Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘But why did they bulldoze our house?’ asks Meili. ‘They had no idea I was pregnant. Perhaps the police were monitoring the line when you phoned your father last month.’ Turning to Nannan, she says, ‘Let me wash that doll before you play with it.’ The cabin is suffocatingly hot. Unable to bend down over her pregnant belly, Meili picks up Kongzi’s vest with her toes, folds it and places it on the stool. Then she goes outside, turns her back to the setting sun and inhales deeply. The scorching breeze blows against her sweat-soaked dress. ‘At least the Kong Village police won’t be able to track us down to this place,’ she says. ‘Not from a phone call.’

‘Probably not. But I’ve heard that the authorities here are sending police to check the documents of every migrant worker in the county. Our team manager told us to make sure our papers are in order.’

‘Let’s sail downriver, then. If the inspectors find me, that’ll be it.’

Meili looks over to the bank and notices some men stepping off a van. Then a white boat approaches and a fat officer standing at the bow shouts out to her: ‘Hey, you with the big belly! Do you have a birth permit for that? Where are you from?’

Panic-struck, Meili stoops down into the cabin and says, ‘Kongzi, quick! Start the engine. They’ve come to arrest us.’

Kongzi scrambles to the stern and grasps the steering wheel, but before he manages to pull the start cord, three men from the van jump aboard and yank his arms behind his back. As swiftly and quietly as she can, Meili crawls to the starboard and lowers herself into the river.

‘Get back on the boat!’ one of the men shouts at her.

‘I’m just having a… w-wash,’ she stutters. She’s up to her shoulders in water, quaking with fear.

‘There’s no point trying to hide your belly from us. We can still see it through the water. Get back on board and show us your birth permit.’

‘She’s not pregnant — she’s just plump,’ Kongzi says, the colour draining from his face.

‘We’ll need to take her to the clinic to confirm that.’ As the man speaks, the white boat draws closer and is hooked to theirs. The fat officer at the bow takes a swig from his can of Coke then says to Meili, ‘Get out of the water! We’re from the County Family Planning Commission, and we’ve come to round up every woman in Sanxia who’s pregnant without permission.’ The silver buckle of his belt glints in the sun.

Kongzi pulls Nannan out of the cabin and says, ‘It’s my wife’s first pregnancy. This girl here belongs to our neighbours.’

‘I’m your girl, Daddy, not neighbour girl,’ Nannan splutters, bursting into tears. ‘I not blabbing nonsense. Mummy, Mummy…’

The fat man eyes Kongzi sternly. ‘If we take the girl away with us, will you still claim she’s not yours?’

A man in black sunglasses steps aboard. ‘Any woman pregnant without authorisation is both violating the family planning laws and endangering the economic development of our nation,’ he says. ‘You think you can turn up here and breed as you wish? This is the Three Gorges Dam Project Special Economic Zone, don’t you know?’

‘If you cooperate with us, you won’t have to pay the fine,’ another man says. ‘But if you resist, we’ll get your village Party Secretary to arrest every member of your family.’

‘We’re peasants, with rural residence permits, and our daughter here is already five years old, so my wife’s entitled to have a second child,’ Kongzi says.

‘Five years old, you say?’ says the man in sunglasses. ‘Three, more like. And who knows how many more children you’ve got hidden away.’

‘My wife’s eight months pregnant. Don’t take her to the clinic, I beg you. I’ll pay the fine right now.’ Standing stripped to the waist among the men in white shirts, Kongzi appears feeble and submissive.

The fat man drops his empty can into the river. ‘We’ve been ordered to terminate every illegal pregnancy we discover. If we let any woman off, our salaries will be docked.’

The word ‘terminate’ throws Kongzi into a fury. ‘Have you no humanity?’ he shouts. ‘You want to kill our unborn child? Have you forgotten that you too once lay in your mother’s womb?’

A female officer steps forward. ‘Humanity?’ she sneers. ‘If your baby turns out to be a girl, you’ll throw her into the river, so don’t talk to me about humanity! You migrant workers travel around the country, dumping baby girls as you go. You’re the ones who have no shame! You think we wanted to come here and deal with you squalid boat people? No, the higher authorities sent us here because of all the filth that’s been washing up downstream.’

Meili remembers the dead baby she saw floating past the other day, and suspects that this is what the woman is referring to. She wishes she could sink into the water and swim away.

‘Enough talk!’ barks the man in sunglasses. ‘Take her to the van!’ Four men reach down, tug Meili out of the river and drag her ashore. When she tries to resist, an officer kicks her in the belly. She yells in agony and feels her limbs go limp. After they shove her inside the van, she looks through the back window and sees Kongzi knock an officer overboard with a wooden oar, then two men push him onto the deck and force him into handcuffs. As the van drives off, she hears Nannan weeping inside the cabin.

The van trundles up through the flattened old town. Each bump on the road makes her aching belly throb. She screams to be let out, punches the window and bangs her head on the glass. The officer beside her grasps hold of her wrists. The van slowly climbs the mountain along a road flanked with new buildings, then turns down a dirt track and comes to a stop.

Meili can smell a stench of blood which reminds her of Nannan’s birth, but this time fills her with dread. She’s pulled to the entrance of the concrete building but refuses to go in. She knows that this is where they want to rip Happiness from her. But the men push her inside, drag her to an operating room and close the door. A woman in a white uniform looks up from a desk. Meili runs over to her and pulls the woman’s hair. The woman digs her nails into Meili’s hands and shouts, ‘Quick, call Dr Gang!’ Two men yank Meili’s arms behind her back. Forgetting about her belly, she kicks at everything in sight: the men, the woman in white, the air, the stainless-steel surgical table, the walls. Another man tugs her back by the hair. Then the door opens and Dr Gang walks in with a syringe. ‘Hold her left arm out for me,’ he commands. Meili manages to wrench her arms free, but is quickly punched in the small of her back. Startled by the jolt, Happiness pokes a clenched fist through her belly. The woman in white kneels down and grips Meili’s legs. From behind, a man locks his arm around Meili’s waist and another man pulls her left arm out, holds it straight and says, ‘You can inject her now, Doctor.’

Dr Gang lifts the syringe and stabs the needle into Meili’s upper arm. Meili sees the bulb dangling in front of her and the light filtering through cracks in the steel door begin to splinter and blur.

‘Where were you off to when I passed you in the corridor this morning?’ she hears the woman say.

‘To the latrines. The wawa I bought yesterday gave me the runs.’

‘Tell your wife that wawas must be soaked in boiling water and scraped clean before they’re cooked… Right, I think she’s under now. Lift her onto the table…’

The infant spirit watches Mother being tied to the steel surgical table all those years ago, her hands bound in plastic and hemp ropes, her pale, exposed bulge resembling a pig on a butcher’s table.

A man in a white coat rubs his nose, then plucks Mother’s knicker elastic and watches her flinch. ‘Give her another shot, to be safe,’ he says.