Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Mum, flowers don’t have eyes, so why do they die?’

‘Because flowers are too pretty for this world.’

‘Daddy said I’m pretty, so I’m going to die soon too?’

Father frowns. ‘Stupid girl, you can’t even write your own name yet. What do you know about death?’

‘Huh! You’re a naughty daddy. I want a different daddy. I hit your neck. See, my dolly is very angry.’

‘Don’t lose your temper with her, Kongzi,’ Mother whispers. ‘Look, Nannan. Your toes are exactly the same shape as mine. Let me clip your nails.’

‘What does lose temper mean, Daddy?’

‘It means to get angry,’ Father says, his tone softening. ‘Yes, I can tell your doll’s angry — her black hair has turned yellow and her brown eyes have turned blue.’

‘Daddy, you trick me. The chick isn’t sleeping. You sold it to a man, and the man is going to eat it for supper. Tell me the truth.’

‘No, I didn’t sell it, Nannan. Perhaps your little chick woke up and flew into the sky.’ Father switches on his torch and opens a copy of Confucius and Neo-Confucianism .

‘The chick is not in the sky and not in the trees…’ Nannan says, holding back her sobs. ‘Mum, Daddy said I came out your bottom. So I must be very smelly.’

‘No, no, you aren’t smelly,’ Mother says. ‘After you came out, you drank my milk every day, so now you smell milky and sweet.’ Then, glancing back at Father, she says: ‘I can’t believe she’s four already. The years fly by so fast, we never get a moment to stop and enjoy ourselves.’

‘Yes, time has flashed by. If you fall pregnant now, Nannan will be five by the time you give birth, so the baby will be legal.’

‘After today’s accident, I just want to concentrate on Nannan. Tomorrow I’ll take her into town for a ride on the merry-go-round, then I’ll go to the market and see if I can rent another stall.’

KEYWORDS: Yin forces, silkworm pupae, hunted animal, duck shit, bamboo mat, army tanks.

IN THE DARK hour before dawn, Meili wakes with a start and feels as though she’s trapped inside a coffin. Last night, as she was falling asleep, Kongzi whispered into her ear, ‘“Autumn shadows linger. / The frost is delayed. / Lotus leaves withering on the pond / listen to the patter of rain,”’ then climbed on top of her. Rain is rattling on the shelter’s roof, sounding like dried beans dropping into a metal bowl. Gusts of wind sweep water from the trees and send it crashing onto the tarpaulin in heavy sheets. Meili closes her eyes and waits for the storm to reach its peak. As lightning flashes through the black sky and thunder shakes the ground, Kongzi rolls on top of her again. ‘Be kind… to me… Kongzi,’ she mumbles. ‘I don’t want to… fall pregnant…’ Her hands linked behind his neck, she holds onto him, tighter and tighter, until her body is so compressed and her lungs so empty, she feels she is drowning. She opens her mouth and gasps for air. The alcohol on Kongzi’s breath makes her stomach turn, but she can’t escape it. She senses herself sinking into the ground as his jolting body weighs down on her. ‘It’s pouring outside. I must… bring in those pickles… I left to dry on the hutch.’ Desperately she tries to push him off.

To avoid having intercourse with him every night, Meili often goes to sleep on the boat with Nannan. She’s terrified of falling pregnant, of the government cutting out from her a piece of flesh as warm as her own, of having to conceal inside her body a contraband object which would grower larger and more visible by the day. She left Kong Village to find freedom, but if she falls pregnant again she knows she will become a hunted animal once more.

After the rooster in the bamboo cage greets the dawn, smaller birds begin to sing in the willows and insects fly out from the reeds. Meili feels a stream of sperm leak out from between her thighs. Am I already done for? she wonders to herself. Her period is three weeks late, and she suspects that her IUD might have fallen out.

She sits up and looks at the imprint of the bamboo mat on Kongzi’s forehead. He’s grown so familiar to her, he almost looks like a stranger. She wants to shout, ‘I’m pregnant! Are you happy now?’ but stops herself just in time. If she is pregnant, she wonders whether she could induce a miscarriage by lifting heavy objects or encouraging Kongzi to make love to her more aggressively than usual. She crawls outside and puts on a T-shirt. Her breasts feel heavy and tender and she can detect a sour taste in her mouth. Yes, I have all the symptoms. As her bare feet press into the sand, images from the past flit through her mind. She sees the winter morning she first set eyes on Kongzi, walking up to her wearing a yellow down jacket like a promise of a golden future. The first time he asked to meet her in the woods, her legs trembled with fear. She and Kongzi crouched in the dark shade of a tree beside a group of gravestones. He gave her some peanuts and said he’d invite her to a film in the county town and take her out for a meal. He told her a friend of his had opened a Sichuan restaurant on the ground floor of the County Cultural Centre which served beef poached in hot chilli oil and Chongqing hotpot. She remembers the photograph of Kongzi as a child, standing next to Teacher Zhou with a big smile on his face. She knows that Kongzi was Teacher Zhou’s favourite pupil, and that in 1989, when he went to stay with him in Beijing, they joined the democracy protests and, on 4 June, stood at a street corner arm in arm and watched the army tanks enter the capital. Now she is Kongzi’s wife. For his sake, she left the village designated on her residence permit and the comfort of their tiled-roofed house. She’d dreamed that if she worked hard, she could open a shop one day and buy a modern apartment in a county town with a flushing toilet and hot shower, like the one owned by Cao Niuniu, the son of Kongzi’s artist friend, Old Cao. She still believes that as long as she avoids another pregnancy, she’ll be able to live a good life one day, and stroll along supermarket aisles wearing nylon tights and high-heeled shoes.

She peeps back into the shelter. Nannan sits up and says, ‘I want to cuddle Daddy.’

‘No, you’ll wake him up,’ Meili replies.

‘I want to tell him I not going wake him up, then!’ Nannan says, leaning over to hug Kongzi’s head. Meili puts a second jumper on Nannan, then shuts the door and goes down to the beach. Hugging herself against the cold, she watches the rising sun stain the horizon red and pour its soft light over the river, the banks and the distant bridge. Once more, she feels an urge to tell Kongzi that she’s pregnant, just to see the look of joy on his face. Then she considers keeping quiet about it, and getting rid of the fetus on the sly by swallowing some castor oil. No — I will have this baby, she says to herself, digging her toes into the sand. Once it’s born, Kongzi will leave me alone, and I’ll never have to get pregnant again. Suddenly she sees a vision of herself as a girl, leaning over an enamel basin and splashing icy water onto her face before setting off for school. She remembers the coldness of the water seeping through to her cheekbones.

Smells of fish and duck shit begin to rise from the ground. The ducks in the pen preen their feathers and ruffle their wings. Meili sniffs the stale sweat on her skin and longs for a shower or a bath. She knows that although the town’s public bathhouse doubles as a brothel, it has warm pools in which visitors can bathe for just six yuan if they bring their own soap and towel. She hasn’t dared go there yet, as she hates the thought of having to undress in front of strangers. The river has been too cold for bathing. But winter is over now. She grits her teeth and steps in up to her ankles. The cold refreshes and invigorates her; her feet transmit forgotten memories to her brain. She feels fully awake, conscious of the beating of her heart and the ticking of each passing second. She wades deeper into the river and feels the coldness dragging her further into her past. She is aware of being, at the same time, both a woman and child: her daughter’s mother and her mother’s daughter. She remembers the day twenty years ago, during the osmanthus-blossom season, when she accompanied her mother to the dentist to have her molar capped, and realises that she is now as old as her mother was then, and that in another twenty years she’ll be as old as her mother is now, and that all that will await her after that will be old age and decrepitude… As her thoughts begin to freeze, she glances over her shoulder and sees the ducks force their way out of the pen and wade into the shallow water.