Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

‘Quit wasting time and energy, Kongpi, the picket ships are on their way, and when they get here it’ll be like a racehorse chasing a turtle. Then where do you think that rust bucket will take you?’

I continued my fight with the barge. There was no time to worry about Father and the memorial stone. I could not have told you what was going on under the canopy, because by then I could hear the motor of the picket boat far down the river, which elicited whoops of joy from the shore. But they died out as quickly as they came. ‘The canopy!’ they shouted. ‘Ku Wenxuan!’ They started running parallel to our barge, saying something as they ran. I turned to look, and saw that confusion was setting in on the shore, as the first group was joined by several policemen; longshoremen, attracted by the commotion, had also come running. They were craning their necks to one side to see what was happening under the canopy.

The police chief stepped on to an oil drum and once again raised his magazine megaphone; but this time a note of anxiety had crept into his shouts. ‘Comrade Ku Wenxuan, calm down, please calm down. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Kongpi, are you a fucking idiot? Stop poling and go and stop your dad!’

I threw down my pole and ran over to the canopy, just in time to see Father, his arms wrapped around the memorial stone, about to fall into the river. I couldn’t believe my eyes, I didn’t think he’d have had the strength, and I’d never imagined that the battle over the memorial would end like this. My father, Ku Wenxuan, had tied himself to the stone and inched his way to the edge of the deck with it on top of him. The stone was crushing him. I couldn’t see his head or his body, only his feet. A sandal was on his right foot; his left foot was bare. I ran up and grabbed one of his feet. ‘Dongliang,’ he said, ‘I’m going down, I’m going down.’

Was this another miracle? In the final seconds of my father’s life he was bound to the memorial stone, the two together a true giant. I couldn’t hold him. A giant was falling into the river. I couldn’t hold him. Now my eyes beheld nothing. The surface of the Golden Sparrow River exploded, sending a pillar of water into the air, accompanied by frantic screams from the shore, and my father was no more; neither were the memorial stone or the giant. I couldn’t keep Father with me; all I held was a single sandal.

I SEARCHED FOR Father in the Golden Sparrow River for several days.

The riverbed was a vast world unto itself. Its scattered rocks longed for mountains in the upper reaches of the river; broken pottery longed for old masters’ kitchens; discarded brass and corroding iron longed for the farm tools and machinery of an earlier time; broken skulls and frayed hawsers longed for boats on the surface; a dazed fish longed for another fish that had swum away; a dark section of water longed for its sunlit compatriot; I alone scoured the riverbed, longing to find my father.

On land, tortoises that, according to popular legend, travelled far with memorial tablets on their backs were enshrined in temples. But the chances were there was only one human who had carried a memorial stone into the river, and that was no legend, for that person was my father, Ku Wenxuan. No temple wanted to enshrine him, so he rested at the bottom of the Golden Sparrow River.

I located the stone on the third day and caught a brief glimpse of the body that lay beneath it. Unable to hold my breath long enough to swim deeper to get a closer look, I surfaced, then went back down, but the figure was gone. I reached out, and touched a large crack that was icy cold and felt as if there were life inside. Something nibbled the back of my hand — a fish had swum out from the crack, and though I couldn’t tell what kind it was, I could see how gaily it swam as it shot past my eyes. I tried going after it, but lost it almost at once. How could I, a human being, ever catch a fish in the water? So I just watched it go, believing that it was my father, swimming happily past me.

My father and I had got by for eleven years by relying on one another, but in the end he had left me. He obeyed the river when it told him to come down. The strange thing is, after he went down, the river stopped speaking to me. I spent three days in the river and on the boat, but it never spoke to me again, not once. Did the river see my father as a fish? He had disappeared into the water, but the river did not send me its condolences, nor did it offer me congratulations. I didn’t know why that was. On the third day, I sat dripping wet on the sunlit bow; the hot sun sizzled the water on the deck, quickly reducing little puddles to a few drops. Kongpi , I said to those drops before they too evaporated. Kongpi , I said to the sun’s rays on the deck. Kongpi, kongpi . Unlike the drops of water, the sun’s rays stubbornly refused to disappear. Instead, they fervently shone down on my face and my body, and the entire barge, covering me with their warmth. As I slowly turned my gaze to the shore, I was struck by the thought that my grief was just like those puddles of water; it too was dried by the sun. Father had been gone only three days, and my thoughts were already on the shore. I didn’t know why that was either.

I went first to the shipping office on the western edge of the piers to catch up on the barges’ movements. I read that the Sunnyside Fleet had left the town of Wufu and would reach us in three days. Again, three days. I stood transfixed in front of the noticeboard, wondering how I’d get through the next three days.

‘Kongpi!’ Someone was calling me. ‘Hey, Kongpi, come with me.’ Baldy Chen walked out of the shipping office with a glass of water, took me by the arm and led me to the security-group office.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Was I disturbing the peace by looking for my father in the river?’

‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to bother you so long as you live by the rules. Somebody asked me to give you something.’

‘Who?’

He wouldn’t say. We walked inside, where he noisily opened a cabinet with a key. I thought my mother, Qiao Limin, might have come this way, so I stood in the doorway waiting for whatever she’d brought. It took a few minutes, but then Baldy came up with a bundle, which I took from him and weighed in my hand. There was something strange about that bundle. ‘What are you afraid of?’ Baldy said. ‘It’s not a bomb. You’ll know who gave it to you when you open it.’

I untied the blue cloth and there was a tin red lantern, Huixian’s red lantern.

‘Huixian decided to swap with you,’ Baldy said, studying my reaction. ‘Her red lantern for your diary, her treasured item for yours. Fair?’ My reaction puzzled him. ‘You’d better not feel cheated. Your diary is just a worthless jumble of words, but what you’re holding is Li Tiemei’s red lantern. You get the better deal, Kongpi.’

Reminded by that lantern of so much that had happened, I felt my nose begin to ache and was nearly in tears. Not wanting to show weakness in front of Baldy Chen, I ran off with my lantern, confused and flustered, as if I were in possession of a priceless object or a keepsake that had been thought lost. It brought me consolation and it brought me pain. As I was running to my boat, a chewing-gum wrapper fell from under the lantern’s shade. I stopped and picked it up. The image of a girl’s head with a perm and a broad smile was printed on the red and white wrapper. Was that meant to symbolize the joy of chewing gum? How could something like that bring anyone joy? How strange. I didn’t know how that could be.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon, that third day, as I strolled along the deck polishing Huixian’s tin red lantern until it shone. The plastic shade gave off a red glow in the sunlight. Now I was content. As I was hanging the lantern in the cabin, I heard a strange sound from the shore. I stuck my head out and saw, to my surprise, that the gangplank was gone. How, in the few moments I’d been in the cabin, had it disappeared? Then a roar burst from the shore. ‘We’ll settle up later!’ There was the idiot, Bianjin, standing on the bank in a blue and white hospital gown, a patch over one eye, a cold avenging glare emanating from the other. His forehead was badly scarred, but it was his nose that caught my eye: it looked white from a distance, but then I saw that the gauze had formed the character , for ‘abundance’, on his nose.