Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

As soon as I was back on the ground, Zhao Chunmei walked towards me, taking a strip of white cloth out of her overcoat pocket and waving it in the air. ‘Ku Wenxuan’s whelp,’ she shouted. ‘Since your dad’s not here, you can wear this.’

I was horrified. She must be crazy to think I’d wear something like that. ‘Dream on!’ I said, before taking off and running up the mountain of coal. She ran after me for a few steps, but when she realized she’d never catch me, she turned and headed back to the pier to wait for my dad, grumbling to herself and tucking the white sash back into her pocket.

I spent the rest of the morning on top of the coal, waiting for the fleet to return, while Zhao Chunmei waited down below. Two enemies, each with their own thoughts, awaited the return of the same person — my father.

Finally, the sun got up the nerve to climb into the sky, making the piers shimmer. Off in the distance I heard the toot of a tugboat and saw the hazy outlines of the fleet. From where I stood, the string of barges looked like an archipelago, eleven floating islands approaching in an orderly fashion. I assumed they were carrying cargo from the town of Wufu. Goods from most places could be shipped uncovered, making them easy to identify. But Wufu commodities were different. The barges approached the piers, their cargo covered by dark-green tarpaulins, and I knew there would be large sealed crates with no delivery addresses under the tarps. They’d be marked with coded Arabic numerals and foreign lettering. I knew without looking that this cargo was destined to wind up at the Southern Combat Readiness Base.

From where I stood I could see barge number seven, and there was my father. The other barges were shrouded in green tarps, like a secretive collective body; number seven stood out from the others by the way its decks were open to the sky. The forward hold was packed with squirming black and white animals. At first I couldn’t tell what they were, but soon I realized it was a boatful of pigs — our barge was transporting thirty or forty pigs! My father, bent at the waist beside the hold, was trying to control a boatload of black, white and spotted pigs. After driving me off the barge, he’d gone off to pick up some honoured guests. Now, days later, he was bringing a boatload of live pigs to Milltown.

It was around eight in the morning. The loudspeakers were blaring callisthenics music that drowned out the tugboat’s whistle. The barges were ready to dock, sending water splashing in all directions and galvanizing the crews into action — they dropped anchor and secured the boats with hawsers. I saw my father standing in the bow, not knowing what to do until Desheng ran up and helped him drop anchor. A husky man’s voice came over the loudspeaker — ‘Limbering exercise: one, two, three, four’ — as the boats, matching the callisthenics beat — ‘one, two, three, four’ — nestled up to the piers.

Dockside cranes swung into action, but not before the stevedores had gathered on the embankment. A cacophony of noise rose all around. I saw Zhao Chunmei race under the arm of a crane, heading for the boats. If I knew anything, it was that no one would let her aboard while she was in mourning garments. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and would never allow that to happen. As I expected, Sun Ximing and his wife came down off barge number one to stop her. Then Six-Fingers Wang and his family blocked her way on to the gangplank. So, with a quick change of tactics, she turned and headed for barge number seven. When the people spotted what she was doing, they grew anxious. ‘Go away!’ they shouted. ‘Don’t come any closer!’ Desheng and Old Qian even used poles to drive her away. I watched as she ran around avoiding them.

In the end, she gave up. ‘Ku Wenxuan, get off that boat!’ she shouted, before crumpling to the ground.

Anticipating something like this, I ran down the mountain of coal and saw a crowd of people heading from the General Affairs Building towards the piers. We all reached Zhao Chunmei at the same time. Obviously, they’d been sent by her brother Zhao Chuntang, and they started to carry Chunmei away. She was crying — not keening, but sobbing her heart out. ‘I’m not crazy,’ she insisted. ‘Why are you doing this? I haven’t done anything wrong, and you don’t have to worry that I’ll humiliate you.’ She struggled in their arms; first a defiant leg kicked out, then an angry arm flailed in the air. She was desperately trying to get back to the pier, by crawling if necessary, twisting her head to keep the boats in sight. We passed each other, going in opposite directions, and when she spotted me, she turned to get a better look. Glaring at me hatefully through tear-filled eyes, she cried out shrilly, in a desolate tone, ‘Go and tell your dad that I don’t care about the blood debt. I just want him to visit Little Tang’s grave in funeral garb!’

I stood on the pier, bag in hand, and watched them carry Zhao Chunmei away. One of the white sashes fell from around her waist and skimmed the ground behind her. As soon as she was out of sight, my fears were replaced by curiosity. Do it, do it, thump, thump! How had she and my father managed so well, and Little Tang wound up dead? I struggled to conjure up an image of the now dead Little Tang, and what came to mind was a fair-skinned, bespectacled man with a kindly face, one of the most cultured men in town. He was in the habit of saying sorry. Always ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ He’d played chess at our house, and each time he took one of Father’s men, he’d say sorry. I pondered the relationship between my father and the two of them, and couldn’t help feeling that it was all tied up with cheating and ugly schemes. Father did what he did with Zhao Chunmei in the caretaker’s cupboard during the day and then invited Little Tang over for a game of chess at night. Was that supposed to be some sort of consolation for the cuckolded man, or was it shitting on his head? Then, for some strange reason, two words Mother used a lot in her notebook — ‘active’ and ‘passive’ — came to mind. Who had been the active participant in all this, and who had been the passive one? I couldn’t work out how passive Zhao Chunmei had been, or how active Father had been. But my mind was clear on one thing: Little Tang had been totally passive. Seen from this angle, Master Liu had hit the nail on the head: Father had secretly placed a green hat on Little Tang’s head, and that hat had crushed him to death.

I turned my anxious gaze to barge number seven and looked for Father, since it was time to unload. I didn’t want him to see me. The gangplanks were down on the other boats by now, but not ours. Father was still inside, obviously hiding from Zhao Chunmei. But he was wasting his time. ‘You can hide through the first of the month, but not through the fifteenth,’ I heard myself grumble, quoting a popular saying. ‘Come out of there if you’ve got the balls. All you know how to do is thump women — thump, thump. Well, come out and take a look where your thumping has led!’

The other boat people, who were watching me pace back and forth, interrupted their discussions about Zhao Chunmei and waved greetings. ‘Hey, Dongliang, coming back, are you? That’s good. Things always work out when a son obeys his father.’ I was in no mood to pay any attention, so they directed their shouts at barge number seven: ‘Come on out, Secretary Ku. There’s nothing to worry about now, they’ve taken the woman away. Your son Dongliang’s back!’

Still he wouldn’t come out, and I refused to go aboard until he did. So I stood there watching a bunch of pigs squeal and squirm in our forward hold, giving off a stench I could smell from here. I wondered why our barge had been chosen to transport the pigs. Was it a sign of trust or just the opposite? Was it intended to show consideration for my father or to make things hard on him? I held my nose and surveyed the goods on the other barges, now that the oilcloth tarps had been removed and the goods were laid out in the open. There was machinery for the Southern Combat Readiness Base in wooden crates with strict warnings not to open them. There were also steel oil drums. Those I found interesting, since they had foreign words printed on them — not English, apparently, some language I’d never seen before. I’m kind of weird in a way — when I encounter words in languages I don’t know, I read them to myself. Ne-fo fo-gai-te ke-la-si si-que-ge: Never forget class struggle — a chain reaction. I read and I read, and my thoughts went in a new direction, until I began thinking things I shouldn’t.