Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Don’t kill my baby, don’t touch my —’ Mother splutters, white foam bubbling from her mouth. But the man slides his hands beneath Mother’s bottom and pulls off her knickers. ‘Hooligan!’ Mother weeps. ‘If my baby dies, its spirit will haunt you for eternity.’ She tries to spit the foam covering her mouth onto his face, but it rises only slightly then falls back on her lips.

The man begins to prod Mother’s belly.

‘Don’t do it, I beg you…’ she moans. ‘Let me keep this child. I won’t have another, I promise… It’s a Chinese citizen. It has a right to live…’

The man is handed a second syringe with a much longer needle. He inserts the tip into Mother’s belly and pushes it all the way in.

‘Stop, stop! Don’t hurt my baby…’

The infant spirit observes its first incarnation writhe and squirm as the long needle enters its head. When the cold astringent liquid is released into the brain, the spirit sees the cells shiver and contract, and the fetus flail about in the amniotic fluid, pounding Mother’s warm uterine walls, then gradually grow weaker and weaker until all that moves is its quivering spine.

‘Is this what your mothers brought you into the world for?’ Mother cries out to the men. ‘To kill babies? Well, you’d better kill me too, while you’re about it…’

‘Good work, Dr Gang!’ the woman says. ‘You must have been studying me on the sly.’

‘It was much simpler than this morning’s one. Look, when you press the belly here you can see the head clearly. It was easy to hit the target.’

Ignoring her moans and handling her as roughly as they would a corpse, the doctors part Meili’s legs, slide a speculum into her vagina, mop up the discharge, then, when the mouth of the cervix is visible, insert a prostaglandin suppository. Meili tries to scream but can produce only a soft sigh. She tries to roll onto her side but, apart from her neck, nothing will move. ‘Forgive me, Happiness,’ she whispers. ‘I couldn’t protect you. I’d kill myself if I could, so that we could die together, but my hands and feet are bound…’ She lifts her head, squeezes her eyes to expel her tears and stares at her belly. A sharp pain shoots through her womb, spreads to her lower back and flows to every part of her body.

‘Goddess Nuwa, Mother of Humanity, rescue me!’ Mother wails. ‘Oh, Father of Darkness—’

‘What a fine voice you have,’ the man says coldly. ‘Your cries won’t change anything, though. We’ve seen it all in this room: vomit, faeces, blood, urine, screaming tantrums. But however much the women curse and resist, they must all surrender their babies to us in the end. You think you can defy the state? Don’t waste your breath.’

‘When we tied you to this table there were two of you, but when you get off there’ll be just one,’ a male nurse in a blue hat tells her softly.

‘Devils! Animals!’ Meili moans. She tries to cross her legs to close her cervix, but all she can feel is her toes clench slightly. The hot air in the room smells of deep-fried sausage. ‘May you die without sons or grandsons! May your family lines perish!’ Mother cries, drenched in sweat, her lips the colour of frozen meat.

‘If you want to leave this room alive, you’d better shut up!’ the male nurse says, taking off his blue hat and fanning his face with it.

‘Yes, if you don’t keep quiet, you’ll be responsible for any medical accident that might happen in this room,’ says the woman. ‘Your womb belongs to the state. Getting pregnant without authorisation is against the law. Argue your case with the government, if you want. Go to America — see what they say. China’s population control policy has the full support of the United Nations. Do you understand, you ignorant peasant?’

‘Doctors have a duty to rescue the dying and heal the wounded, but you—’

‘We’re professional surgeons. We had well-paid hospital jobs. You think we wanted to come here and operate on you lot? For the measly bonus they give us?’

‘If you don’t like this job, I’ll tell the director to transfer you back home,’ says the woman. The men behind her chuckle.

The blood-engorged walls of Meili’s womb begin to soften and the cervix is prised apart. She watches blood trickle down her thigh towards the fingers of her left hand, then sees the trickle become a stream which runs along the table’s incline and falls onto the floor.

‘This imported oxytocin seems to take effect much faster. Look, the membranes have already broken.’

The woman walks round and takes a look. ‘What thick black hair it has! Let’s use the forceps.’

Meili senses what feels like a hot soldering iron enter her body. When she hears the sound of ripping flesh, in her mind she sees the baby’s eyes, ears, throat.

‘Mother, help me!’ she howls through every strand of her hair. ‘Don’t come out, my child. Don’t come out into this evil world. Stay inside me and we can go to our deaths together…’ But the forceps continue to press around the baby and yank it from her flesh.

Hearing the baby cry, Meili lifts her head, desperate to catch a glimpse of it.

‘It’s still alive, the stubborn little thing,’ Dr Gang says, holding Happiness by the neck. ‘What shall we do with it?’ Happiness kicks its little legs about just as it did in the womb. Meili looks at the space between its legs. It’s a boy. She tries with her eyes to reach out to him, but soon all she can see is the colour red.

‘Strangle it,’ the woman says. ‘We’ll register it as a stillbirth. Don’t wipe its face. Illegal babies aren’t entitled to have their mucus removed. Squeeze the neck here. That’s right. Keep squeezing. That’s it…’

When Happiness’s body turns stiff, Dr Gang drops it into a plastic bag as though it were a criminal who’s just been dragged from an execution ground.

Meili cranes her neck, straining to catch another glimpse of her son. ‘Your mother heard you cry three times, my child. I heard you. Come back to me soon in your next incarnation and I’ll give you my milk to drink…’ She looks up at the doctors, and with no strength left in her voice mutters: ‘Murderers, murderers…’

‘I’m going to miss the afternoon boat and won’t get home until ten. I bet my son will sneak off to that damn internet cafe… Wen, fill this basin with water.’

‘They’ve just done the woman next door as well. Whose name shall I put on the abortion certificate?’

‘Guo Ni, the wife of the Road Bureau chief. She gave birth to a second son yesterday. The chief gave the clinic twenty thousand yuan this morning, so we’ll all receive a good bonus this month.’

‘It’s not your son you should be worrying about, Dr Su. I heard your husband visits the sauna house every night on his way home from work. Won’t be long before he finds himself a “second wife”.’

‘You want to break up our marriage? No chance!’

‘You don’t believe me?’ says Dr Gang, pulling off his bloodstained surgical gloves. ‘Just wait and see.’ He sits on a plastic chair, dangles a sandal from his toes and puts a cigarette in his mouth.

‘Stop stirring things up. And go outside if you want to smoke.’

The electric fan overhead circulates the smell of stale blood through the room. Meili’s placenta flops onto the metal table like a wet, purple sock.

The woman in white coils the remains of the umbilical cord around her gloved hand and puts the placenta inside a second plastic bag.

‘That placenta looks nice and plump.’

‘Well, you can’t have it. The Party Secretary has already reserved it…’

Meili feels as though she’s floating on water. Her thoughts become foggy and vague. Like the severed neck of a duck, the hole between her legs drips with dark blood.