Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Xinxin was unhappy about her leaving so soon, and was close to tears before Mei Yuan assured her she would come to see her again, and that in the meantime she would leave the books for Xinxin to look at.

As she left she said quietly to Li, ‘Anytime you need me.’ He squeezed her hand and nodded his silent gratitude. And when she was gone he sat gloomily in the sitting room listening to Xiao Ling in Yifu’s old room trying to persuade Xinxin that it was time for her to go to sleep. At first he heard Xinxin complain that she wasn’t sleepy, and then Xiao Ling talked for a long time in low, hypnotic tones, and then there was silence. But it was, perhaps, another ten minutes before Xiao Ling came through. She had removed her cardigan, and he noticed for the first time how much the swelling in her womb was already showing. She looked tired and strained, and Li saw that his little sister was beginning to age.

She was no longer the fresh-faced young girl he remembered from trips home to Sichuan when he was still at university. It brought back a recollection of the time he had returned to discover that she was engaged to a young man he had not even met, a young man who, he was dismayed to discover, he could not bring himself to like. Xiao Xu owned a small farm near the town of Zigong in Sichuan Province, where he and Xiao Ling and Xinxin lived with his parents. In the new China, his privately owned farm had flourished and he was, comparatively speaking, well off. They had just built themselves a new house. Li had never been there. He had never been asked. But neither had he any inclination to go. As far as he was concerned, Xiao Xu was a brutish peasant and not good enough for his sister. Not that he had ever treated her badly — Li would have beaten him to a pulp if he had — but Li had never sensed in him any real affection or respect for his sister. She had been a pretty girl, and come with a respectable dowry, but Li believed that Xiao Xu had simply been in the market for a wife to bear his child, and that his sister had been in the wrong place at the right time. She had deserved so much better. And now this.

‘Do you want tea?’ she asked. And he nodded. He would have preferred beer, but needed to keep his head clear. She went into the kitchen to boil some water. All that she had told him was that she had not yet decided if she was going to have the baby or not. She was only sixteen weeks pregnant and could still decide up to twenty-eight weeks if she wanted an abortion. Under China’s One-Child Policy, the penalties, both psychological and financial, of going ahead with the birth when she already had a perfectly healthy little girl, could be severe. Loss of free education for Xinxin and her unborn brother or sister, loss of free medical care for the whole family, loss of housing benefit and other tax breaks, even a hefty fine. The psychological pressures that could be brought to bear by the village committee and Party cadres had, in some cases, driven mothers to take their own lives. But at the same time Li abhorred the idea of abortion, of taking the life of her unborn child. It was a dreadful dichotomy, a dark place into which it would have been better she had never ventured.

It was almost the first question he had asked her. ‘Why?’ And she had been dismissive. It had happened, she said, and that was that. But he knew she had wanted this baby. He knew that she had been dissatisfied with her little girl. She wanted a boy, like every other mother in China.

His decision to take her to the Sanwei tearoom, somewhere quiet where they could talk uninterrupted, had been a disaster. Jazz nights were normally a weekend phenomenon. He thought of Margaret, and his surprise at meeting her there, of his anger and jealousy at finding her in the company of a good-looking American. He had no right, he knew, to be jealous, but he touched his cheek where it tingled still from her slap, and he wondered if her righteous indignation of that afternoon had owed more to guilt than to anger.

Xiao Ling brought the tea through on a tray, and laid out teapot and cups on the coffee table in front of the settee. She poured hot water on to the green leaves in the cups and put their lids on to let the leaves rehydrate and infuse the water with their leafy bitter flavour. Then she perched on the edge of the settee next to Li and waited in tense silence.

‘So what did Uncle Yifu say to you?’ Li asked, finally, and she immediately tensed further.

Yifu, at the request of their father, had travelled to Zigong by train to talk to Xiao Ling about her pregnancy and had been killed on the night of his return to Beijing.

She clasped her hands together, wringing her fingers as she spoke. ‘After all the pressure everyone had been putting me under,’ she said, ‘old Yifu sat me down and took my hand and told me my destiny was my own to decide.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He made no judgements or accusations. He took me through all the options and all the consequences. He asked me to tell him why I wanted a boy. He made no comment upon my reply, but he made me think about it and give expression to my feelings. Nobody else cared what I thought, not Xiao Xu, not his parents nor our father, nor anyone. They just wanted me to do what I was told. Uncle Yifu wanted me to do what I thought was right.’ She turned to Li as the tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. ‘He was such a lovely old man, Li Yan. Such a good man. We talked for hours and I wanted him to stay for a few days. But he said he had to go.’ She bit her lip. ‘If only I’d insisted, if I’d made him stay, he’d still be alive today.’ And the guilt that she had been holding in for who knew how long, rose in great sobs that tore at her chest, and she wept unreservedly. ‘I feel so responsible.’

Li put an arm around her and pulled her to him. She felt so small and fragile, he was afraid to squeeze her too hard in case she broke. ‘You share no blame for his death,’ he almost whispered. His voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘If there is someone to blame then it is me. He would not have been killed if it were not for me.’

But this seemed only to distress Xiao Ling even further. ‘I don’t know why you ever wanted to be a policeman anyway,’ she sobbed, and he felt her accusation in it.

‘Because I wanted to be like him,’ he said, desperate for her understanding. ‘Because I believed in the same things he did — in fairness and justice, and the right of people to live in security without fear for their lives or possessions.’

And she turned her tear-stained face to his. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you loved him, too.’

They sat for a long time then, just holding each other, until their tears had all been spilled. Finally Xiao Ling wiped her face dry with a handkerchief and sat forward to sip her tea. It was only lukewarm by now. Li no longer felt like drinking his, and he went to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of beer. He stood in the doorway watching her, then took a long pull from the neck of his bottle. The ice-cold beer took the heat out of the burning in his throat. Then he asked the question he had been putting off all night. ‘Why are you here, Xiao Ling?’

She avoided his eye. ‘There is a clinic in Beijing where I can go to have what they call an ultra-sound scan.’ Her voice was husky.

He frowned. ‘What’s that?’ Such things were beyond his experience, and he was apprehensive.

‘It’s where they can get a picture on a television screen of your baby in the womb. They do it with sound, somehow … high frequency sound waves. I’ve been reading up about it.’

‘What is the point of that?’

She hesitated. ‘Sometimes they can tell the sex of the baby.’ And he knew immediately what was in her head, and he felt sick to his stomach. ‘And if they can’t,’ she said, ‘then they can take fluid from the womb and know for sure.’