by Keyi Sheng
My sister’s errand was not in vain. The next morning, Letian came to our home and, right in front of my father, handed my sister an envelope with 3000 yuan inside. He said, ‘You can pay me back when you have earned lots of money.’
Chuntian was so stunned by the amount that her lips, normally clamped as tightly as a chicken’s arse, fell wide open. In this way, Letian displayed his wealth in front of my father. He did not know it, but my father had never once regretted anything he had done, and he was not about to be flattered by this fellow’s manner today either.
*
It was three days later, at seven in the evening, that Zhima finally came back. He had sought out seven or eight relatives and borrowed money from them, bringing back just 2000 yuan with him. They put all the money together in one pile and spread it out on the bed. Neither of them had ever seen so much money before, and the pile seemed alien to them. They stared at the money for a long time, experiencing the joy of some secret wealth. For a moment, the charm of money seemed to overshadow the foetus, and in their minds, the couple separately realised their own dreams with this 6000 yuan. For instance, Zhima had always wanted a motorcycle to use in his runnings to and fro in the mosquito net business, perhaps even enabling him to go to the city from time to time to transport customers. Chuntian thought of sending Yihua into the city to attend kindergarten and primary school, giving her a bright future like all the little girls in town. After a while, the foetus in my sister’s womb kicked her, bringing her back to reality. She remembered that the money was meant for an almost certainly futile investment, and they still had to find ways to get another 14 000 yuan to accomplish even that.
This really was a messy debt. With an anxious expression, Chuntian was distracted as she was doing housework. She really could not figure it out. The people from the family planning group would be there the next day. She would have to ask them to extend the deadline. But even if they gave her a month, or even six months, where could she get that kind of money? This road had come to an end. Whether alive or dead, they could only come up with 6000 yuan. The rest of the money they had to pay with their lives, if the Party would even accept it. This was how Chuntian settled her own mind, and she said the same thing to comfort Zhima. Zhima agreed, saying, ‘Yes, I don’t have any more money. Take our lives if you want.’
The two of them encouraged each other, growing emotional. Zhima said, ‘What does my having a child have to do with them? I even find it hard to give up this 6000!’
Chuntian said, ‘We have gone against the state policy and should be punished, and we won’t cheat, but the fine is all up to them. Some pay a few thousand, some tens of thousands. What right do they have to fine us 20 000? They’re just bullying us.’
Zhima was getting more worked up. He cursed the policy. ‘Who cares about controlling the population? Control, my arse! If you have money, you can have as many children as you want. If you have power, you can have as many kids as you can spawn. Son of a bitch! They’re just targeting us – poor, powerless people!’
That night, Yihua and Yicao slept very soundly. Chuntian and her husband clung on to the 6000 yuan and could not close their eyes. As soon as it was light outside, Zhima decided to handle it like a man of integrity. He told his wife to plead their case before the family planning group, and not to anger them. He himself went outside to hide. All along, he had feared they would catch him and take him in for a vasectomy. In the village, any man who was castrated like that would be a laughingstock, ridiculed even by his wife and mother-in-law.
Just after breakfast time, the Eight Immortals turned up again. Yihua and Yicao clung tightly to the hem of my sister’s dress, with her bulging belly. She put her arms over each of them. Soon, people heard Chuntian shouting. The two children wailed. There was momentary confusion, and then Chuntian was put into the car and taken away.
‘I would rather bleed a river of blood, than have one more kid. They really did it.’ When Chuntian told me this, I had already graduated from university, and was eager to contribute to society.
When the son was aborted and the wife given a tubal ligation, the couple did not return the money they had collected. Zhima spent 3000 yuan on a motorcycle, and before long, he had an accident. The vehicle was totalled and his leg injured, and he still owed 3000 yuan of medical fees. This shattered Chuntian’s dream of sending Yihua to a school in town. With no son in his life, Zhima did not care about anything. He started drinking, spending three yuan for every quart of spirits. He was drunk every day, taking no interest in anything.
June was painful to our family, as if silkworms were nibbling away at our hearts. No one mentioned my second brother. Whether he was confused or patriotic was irrelevant; all we had left was a pile of ash. My father did not know where to go to find out the truth, and had no interest in knowing the truth either. Anyway, my brother was dead now and would not come back. When my mother cried, my father did not scold her now, as he usually did in the face of any other displays of sympathy for her children. He drank half a glass of sorghum spirit at lunch, then took a nap. This pattern was repeated for many days.
By June of the following year, my oldest brother’s leg had completely recovered. He was able to go about doing farm work, fishing, and catching frogs in his normal fashion. Fishing and catching frogs was no longer just a form of recreation for him, but had become his livelihood. Nobody knew when this sort of sideline work had begun to flourish, when men started relying on this kind of primitive hunting instinct to feed their families.
At dusk, people started out one by one from the causeway on their bicycles, armed with torchlights and fishing devices. Their rations for the journey consisted of cooked corn, sweet potatoes, or bread. They greeted and called out to their friends, ringing their bicycle bells. They laughed raucously, cursed, and slowly blended into the belly of the twilight. These people caught frogs throughout the night, and in the morning they passed by the market and sold them. Then, they took the cash home and lay down to rest, their faces dark with weariness. Those who used storage batteries to fish wore rubber boots attached to jumpers as they waded into the water. The fish floated up after they received the electric shock. If the fishermen were careless, they could be electrocuted themselves.
At this time, people kept introducing older women who were waiting to be betrothed to my elder brother. My mother encouraged my brother to go take a look, so he dutifully agreed to go look at one of them, but at the last minute he refused to make an appearance. My mother said, ‘Just choose a woman who is healthy and can have children, and that will be fine. In your situation now, you can’t hope to catch someone like Luo Yan.’
Our mother liked to attack others’ weak points.
Luo Yan, a girl from the city, had been my brother’s colleague. After my brother went to prison, she came to our house. Her eyes were red, and she did not say much. As always, my father behaved arrogantly, not treating Luo Yan nicely at all. She acted like she came to say farewell to Shunqiu’s corpse, silently placing a full stop in her heart, and then she never appeared in our lives again. Luo Yan had earlier taken the initiative to pursue my brother, but I never found out what happened between the two of them. I told Shunqiu that she had come to our house after he met with trouble.
He did not ask why she came, but just said that her father objected to the two of them carrying on. Luo Yan did not listen, so her father had kept her under house arrest. This was the only time my brother spoke to me of Luo Yan. He said very little, leaving me in suspense. In my opinion, this was the most mysterious part of his life, an even greater secret than the time he spent in prison.
In a change from his usual appearing and disappearing in the night, Shunqiu gradually started appearing in the daytime. He came and went, like a shadow passing by, never stopping in one place. Had he worn a hat and cloak and carried a sword, he would have been called a knight errant. Then the villagers would have feared and avoided him instead of chasing after him asking, ‘Had your dinner yet?’ or ‘Whe
re are you going?’ or ‘Is your father at home?’. My brother, though weary of such courtesies, felt obligated by his sense of propriety to treat them seriously. His answer was often thrown like a hidden weapon, and he was gone immediately after he spoke, leaving the questioner startled. Over time, the villagers came to know his habits, so they usually stood at some distance as they called, ‘Had your dinner yet?’. Then, they turned and walked away. After all, this was the usual way of greeting. No one really cared whether he had eaten or not. But even this sort of entertainment made Shunqiu miserable. From then on, he walked more swiftly and if he saw someone coming, he would quickly duck behind a haystack or shrubbery. This certainly wasn’t the classy style of a knight, pulling his bamboo hat low and quickly diving away as soon as he saw a woman.
Shunqiu felt he was different. He did not like being with other people. Had it been possible, he would have been most willing to live in a cave in solitude.
He was very capable of creating his own world. This world had its own atmosphere and flavour, like a cloud floating over the village sky. When he had nothing to do, he would sit in this world. When he was finished, he would come down from the cloud, fold it up and put it in his closet, where no one could see it. No one asked him about it, because no one even knew he had this cloud. They simply said his behaviour was a little strange, but if you gave him a wife and they had a few children, it would make him normal. This was what my mother believed, too. But she also had an ulterior motive, hoping for a grandson. An old, white-haired woman without a grandson peeing on her trouser legs was a shameful thing.
My mother secretly encouraged those matchmakers who were left out in the cold to continue to look for healthy girls fit to have children so that, if Shunqiu would not visit the matchmaker, she could bring the girl to him. Whether it was a success or not, they would definitely not go empty-handed. At the critical moment, my mother emanated the sheer animal strength of people from the mountains.
Lying awake at night, she could not make sense of it, so she even woke my father, asking whether something might have gone wrong with Shunqiu in prison. ‘What man does not want to find a wife and have children?’ she asked. ‘In a few more years, he might only be able to find a widow who can’t have children.’
My father did not care about grandsons, because a grandson would not be under his control anyway. Having a grandson meant he was on the road to decline. Like a rotten straw rain cape hanging on the wall or a rusty tool in a corner of the shed – it was a useless thing.
It was generally not very easy to find Shunqiu at home. It wasn’t much easier to find him outside, for that matter. For instance, if someone said they had just seen him at such and such a place, when you went to that place to look for him, you’d find nothing but a few discarded cigarette butts still issuing a tail of smoke, but there was no one in sight, like a warm crime scene. Even if he was out catching frogs the whole night, it was still hard to catch him in bed. Twice girls showed up at our house with the matchmaker, but Shunqiu was nowhere to be found. This caused my mother great distress, as well as great financial loss, since she had to pay their travel expenses, even as she endured their suspicious stares.
But one spinster was more persistent. Without a matchmaker to accompany her, she came to our house by herself a few times. She was quite satisfied with what she saw. Li Shunqiu had a resident’s permit in town, and he had no brothers to share the property with and no jealous sisters-in-law, so when our parents passed on, everything they owned– all several hundred square metres of land– would be hers. The chickens and dogs would be hers, and no outsider could encroach on a single centimetre of her territory. This girl was called Xiao Shui Qin. She was thirty years old, and possessed a good measure of stubborn strength. She took the college entrance exam four years in a row, hoping with all her heart to make a success of herself. But she failed every year. Her arrogant spirit made her look down on the rural types. Ultimately, she wound up a spinster. Now that her hopes of going into the city via the college entrance exam had been destroyed, she took remedial action to sort out her own life. She took up sewing, and the clothes she made were quite good. She liked to come up with trendy designs, and all the coquettish girls and daughters-in-law in the village sought her out to make clothes for them.
The fourth time Shui Qin came to our house, she ran into my brother at the slope of the dyke. The moment their eyes met, my brother felt his private world invaded by an alien, and he quickly pulled his imaginary bamboo hat down lower as he brushed past her.
Shui Qin later said that my brother emitted an odd aura that gave her a start. She instinctively felt that this person was the one she was looking for. She immediately turned around and followed him, and saw the proof that she was correct.
My mother liked Shui Qin. The two plotted together to do this and that, arranging things this way or that way. Three days later, Shui Qin’s sewing machine was moved into our house, and she stayed there with it, arranging flowers and plants in my room and making it fragrant. The closet was tidied up too, with my side and hers being clearly demarcated in the process. For about half a month, my brother hid in his cloud every day, not emerging at all. He did not chase Shui Qin away either. He watched the vast expanse of white world in his cloud. When another cloud in the distance appeared strange, it was the monster, Shui Qin. This monster was grasping the present and steering for the future, pushing her way into the territory of others and leaving an indelible footprint there. My brother could solve any equation and calculate square roots, but he could not deal with women; they were to him a strange sort of being. They were like a ball of cloud which could not be caught, solid and formless, and also like a gigantic cavern formed by a tornado, trying to uproot him.
Because my brother did not chase Shui Qin away in the beginning, it became more embarrassing to do so the longer she stayed, so my brother decided not to hide any more. He would even smile at the lady sometimes, touching the fabric she had cut and asking what sort it was, much in the way a patient might ask the doctor for an update on his condition. Shui Qin was fully integrated into our family. She told my mother she knew Shunqiu was innocent and that his fate was unfair, depriving him of many things. She hoped he would gradually be repaid for all that.
This made my mother’s nose run and eyes tear. She had a special respect for someone who had taken the college entrance exam four times, so she discussed everything privately with Shui Qin. All the mothers and daughters-in-law in the village were natural enemies, but in my mother’s relationship with Shui Qin, there were no signs of animosity at all.
The first thing Shui Qin did when she arrived at our house was make a draped coat for my mother and a small jacket for my father. She paid for the fabric, paying for her upkeep even before she married into our family. Such a sincere girl was certainly hard to find. Shui Qin was not considered ugly, nor was she short, and never mind that her skin was a little on the dark side – a matter of no small prejudice in our village. She had a small face, double eyelids, and dark eyes. Her face showed her intelligence. Her self-esteem had not been affected in the least by her advanced age. The other villagers were quite envious of my mother; she was getting a capable daughter-in-law without spending a penny. They said it was a blessing from our ancestors. There was really nothing to say about a gift from the ancestors. My grandfather wrote poetry and gambled, never harming anyone, but also never doing anything particularly good. But then, if you count gambling away the family fortune as a sort of charity, then my grandfather had truly accumulated some old morality. But the key was, who knew where heaven had recorded this karmic debt?
My brother and Shui Qin lived on either side of a wall. She hummed and read stories in her room, and before she went to bed, she tapped on the wall, which was made of earthen bricks. Over time, her tapping made a small depression. Before she chiselled all the way through that wall, the sound of her fist pounding suddenly stopped one day. My mother was so excited she could not fall asleep, feeling the thing she wanted
had finally been accomplished.
The marriage date was quickly fixed. My parents vacated the master room, which had red brick walls. Shui Qin implemented her own design ideas, sweeping the walls of dust and painting the bricks with lime, turning them white. She put wild flowers in bottles and jars and sewed flounced curtains and quilts. With her own money, she bought a Western-style double bed which was popular in the city, and wall unit cabinets. Throughout the whole process, my brother had only to put forth a bit of brute force to move this and that during the day. At night he rolled around in bed with Shui Qin, and everyone was happy.
While our family home was undergoing renovations, my grandfather inspected the building site, looked at the sky, then looked from the sky back to the building site, as if comparing the two. The ducks in the pond had long since been made part of my brother’s engagement banquet, leaving only the big white geese that liked to peck people to serenade us. My grandfather always kicked them for no reason, so they ran to the pond every time they saw him. He stood on the riverbank under the willows now, hands behind his back, enjoying a small victory.
My grandfather’s mind was mixed up, and he was often quite confused. When he was alert, he could still write and compose poems, sparing no effort to express his aloofness and pride, as if his mind had not given in to anything.
My grandfather’s birthday coincided with the blooming of cole flowers and the buzzing of bees. Early that morning, he had put the table on the floor and started rubbing his ink stick against the ink stone and reciting poetry, repeating it over and over. After working out the draft in his mind, his brush soaked in ink, he leaned over and, like a carpenter at work, he slowly chiselled away at his paper. Before long, a couplet scratched on two long red sheets of paper was pasted on either side of the door of my grandfather’s short, thatched cottage. It read: a celebrity does not complain about his cottage being too small, and a hero always dresses like a commoner.