Ma Jian - The Dark Road

At dusk, when the golden sky fills with fluttering crows and sparrows, the workers finish for the day and climb up the path for some fresh air. At the top of the hill, beyond the demolished village, stand the ruins of an ancient convent that was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The villagers built pig pens within the crumbling walls, using its tombstones and broken rafters. From up there, the landfill site resembles a dry lake nestled in a green forest. In a few years’ time, when the natural dip in the land has been filled, the local government is planning to cover the site with concrete and build a large sports centre to commemorate the forthcoming Beijing Olympics. On the other side of the ruined convent is a field of white chrysanthemums the site manager is growing for his own profit. As the workers return to their huts, Meili keeps climbing the path that’s still covered with old mattresses and tabletops laid down during downpours to prevent it turning into mud. She’s wearing the two left purple sandals that she’s been practising walking in for three days. Red, orange, yellow, green and blue clothes swing from washing lines tied between floor lamps and exercise machines flanking the path.

At the top of the hill, she sits down on an ancient flagstone of the ruined convent and thinks of Suya, who treated her like an older sister. She has read her journal from beginning to end, skipping the words she didn’t understand. There are no addresses inside, so she won’t be able to find Suya, or give the journal to her boyfriend as she promised. Even if Suya is still alive now, she’s unlikely ever to see her again. But she knows that if she hadn’t met Suya, she herself would probably be dead now… When I thought about killing myself after the rape, Suya, I knew how angry you would have been. You were raped every day for a year, sometimes twenty times in one night. What were you hoping to gain from that life? Independence? Revenge? I can feel you looking down on me now. The pink clouds above are filled with your eyes. Even without looking up, I can see you…

As the autumn wind begins to whistle, Meili opens her throat and sings, ‘ My dearest sister! Alone you cross the Bridge of Helplessness and step onto the Home-Viewing Pavilion from which the dead may throw a last glance at their families in the living world. Before you drink Old Lady Meng’s five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia, turn back and look at me one last time… ’ Feathers of gold light flutter through the rosy clouds like strips of satin, then, seconds later the sky becomes as murky and grey as the field of waste below. In the darkness at the bottom of the hill, the mad dog struggles out of a pool of mud and starts trudging up the path, the bra and plastic net hooked to the springs on his waistcoat trailing behind him. A glimmer of hope sparkles in his eyes. High above in the ruined convent, Mother’s lament pounds against the broken tombstones and crumbles into the sweet, fetid air.

At dawn a week later, Meili senses that she has finally emerged from her state of shock. Although her body still aches, her mind has cleared. She knows now that she won’t kill herself. She will keep the rape a secret from Kongzi, and will struggle on until she finds happiness. As Suya wrote in her red journal, ‘To survive in this world, one must have an expansive state of mind.’ She will become strong, and will use the red journal as a beacon to guide her along her path… I will become as strong and resilient as you were, Suya, and will carry on living, on your behalf…

She slips a sharpened shoe knife into her handbag and prepares herself for the dangerous journey ahead. First, she crouches down beside her basin of water, carefully washes her face and neck, combs her hair into a neat bun and fixes it in place with a silver clip. Then she steps onto a broken mini freezer, looks into the mirror and puts on the same frosty-pink lipstick and blue eyeliner she’s seen models wear in magazines. She applies some mascara, but the liquid is so coagulated that her eyelashes become glued together. Realising that she forgot to put on the foundation, she quickly presses a dampened sponge onto the small patch of pale powder in the compact and dabs it over her face, taking care not to smudge the rest of her make-up. Her ears and neck now look far too dark in comparison, but there’s no more powder left to lighten them, so her face is left looking like an oval of frost on a brown cowpat. She sighs, and tries to disguise the problem by tying a red scarf around her neck. Inside her gold handbag is a collection of business cards she found on the site, including those of the director of the Provincial Bureau for Industry and Commerce, the section chief of a large tobacco company and the president of the city hospital. These cards will be her protectors. She’s memorised the details of five of them, ready to reel off if the police attempt to arrest her. She puts on the long maroon skirt Liu Di gave her, a pair of black, undamaged nylon tights, and the two left purple sandals. She notices an ink stain on her fitted white shirt and blots it out with a piece of chalk. Liu Di walks past, catches sight of her, and jumps back in astonishment. ‘My God, you look like a prostitute!’ she blurts. ‘No, sorry — I mean like a secretary of a CEO. Who would have thought that this dump could produce such a beauty! You could get on any bus you like now. No one would think of checking your documents. Ha! If you had a cigarette dangling between your fingers, you could be a guest at a foreign wedding.’

‘I’m going back to Guai Village,’ Meili says. Last night she told Liu Di the reason she ran away.

‘Good for you! As the saying goes: “However far a hen might stray, she will always return to the coop one day.”’ Last night, Liu Di revealed to Meili that her husband often beats her up, then let out a stream of curses to release her pent-up anger.

‘I’m just worried that my smell will give me away,’ Meili says. Although she’s grown so accustomed to the stench of the landfill site that she can no longer detect it on her skin, she went to Sunlight Bathhouse with Liu Di yesterday and stood under a shower for an hour. Her clothes, however, have a rotten stench that no amount of washing could remove, so all she can do is douse them with a pungent perfume, which she also plans to spray onto her neck before entering any crowded place.

The mad dog comes to sit at Meili’s feet. She wonders what she should do with him. Since he heard her wail the funeral lament on the hill last week, he’s trailed her every step, gobbling up whatever scraps she tosses onto the ground. She has already cut off his tattered waistcoat with her shoe knife, and before she leaves today, she wants to give him a good wash and see him emerge from the dirt as spotless as a lotus from a muddy pond.

KEYWORDS: state crematorium, gates of hell, charred and mangled, earthen jar, merciless beast.

MEILI SEES KONGZI’S eyes widen in disbelief, redden, then become as vacant as still water. Nannan stays sitting on the bed chewing her fingers, not daring to look up at her.

‘Come here, Nannan!’ Meili tries to shout, but the words come out as a soft whisper. She sits down beside Nannan and wraps her arms around her.

‘You died, Mum,’ Nannan says, tears welling in her eyes.

‘No, I didn’t die.’ Meili missed the long-distance bus yesterday, so she had to spend the night in Dexian station, huddled up on a metal bench.

‘You’re dirty, and you stink,’ Nannan says, sniffing Meili’s neck. Before she left the landfill site, she took the mad dog to a petrol station and scrubbed him with soap and water. By the time she’d finished, the dog was as white as snow but she was splattered with mud. The dog waited with her by the roadside for hours. After a truck finally pulled up and gave her a lift, he chased after it for as long as he could, then gave up and shrank into a tiny white speck.