The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  I upped my pace, and returned to Lovari’s side.

  ‘I have never seen such a strange and diabolical city so filled with pagan magic,’ I said.

  My companion gave me one of his infuriating grins. ‘It is the rule of travel that men compare the new places they visit with the memory of their homes. Some see only similarities, some only differences.’

  I was not much impressed by this response. However, as we turned into yet another small alley, I found I could not keep my peace. ‘I see that we are heading in a new direction. Why do we not go straight to the palace? Remember that Father Montercorvino did entreat us to make haste,’ I said to my companion.

  ‘It will take a number of days, perhaps weeks, to obtain permission to enter the palace. We must move through the proper channels and observe their rituals with respect, brother, no matter how strange we might find these people, for we cannot risk offending our hosts. Remember that the fate of millions of souls depends upon us.’

  We walked on, our noses assailed by countless queer smells as we passed many a tavern. Men sat at crowded tables or perched upon their haunches on the street, feeding on steaming balls of dough or bowls of what looked like lengths of thin grey string. They drank from tiny white cups, fashioned, it seemed, from strange bright shells unknown in our country. It was no wonder they were a race of such insubstantial height if they did not take wine and meat at every meal.

  ‘Then, pray tell me, what is our destination?’ I asked.

  ‘Our men have been travelling for close to two years, far from the comforts of home. They are weak creatures of flesh, brother, but they have helped us no end and our journey would have been impossible without them, and so I fear we must turn a blind eye to their celebrations. The merchants have promised them a trip to a street of a certain repute, and so we shall be lodging near there.’

  ‘I am afraid your meaning is unclear to me, brother. Yet I would be glad of a comfortable bed and a hearty meal, if one may be found in this place.’

  However, the meaning of his words soon became painfully clear. The street the merchants led us to seemed populated with sinful women – tiny young things who looked barely out of swaddling and old crones missing most of their teeth; thin creatures whose ribs bulged through the fabric of their robes as well as the most lascivious of wobble-fleshed wenches. Many called out to us as we made our way to the inn where we were to lodge, and so I crossed myself and did my best to keep my eyes focused upon the cobbles in front of me.

  I had half a mind to quote Scripture at Lovari, yet he was still my elder, and I realised that this was simply another test that the good Lord was putting me through. I am pleased to say that I passed admirably, though on many evenings my rest was interrupted by the cacophony of grunts and moans that spilled from the lines of cheap backrooms surrounding the inn. And so it was that our party had finally arrived in the great city of Dadu, walking straight into the open arms of Sin herself.

  A Delicate Matter of Phrasing

  PART 4 · 26 FEBRUARY 1993 CE

  I drew the dull blade against the grain, hunched forward over the bathroom mirror. After finishing another long and boring day in the office – feigning nonchalance in front of Fishlips, trying to stop myself from staring over at Wei Shan’s empty desk and thinking about the dead bodies, the mine, the crow – I’d rushed back home for a shave. I couldn’t go to meet Li Yang looking like a wreck. Flecks of stubble were collecting in the sink. Even in the weak light of the bare bulb I could see the scuffs on the tiles. A heating box and a loose-swinging showerhead hung to my left, and to my right was a Western toilet – one of those unhygienic things where you sit on a fold-down plastic seat whose warmth tells you someone else was sitting in exactly the same space only minutes before – that my wife had insisted on.

  Someone started banging on the bathroom door. I ignored it. My head was beginning to throb, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the landslide, the bodies in the hospital. Why couldn’t I let it go? Why did I let it enrage me and twist my gut into knots? After all, similar things happen every day. Trains crashing, bridges collapsing, mines falling to pieces, factories going up in flames, all because of some greedy businessmen with good connections cutting corners to bump up the profit margins. But not for long, I thought. The Party knows what it’s doing. Once we’ve built up the economy, once we’re level with the Americans, then we’ll be ready. This is just the groundwork for the next stage of the revolution, the greatest stage, when we’ll pull the rugs out from under all of their feet. But what if … no, that just wasn’t worth thinking about. It must happen. Soon. Otherwise what was the point of all of this?

  Someone started banging on the door again. My hand slipped and I nicked my chin. Damn. I dabbed at the blood with a shred of toilet paper. The banging grew louder.

  ‘Give me a fucking second, all right? I’ll be out in a moment.’

  The banging stopped. Footsteps stomped away. I splashed water over my stinging face and reached for a damp towel. Then I grabbed one of my wife’s brushes and tried to push my hair around to try and cover up the receding patches at the front. It didn’t work. I gave up. Li Yang wouldn’t mind. I hoped.

  The footsteps were stomping back.

  ‘Dad! Hurry up! What are you doing in there? Mum says you need to come out now so that I can get ready.’

  I unlocked the door to find my red-faced daughter standing with her hands on her hips, still wearing her blue and white school tracksuit. Her nose creased up in an expression of distaste that was an exact facsimile of the one her mother always pulls just before she launches into a tirade – like a hawk drawing back its beak, its whole body tensing up as it prepares to swoop towards its prey.

  ‘Dad, you reek of baiju. What are people going to think?’

  I opened my mouth, but wasn’t sure how to reply. I was missing some vital link in this conversation.

  ‘At least you shaved. Now can you let me get ready, please?’

  I stepped out of the way and she barged past, locking the bathroom door behind her. I can’t remember when we got the lock fitted. I remember in the early days of my marriage I used to wander in and brush my teeth while my wife would be combing her long dark hair, a single blue towel wrapped around her body.

  Down the hall I found the bedroom door ajar. My wife was back. My initial instinct was of course to turn around and tiptoe away as quickly as possible, but I needed to at least change my shirt before I met Li Yang, to put on something that didn’t have the tang of sweat and nerves and stale smoke. I took a deep breath and walked in.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  She was buttoning up a high-necked brown blouse, and I wondered for a minute who else she thought it could have been coming into our bedroom. She had a wonderful way of making me feel that I wasn’t welcome in my own home.

  ‘Close the door, would you?’

  I pushed it shut, and stood awkwardly in the corner as my wife finished dressing. She then began rifling through a small jewellery box embossed with little grey baubles that once looked like pearls.

  ‘Now, about the school celebration this evening.’

  That was what my daughter had been talking about. Shit. I fumbled for words.

  ‘Yes. I’ve been looking forward to it. Only —’

  ‘It’s important to Peipei. Her teachers decide what marks she gets, which determines where she can study later, and what kind of job she’ll be allocated. So we need to make the best impression we can.’

  ‘Of course. It’s important to me too. It’s just I’ve —’

  ‘I can see you’ve at least made the effort to shave this time. So I’m really sorry to say this, but I think it would best if I took her. Alone. I know half the teachers from meetings at the education board anyway, so I think they’re more likely to warm to me. Don’t make a scene, all right? Just tell Peipei that something important has come up at work.’

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel offended. I decided I ought to at least make a show of a
cting as though I cared that she thought I was too embarrassing to take to our daughter’s school. I was a Party member working for the local Public Safety Office. If anyone could give a good impression to a bunch of lazy teachers, it was me.

  ‘Shit. You know I care about her too. I’m the one who works every day to pay for her books and her uniforms and all that crap, you know.’

  ‘Don’t do this. You remember what happened last time we went down to the school together. And you stink of drink. What do you think her teachers, and her friends, and her friends’ parents, are going to think? And if people see us like this … well, they won’t believe we’re good citizens. Everyone knows that children inherit their parents’ faults, and whatever we do or say tonight is going to reflect on her.’

  ‘Give me a break. My best friend’s just fucking died, all right.’

  ‘I know that, and I’m sorry. But someone has to think about our daughter.’

  ‘I think about her all the time!’

  ‘Then prove you care about her by doing something decent for a change. Stop coming home drunk or spending all hours out with other women – don’t give me that look, I’m not so dumb that I don’t know what it means when you come home smelling of perfume – while I’m here helping with her homework and cooking her meals. Your only discernable social talent seems to be for pissing people off, and your snide little comments aren’t going to help tonight, all right?’

  She hooked a pair of light blue plastic earrings through her lobes, one after the other. Her ears hadn’t been pierced when we got married. Had they? I wasn’t sure, and it suddenly seemed important. She stood up and smoothed down her blouse, her dark trousers. Her hair was a rigid bun, and as far as I knew it hadn’t been unknotted or left to hang loose for the best part of five years. She looked at me and sighed.

  ‘Just stay here, all right? We can talk about it properly when I get back.’

  She twanged an elastic band around a pile of business cards and put them into her handbag. Since when did teachers need parents’ business cards? I moved aside to let her march from the room. She always gives off a sense of having a clear purpose. I guess that’s what riles me so much.

  I sat on the bed and flicked through the jewellery box. Earrings, a few faded bracelets, a necklace I had bought for one of our early anniversaries and a couple of seashells amid the other trinkets. The low purr of voices reached me from the sitting room. I held the shells up to the light, examining the familiar dents and scratches. They still had that smell of salt and brine, as though they’d only left the shore a moment ago. The voices had stopped. I replaced the shells and grabbed a clean jacket from the wardrobe. Time for a quick drink before I went to Li Yang’s.

  My wife and daughter were just leaving through the front door when I got to the sitting room. My daughter spun around when she heard my footsteps, and I stopped on the spot, halfway to the kitchen. Her eyebrows knotted together, and her lips parted. Both of us were waiting to see what she would say. Was she disappointed I wasn’t coming, or relieved? I realised I didn’t have a clue. My wife reached out and put her hand on her shoulder, and led them both out. The front door closed behind them. I went to see if there was any beer in the fridge.

  It was almost seven. An hour left. I switched on the TV and sat down. The news again, showing a flood in one of the southeastern provinces. Despite my wife’s whingeing, I wasn’t in any hurry to get one of those new colour television sets. I like black and white. It gives everything a kind of legitimacy. Take these grubby peasants using pots and pans to clear the river out from their bedrooms. In black and white they look like they’ve just stepped out of history, like the continuance of a long line of honest Chinese peasants, unchanged since the first emperor some two thousand years ago. They remind you that we’re all tied to the past, no matter how bitterly we struggle to break free. In colour they would just look like the same unwashed mugs loitering outside the stations and the mines round here, the ones you do your best not to get too close to on account of the smell. You put people in black and white and suddenly they seem to matter.

  I finished my drink and turned off the TV. I picked up the beer bottle. We’d had none left the other day. So who’d bought it? There are gaps and holes and fuzzy bits in my memory, but between creeping around a morgue and being buried beneath the earth I was pretty sure I hadn’t stopped at the shops for a couple of bottles of horse piss. My daughter? No way. My wife then? Had to be. I stared at the green glass, wondering why. She hated the taste of it, and she hadn’t had any of her friends round to our place for months. What had happened to our old friends, the other young couples we used to go out with? Perhaps she’d bought it to soften my reaction to being barred from the school anniversary celebration, or just to make sure I didn’t drink anything stronger.

  I gave up trying to figure it out and headed down to the car. The streetlights seemed to gain in intensity the closer I got to Li Yang’s flat. As I drove I kept one eye on the digital clock flashing its urgent green message in the middle of the dashboard. I didn’t want to get there early and look too eager. But neither did I want to be late, and make it look as if I didn’t really care. Because I did care, no matter how much I tried to stop myself, no matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise, no matter how sickened and revolted I felt with myself for acting like this. I was a married man. With a good job, a half-decent flat, a beautiful daughter. I was a man with a respectable family and Party membership for fuck’s sake. But I couldn’t turn back now.

  As I approached my destination the buildings grew higher, more imposing. This was the most exclusive, most expensive part of town. Brand new restaurants flanked by marble Fu Lions. Green parks with padlocked gates. Shimmering glass tower blocks everywhere you turned, and yellow cranes swinging through the sky above the riverside flats, hauling bricks up to heaven. It wasn’t just Li Yang who lived round here, there was also my boss, the local cadres, the men who’d bought out all the failing factories, and probably a couple of rich, myth-chasing mine-owners too.

  It was about a month after I first saw Li Yang at the cadre’s retirement party that we bumped into each other unexpectedly in the lobby of a hotel where some big Party bureaucrats were about to be honoured. Even though we had never even spoken, somehow it felt as if we already knew each other intimately, as if we were old friends with so much between us that we didn’t need to talk about the past. We crept away after the ceremony, and that was it. I mean, I’d cheated on my wife before. More times than I can remember. But never when I’d been sober. It would only happen after a few too many drinks, when I couldn’t bear the thought of going home. And immediately afterwards I’d feel ashamed and revolted and I’d drive back to the house as fast as I could, and, for the next couple of days at least, I’d try my hardest to be the perfect husband, the perfect father. It never lasted, though. A few weeks later I’d find myself doing the same thing, wandering through the seedy alleys on the other side of the river, drink and desire suppressing my shame.

  Until I met Li Yang. And then everything was a thousand times worse. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore; I couldn’t blame the booze or the boredom or my father or my frustration or anything else. It was me. That was who I was. Some people would say it’s a bourgeois urge, a failure of that internal class struggle which we all must keep alive in our hearts if we are to retain our moral compass. But I think it’s worse than that. Sometimes your heart gets stuck somewhere, and if it’s in too deep then no amount of Mao Zedong Thought can wrestle it free.

  I left the car behind a flashy new seafood restaurant. I parked in a different place each time. Never too close to Li Yang’s building. I passed men in expensive-looking Western suits walking along the river with women in fur collars, and I suddenly felt worried that everyone who glanced at me would somehow be able to guess my dirty secret.

  The doorman waved me through without looking up from his paper. I got into a lift that hummed noisily as it juddered upwards to the eleventh floor. I felt my pockets
for cigarettes and found that I still had the screwed-up map from the mines in there. It’s funny what stays with you. Guilt, anger, shame: they’re about as easy to escape from as your own shadow. It’s often the things I’ve tried my hardest to forget – my father, those long years in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the faces of the dead – that are the most persistent. As if memory is always playing a trick on you, letting you know that you’re not really in control. You’re its slave, and you must bend to its will, however much you try to resist.

  I knocked on the door. I didn’t have a key. I didn’t want one. My wife was always rummaging through my stuff, and there was no way I could explain a chunky, ornate brass key like the ones they used in this building. I smoothed down my jacket, and felt a smile making war with my frown for the first time in days as the door slowly opened.

  ‘Hello, you. I wondered when you’d finally make it. Well, don’t stay out there, come in.’

  Li Yang was wearing a long silk dressing gown, and clutching a lit cigarette. I shut the door behind me and wandered into the huge living room. Despite the number of times I had been there before, I was still amazed at the look of the place. The long, black leather sofas that swallowed you when you sat down. The antique table and chairs somehow saved from destruction in the Cultural Revolution. The huge windows overlooking the flow and turns of the river. The air-conditioning box, hissing out cool air. The silk sheets in the bedroom. The bronze statue of some long-forgotten deity – the Money God, perhaps, or the God of Things That Might Have Been.