Wild Fruit

by Keyi Sheng

  ‘Hong Kong was a colony. In 1997, when it returned to China, it could not be managed properly, so they came up with the idea of “one country, two systems.” It’s different from here.’

  My sister said, ‘What “one country, two systems”? That’s obviously two countries.’

  Sun replied, ‘Be careful. If you try to split the motherland, you might be picked up by the police.’

  My sister was so scared, she shut her mouth immediately. The thing she most feared was the police. As soon as she saw anyone in uniform, her tongue got entangled, and her legs trembled. But after a while, she asked softly, ‘What language do they speak in Hong Kong?’

  Sun replied, ‘Cantonese and English. Some speak Mandarin, too.’

  Chuntian thought of the couple of Cantonese phrases she had to say whenever Yihua called. It sounded like a foreign language. She laughed.

  Sun ran his hand down my sister’s buttocks and started exploring it, like a blind man. His face turned bright red very quickly.

  My sister pushed him away and said, ‘How can you take that tonic in the middle of the day?’

  ‘Who cares whether it’s night or day?’ Sun said. ‘I’m going to take you anyway.’

  Sun’s words accidentally rhymed, and he found it funny when he heard it himself. He laughed as he and my sister rolled into a ball. Just then, her cell phone rang.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ Sun said. ‘No matter who it is, it can wait until we’re finished.’

  The ringing stopped. After a moment, it started again.

  Chuntian was distracted. She picked up her phone and as soon as she looked, she said, ‘Oh no. My mother rarely calls. Something must have happened.’

  Sun’s arrow was already en route. He said, ‘You answer, and I’ll take care of myself.’ Then, he just carried on having sex with her.

  My sister answered the phone. ‘Ma. . . Huh?. . . OK, I see.’

  And in just those ten seconds, Sun cried out twice. His body pumped a couple of times, then he fell onto my sister and did not stir.

  *

  I’m so long-winded, I have fallen behind a bit. When Zhima called my mother, he had just been admitted to the hospital. He said he was badly injured, and needed 3000 yuan to be admitted, but he could not find my sister. It was a matter of life and death. My mother called urgently, and within five minutes had gotten through to Chuntian. She said Zhima’s skull had been cracked and the wound was still not even stitched, and the place where the ribs had been broken collapsed, and was completely covered in blood – but he knew he would see my sister soon, and that made him so happy he did not even feel the pain. But, when my sister rushed to the hospital with the money and Zhima wanted to greet his wife calmly, all the wounds woke up and he cried out in pain. My sister had just heard Sun’s cries, and now she was hearing Zhima’s cries. All these cries became louder and louder in her ears, making her dizzy.

  Chuntian got a hold of herself and said, ‘If your bones are itchy, why don’t you find a tree and rub yourself against it. Why must you fight with people?’

  Zhima stopped moaning. He wanted to yell something back, but his body hurt like it was being stabbed with a knife, and it made him docile.

  Chuntian went on, ‘Yihua called and said she’s busy. That bad girl.’

  Zhima waved her off. ‘Don’t ask her to come back. It’s too expensive. It isn’t worth it.’

  Chuntian said, ‘It was money that landed you in this state. It’s always money, money, money with you.’

  Zhima moved slightly, then cried out. He had capital now. All he had to do was groan a couple of times and my sister leapt obediently to his side, feeding him, giving him a drink, or wiping his backside.

  On the surface, Chuntian seemed calm, but she felt as if a cat were clawing at her innards. With Zhima looking like this, how could she go to Hong Kong with Sun? This golden goose had started to fly, and she hated dawn for coming so quickly. Before she even had time to enjoy it, she had already awoken from the lovely dream. She wished so much this moment was a dream instead, and when she awoke from this dream, she would find herself on a plane on the way to Hong Kong. She had never been on a plane before, or even seen one. But, that’s not quite right – she had heard the roar of a jet before and, when she lifted her head, saw a trail of white smoke. The plane was tiny, like a sparrow. That was the largest plane Chuntian had seen.

  Sun did not care if Zhima lived or died. He had said to my sister, ‘Go to the hospital and see him and, if he isn’t dying, we’ll go to Hong Kong tomorrow. Anyway, you’re going to divorce him.’

  She looked at Zhima now, all wrapped up like a bound foot, and she simply could not harden her heart. She found an opportunity to call Sun and said, ‘I can’t go. Zhima is hanging on by a thread. I have to take care of him. After all, he’s Yihua and Yicao’s father.’

  Sun said, ‘But I won’t sleep in that huge bed in the hotel all by myself. I’ll find another woman.’

  Chuntian was not the sort to take threats. ‘Do what you like,’ she said.

  She hung up the phone, feeling more confused than ever. Zhima had stopped being lazy and learned to work hard. What more could she ask of him?

  Out of a sense of humanitarian goodwill, my parents went to the hospital, bringing half a basket of eggs for Zhima. My mother thought no matter how insensible Zhima was, it was better than Chuntian being widowed, since widows had a hard time remarrying. So she set aside concerns about carsickness and travelled into the city, vomiting most of the way. When she got off the bus, she carried a plastic bag half-full of vomit. Her face was pale, and her legs felt like cotton. It made one wonder how she had ever survived those long journeys to visit her son in prison.

  My parents were not too concerned about my sister. After all, when they were visiting the patient, it was more like a leadership inspection. My father said some words, the sort of good wishes one might hear during the Spring Festival, and my mother maintained a dark countenance, conveying the image of a heavy burden and a long journey. Zhima listened respectfully. It seemed he even wanted to bow, but his body was immobile. His expression was a confused mix, impossible to describe.

  Chuntian looked lightly at the floorboards of the hospital, heart filled with hidden bitterness. When she had married Zhima, it had been nothing more than an attempt to escape my father’s control. She had never said this, and my father did not know. In fact, he had no idea how much she hated him. Dictators never care about how the little people feel; they are never introspective, and certainly have no sense of remorse.

  But Chuntian had told me everything. I have said she was especially superstitious about the skeleton. She touched the back of my head and said, ‘You have a rebellious bone. One day, you will grab the right to speak, and you will avenge me.’

  My father presented a lot of arguments that day. Suddenly, he felt he wanted to smoke. He had just taken out a cigarette when the nurse saw him. She snapped at him, and he put the cigarette back and kept his hand in his pocket.

  ‘I already called my youngest, and she wants to come back and interview you about this,’ my father said, as if specifically to let the nurse hear. ‘What kind of a world is this, cheating a worker’s hard-earned money? All conscience is eaten up by wolves and wild dogs.’

  Zhima was quite moved when he heard this. He cried out a couple of times.

  ‘Xiaohan’s newspaper is in Guangzhou. Why do they care about what happens in Yiyang?’ Chuntian muttered.

  My father had seen the world. He said, ‘As long as the matter gets reported in the newspaper, they must pay attention to it.’

  My mother added, ‘If you can get your wages and medical expenses, that’s enough. Those big bosses all have friends in high places. You just can’t win when you work for them.’

  Amid all the warm concern poured out for him, Zhima could not get a word in. When he thought of his toil at the work site and how this was the first time he had even been at the centre of my family’s attention, all kinds of pa
in occurred simultaneously and tears flowed silently down his cheeks.

  Shui Qin, my brother’s wife, was like a plant withered by the sun. If she could take in a night’s dew, she would be full of vitality again, getting up quickly after a tumble, and never sighing or complaining in the midst of ruin. She always carried an invisible assault rifle, firing her missiles over obstacles and right on target. My brother had always been like a flag in her hand. When there was no wind, the flag hung limp, but when she waved the flag pole, the flag floated in the air, without volition of its own. But now he had blood-sucking worms in his body, making him prone to dizziness, so if the flag danced too quickly in the wind, the dizziness worsened. In order to prevent the giddiness, he no longer squatted at dinnertime. He could not squat in the latrine pit in the countryside anymore either, so he would control his urge to clear his bowels and rush to the city. The rotten toilet at his house would clog up with every flush, but he did not feel dizzy sitting down to take care of business.

  Shunqiu had no choice but to accept the symptoms. He didn’t want to feel faint, so he had to carefully serve the ‘Fainting Master’ all the time. Because he could not look down too long, he often held his head up, making him look proud – in fact, making him look like the master of the ‘Fainting Master’ instead of its servant.

  My brother’s body was a hospitable environment for the blood flukes. Shui Qin was willing to contribute and she fought them with traditional local remedies, frying pork liver and cooking blood-enriching soup for him. But in the end, she always felt she was only feeding the blood flukes, so she would get frustrated and scold the worms, while at the same time scolding this country’s backward medical technology.

  In order to control the spread of the illness, many healthy cells had been destroyed, and it took a toll on my brother. His intimate relationship with the blood flukes often made Shui Qin feel jealous. She said, ‘A lot of couples don’t even get to grow old together!’ She threw tantrums and threw things around, then picked up the mess she created. All the while, my brother just sat to one side, looking ashamed. He was afraid Shui Qin would say she wanted a divorce, and that made him extremely anxious. If she said the word, the limp shell of my brother would collapse completely, lying helpless on the ground.

  But Shui Qin never mentioned divorce. She said, ‘You have no skill, no qualifications to sit in an office, and you don’t want to be a security guard. You won’t make it at a construction site. What will you do? Anyway, you need to at least earn back your medical expenses.’

  Shunqiu felt she was right. At the very least, he did not want to be a burden. He said he would try the betel nut factory. He thought he could handle loading and unloading betel nuts. Shui Qin had asked someone to help him find a position. When the time came, my brother did not want to take it. There were two shifts, and he knew he could not take the night shift. But then, if he did not go to the betel nut factory, though that was easier on his body, he couldn’t take the mental stress of unemployment. So the next day, he finally went to the betel nut factory. After his first day of work, the roots of his hair were all soot, his nostrils white, and he smelled of betel nuts. After seven or eight days, Shui Qin could not stand it. She said, ‘Don’t keep working there. If you go on like this, your lungs will break down.’

  My brother quit, not earning a single cent for his labour. Those seven or eight days had been for nothing, and now he was back where he started.

  Before long, he developed a craze for cutting down small canes in the countryside and shaping them into thin strips of bamboo to make paper kites for Xianxian. Due to his dizziness, he could only make one kite in two or three days, shaping them into dragonflies and butterflies. On the weekend, he took Xianxian to the river and flew the kites. Sometimes they crashed into the river, and sometimes they soared high into the clouds. Occasionally the line broke, and no one knew how far the kites flew, nor where they went.

  When he was flying kites, my brother was very happy, as if everything that was burdening his body floated off into the sky, and he no longer felt dizzy. Later, he started selling the bamboo and paper kites he made. Many people bought them, but he was chased here and there by the city authorities. That was a blow to his self-esteem. Finally, he hung them in the tailor shop to sell, but a layer of dust gradually settled on the kites, and my brother’s interest in them waned, too.

  After sitting on the toilet for too long, my brother developed haemorrhoids, and they ran rampant. This ailment was very powerful, keeping him from sitting or standing, and disturbing his sleep and diet. When others showed their concern, he was too shy to talk about it. My brother’s weird actions finally caused Shui Qin to suspect something. She coaxed, using both soft and hard approaches. My brother resisted for a while and then, disarmed by shame, exposed his buttocks for Shui Qin to make a clinical examination. Shui Qin was never one to drag her feet. She chose an auspicious day and dragged my brother to the hospital, getting rid of the blood-dripping haemorrhoids. She even told everyone she met about it, embarrassing Shunqiu. He felt that since he had come to this world, he had troubled many people. He had troubled our parents and his wife, and he had troubled the police and doctors, and he had even troubled all his neighbours, who were very concerned about what kind of work he did in the city and how much he made each month. Some even asked him to introduce them to jobs, or take them with him if he found a good job.

  I don’t know whether, during those turbulent days, my brother thought about taking his own life as a show of his gratitude to everyone. There was an old saying – there was a limit to how long bad luck could go on – but Shunqiu’s life had been upside-down since 1983, and there were no signs of improvement. But, as I see it, my brother would not think like that. He was always gentle, but these endless days of fatality were his belief, his religion. He believed that his relationship with the world was set and could not be violated. He was comparable to the Christian martyrs loved by God. His gratitude was obvious, especially when he looked at Xianxian and Shui Qin.

  My mother was not very colourful; she was always grey. After she married my father, she had nothing of her own. She never spoke one on one to other men, and she never had letters come from afar. When I was three or four, the president of the marketing cooperative, Mr Ma, came to our house and spoke to my mother in the bedroom. My father was still working on the river at that time. I heard Mr Ma ask about Xiazhi, and my mother said he was so wild she could never be sure where he had gone. Mr Ma said, ‘Xiazhi looks more and more like me the older he gets.’

  My mother desperately warned Mr Ma not to say such ridiculous things, shooing him out. She remained in her room crying after he left.

  I agreed with what Mr Ma had said. Xiazhi really did look like him, with a round face and narrow eyes. Once when I was quarrelling with Xiazhi over an eraser, he said I was nothing but a foundling my mother had picked up, so I retorted, ‘You belong to the Ma family.’

  When my mother heard that, she rushed over and whipped me, then passed me the eraser. I was very proud to have received a beating and the prize. I had not started school at the time. The eraser had such a strange fragrance, and I eventually chewed it to nothing. Xiazhi complained to my mother, but she did not punish me. She simply sat there, lost in thought.

  Whenever my mother grew a little melancholy, I became especially obedient, voluntarily helping her with the housework. When she wanted to paste cardboard, I handed her the paste. When she wanted to mix putty with 66 pesticide powder, I shovelled the ash for her. When she wanted to raise silkworms, I helped her pick the mulberry leaves. When she planted pepper bushes, I watered them. When she cooked, I fed the fire under the stove. Year after year, the relationship between my mother and me was quietly built this way, and it became too deep to fathom. My mother was the person I loved most in the whole world. She was a huge tree, and I was a sapling growing in her shade. When Mr Ma came around to my mother again, I would put caterpillars on his neck, or spit in his teacup, or let the air out of his bicy
cle tyres. Mr Ma seemed to have learned my tactics, so he did not come to our house again. When he passed by our door, he would only take a quick glance inside.

  Before long, my father returned from his work on the riverboats. He and Mr Ma had a good relationship. They would often stand together under the Chinaberry tree, chatting and sharing cigarettes. Mr Ma would say he had some good-quality tobacco and invite my father to smoke it. My father would light a cigarette for him. They always had lengthy chats while they smoked. My father was macho, while Mr Ma was gentle and frail. He did not lose to my father, but he was mellow, never in a hurry, and completely free of temper. He often carried his daughter on his shoulders and let her pick flowers or ripe fruit from the trees. I thought of how interesting it would be to have a father like Mr Ma.

  Mr Ma’s daughter was my classmate all the way through middle school. She did not like to study, but she passed the exam to get into nursing school. After she graduated, she always wore a pink peaked cap, white uniform, white shoes, and a white mask, over which you could see only her narrow eyes. She would rub the patient’s hand, squeeze the blood vessel, and poke the infusion needle in. Nursing was a good profession. The nurses who worked in the better hospitals could have a meteoric rise, but Miaohong did not get into a higher ranked hospital. She was stuck in the county hospital, so she had a tough time succeeding. She married one of the hospital’s gynaecologists, a bespectacled fellow who had washed his hands so often they were now ghostly white. At the time, the women in the village did not know anything about gynaecology. When they found out what it was, they blushed and said talking about such a thing would shame them to death.

  In private, the village women often spoke of Ma’s daughter’s marriage to a gynaecologist, snickering over it. My mother was one of their ranks. She consciously believed that women were beneath men. Their underclothes should never see the light of day. If I hung such items out where they could be seen by a passerby, my mother scolded me fiercely and quickly put them out of sight, leaving only my father’s and brother’s pants to flip about in the wind.