Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Why my brother dead, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, pressing her small hand on Meili’s sunken belly.

‘The bad people took him out before he was ready,’ Meili answers. She thinks of the anxiety and nightmares she’s endured since their flight from Kong Village, and realises that in this country there is not one roof under which she can live in safety. In the past, she ignored Kongzi whenever he described the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius. Only now does she fully understand that, in the eyes of the Communist Party, she is but a criminal whom they can torture as they please, a woman who doesn’t even have the right to be a mother to her unborn child.

‘But I not want him dead, Mummy,’ Nannan cries, pointing to the plastic bag. ‘I want him moving. You said you give me brother.’

Against the pallor of her face, Meili’s lips are the colour of dark plums. After returning to the boat, she slept for two entire days, still leaking clots of blood. In her sleep, she could hear Nannan crying out to her and feel Kongzi place fresh wads of paper inside her knickers or pieces of banana into her mouth. When she woke, she saw blood on her dress, on the bamboo mat, and even under Nannan’s fingernails.

A swarm of flies crouch on the canopy like a squad of family planning officials.

In the twilight, a sand-dredging vessel sails past, leaving a trail of gleaming foam that makes the surrounding water appear wetter and heavier.

‘I finished,’ Nannan says, lifting her bare bottom in the air and peering down into her potty.

Mother wipes Nannan’s bottom and hugs her tightly. ‘Your brother had a sad fate, Nannan. He must go to heaven now. Say goodbye to him.’ Her eyes are two narrow slits between lids red and swollen from crying.

‘But heaven in the sky. Why you put brother in water heaven? He can swim? He going swim to Sea Dragon’s palace?’

‘No, your brother just wants to have a long sleep,’ Mother says. ‘Kongzi, put Happiness into the river.’

Mother flops onto her stomach again and lies on the deck with her long hair over her eyes, her swollen left arm outstretched towards the bow. Two ducks stick their heads out of the bamboo cage below and stare at the darkening water and sky. ‘Wait,’ Mother calls out. ‘Drive back to the bank and pick some osmanthus.’

The infant spirit can hear the sounds from that evening, but can’t see the images clearly as the sky is not yet pitch black. The river is calm. All that can be heard is the dull thud of the propeller churning through the water. After a short absence, Father returns to the boat holding three branches of osmanthus. He drives the boat back to the middle of the river, threads the branches through the string knot of the plastic bag then gently lowers the bag into the water. The infant spirit plummets to the riverbed and watches the bag descend.

‘Look at that leaf, Mummy,’ Nannan says. ‘It swimming.’

Once the water burial is finished, Kongzi sails back to the bank and drops anchor. ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ he says, crouching down and staring out at the smooth surface of the river.

The night thickens and the river turns black. Happiness and the osmanthus flowers have vanished. The flies have gone. In the candlelight, Meili sees Nannan’s doll floating in the river, one arm outstretched. After soaking in the water all day, its red dress has turned the colour of frozen blood, and its eyes a more intense blue. Its yellow hair streams and scatters around the shiny plastic face.

Meili feels milk begin to leak from her breasts. She leans over the side of the boat and squeezes it out. Drip, drip, drip… The river opens its mouth and swallows.

KEYWORDS: sand island, National Day, forced abortion, blood clot, potassium permanganate.

BEFORE NIGHTFALL, KONGZI anchors the boat near a jetty that juts out over the river beneath a municipal rubbish dump. Other ramshackle boats and barges are tethered nearby, each one crammed with scavenged plastic crates, sofa cushions and lampshades. Chickens, ducks and children are scampering over the muddy shore while above them foragers pick their way over the dump’s broken bricks and tiles. The buildings on the hill behind are festooned with National Day celebration banners and flags. It looks like a sizeable county town.

Meili sees a woman in the next boat washing spinach, and reminds Kongzi that they’ve run out of rice.

‘I’ll go up to the town and buy some,’ he says. ‘And I’ll buy some soap as well, so you can wash in the river this evening.’ Kongzi hasn’t earned any money since he paid the abortion fee, and only has fifty yuan left.

‘No, I don’t want to wash.’ Meili still can’t bring herself to touch the river in which Happiness is buried. Her body is filthy and covered in insect bites, but at least the swelling on her left arm has subsided, and she can now bend it again.

‘I want play with them, Daddy,’ Nannan says, pointing to some children in a cabbage field who are poking a flock of chickens with bamboo sticks. The ducks in the cage on the side of the boat ruffle their wings, desperate to be let out onto the river.

Kongzi ties the boat to a broken slab of concrete, picks Nannan up into his arms and crosses the dump, heading for the town.

Meili turns round and sees a long sand island in the middle of the river. A jumble of houseboats, as dilapidated as theirs, lie anchored by the shore. Children are playing hide-and-seek among the bushes and babies are lying asleep on car tyres. Colourful laundry hangs from cables strung between trees, giving the place a homely air. She can tell at a glance that the islanders are fellow family planning fugitives and, suspecting that they club together to bribe local officials into leaving them alone, thinks it might be safer if they joined them. She wouldn’t want to stay long, though. Once they’ve crossed Guangxi Province, they’ll reach Guangdong, and be able to make their way to Heaven Township. For the first time since her abortion, she allows her hand to touch her hollow belly. A taste as foul as rotting vermin rises into her mouth. She senses that death is lurking somewhere deep within her, cold and implacable. Her abdomen cramps as another blood clot is expelled from her womb. She remembers her friend Rongrong’s sallow face wince as she swallowed the bitter herbal medicine for her pelvic disease, and feels frightened and far from home.

At night, the river is tranquil, apart from the occasional dog bark or squealing of a baby. The roar that flows from the distant motorway makes the trees tremble but doesn’t stir the boats. Meili rests her head on a baby mattress she found on the dump and hugs a hot-water bottle, her breasts beneath her white shirt drooping to either side. The kerosene lamp casts an orange light over her neck and face. ‘Let’s moor by the sand island for a few days, Kongzi,’ she says. ‘This river is so broad and winding I’ve lost track of where we are.’

‘We’ve left the Yangtze and have followed the Gui River into Guangxi Province. This town is called Xijiang. Guangdong is just over there in the east. All right, let’s stay here and rest for a while. I can pick up some work and we can search the dump for things to sell. The shops here aren’t expensive. Peanut oil is four yuan a bottle, and rice is just 3.2 yuan a jin. Diesel and kerosene are quite reasonable too.’

Although Meili can eat now, she still suffers bouts of acute abdominal pain. ‘The days are like water,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘They stretch out before me but I can’t hold them in my hands.’ Before supper, Kongzi poured some boiled water into a basin for her. She scrubbed her hands and face with soap and, for the first time since the abortion, washed between her legs as well then disinfected the area with potassium permanganate.