Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

‘Overturn it? I doubt that I’ll live to see that day. I’ve got it all figured out. I don’t need them to overturn anything. If they’ll issue a martyr’s family certificate, I’m ready to go and report to Karl Marx.’ As he sat in the tub, he began sobbing like a little boy. ‘I think about my life, and there’s no way I can be happy. How could I be?’ Grasping my hand, he said between sobs, ‘I’ve held out for eleven long years, waited all that time, and I ask you, for what? Where’s the good news I’ve waited for?’

‘It hasn’t come,’ I replied, my head down.

‘Only bad news. Rumours, slander and conspiracies!’ He dried his eyes with his hands and pointed to me. ‘You haven’t made anything of yourself. Day in and day out I hear how degenerate you’ve become.’

‘I’ll make something of myself from now on, Dad, for you. You need to hold on, to persevere, and good news will come sooner or later.’

‘I’m not made of steel, you know. I’m not sure I can hold on.’ His sobs became weaker, maybe because they were taking too much out of him physically, but his head fell back hard against my shoulder. Then he said in a small, raspy voice, ‘Tell me the truth, Dongliang, what do I have to live for? Shouldn’t I just die?’

Unable to say a word, I wrapped my arms around his emaciated body. He squirmed instinctively, but I held him tight. My despairing father was wrapped up in my arms, as if our roles had been reversed. To me he felt more like a dried fish than a man, his spine thin and brittle, with fish-like scales suddenly appearing all over his back. The fragrance of the Glory bath soap wasn’t strong enough to mask the strange fishy smell of his body. Father, my father, where have you come from? And where will you go? I felt lost. Suddenly a scene from half a century earlier, of a boundless Golden Sparrow River, flashed before my eyes. The bamboo basket left behind by the martyr Deng Shaoxiang was floating down the river, the child and fish inside tossed by the rapid swells. I watched as the water swallowed up the child, leaving only the fish. A fish. A solitary fish. The image frightened me. Was that really what happened? A fish. If my father wasn’t that child, could he have been that fish?

Father, who had seemingly fallen asleep in my arms, abruptly opened his eyes and said uncertainly, ‘It’s so noisy outside. That doesn’t sound like people. Is the river speaking? Why has the river started speaking?’

I was amazed by the sharpness of his hearing. Even with his body in such a weak state, he had actually heard the river reveal its secret. ‘What did you hear, Dad?’ I asked. ‘What’s the river saying?’

He held his breath to listen closely. ‘It’s telling me, come down, come down.’

I fell silent. Even after the shock had passed, I didn’t know what to say. This was not a good sign. I’d always believed I was the only one who understood the river’s secret, but now he had heard it too, and if one day the river revealed all its secrets, why would barges continue to stay in its waters? I felt the steel hull of our barge start to rock, along with my father’s life and my home on the water. Come down, come down . The river’s secret became clearer and clearer, and it was beyond my power to jump in and stop up its mouth. River, ah, river, why are you so impatient? Are you summoning my father or a fish to your depths?

There was nothing I could do. Then my eye was caught by a length of rope under my cot. It was the same rope that had nearly been used to tie me up. As I stared at it, I had an idea that made my heart pound. I hurriedly lifted Father out of the wooden tub and laid him on my cot. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Not on your cot! Put me on the sofa.’

‘Do as I say, just this once, Dad,’ I said to him. ‘The cot is sturdier. From now on, this is where you’ll sleep.’

I began dressing him in clean clothes, and as I was putting on his socks, I bent down and took the rope out from under the cot. First I looped it around his feet, without his realizing what I was doing. Until, that is, he noticed that my hands were shaking. He shouted and began to struggle. ‘What are you doing? What? You’re tying me up? My own son! You’ve gone crazy! Is this how you get your revenge?’

‘This isn’t revenge, Dad. I’m trying to save you.’ In my anxiety, I wrapped the rope around him speedily and indiscriminately. ‘Bear with me, Dad, I’ll be finished in a minute, and I won’t let you go down. You can’t go down there. I’m here, and I’ll keep death away!’

Father kept struggling until his strength ran out. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘tie me up. I raised you to adulthood and taught you all those years, and this is what it’s all come to.’ A bleak smile creased the corners of his mouth, releasing a crystalline bubble that fell to the floor and disappeared. He gave me a cold look. ‘You’re too late,’ he said. ‘The river wants me. I don’t care if you’re a dutiful son or an unworthy one, you’re too late. Me tying you or you tying me, it makes no difference. It’s too late for anything.’

The hopelessness I saw in him scared and saddened me. I felt the blood rush to my head. ‘It’s not too late, Dad, it’s not. You have to wait.’ I tied his hands to the sides of the cot as I prepared a vow. ‘Don’t fight me, Dad, don’t be stubborn. You have to wait. I’m going ashore in a minute and I’m going to make sure that bastard Zhao Chuntang comes aboard our barge to give you the apology you deserve.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ Father cried out. ‘Even if you drag him aboard and force him to tell me he’s sorry, I won’t accept his apology. You mustn’t go. If you do, I’ll find a way to die before you get back.’

But my mind was made up, and I wasn’t about to let my trussedup father interfere with my plan. I picked up the wooden tub, took it out on deck and dumped the dirty water into the river. Not wanting the rope to cut into Father’s flesh, I checked all the knots to make sure they were tight but not too tight. I placed two steamed buns and a glass of water next to his head. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, so if you’re hungry there’s food, and water if you’re thirsty.’ I put the bedpan down by his hip, but then it dawned on me that he could not relieve himself tied up like that. So I reached down to take off his trousers, to which he reacted by curling up and angrily spitting in my face. What I was doing, I knew, was taboo. We needed to talk this out. ‘I have to take them off, Dad. How else are you going to relieve yourself? Someone like you, so insistent on cleanliness, doesn’t want to pee in his trousers.’

I saw a trickle of murky tears snake down his cheeks. Then he turned his face away and I heard him say, ‘Go ahead, take them off, but don’t look. Promise me you won’t look.’

I promised, but when I pulled down his underpants, I couldn’t stop myself from looking down. What I saw shocked me. His penis looked like a discarded silkworm cocoon, shrivelled and ugly, lying partially hidden in a clump of grass. I’d imagined it to be ugly, but not that ugly or that shrivelled. It looked miserable and sad. Instinctively I covered my eyes and ran to the door, not taking my hands away until I was at the bottom of the ladder. I didn’t realize I was crying until the palms of my hands felt wet. I looked down at them — there were fresh tears falling through my fingers.

I WENT ASHORE.

The sunset had begun to lose its brilliance at the far end of the Golden Sparrow River when I stepped off the gangplank, and in no time, empty, dark clouds had taken its place. This was normally the time when I’d be returning home from a visit to the shore, but everything was different now. As night began to fall, I left the barge with a plan.