by Geling Yan
Xiao Peng’s glance shifted away. Xiaohuan noticed it at once. The crowd of faces were already exchanging glances; they could tell that Xiaohuan’s innuendoes were aimed at Xiao Peng, but they still felt inhibited from looking directly at him.
‘Don’t think you can weasel out of it. We know all about you – every wart and mole in places too shameful to be seen! And there’s no weaselling out of that!’ Xiaohuan saw Xiao Peng’s expression darken. She’d got him!
People started to titter. Xiaohuan sensed that all her skills as a performer were being cheered on by an appreciative audience, and she felt her spirits revive as she fell still more into character.
‘Yes, we concealed my sister’s identity, so what? If we hadn’t, you’d have given her the devil of a time years ago. She’s a Japanese woman: should she just have let you ruin her? Even the People’s Liberation Army treated their Japanese prisoners of war well, and gave them wheat cakes to eat! I kept things from you, so now you’re going to see how you can punish my crime, eh? I’ll be waiting for you back home!’ She walked away, and turned her head. ‘Director Peng, we’ve been making red-bean sticky rice balls, why don’t you come by for a taste, see if they’re any sweeter than the ones you used to eat in the old days?!’
As Xiaohuan walked towards the stairwell, she could feel a chill on her back. It was Dahai’s gaze, full of loathing and despair. It did not bother her, playing the role of a female clown in her son’s eyes. She wanted to let people know that the Zhang family was not a lump of meat for them to carve up any way they pleased. When Xiao Peng brought down his knife, he should feel very nervous inside.
She walked to the courtyard of the factory headquarters, where she saw a row of towels hanging on a wire, with the red characters for ‘guest house’ printed on one end. Cut off the red characters and they’d still be perfectly good towels. With the family breadwinner in prison, they had had precious little food to go with their rice over the last few months, and there was no oil, salt, soy sauce or vinegar or other such basic condiments. You could forget about getting hold of any meat. Anything you could snatch up in passing you should grab immediately, and the day was not far away when they would be short of towels.
By the time she had squeezed her way under the wire, she was clutching six towels to her bosom. She left at a quick pace, hastily groping at her long sleeves, pressing the towels into her arm, and against her chest. The trick was never, ever to turn your head, looking made you a focus of suspicion, and wouldn’t solve anything. She had to make something out of nothing: to find food, drink and clothes to wear without spending a fen was no easy thing, but take a bit of trouble and it could still be done. So in summer, when she went out of the main gate of the factory she would not take the main road, rather she would walk out along the railway line which ran through the fields on both sides, first plucking a handful of trailing water-chestnut stems, then hiding aramanth and other leafy vegetables she had secretly stripped from their stems inside. There were often ponds by the side of the fields, which always had water chestnuts in them, and no one could see that she was actually picking vegetables, and not gathering a few water chestnuts to idle away some time. Once she had picked enough vegetables, she would bundle them up in her headscarf, with water-chestnut vines poking out at the corners.
Duohe had lost her job at the same time that Zhang Jian lost his. The only one left in the family who was qualified to work was Xiaohuan. She had applied to lots of places: the ice-lolly factory, the processed-food plant, the slaughterhouse, the soy-sauce factory, and they all told her to wait to hear from them, but nothing ever came of it. The reason she went to those factories was because they were all places where you could pick up fringe benefits with minimal effort. The benefit in the lollipop factory was Cuban sugar, the slaughterhouse would always have pigs’ offal, and the processed-foods factory spoke for itself. Xiaohuan’s waist was narrow, and she could steal a few links of sausage or a pig’s lung and stuff them into her waistband, and still have a waist pretty much the same as normal people.
Pushing the bicycle, Xiaohuan headed away from the steelworks towards home. A woman with a basket of eggs slung over one shoulder walked up. Xiaohuan greeted the peasant woman warmly and heartily as ‘big sister’, saying she had a lucky face. The peasant woman cackled and said that she was all of forty-nine years old. Xiaohuan gave a start, thinking to herself that she looked at least sixty-three. Having chosen six eggs, Xiaohuan patted her pockets, saying that she’d left for work in a hurry that morning, and forgotten her purse, such a shame after all that work choosing the eggs! The peasant woman said: No hard feelings, we’ve made friends even if we can’t do business, who’s to say we won’t get another chance to meet in future? Just as she was leaving, Xiaohuan took out the six towels from her clothes, printed with red peonies, Little Red Books, bedbug blood and ‘guest house’.
‘These are all good cotton yarn, have a feel, thick, isn’t it?’
The peasant woman did not understand what Xiaohuan was up to, taking her hand and running it over the towels. She hurriedly replied: ‘Yes, nice and thick.’
‘Since we sisters met by this lucky chance, I’ll make you a present of two of them!’
The peasant woman’s face wavered on the point of a smile.
‘Much better than the ones they sell in your Supply and Marketing Cooperative in the countryside. You can lay them over a pillow, and it’ll be like entering a bridal chamber!’ Xiaohuan pressed the towels into her hands.
The peasant woman said: How can I accept a favour like this when I’ve done nothing to deserve it! Xiaohuan said that the place where she worked was always getting rid of towels, sometimes after just a couple of mild washes, and they weren’t worth anything, she had just thought it was a rare thing to have found herself an elder sister like this. When Xiaohuan had finished speaking she got up and took her leave, but after two steps the peasant woman called her to stop. Since they were friends now, the warmth couldn’t be all on one side, she should give her something too. The eggs were from her family’s own hens, they weren’t worth anything either, so Xiaohuan should take the six eggs that she had just selected as a passing gift.
‘Aiyo, that would be trading goods with you!’
The peasant woman asked if an exchange of gifts wasn’t just the same as a trade? She put the six large, shining eggs on the edge of the basket, and urged Xiaohuan to take them away. Xiaohuan looked askance, her lips pursed as if in complaint, while slowly squatting down. The peasant woman asked her what the three characters on the towels meant. Xiaohuan said they meant ‘Make Revolution’. Aiya, that’s good, good, fashionable characters!
Xiaohuan thought to herself that she really did have a good eye: as soon as she came near this woman she had seen that she was a total illiterate. On the way back, she thought that when the woman got home and laid out the towels on the bed, and other people told her that those three red characters meant ‘guest house’, she was bound to think: looks like that poor girl didn’t have the first idea how to read.
She made a bag for the eggs with her headscarf, tied it onto the handlebars of the bike, and strode away with elegant steps. The road was covered in potholes, the tarmac having long since been carried away on the rolling wheels of passing vehicles, and trampled by the soles of people’s shoes. The Ministry of Roads was busy making revolution too. The bicycle kept bouncing up and down, and she felt that her heart was more fragile than an eggshell, and thinner; she had to carry it as she walked. She could not remember how long it had been since the family had last eaten eggs. After Zhang Jian’s salary was stopped, she had resolved to learn how to run her life properly. But very soon the money in the bank book, which had not been that much to begin with, had all gone. She chastised herself; as soon as she got hold of money she was a fool, but on the other hand she could live very cleverly without it. Zhang Jian had been saving new fur-lined boots, overalls and cotton gloves for many years, and these she took to swap with peasants for rice and flour. He h
ad saved two whole cartons of the soap issued by the factory, all dry and cracked. There had been a desperate shortage of soap these last few years, and you could get enough maize flour for two months in exchange for a single carton.
Zhang Jian was bound to be cleared before all the things had been exchanged or sold off. And if he was still not cleared by that point, she would have to find work. It wasn’t as if she had reached the end of the road. Even when the people from Duohe’s village had fled disaster only to find disaster wherever they turned, hadn’t Duohe at least come out alive?
Bicycle after bicycle brushed past her. People were coming home from work. The crowd was far removed from its former grandeur, when it had resembled a vast army storming a city’s gates. Now only two-thirds the number of people were working, the rest were either under observation or doing the observing. The bicycles had got old as well, clanging their way along the aged road, bumping three times for each pothole.
She had to keep shouting, to keep people out of her way. Six eggs would make a nice, thick sauce for six pots of noodles. There were wild edible yellow lilies in the fields, it was exactly the season to eat them, to have a pre-New Year feast with dropped eggs. Erhai could eat three big bowls in surly silence. Right now he was the only child, and the two women were half starved as he ate everything.
Before Zhang Jian was taken away, Dahai had come home to collect his quilt and clothes, for all the world like a stranger who had come to the wrong door. He had charged into the room, his feet covered in sloppy mud leaving a trail of yellow footprints. There were also two little youths who had come along with him. Xiaohuan was not yet aware that he had hardened his heart to sever relations with his family, and as soon as she saw him she yelled: ‘Young master, how come you’re not taking off your shoes?’ When he had finished trampling through the big room he stomped to the little room, as if he had never known this long-standing family rule. Duohe lowered her head to look at the string of muddy yellow footprints, but said nothing at all, and just went off in search of socks. She turned out a pair of incomparably folded, flat, snow-white socks, and walked to the corridor. Dahai had already rummaged out his own clothes, leaving things strewn all over the bed and the floor.
‘You, out of there, get your shoes off!’ Xiaohuan grabbed him, and dragged him to the doorway. Dahai’s two companions could see that the situation had taken a turn for the worse, and retreated outside.
He sat down on the long bench where all the Zhang family changed their shoes.
‘Shoes off!’ Xiaohuan said.
‘No!’ The two kids behind him were standing in the open doorway, peering inside.
‘You dare!’
‘They’re still on, aren’t they? I have dared.’ Dahai stuck a muddy shoe up in the air, crossing his legs and waving it from side to side to show Xiaohuan.
‘Then you just sit right where you are. You take one step into the room, you just try it!’ Xiaohuan picked up the broom, which was lying nearby.
‘Pass my quilt and mattress out to me! I can’t be bothered to go in anyway!’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out!’
‘If you don’t explain yourself, don’t think you can take so much as a needle from this house!’
‘I’ll get them myself!’
Dahai had no sooner stood up from the stool, than Xiaohuan’s broom handle was raised again.
‘Shoes off.’ The broom handle rapped at his feet.
‘I won’t, so there!’
At this moment Duohe came to his rescue. She walked up level with his face, then knelt, neatly and squarely, intending to untie those mud-encrusted shoelaces. Xiaohuan was on the point of telling her not to wait on him, to let him take them off himself, but at that moment Dahai lashed out with his foot, exactly level with Duohe’s solar plexus.
Duohe was wearing a white apron over her clothes, and a white headscarf on her head. The sole of Dahai’s size 43 Huili sports shoe immediately left a print on the apron. His Red Guard basketball team issued him with a pair of shoes every six months, and usually he couldn’t bear to wear them for fear of ruining them, let alone in the mud on a rainy day. Duohe’s white apron was new, with the marks of the sewing machine’s needle still on it, and she had just been putting it on, ready to go into the kitchen, when Dahai came back. It seemed like everything was prepared for this kick and the evidence that the kick left behind.
Xiaohuan still remembered how Duohe had looked down at herself. Actually, the imprint of that size 43 shoe was pretty faint, but Duohe brushed at it several times with her hand.
What Xiaohuan could not remember was her own reaction. Whether she had succeeded in hitting Dahai with her broom, and whether he had shielded his face. She had no clear memory at all of how he had got out of the door. It had taken half an hour before she realised that he had not taken anything with him at all. The following morning, she had noticed that Duohe kept nursing her chest. She had tried to persuade Duohe not to give that little swine the satisfaction, as she rubbed her faintly bruised chest with baijiu liquor.
That same afternoon, Zhang Jian had been taken away from the factory.
Since the departure of Zhang Jian and Dahai, Duohe had been even more silent. Xiaohuan discovered that whenever she was on her own she put her hands protectively to her chest. It was as if another foot was going to lash out at any moment, and she was already on the verge of ducking out the way. It also seemed that the injury wasn’t healing, and she had to carefully work around the pain in her chest and in her heart. Whenever Duohe thought no one was watching her, when she could relax and let herself go, she fell into just that kind of posture. It aged her by several years.
Xiaohuan kept wanting to set her straight: Zhang Jian’s case is an injustice, pure and simple, he won’t be locked up there for very long, there are people who’ve been unjustly accused in every family, and if not in the immediate family, then distant relations or close friends have been affected. But Duohe said nothing. She only spoke to Erhai, and to him no more than: have some more to eat; you should change your clothes; Blackie’s had a bath; your socks have been mended; you play the erhu really well.
They did not know when Erhai had started to learn how to play the two-stringed fiddle. Erhai was like the old Erhai, Zhang Jian; he preferred to wait for other people to find out things. When asked about his erhu he’d said impatiently: ‘I studied it at the Children’s Palace, didn’t I?!’
It turned out that this was true, and he had kept on playing, just never in front of the family. He had also joined some group called the Propaganda Troupe, which Xiaohuan had deduced from the characters printed on his erhu case. Xiaohuan suspected that the only reason Erhai came back home was out of respect for Blackie’s feelings, otherwise who was to say that he too would not be like Girlie and Dahai, harbouring a secret resentment towards this family in his heart?
By the time Xiaohuan got home with the eggs it was already six o’clock. All the way up the stairs was a hubbub of vegetables falling into hot, oily woks. This evening they would have a similar hubbub in their kitchen too. When Xiaohuan came in, Duohe was scrubbing the floor again.
‘Give over scrubbing,’ Xiaohuan said.
She stopped for a moment, then returned to her scrubbing with a swishing, scratching sound.
‘If you don’t care about wasting energy, I’m afraid of wasting water. It’s not like it’s free!’
Duohe paused once more, and when she took up her scrubbing again the sound was different, hot and fierce. Its meaning was clear to Xiaohuan: the water has been kept back in a bucket anyway, you’re not trying to tell me that pouring it out is called wasting money? These days, there was no goodwill between Xiaohuan and Duohe, they would grudgingly but politely pass a mouthful of something tasty to the other one, grudgingly urge the other to wear more clothes, and not catch her death. When Xiaohuan had finished making the noodles in their thick sauce and set the table, she started to eat her own noodles, and shouted out at Duohe, who was sti
ll scrubbing the floor: ‘Now I’ve made them do you expect me to feed you by hand? And I’ll have to waste gas reheating them!’
Duohe carried the water she had been using to scrub the floor to the toilet, gave her hands a wash, went over to the dinner table, picked up the noodles with their scraps of egg and edible lilies on top and walked into the kitchen. Xiaohuan stood up in her turn. Duohe had her hands up to her chest again. As soon as Xiaohuan saw that painful sight, she felt even more full of unspoken rage and frustration.
‘Just eat, relax and eat properly!’
Even Blackie, lying in a corner of the kitchen, could hear that Xiaohuan was being unfriendly, and rolled his eyes at her.
The door banged open, and Erhai, who was now known by his proper name, Zhang Gang, came in. He was named for steel, as his brother was for iron. He might be a silent person, but his actions made plenty of noise. When he took off his shoes he would not sit on the bench, but one leg would kick in mid-air, his bottom leaning against the door, causing the door to clatter and bang. His wooden slippers were the same thickness and weight as everyone else’s, and yet when he walked the sound was much louder, filling the room with clacking like the bamboo clappers in a beggar’s ballad. Normally when he came back home he only said two things: ‘Ma, Auntie,’ and after that it was up to the others to ask him questions. Moreover you had to ask provocative questions, so he was forced to contradict you, as this was the only way to get answers flowing without too much effort.
‘So I hear you’ve been wrestling with people at school again today?’ Xiaohuan said.
‘I never went to school!’
‘Then you went out somewhere and ended up wrestling someone?’ She put a bowl of noodles in front of him, piled up high in a little mountain.
‘I was rehearsing! I was in the auditorium the whole time!’
If Xiaohuan’s next question had been ‘What were you rehearsing then?’ he would certainly not have deigned to reply. So Xiaohuan said: ‘What’s there to rehearse? It’s just the same old tunes!’