forgiveness had hurt his heart so much that a part of it had died. He had endured all of this, just in order not to marry this daughter of the enemy Duohe? Xiao Peng thought that it was his own freedom that he had ransomed from his marriage; it was in order to love Duohe freely without getting married. Women who could marry were everywhere, women who could be courted without marriage were exceedingly rare. The fact that she was the daughter of the enemy alone was enough for Xiao Peng to indulge in heart-stirring romance, but without any danger of getting completely drawn in.
He had the guards scrub the glass until it was as clear as air. The windows in the Zhang family home were so transparent that you could mistake them for empty frames. He also made them scrub the floor, bottoms wiggling. The floors in this building were made of wood, and when he dragged out all the shoes and cardboard boxes from under the bed he discovered that it had once been painted dark red. But the rest of the floor inside the room was full of bumps and hollows, and its surface was rough and ridged, well on its way to returning to its original state as a log – one felled by the water’s edge, to be slowly eroded away for years by the sun and rain. The guards did all they could to make the floor a bit cleaner, to scrub the grime, and to chip out the dry grains of rice, melon-seed husks and finger -and toenail clippings from the cracks.
It turned out that this room could be made bright and very sweet-smelling. In April and May, the slopes of the mountain were covered with red, downy wild lilies, so Xiao Peng had his guards pick a large bunch. Fiddling around with flowers and plants did not fit in with his status as Director of the Revolutionary Committee, but red flowers could be understood in another way.
This afternoon Duohe was going to come to ‘sit for a while’ after work. Around five o’clock the factory’s alarm suddenly let out a long wail, and a guard reported to Xiao Peng that the opposition faction had launched a new offensive. They had gone to the outskirts of the city to mobilise a great mob of peasants, and now peasants with farm tools in their hands were converging from all sides: from the mountain, from trucks, from tractors, gradually pressing closer to the steelworks.
The members of the opposition faction were from Shanghai and the south, and made up the minority in the factory; as things stood they had no hope of occupying the factory Revolutionary Committee by force of arms. They had gone to the peasants to stir up divisions, saying that the steelworks had drawn off the water from their reservoir, having originally agreed to lay on running water for them, but after many years they had failed to make good on their promise. The steel factory dumped piles of rubbish on their land, and paid no rent for the land they used in order to do so. As soon as the opposition had snatched the power from the Revolutionary Committee, the peasants could depend on them for water pipes and land rent.
Xiao Peng strapped on his brass-buckled leather belt, slung his .54 calibre pistol over his shoulder, donned his steel helmet and left. At this moment Duohe did not exist, until she bumped into him on her way up the stairs.
‘You can’t go back home, the factory’s surrounded! It’s dangerous for you to go home now!’ said Xiao Peng, pulling her along. Duohe followed him as he sped down the steps, crossed the courtyard and got into his Volga. All the guards jumped onto their bicycles behind him. In an instant they had become contestants in a bike race, following hard on the heels of the Volga.
Duohe followed Xiao Peng into the factory headquarters. A great red flag had been raised on the roof, and Xiao Peng stood beneath it, a loudhailer in his hand, shouting in all directions: ‘Comrades, workers of the Revolution! The reactionary faction wants to force us to cease production! Our answer to their counter-revolutionary attack, their sabotage of anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism is this: Hold your ground and remain at your post! If any of them should dare to set foot on the base of the furnace, a rolling flood of molten steel will transform them into a puff of black smoke!’
All the main gates of the factory had been closed, and workers from Xiao Peng’s faction stood inside the boundary wall, holding all kinds of spears and big knives, ready to cut down anyone who came over.
Several cranes drove to the foot of the factory headquarters, and lifted sack after sack of cement used for repairing the workshops to the roof of the building. Soon, work on the fortifications was under way.
Duohe had been ordered to take refuge in the meeting room, with two elderly secretaries as her companions. After dark, voices could be heard very clearly shouting outside, telling Xiao Peng to stop resisting, and to surrender as quickly as possible, otherwise they would not guarantee his unworthy life.
Xiao Peng had stopped fighting a war of words with the people on the other side of the wall. The big floodlights in the factory had all been extinguished, with only a few searchlights sweeping back and forth in the darkness. Every time the searchlights swept into the meeting room, Duohe would look at the clock on the wall: eight o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock …
Duohe’s two companions were close to tears. They were just a couple of years away from retirement: a time to enjoy their old age in peace with their grandchildren in their arms, and now this, there was no chance of a good end for them now. Even if the opposition faction did not storm their way in, they would be surrounded anyway, and would starve to death inside the building.
It occurred to them that when meetings were held in the factory headquarters, they would sometimes bring out a few peanuts and melon seeds for their visitors. Sure enough, they groped in a cupboard and found a packet of peanuts. They invited Duohe to eat, and shared a fistful with her. Douhe packed peanuts into the pocket of her overalls, and hurried up to the roof.
As soon as Xiao Peng saw her arrive, he immediately shouted at her to go down. She paid no attention, and poured the peanuts into the pockets of Xiao Peng’s coat. A map was still spread out on the ground in front of him, a hand-drawn relief map of the factory area that he had drawn from memory, as he deployed the people around him in attack and defence.
He raised his head, and saw that Duohe had not left; she was watching him gesticulating and waving his hands. He could not see her face clearly, but he could tell that his appearance as a great commander in this age of great deeds had left a deep impression on her.
If he did not eat those peanuts she would not leave, so Xiao Peng chewed hard and issued commands with peanutty breath. Group after group left after receiving their orders, only for new groups to gather, waiting for him to issue further commands. After he had given out all the orders he had one remaining for Duohe: ‘Quick, downstairs! What’s it going to look like if you’re here?’
At this moment the disaster occurred. The opposition outside the factory had no plans to attack the main gate, or the side gates, nor did they climb the walls. They had somehow got hold of a train, which they used to enter the factory directly along the rail tracks. The people inside the factory had no time to react, and they did not realise it was too late until the train had been driven inside, overturning an empty truck parked on the track.
From the train a black mass of the Great Peasants’ Army came pouring out. The southerners of the opposition faction were not prone to sudden flare-ups of temper like the North-easterners, who would fling themselves into fights without a thought for their own lives. Their aim was to seize power, who
ever helped them was fine by them, and the peasants had time on their hands, so why not turn them into an army of volunteers? Under the direction of a small number of workers, the peasants immediately occupied the strategic parts of the factory area. The North-easterners all retreated into a workshop and the factory headquarters building. Before long the peasants had occupied another workshop, and the club opposite the factory headquarters. The club building was not as tall as the headquarters, but it offered a better line of fire.
The iron staircase leading to the roof was sawn away. So long as they held fast, no one could think of climbing up there, and Director Peng’s safety was ensured.
The gunshots started in the small hours of the morning.
The firepower of the opposing side was very fierce. One after another of the cement bags were pierced through, and the fortifications gradually started to shrink.