Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘You mustn’t give way to despair,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘We’ll have another child. We won’t give up.’ He opens the bottle of rice wine he bought at a stall near the motorway and pours himself a glass. A white cruise ship passes in the distance, a red flag tied to the mast. A couple on the back deck stand locked in an embrace beneath a loudspeaker blaring out ‘Ode to our Motherland’: ‘ Our beloved nation is rich and powerful. Signs of prosperity are all around us… ’

‘Why don’t we just go home and hand ourselves over to the authorities?’ Meili says. ‘If we show them the abortion certificate, perhaps they’ll drop the fine. Life here is no safer than anywhere else. I’ve had enough…’

‘The certificate wasn’t stamped, so it’s not valid… Oh, it’s all my fault. We should have left Sanxia as soon as we bought the boat. Rivers are our country’s arteries. As long as we keep following them, we’ll eventually reach the heart — a mystical haven where we can live in peace.’

‘You think we’ll find anywhere more mystical than Nuwa Cave? As soon as I placed my hand on it, I fell pregnant with Nannan. Women from Nuwa aren’t destined to have sons. You’d better accept our fate.’ Happiness’s asphyxiated face suddenly flashes before her eyes. She leans over and extinguishes the lamp. ‘Besides, I can’t go through another illegal pregnancy and forced abortion. Do you want to see me die?’

‘Of course not. You’re my wife. But we have a right to try again for a son.’ Kongzi slaps his arm, trying to swat a mosquito. Then he stares into the darkness, at the mosquito’s fluttering wings, perhaps, or a remembered image of Happiness’s corpse.

‘We have no rights, you stubborn fool! Only the state can decide whether I have another child or not. Pull the curtains down. I’m cold.’ As the darkness thickens around her, Meili feels her heartbeat slow down and her hearing become more acute.

Kongzi takes a last drag from his cigarette and says, ‘The bloody Communists have destroyed Confucius’s legacy. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom — all the values he upheld have gone. If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates. But if a woman gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal. What kind of country is this?’ He tosses his stub into the river then sits silently, his eyes darting about. When it becomes too dark to see a thing, he lowers his head and lets out a guttural cry of misery. ‘My son, my son! Make your way back to us. “Summer wildfires cannot destroy the grass, For in spring, soft winds will restore it to life…” I cannot believe that in this immense country there is no space for my male descendant.’

Kongzi’s brother, three years his senior, also has one daughter, but didn’t register her in Kong Village in case they had a second child before she turned five. But a fellow villager who worked on his construction team in Wuhan reported him to the village police, so now neither his daughter nor any second child they might have will be granted a residence permit. Kongzi and his brother look almost identical. The brother left home ten years ago to work in Wuhan, and when he returned every Spring Festival with bundles of cash, Kongzi, the poorly paid school teacher, always felt inferior. The village school had so little money that parents had to buy the children’s desks and Kongzi had to provide his own. His brother paid for their wedding, spending five thousand yuan on a banquet for eighty guests and entertainment provided by the local song-and-dance troupe. He doesn’t enjoy conversation or reading books. When he returns to the village, he sits in front of the television all day, chain-smoking. Kongzi would love to talk to him now, but knows that if he mentioned the family’s need to produce a male heir, he’d be met with a blank silence. Kongzi is still convinced that only a son will bring him happiness. If his brother fails to produce one, the responsibility to continue the family line will fall on him. His brother’s wife is almost forty, so time is running out. Kongzi hasn’t dared phone his father and tell him that Meili was subjected to a forced abortion, and that the baby was a boy. Nor has he dared tell Meili that after they fled the village, his father was arrested and locked up for a week, and that because Meili didn’t turn up for her mandatory IUD insertion, his mother was forcefully fitted with one instead.

Nannan rouses from her sleep, kicks off her blanket and crawls blindly onto Kongzi’s lap.

‘Go back to your mat, Nannan,’ Kongzi says, pushing her away.

‘I frightened of Sea Dragon — he hiding here,’ Nannan says, pointing to her head. Before she went to sleep, Kongzi told her a story about a fairy called Flower Girl who was imprisoned by the Sea Dragon and rescued by the Bodhisattva of Mercy.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Kongzi replies. ‘The Sea Dragon died a long time ago.’

‘You said after my brother dead, he wake up again.’

‘Come and sleep next to me,’ Meili says. She pulls her down onto her mattress. The boat rocks from side to side. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Kongzi? Lower the curtains — I’m shivering. Now go back to sleep, Nannan.’

‘I like sleeping next to daddies, not mummies,’ Nannan says, rolling back towards Kongzi who’s lying on a folded blanket, his head resting on three magazines.

‘The nights are so cold now,’ Meili says, tucking a jumper around Nannan. ‘If we don’t withdraw some cash from the bank tomorrow and buy a generator and an electric heater, Nannan will come down with a terrible illness. We can’t live like animals any longer.’

KEYWORDS: deep-fried dough stick, sperm, mandatory sterilisation, shiny leather shoes, scorched poultry.

MEILI IS WOKEN by distant voices shouting, ‘There’s a man in the town who’s threatening to leap from a five-storey building. Quick, everyone, go and have a look!’ As Meili sits up, a stream of Kongzi’s sperm leaks out from her and runs down her thigh. Grimacing with anger and disgust, she pulls some tissues from a box and stuffs them inside her knickers. That bloody condom must have split last night, she says to herself. If I fall pregnant, I’ll become an enemy of the Party again. During the eight months since the abortion she has fended off Kongzi, but last night she relented, and let him push his way inside her.

Kongzi rolls over and says, ‘If you’re going over to take a look, buy me a deep-fried dough stick. I’m starving.’

‘Why would I want to watch a stranger jump to his death?’ Meili says. ‘I’m not far off from jumping into the river myself. You want a dough stick? What about those noodles left over from yesterday?’ Kongzi’s cigarette smoke rises straight into her nose. She stands up and coughs.

They’ve set up home on the sand island. Meili has reared almost thirty ducks, and Kongzi has bought two egg-laying hens and a rooster which he keeps in the bamboo cage. When he isn’t hauling cargos of smuggled or fake goods, he scours the town and rubbish dump for junk he can sell. There are twelve other families living on the island, most of them fellow family planning fugitives.

Meili dips a flannel into the river and rubs it over her face and body, flinching from the cold. Their neighbours Xixi and Chen are about to sail over to the town. They were the first family to arrive on the island. Last year, the river police pulled down all the shacks, but the islanders soon built themselves new ones with tarpaulin and wooden planks scavenged from the dump. A strong sense of community has formed among the families. Everyone rears chickens and ducks, so the air is always filled with the scent of roast meat.

‘Want a lift, Meili?’ Chen calls out. Meili says yes, but quickly changes her mind. ‘No, if a big crowd has gathered to watch the man jump, the town will be swarming with police. I don’t want to get dragged off to a family planning clinic and have some stranger push an IUD inside me.’ Meili has developed a fear of crowds, and has only visited the town three times.