Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

This time I believed what I was hearing, maybe because the voice was so dignified, so stern. Come down, come down . After that, it was the sound of the river I trusted most.

In my father’s eyes, I was now an adult, and he disapproved of this sort of childish behaviour. I hid all my cans, but he found them and threw them angrily into the river. ‘How old are you, Dongliang? I joined the revolution at the age of sixteen. But you? You play with tin cans! Sailing on the river is a lonely life, so spend your time studying. And if that doesn’t appeal to you, do some work. When there’s nothing else to do, you can swab the deck.’

Once, when I was swabbing the deck up front I saw Huixian and Yingtao playing with a skipping rope on Six-Fingers Wang’s boat. Six-Fingers’s daughter was counting spiritedly, acting as a referee. Suddenly Yingtao shouted, ‘Not fair! How come everybody’s siding with her? Anyone could see I did a hundred, but you only said ninety-five, and she only did ninety-five but you gave her a hundred.’ Wang’s daughter went up to humour her, but it did no good. Yingtao stormed off in anger. I’d stopped working and was waiting for Huixian to come to our boat. It always happened like that — she and Yingtao would have an argument, which would end in her running over to number seven.

That didn’t mean she paid any attention to me once she got there. With the skipping rope over her shoulder, she walked towards the cabin as if she owned the boat, her eyes on the sofa. To her chagrin, this time my father was sitting in it. She stuck out her tongue to show her disappointment, then turned and came back down the other side of the boat.

Maybe she’d heard too many grown-up discussions about us, but the moment she opened her mouth, out came the crucial question: ‘Is yours a martyr’s family or isn’t it?’

‘Who’ve you been talking to?’ I said. ‘Do you even know what a martyr is? We can’t be martyrs because we’re all still alive.’

‘I haven’t been talking to anybody. I’ve got ears, and I know how to listen,’ she said proudly. She pointed to our cabin. ‘Deng — Deng Xiangxiang, that’s her picture. Is she a martyr?’

‘Her name’s Deng Shaoxiang, not Deng Xiangxiang. She’s a martyr, I’m not.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘She’s your grandma, isn’t she? So if she’s a martyr, then so are you. It’s a great honour.’

‘I’m a martyr’s descendant, not a martyr. My grandma is the honourable one, not me.’

She blinked, still not clear on the distinction between a martyr and a martyr’s family. Instead of trying to pretend she understood, she took the skipping rope off her shoulder, shook it at me and said, ‘Cleaning the deck is boring. Let’s see who’s better at skipping.’

‘Not me.’

‘See, now you look unhappy.’ She studied my face. ‘Do I make you angry?’

‘No. I may be angry, but not because of you.’

Abandoning the idea of getting me to skip, her eyes lit up as she blurted out, ‘Has your mama sent you any gifts lately?’

I said, ‘No. Who wants her gifts anyway?’

She looked disappointed. ‘She’ll send you gifts because she’s your mother and she cares about you. Animal crackers are my favourites,’ she said. ‘Giraffes taste great. So do elephants.’

I knew how much she liked to eat, so I said, ‘If she sends things to eat, you can have them.’

She blushed and twisted the skipping rope in her hands. ‘That’s not what I meant. She’s your mama, not mine. If you want, you can give me half.’

Any talk of mamas was a taboo that everyone adhered to. I didn’t want to talk about my mother, and definitely wasn’t about to mention hers, so I decided to tell her my river secret. ‘You’ve been with us a long time. Have you ever heard the river speak?’

She snickered. ‘Liar. The river doesn’t have a mouth. How can it speak?’

‘It doesn’t speak because you haven’t given it a mouth. Give it one and you’ll hear it speak.’

She gave me a blank stare. ‘You’re lying again. The river’s water. Give it a mouth and it still can’t speak.’

I probed the surface of the river to find its mouth, spotting a wooden spindle floating downstream that was coming slowly towards our boat. It was barrel-shaped, with hollow ends, and seemed to be the perfect shape for a mouth. ‘See that? It could be the water’s mouth,’ I announced earnestly as I scooped it out of the water with a net pole. ‘Now watch while I get the river to speak.’

After drying off the spindle, I carried it to the starboard side, where I lay on the deck. Huixian followed me. ‘How come you brought it to this side? Doesn’t the river speak on the other side?’

I told her that sunlight affected how the river spoke. ‘The sun has lit up the other side of the boat, and the river will only speak over here. It’s too bright and too noisy over there. And even if it did speak, it would be lies.’

Only half believing me, Huixian put the spindle up to her ear and lay down on the deck to listen to the sound of the water. ‘Liar,’ she said. ‘The water’s flowing along, not speaking.’ She tried to get up, but I pushed her back down.

‘You’ve got to get rid of all thoughts of animal crackers and focus on the river. Hold your breath and be patient. Give it time and you’ll hear it.’

So she quietened down and listened. ‘I heard it!’ she cried. ‘I did!’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what you heard.’

She looked up, with hesitation and a bit of embarrassment in her eyes. ‘It said different things. At first it said, Eat, eat . Then it said, Don’t eat, don’t eat .’

Eat? Don’t eat? That’s what she heard? How disappointing. ‘That’s all you know — eat, eat!’ I snatched the spindle out of her hand, gave her back her skipping rope and said, ‘Go and skip. That and eating are just about all you know how to do.’

With a pout and an angry look, she said, ‘Then what did you hear? Why won’t you tell me that?’

‘Why should I? You wouldn’t understand.’

That upset her. She hit me with her skipping rope and took off running. ‘You’re a liar,’ she said. ‘My new mother told me to stay away from your stinking boat, so I’m not coming over any more.’

THE GOLDEN Sparrow River was calm and tranquil the following autumn. The riverbed shrank and the banks receded, revealing patches of swamp land overgrown with reeds and water grasses. An occasional egret landed, but only briefly, as wild dogs prowled around and barked enthusiastically at passing ships. There was a sometimes bleak quality to the prosperous scenes on the densely populated shore, with villages big and small dotting the area. I knew all their names, but after the floods had passed, the one called Huage had disappeared; the eight dye mills had moved away, and I no longer saw Huage’s blue and white fabric billowing in the wind from the boats. The Fairy Maiden Bridge had sunk into the river, like an old man beaten down by time who could no longer raise his head, while by gazing into the distance at the steel tower and traces of high-voltage wires not far from Li Village, I could see a new marketplace that had exploded into existence on the marshy bank, large clusters of simple structures that had seemingly risen up overnight, with red brick walls and white asbestos tiles. From afar, it looked like a mushroom farm. ‘They call that East Wind Villa,’ someone told me. ‘It’s where the East Wind No. 8 construction workers who chose not to return to their homes live.’

As autumn arrived, a rash developed in my groin. It itched like crazy, and I couldn’t stop scratching, an inelegant practice my father couldn’t help noticing. He told me to drop my pants, which exposed my rash, as well as my genitals, for him to see. I’ll never forget the look of shock in his eyes, not from seeing the rash — he asked me what I expected, since I hated taking baths and paid no attention to my personal hygiene — but from the physical changes; maturation had occurred unnoticed. The damned ‘helmet’, with all its rosy freshness, gave off a cursed, wicked glint; bad for others and bad for me. The sight put a worried scowl on Father’s face, and I was so embarrassed I wanted to crawl into a hole. The look of fear in his eyes was unmistakable, for this involved desire and tumult, danger and sin. The devil was on its way, the very devil he had extirpated from his own body had now shown up on mine. Any comparison between us was cruel, and the results were hard to utter. Father took out a bottle of gentian violet. His mood resembled the purple liquid in the bottle — irritable and gloomy — while his gaze remained fixed on my crotch, cold and hostile, mixed with profound misery. His eyes were like a pair of scissors, terrifyingly open. I trembled; my rash mutated into a barely perceptible pain that covered my crotch. I knew that Father hated my ‘helmet’, and it disgusted me too. But what was I to do? Once a male dons the ‘helmet’, it’s impossible to take it off.