Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘A girl,’ Meili answers, trying to sound offhand as she squeezes her nipple back into Waterborn’s mouth.

Kongzi walks over to her, lifts the swaddling cloth and examines the baby for himself. His face scrunches in anger. ‘So I paid five hundred yuan for you to give birth to that !’ he shouts, then storms outside and lights a cigarette. Meili breathes a sigh of relief. The government and her husband are powerless now. Her baby will live. Looking down again, she catches sight of Waterborn’s left hand and cries out, ‘My God! Sister Mao, come and look! She’s got six fingers!’

‘Yes, there is one too many,’ Sister Mao concurs. ‘Let me check her right hand. Fine. And her feet. Normal too, thank goodness. Don’t worry. One extra finger isn’t a calamity. You know what they say: a sixth finger signifies a sixth talent. But if it bothers you, I can chop it off. No extra cost.’

Meili shudders at the thought, and feels the little finger of her own left hand begin to throb. ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ she blurts.

‘But the baby does seem a little slow to me. Take her to the district hospital in a month to have her checked. And keep a record of how much milk she drinks, the colour and frequency of her stools. These days there are so many pesticides on our crops, so much formaldehyde in our homes, it’s rare to see a baby born without a brain defect, cleft palate or other deformity. Make sure you regularly clear the duck shit from your enclosure. That sixth finger suggests to me that you caught toxoplasmosis during your pregnancy — it’s a disease caused by a parasite that lives in animal dung. A baby I helped deliver last week was born with no nose and no limbs, so you should consider yourself lucky.’

Meili’s heartbeat returns to normal and a rosy glow suffuses her face. She can’t find the strength to close her legs. Her womb feels like an opened cellar, with hot air wafting in and cold blood streaming out. ‘Sister Mao,’ she says, ‘I’ve changed my mind. Babies don’t remember pain, do they? So can you get it over and done with, please, and chop off the sixth finger now?’

KEYWORDS: paralysis, water on the brain, fishing net, male chauvinism, good by nature, soft spot.

THE EVENING SUN turns the papaya tree and dead banana trees behind the hut golden green. Moths swirl around the hut’s doorway. Kongzi sits on a cracked enamel washbasin, his head in his hands. By his feet, a line of yellow ants are marching across an opened tin of lychees. Since the sluice gates were raised last week, foamy floodwaters have engulfed the creek, risen to the pond and are lapping at the base of the willows a few metres from the hut. Half the ducks have died. Kongzi said the pollution in the floodwater must have killed them, but Meili thinks they were poisoned by the contaminated rice he’s been adding to their feed. Each time they swallow a grain, their heads jerk back in discomfort. When Meili steams the rice for supper, it turns yellow and gives off the smell of rotten tree roots.

Nannan is standing barefoot among towering water weeds, singing, ‘ Four, six, seven, eight. The farmer stands by the gate. Too many ducks to count. For dinner he’ll be late… ’ A white fishing net hangs over the boat’s bow like a bridal veil. Last week, when Kongzi saw that the flooded creek was teeming with dead fish, he bought the net so that he could scoop them out and sell them in the village. He’d heard that once the poisoned fish are gutted, salted and dried, the chemical taste is barely noticeable.

The stink of pollution and decay in the sweltering August air makes Nannan’s eyes water. When Waterborn is unable to latch on to Meili’s engorged nipples, she cries herself into a purple frenzy. Kongzi has noticed her eyelids are swollen, her mouth hangs open, and that she has a blood-filled lump on her crown, and suspects she might be mentally handicapped. He couldn’t afford the 800-yuan cost of a check-up at the district hospital, but with the help of a contact at the Radiance Hair Company, he was able to bribe one of the hospital’s doctors a hundred yuan to visit them at the hut. The doctor was a recent graduate and looked no more than twenty-two. After examining the lump on Waterborn’s crown and palpating the soft spot above her forehead, he said, ‘Her skull shouldn’t be this big. She might have a tumour, or water on the brain. If the head grows any larger, she could suffer paralysis and severe brain damage.’

Ever since then, Kongzi and Meili have been quarrelling over what to do with her. Kongzi wants to sell her, but Meili won’t hear of it. He raises the subject again now, and Meili charges out of the hut holding a greasy wok lid in one hand and Waterborn in the other, and shouts, ‘Over my dead body! She’s my flesh and blood. I’ll never let you take her away from me.’ Nannan, who’s sitting on a plastic crate eating a banana, kicks her legs about, sending the mud on her bare feet flying into the air.

‘Just think things through, Meili!’ Kongzi says, wiping his wet face on his T-shirt. ‘The brain surgery alone would cost thirty thousand yuan. And even if it’s successful, she’ll still need full-time care for the rest of her life.’ He flinches as his tongue touches the two large ulcers on his gums, which cause him so much pain he hasn’t dared have a cigarette all day.

‘You love Nannan, so there’s no reason you can’t learn to love Waterborn as well. I’m sick of your male chauvinism. No wonder Confucius wasn’t welcomed during his travels — jabbering on about male superiority all the time!’ Meili stares out at the heat haze above the pond, and at the large banyan tree on a hill far behind that is blotting out the setting sun. Then she goes to the stove and puts some water on to boil.

‘She needs the operation,’ Kongzi continues. ‘The doctor said she might have a brain tumour.’

Meili wonders if the IUD did indeed become embedded in Waterborn’s brain, and is the cause for all the problems. She decides to get Waterborn’s head X-rayed, no matter how much it costs.

Kongzi pulls a cigarette from his pocket and sniffs it longingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with her being a girl. We just don’t have the resources to look after her.’

‘I don’t trust that doctor. We should get a second opinion. If she does have a tumour, we’ll have it removed.’ Meili has rolled her white vest up to her neck. When she bends over, her bare breasts hang down like two long gourds.

‘Huh — women: long hair, small brains,’ Kongzi mutters under his breath. He turns to Nannan. ‘You haven’t recited the Three Character Classic for days. Come on, give me the first lines.’

‘“People at birth. Good by nature. Mother of Mencius. Chose good home. Son didn’t study. Broke loom’s shuttle…”’ Nannan walks towards him, swinging her hips in time with the chant.

‘Stop — you missed at least six lines,’ Kongzi says, then blows out a long stream of air in a useless attempt to cool himself. The hills surrounding this swampy marsh block off all the wind, so in summer the heat is unbearable.

‘Ugh, your mouth farted, Dad,’ Nannan says, catching a whiff of Kongzi’s rancid breath. She turns and runs off into the reeds to look for grasshoppers and cockroaches to feed to the ducks.

‘If Confucius came back to life now and discovered that it’s illegal to set up unofficial schools, he’d die of despair.’ Kongzi still dreams of returning to teaching. Sweat is streaming down his suntanned neck onto his pale chest. He’s built a small porch for the hut out of bamboo and plastic sheeting, and laid plantain leaves on the ground underneath, hoping it would provide a refuge from the heat. At midday, it does offer some shade, but when the sun shines obliquely in the late afternoon it turns into a heat trap.