Susan Barker: The Incarnations

I understand your need to be with your wife. Yida is a woman who stirs up in men the animal instinct to fuck and procreate. Tempting men as spoiled fruit tempts flies. But sleeping with Yida must be a sad and lonely experience, for the pleasure and the rhythm of coitus do not amount to intimacy. Your soul detaches when you conjoin with her and looks away. And I don’t blame your soul for averting its gaze. The thought of you with your wife repulses me too.

Please do not misunderstand me. You aren’t the one I am disgusted by. In other incarnations I have explored every inch of you, with tongue and fingers and eyes. No matter how dilapidated, scarred and mutilated your body, I have always found you beautiful, for it is the soul beneath I seek.

The sky is lightening now. In twenty minutes your alarm clock will ring. At quarter past seven you and Echo will leave the building together, bundled in your winter coats, fogging the air with your breath. You will climb into the driver’s seat. You will see this letter. You will wait until Echo is in school before tearing open the seal and reading it. Certain emotions will possess you. Anger. Scepticism. Fear. But these sentiments are transitory. Once reacquainted with your past, you will be grateful for my hard work.

To scatter beams of light on the darkness of your unknown past is my duty. For to have lived six times, but to know only your latest incarnation, is to know only one-sixth of who you are. To be only one-sixth alive.

YIDA WAKES ON Sunday morning, shivering and burning up with a temperature so high she half expects the duvet to burst into flames. The fever is incandescent on her skin, and when Wang lays his hand on her brow, she is scalding to the touch. He slips a thermometer under her tongue and mercury expands in the calibrated glass tube. ‘You’re a furnace in there,’ he says, reading the scale. He makes her a cup of lemon and ginger tea and holds it to her lips. Yida’s throat, sore and inflamed, undulates as she drinks it down. Echo peers through the shadows at her mother, then bounds over in her pyjamas and bounces on the bed. She peels a satsuma and feeds the segments to Yida, one by one. ‘There there, the vitamin C in this orange will make you better,’ she sings. ‘Go away, Echo,’ Yida croaks, ‘or you’ll catch my bug.’

Mid-morning Wang hacks up a medium-sized chicken with the cleaver and simmers the carcass with herbs to make a soup. As the pot bubbles on the stove, Echo sits at the table in dungarees, her rabbit’s teeth sticking out as she sketches a machinegun-toting vixen with a sexy hourglass figure in her spiral-bound pad. This doesn’t strike Wang as the right sort of thing for a child to be drawing but, unsure of how to broach this, he says nothing. He stirs the pot and his thoughts drift to the letter. At the police station they had asked him for a list of people who might play a practical joke on him. Wang’s mind had gone blank. Who does he know who is capable of writing such strange letters? Such sinister stuff about reincarnation? The letter makes Wang feel as though his privacy has been violated — as though the writer has keys to Apartment 404, and enters in the night to watch his family as they sleep. ‘Someone is stalking us,’ he told the police. ‘What can you do?’ They had suggested that he get a car alarm fitted. They told him to warn his family to be vigilant, but Wang hasn’t yet. Something holds him back.

At noon Wang wakes Yida, props her up with pillows and places a bowl of chicken broth on a magazine on her duvet-covered lap. He and Echo have lunch at the table, slurping out of the bowls and stripping the carcass of meat. On TV, camouflage-smeared Communists run through a twig-snapping forest, pursued by Japanese soldiers. ‘The TV is a time-machine,’ Wang says. ‘Every day you can travel back to the War of Resistance against the Japanese on one channel or another.’ Echo nods and picks at a chicken bone. Then she asks, unexpectedly, if he will take her to the park. Unexpected, because Echo is not a child who likes to play outdoors. Wang prepares his excuses. Beijing is submerged in a heavy fog and a temperature five below zero. He wants to potter about the centrally heated apartment and click about online. But Yida has overheard and calls out weakly from the bedroom, ‘Take her, Wang. She’s been cooped up indoors all morning.’ So Wang and Echo pile on jumpers, button up coats and wrap on scarves, and Echo pulls on a bobble hat with flaps that hang over her ears. They call goodbye to Yida, but she has lapsed back into fevered sleep, and doesn’t reply.

They walk to the park through fog as dense as descended clouds. They walk past skeletal cranes jutting into the sky, and tall plywood walls surrounding a construction site; a photoshopped utopia of villas and trees hiding the pit of mechanical diggers within. ‘How’s school?’ Wang asks. Echo tells him about the Hygiene, Homework and Politeness Monitors; eight-year-old bureaucrats-in-training, who deducted points from her Young Pioneers passbook this week because she forgot to wash her hands and has been ‘separating from the community’ during break. Echo is one of the few students not yet invited to join the Young Pioneers, and Wang, suspecting that he has passed his inability to fit in down to his daughter, feels responsible for this. ‘How are your friends?’ Wang asks, knowing full well Echo has only one friend, a chubby and awkward boy called Xiu Xing. Echo tells him the girls in her class won’t sit near her because she is ‘ugly and has rabbit’s teeth’. ‘I hate my teeth,’ Echo confides to her father, and her small voice pierces his heart. ‘Don’t listen to those girls. You aren’t ugly!’ he says. ‘When your teeth are fixed you’ll be very pretty!’ It pains him that Echo has to go to school and suffer the bullies, and the teachers, drilling her into becoming a loyal, obedient citizen of the PRC. But Echo needs an education. He has no choice.

They reach the south end of Chaoyang Park Road and Wang tells Echo that they have to call on her grandfather and Lin Hong and invite them to the park too.

‘Do we have to?’ Echo asks.

‘Yes we do.’

Wang is firm and resolute, though he feels exactly the same way.

Before motor aphasia slurred Wang’s father’s speech, making him sound permanently, paralytically drunk, he liked to remind his son of the money he’d wasted on him over the years. Hundreds of thousands of yuan in boarding-school fees, and then tuition for the university Wang never graduated from.

‘Such a privileged education,’ he laughed, ‘and what do you end up as? A taxi driver!’

Wang Hu’s government official’s perks meant he could more than afford the expense, but he liked to remind his son of what a failure he was. So when he married Yida and started a new life, Wang resolved not to see his father again. They had barely been on speaking terms since his mother had died anyway, and had already had a long period of estrangement, stretching five years. The second time around, Wang had expected the rift to last for good.

Then one day in 2004, when Wang was twenty-eight and hadn’t seen his father in four years, his stepmother Lin Hong called to tell him Wang Hu had had a stroke. He was now paralysed on his left side and had reduced motor function on the right. The doctors said the damage was irreversible. ‘Your father wants to see you,’ Wang’s stepmother had said, and Wang went to their apartment the next day. His father was crippled now, slumped in a wheelchair, with a bib to catch dribble tucked into his collar and an incontinence pad bulging under his pyjamas. His once-commanding speech had deteriorated to a garble only his wife could understand. Wang had looked at his father, struck down at the age of fifty-eight, and felt conflicting emotions. He had expected to feel vindication — that his father had suffered the fate he deserved. He hadn’t expected to feel so sad.