Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Yes, it’s a beautiful song,’ Chen says. Everyone else remains silent and begins to help themselves to more food.

As they’re surrounded by water on all sides, at dusk the air becomes cool — especially now in winter — and the island feels more spacious.

‘How much grain do you feed your ducks every day?’ Juru asks Meili, picking a piece of straw from her jacket. Seeing the children come running up waving branches in the air, she shields her bowl and shouts, ‘Careful not to kick sand into the food!’

‘Here, one for each of you,’ Meili says, handing a meatball to each child.

‘Rub your hands on your trousers first, you grubby girl!’ Juru says to her daughter. ‘Look, they’re covered in mud.’

Nannan wanders out from behind a tree and watches the children scurry into the bushes.

‘Don’t tread in the poo!’ Chen calls out to them.

‘I wish people wouldn’t shit in those bushes,’ Meili says, staring pointedly at Juru. ‘When there’s no wind blowing, the island stinks to high heaven. You asked how much we feed the ducks? We only have twenty-three left now. We give each bird a cup of grain a day, or two cups if they’re laying eggs.’ She sees Nannan pick up a tiny dead chick and says, ‘Drop it!’

‘Why is it dead, Mum?’ Nannan asks, studying its face closely.

‘It got sick, probably.’

‘Why it wants to leave its mummy and daddy?’

‘Huh, always asking questions! Come here and have another meatball!’

‘I’m full up,’ Nannan says, frowning. ‘My tummy’s tired.’

‘Why not bury the little creature in the ground to keep it warm?’ Meili says, and looks down at the ducks in the small pen Kongzi wove from branches and twigs. Nannan puts the chick down next to the stove and presses it into the sand with her foot.

‘You’re lucky to be able to have fresh eggs every day — my ducks seem to have stopped laying,’ Xixi says, taking a fried pickle from the plate Juru is passing round.

‘I’ve heard you’re not producing enough breast milk, Juru,’ Meili says. ‘You should give your baby a formula top-up before you put him down to sleep.’ The baby is sucking Juru’s left nipple now, his little nose and hands red from the cold.

‘The formula they sell at the market is fake,’ Juru says. ‘It’s just ground rice and sugar. No protein.’

‘I would’ve been lucky to have been fed rice and sugar at his age!’ Meili says. ‘Come on, let’s taste the duck soup. Pass me your bowls.’

‘“Condemned to the same life of wretched vagrancy, / At our first encounter, we laugh like old friends…”’ Kongzi intones, his gold spectacles glinting under the strip light. ‘So, who wrote that poem? If you can’t answer, you must drink a shot!’

‘We’re peasants,’ Bo protests. ‘What do we know about poetry?’ Bo never washes when he returns from the rubbish dump. As soon as any alcohol reaches his stomach, a smell of rot rises from his skin.

‘How about a game of rhyming couplets, Kongzi?’ says Dai, tossing his stub on the ground. ‘Let’s fill our glasses and have a go.’

‘No, play with him first,’ Kongzi says, pointing to Chen with his chin.

‘All right,’ Dai says, raising his glass to Chen. ‘You and me, then. If you can’t complete the couplet, you must empty your glass in one gulp. Here goes: Men who drift down the river…’

Chen pauses for a moment then blurts: ‘End up getting stabbed in the liver…’

Dai rolls his bulbous eyes. ‘Stabbed in the liver? When have any of us been stabbed in the liver?’

‘Help me out, someone!’ Chen whines.

‘No, I’m afraid you’ve lost, my friend. Drink up!’

The infant spirit sees that these lives have now vanished from the island. All that remains is a smell of darkness and wisps of Mother’s breath blowing from the bushes that have grown over the sandy beach. The reflections of the town’s neon lights stretch right across the river into the reeds below. Mother and Father’s plastic bag is still hanging from a branch. Inside it are some yellow flyers, a pocket mirror, three condoms, a stick of cinnamon, some star anise and a mouldy stub of ginger. Sounds from the evening return once more.

‘Come on, Master Kong. My turn to challenge you.’

‘All right. I’m ready.’

‘A man who doesn’t drink…’

‘Lives a life more tedious than you could think.’

‘A man who doesn’t smoke…’

‘Lives more miserably than an ox in a yoke.’

Father’s efforts receive loud applause. ‘What a scholar! It’s clear you’re a chip off Old Confucius’s block. Such learning! Come, Master Kong, let’s fill our glasses again and have another go…’

KEYWORDS: inferior breed, Mount Yang Guifei, merry-go-round, trampoline, bandages.

LAST MONTH, AFTER two days of torrential rain, the sand island flooded. Some families retreated to their boats, others moved over to the opposite bank and built temporary huts near the rubbish dump. When the floodwaters receded, they all returned to the island and rebuilt their shelters. At Spring Festival, Kongzi wrote rhyming couplets for every family to hang outside their doors. Bo and Juru didn’t have a door, so they hung their couplet — IN THIS GOLDEN AGE, EVERY FAMILY WILL PROSPER / IN THIS NEW YEAR, EVERY HOUSEHOLD WILL REJOICE — from the branches of a nearby tree.

Kongzi has released the ducks back onto the island. He lets them forage under the trees for water weeds, fish and slugs left behind by the flood, so only has to give them a full meal — usually a cabbage and cornmeal gruel — after he returns them to their pen at dusk. The pale brown hens scuttling about in the sunlight are squealing like children running home from school. Meili’s favourite bird is the large white drake that is double the size of the female ducks. Since she was forbidden to renew her lease on the market stall, she has spent most of her time on the island, looking after the birds. Every morning, she collects five or six luminous eggs from the cardboard boxes in which the egg-laying ducks roost.

Kongzi bought a hundred little ducklings yesterday for just two hundred yuan. Meili suspects that at such a cheap price they must be an inferior breed. She tears a cardboard box into pieces, scatters them over the beach and ladles boiled rice onto each one.

‘Get up now, it’s lunchtime!’ she calls out to Kongzi, watching the yellow ducklings wander off towards a bush littered with plastic bags. It’s noon already, but Kongzi is still fast asleep, his legs draped over his blanket and peony-printed sheet. The new shelter he built from scavenged tarpaulin, wooden planks, tiles and old doors is finally, after many repairs, waterproof. It’s taller than their last one, and wider than the cabin of their boat, so the three of them are able to sleep quite comfortably. On the inside of the door Meili has nailed a coat rail, and on the outside a kitchen rack in which she keeps ladles, spatulas, chopsticks, spoons, and bottles of soy sauce and vinegar. Next to the pile of shoes beside the entrance is a coil of rubber hose which Kongzi found on the rubbish dump. He was going to take it to Time Square to water his plants, but last week the police discovered his vegetable patches and destroyed them, so it’s useless to him now.

‘Help me up, Meili!’ Kongzi shouts.

Meili peeps inside the shelter and sees Kongzi’s penis sticking up under the sheet.

‘No, my hands are dirty,’ Meili says.

Kongzi reaches up, pulls Meili down and presses her hands onto his penis. Reluctantly, she begins to rub it, peering out through a crack in the door at a duck stretching its neck in the sunlight. She glances down at the erection in her hands and feels a warm jolt between her legs. Kongzi squeezes her nipple. Her face flushes. ‘You lecherous pest,’ she says. ‘Can’t you wait until tonight?’