Ma Jian - The Dark Road

Kongzi soon returns with a fisherman who leads him onto the bridge and says, ‘See that marshy beach further down the creek? No one’s renting it now. It has a pond where you can keep your ducks.’ On a road far behind them, a red car drives slowly past.

Meili sits at the bow and begins to remove dead leaves from a bunch of spinach.

‘If I wash the spinach in that water, the spinach get clean but I get very dirty,’ Nannan says, pointing to the muddy creek.

‘Oh, stop talking nonsense,’ Meili says irritably.

Kongzi jumps aboard and drives the boat towards the place the fisherman indicated. The banks here are so darkened by dust and pollution that, compared to them, the fumes billowing from the far-away factories look clean. Sickened by the scenery, Meili stares down at her shoes and reflects on her predicament. To protect what might be Kongzi’s precious male heir, she’ll have to spend another eight months lying low. When she discovered she was pregnant, she suggested they go straight to Heaven Township, where she knew they’d be safe. But Kongzi said the journey would be too long and arduous, and insisted they find a hiding place closer by. Meili’s only hope now is that she’ll suffer a miscarriage before the government has a chance to tear the baby out. Inside her wet shoes and socks, her feet feel cold and pinched.

The boat draws up onto the marshy beach of mud, coarse grass and dirty pools. Above it are a large swampy pond enclosed by a bamboo fence, and a small bamboo hut. Kongzi jumps ashore. ‘This is a perfect place for us to hide until Waterborn is born!’ he says excitedly. ‘We’ll be safe. We could rear a hundred ducks inside that enclosure, easily. And the creek seems to have life in it. The fisherman back there said the rent is only five hundred yuan a year. Look, it’s surrounded on three sides by hills. Ideal feng shui for a home!’

Meili looks up at the dry gravelly hills. Villagers have carved terraces into the slopes. Some are cultivated with corn, but the rest have gone to seed. There are a few banana and papaya trees around the enclosure and some lychee trees behind the hut.

‘This isn’t a creek,’ Meili says. ‘It’s a waste gutter! “Untamed rivers, barren hills…”’ She’s been short-tempered ever since she took the pregnancy test. She’s terrified by the thought that the IUD might still be inside her and that the fetus is now growing around it. As soon as she told Kongzi that she was pregnant, she immediately regretted it. In bouts of anger since then, she has been tempted to take Weiwei’s tortoiseshell glasses out from under her pillow and fling them into the river. She knows that when his hand moved over her body that night, it was really his mother that he was searching for, and she wishes she could forget him. But part of her longs to talk to him again about matters that still confuse her. Kongzi never has the patience to listen to all the things she wants to say.

‘Dad, a snake in the water — look!’ Nannan says, pointing to a submerged stick. ‘It’s dead. No, it’s moving!’

So the three of them set up camp on the marshy beach below Guai Village, and wait anxiously for the birth of the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius.

KEYWORDS: flood diversion area, bamboo hut, blood donating, tightly stuffed, yellow foam, severe deformities.

THE PUBLIC ROAD that winds out of Guai Village leads to Dexian, but only two or three cars drive along it each day. The creek connects the Xi River to factories along the Huai River, but it’s too shallow for large boats to navigate. In the afternoon, the sunlight lingers on the marshy beach for a while, then disappears behind a distant mountain that is surrounded by fields of yellow rape. Guai Village is in a flood diversion area. At times of emergency, the sluice gates upstream are raised, and the entire village becomes inundated. When the pollution from the factories is severe, yellow foamy waters flow into the creek, carrying dead chickens and dogs.

Guai villagers used to take water from the swampy pond to irrigate the paddy fields behind. But ten years ago, a villager sold his club-footed son to a criminal gang who made the boy beg on the streets of Anhui Province. In one year, the boy was able to send his parents ten thousand yuan. Envious of their good fortune, other parents in the village have sought to get rich through similar means. They mutilate their babies at birth, twisting or snapping their limbs, knowing that the severer the handicap the more money they will earn, then they sell or rent their maimed children to illegal gangs who bundle them off to beg in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Within months the parents are able to buy colour televisions, refrigerators, imported cigarettes, electronic alarm clocks and mobile phones. The village’s economy is booming from the deformed infant trade, and the mud houses have been replaced with three-storey villas. Eager to claim their share of the wealth, the local government has hiked taxes, and to promote the production of the village’s valuable commodity, has turned a blind eye to family planning violations. But just to be safe, Kongzi has bribed the village family planning team five hundred yuan to allow Meili to carry her pregnancy to term. The team’s chairman told him that if the baby is a girl and they decide not to keep her, the Welfare Office would take the baby off their hands and pay the 4,000-yuan fine for the illegal birth. It’s common knowledge that the Welfare Office sells children in their care to foreigners for a 30,000-yuan profit.

Kongzi, Meili and Nannan have moved into the bamboo hut. A Fujian family who lived here before reared turtles in the pond, and made enough money to pay a human trafficking gang to smuggle them into England. Most of the mud plaster has now dropped from the hut’s bamboo walls. At dawn, sunlight breaks through the cracks and falls in splinters on the floor. As Meili gets dressed, she remembers the blue tracksuit with two white stripes running along the sides which she wore to primary school. Her uncle who lives in the county town bought it for her. She was the only girl in the village to own one, and it always made her stand out from the crowd.

The rooster in the bamboo cage pops its head out, yodels loudly at the dawn, then draws it back again. Nannan is on the marshy beach, tossing twigs and old batteries into the creek. As the water splashes up, flies resting on a floating banana peel dart into the air.

‘We’ll never make much money rearing ducks,’ Kongzi sighs, watching Meili drop shredded cabbage leaves into the bucket of slops.

‘We’ve sold the first batch and thirty-three from the second,’ Meili says. ‘That’s not bad. But now that winter’s set in and the nights are getting colder, the breeding seems to have slowed down.’

‘I spoke to your brother when I phoned your parents yesterday,’ Kongzi says. ‘He can’t lend us any money. If we don’t raise four thousand yuan to pay the birth fine by the time the baby arrives, I dread to think what will happen.’

‘Feed these slops to the ducks, Nannan!’ Meili calls out. Her belly is so large now that she can’t see her feet. When the flea bites dotted over her toes itch, she has to rub them against a tree.

‘No, that bucket’s too heavy,’ Nannan says, biting her nails.

Kongzi picks up the bucket, takes it into the duck enclosure and pours the slops into two bowls. The ducks ruffle their wings and jostle their way to the feed, quacking and grunting. Downy white feathers flutter into the morning sunlight.

‘I’ll look after the ducks today,’ Meili says. ‘You have a cargo to deliver this afternoon. Don’t worry, I’m sure if we work hard, we’ll be able to make four thousand in the next two months. And if we don’t, we’ll just have to run away to Heaven Township.’ Meili is wearing Kongzi’s blue cotton trousers and a white shirt she’s left unbuttoned over her bump.