Ma Jian - The Dark Road

Kongzi rolls out of the shelter and rinses his mouth. Meili walks up to the stove, opens a bag of slops she bought from a restaurant yesterday and ladles some into the bucket of duck feed. A large container ship shrouded in diesel smoke chugs past, blasting its horn. The huge wake it leaves behind surges onto the beach, floods the shelter then recedes, taking Meili’s flip-flops with it. Meili goes into the shelter to brush her teeth, but discovers that her toothbrush has been washed away as well.

As usual, during the few minutes before dusk, the wind drops and the river becomes calm. Kongzi is sitting at the bow of their boat, gazing at the ducks and the back of Meili’s neck as she stands knee-deep in the river, her skirt hitched up to her waist. In her rippling reflection, her skin is the same colour but her white skirt is slightly darker. Nannan lies in the cabin, gazing at her plastic doll in the red dress and singing a nonsense song she’s made up: ‘ A-da-li-ya, wah wah! …’ A golden, late-spring haze spreads over the river, making the watery landscape resemble a blurred and muted colour photograph.

By the time Kongzi walks down the beach with the bucket of shredded cabbage for the ducks’ last feed, the evening sun is so low in the sky that his silhouette is dragged halfway across the river. With sudden alarm he notices six or seven ducks being swept downstream. He wades into the river, scrambles onto the boat, and tries to shoo them back towards the beach with the long bamboo pole. In the commotion, the boat becomes untethered and it too starts to drift downstream. Kongzi turns on the engine and drives it back to its mooring, while Meili chases after the errant ducks and tosses pebbles at their heads to encourage them to swim back. The ducks shake their wings in a fluster, splashing water into the air.

‘Call them back, Kongzi!’ Meili shouts.

‘“What passes is just like this, never ceasing day or night…”’ Kongzi yells, quoting a line from the Analects as he gazes with excitement at the current. ‘Don’t worry, Meili, I’ll put some food on the beach. That’ll bring them back.’ He leaps off the boat, making it rock so violently that Nannan is knocked onto her side. Meili strides further into the water, positions herself in front of the ducks and with open arms shoos them back. At last, they turn round and swim to the beach, then they shake their feathers dry and wobble off towards Kongzi’s bucket.

An hour later, the river sinks into darkness and the island becomes shrouded in a cold dank mist. The kerosene lamp shines on Kongzi’s and Chen’s weathered faces.

‘Beautifully recited, my friend,’ Kongzi says, then swigging some beer stares at Meili’s backside as she bends over the stove. ‘Now let’s hear another one.’

Chen crashed his boat into a ship last week, and it will take a month to repair. After Nannan burnt her foot, he bought her a new pair of flip-flops. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll try “Feelings on a River in Early Winter”, by Meng Haoran. Here goes: “Trees shed their leaves, wild geese fly south. / Rivers shiver in the north wind. / My home is far away, at a bend of River Xiang / In the Land of Chu, high above the clouds. / A melancholy vagrant, whose tears have run dry, / I fix my gaze on a solitary boat at the edge of the sky. / Having drifted off course, I long to find my way home. / Before me stretch the flat sea and the endless night.” Ah, I remembered every line! You really are a fine tutor. Would you consider teaching my daughters as well?’ Chen has a gold tooth which at night always glints in the lamplight.

‘Yes, I could give them lessons every morning. They may be black children with no residence permits or legal status, but you must think of their futures. At the very least, they should learn to read and write.’

‘How lucky we are to be able to rub shoulders with a scholar of your calibre — a descendant of Confucius, no less! Come, a toast to you, my friend!’ Chen’s face crinkles into a broad smile. As he munches one of the deep-fried silkworm pupae he’s brought, a pungent yeasty smell fills the air around him.

‘Teachers are the least respected and most poorly paid members of society,’ Kongzi says. ‘Chairman Mao called us the “stinking Ninth category”. But teaching is my vocation. I don’t care about the money. As Confucius said, “A noble man should seek neither a full belly nor a comfortable home.”’

‘Why you not a doctor, Dad?’ asks Nannan, stroking her doll’s red dress.

‘Because I wanted to be a teacher, and I’m too old to change professions now.’

‘Wen’s cat died today. You must make it better. When I had big burn, you made my foot better.’

‘You’re right, Kongzi — our pockets may be empty but our will is strong,’ says Chen. ‘When our children grow up, they can find jobs in factories that provide free food and lodging. They won’t have to live like tramps any more.’ Since he crashed his boat, Chen has been going over to the town every day to look for work. Kongzi has been busy as well. This morning he hauled a cargo of asbestos to a Sino-Hong Kong flagstone factory three kilometres away.

The island has suffered many disruptions this week. River police, municipal police and family planning officers have turned up repeatedly to check boat licences, residence permits and birth permits. Two days ago, Bo and Juru and Dai and Yiping packed their bags and left. Kongzi now uses their abandoned shelters as supplementary duck pens.

Meili clears away the bowls and chopsticks and says to the men, ‘You stay here and chat. I’ll go and sleep in the cabin.’

‘The gods haven’t favoured us,’ Kongzi sighs, watching Meili hitch up her skirt and wade over to the boat, her bottom swaying from side to side. ‘I still haven’t managed to get her knocked up.’

‘I just hope our one will be a boy,’ Chen says. His wife Xixi is due to give birth to their third child any day now.

‘Meili was born in the birthplace of Goddess Nuwa,’ Kongzi says. ‘The Yin forces of the area are too strong. Every name has a female connotation: Dark Water River, Riverbrook Town, Pool of the Immortals Mountain. Women from such a place are clearly not meant to produce sons.’

‘Without a son, a man can never stand tall,’ Chen says. ‘The bloody family planning policies have ruined our lives! Back in the village we owned two hundred turtles — they were worth eight thousand yuan — but after our second daughter was born, the officers confiscated the lot.’

Chewing angrily on a pupa, Kongzi says, ‘Not even the most evil emperor in China’s history would have contemplated developing the economy by massacring unborn children and severing family lines! But today’s tyrants murder millions of babies a year without batting an eyelid, and if a baby slips through their net, they cripple its parents with fines and confiscate their property.’

‘I’m your baby, Daddy, so why you want another baby?’ Nannan says, perching on an old motor cylinder beside him.

‘Don’t interrupt when the grown-ups are talking,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘It’s time you went to sleep. Go and join Mum on the boat.’

Nannan wraps her arms around Kongzi’s neck. ‘I eaten so much food, I’m a grown-up too, now. Daddy, why you got hair in your nose?’

Kongzi pulls Nannan onto his lap and gently tugs her ear. ‘A grown-up, you say? Then how come you still wet your bed every night?’ Since Nannan burned her foot, he has become much more affectionate towards her.

‘When you’re here, I like you. When you’re not here, I like Mummy.’ The bottoms of Nannan’s long trousers are damp and her bare feet are stone cold.

KEYWORDS: spouse’s return, hairy armpits, water burial, Dragon Mother, corpse fisher, dead fish.