Ma Jian - The Dark Road

After flicking his stub onto the floor, the boss grabs Meili by her shirtsleeve and says, ‘Let me taste you before the clients have a go.’ Meili lashes out at him and digs her nails into his legs, but he keeps hold of her sleeve with one hand, and tugs her trousers down with the other. She bites his arm. Enraged, he jumps up, grasps her by the hair and flings her onto the bed. ‘So, you want me to play rough, huh, you filthy cunt?’ he shouts, and whips off his belt, loops it around her neck and secures it tightly to the steel bars of the headrest. Then with a pillowcase that he’s ripped off from a pillow, he ties her right hand to the bars as well. Meili kicks her legs about like a drowning dog. Her trousers and knickers have been pulled off. The belt is so tight around her neck, she can hardly breathe. Her heart races; she seizes up with terror. He leans over and strikes her across the face with a force that knocks her out. She raises her left arm and waves it feebly. He opens her legs and forces them up against her chest, then slaps again and again over her shoulders and face. Like a boat that’s struck a rock, she feels herself break into pieces and sink. He stuffs the unsheathed pillow into her mouth, spits onto her vagina then shoves his hand inside. ‘Mother, mother…’ her vagina screams in despair, but the noise is muffled by the man’s flesh. She’s suffocating now; her whole body is shaking. Her chest rises, straining for air. He’s jabbing against her womb. Gastric fluids surge into her throat. She wants to open her jaws and howl, ‘Mother, help me, help me…’ Feeling raw and scorched inside, she closes her eyes and shrinks back into herself.

‘Hah! You’re mine, now,’ the boss grunts, leering down at her with a lewd grin. He moves in and out, faster and faster, then turns her over, enters her from behind and gyrates like a wild dog, slapping her hard on one side and then the other. With one final thrust, he shouts, ‘Filthy fucking bitch!’ and spurts his sperm onto the enflamed walls of her womb. Her head is twisted to the side, pressed against the bars. Now that he’s finished with her, he shoves her back down onto the bed. She clamps her legs together as tightly as she can, then huddles into a ball, rubs her stinging neck and gasps for breath.

‘You’re nice and wet now,’ the boss says. ‘I have ten more men lined up for you tonight, including a French professor.’

Meili’s body goes into spasms of shock. She wishes she could escape to a netherworld where there are no men. She wants her defiled body to enter a furnace and emerge from the other side as ash. I’m sorry, Nannan, she says quietly. The man has beaten me. I’m too weak to take my revenge. All I can do is die, then return as a ghost and drag the bastard down to hell.

The boss switches on the lamp on the bedside table and unbuckles his belt, releasing her head. ‘Good thing you’re pretty. I can never get a hard-on with the ugly ones. You’ve got a nice round arse. Work hard here, and in a few years you’ll make enough money to set you up for life.’ He lights another cigarette and stretches himself out. Meili clambers off the bed, reaches for her trousers and pulls them on.

As she squats on the floor, she has a sense that thousands of insects are crawling beneath her skin and that rancid leftovers have been stuffed into the cavity between her legs. She tears sheets of paper from a toilet roll and tries to wipe herself clean… The boss is shorter and thinner than Kongzi. How did he manage to overpower me? It doesn’t matter now — I’m already dead. It’s time for me to join Happiness… She remembers that when her periods first started, her grandmother gave her a small soot-filled cloth bag to put inside her knickers, and said: ‘You’re a woman now. The place from which the blood flows is the source of life. You must protect it, and not let any man touch it. When you’re older you will marry, and that place will bring you new life and happiness.’ Meili looks up at the wallpaper and sees her grandmother’s face. She’s crying out, ‘Meili, help me. Fire, a blazing fire! I’m burning, burning…’

Mother sees that the man has fallen asleep. She puts on her shoes and pulls out her bag from under the bed. Her eyes glazed and empty, she takes a cigarette lighter from the bedside table and sets light to the bed sheet. Then she picks up a half-finished bottle of liquor and smashes it over the man’s head. Within seconds, flames engulf his body. He sits up for a moment and waves his arms about, then flops back down with a thud. Mother retreats into the corridor and watches the bed burst into a ball of fire and the flames leap along the carpet and up the papered walls. Black smoke billows into the corridor. Coughing and spluttering, Mother returns at last to her senses, falls to her knees and crawls to the steel door. Someone opens it from the outside, peers round then runs away in fright. Mother swings the door open, bolts down the stairwell and runs out onto the road. Flames are pouring out from the third-floor window now, and licking the heaven on earth nightclub neon sign. Panicked, half-dressed men and women stagger out of the building, knocking into each other like insects fleeing a fire pit. Everyone is screaming and darting about. Mother detaches herself from the crowd, walks to the billboard on the other side of the road and disappears into the darkness.

KEYWORDS: convent, white chrysanthemums, purple sandals, red journal, nylon tights, mad dog.

MOTHER RUNS AS fast as she can across the city, her intense pains deadened by fear. She races past the flower market, the Chairman Mao statue in front of the government office building, the musical fountain in the main square, she sprints along broad avenues of office towers and roads lined with gated compounds of identical apartment blocks, and finally reaches an empty asphalt road that winds along the banks of a dark river. She keeps going, running, walking, then running again. When she hears a car approach, she crouches behind a tree and waits for it to pass. As the sky begins to lighten, she stops and looks up at some houses on a hill in front of her with lights already shining at the windows… Although she has left the city, Meili still feels nervous. She climbs over a low wall into a deserted demolition site. Alone and hidden from view at last, she falls to her knees and breaks into sobs, her whole body convulsed. She wants to go back to the bamboo hut. It may be a tiny and ramshackle hovel, but it’s her home, the place where she is both a mother and a wife. The thought of suicide frightens her, and she knows she will need to build up her courage before she can carry out the act. In the meantime, she will try to get a lift to Dexian and make her way back to Guai Village. She hears a truck rumble in the distance, and walks towards the noise, picking her way over the broken ground. Below her feet, maize leaves and burst balloons lie caught between shattered bricks. She can smell a stale, masculine scent in the dawn mist, and after scaling another low wall, she finds herself on the edge of a large landfill site. A light is twinkling in the distance. She starts to walk towards it across the refuse. The truck she heard a few moments ago has dumped a load of garbage from the city onto the ground. Workers are circling it, prodding it with spades, turning it over. Foul vapours fill the air. Meili dodges around heaps of plastic bags the workers have emptied and discarded. A woman spots her and shouts, ‘No scavenging! We’re in charge of this patch!’

‘I’m just looking for a lift,’ Meili says. Drawing closer, she sees the woman impale a plastic bag with a hooked pole, shake out the orange peel, sanitary towels and food scraps, then stuff it into a large plastic bucket.