Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Where has Grandmother been buried?’ Meili asks her brother, looking up at him just like a mouse that’s fallen into an earthen jar.

‘Don’t ask him,’ Kongzi says, rubbing some dirt off the back of his hand. ‘He’s so furious about what happened, he says he wants to blow up the county crematorium. Nuwa authorities have ruled that all corpses must be cremated. So now, after someone dies, the family has to pay the state crematorium two hundred yuan for a hearse, a thousand yuan for the cremation and five hundred yuan for the urn. The authorities want to make as much money as they can from the dead before they allow any funeral to go ahead.’

The brother stares down at his feet. ‘Yes, we knew we couldn’t afford to get Grandmother cremated, so Dad secretly buried her body in the garden, under the shed where we keep the straw. We tried to keep quiet, so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear us, but Mum couldn’t stop herself from crying. A neighbour peeked over the wall, saw what we were doing and reported us to the police. All tip-offs are given a hundred-yuan reward now. The next day, officers from the municipal court turned up, searched the garden, found the grave and dug out Grandmother’s corpse. They couldn’t be bothered to take it to the crematorium, so they doused it in petrol and set fire to it, right in front of us. Then to cap it all, they demanded we pay a fine for illegally burying a body. We didn’t have enough cash on us, so they confiscated two of our pigs.’

‘Those fascists — have they no conscience?’ Mother cries out, then winces in pain as her tongue brushes against the large ulcer that’s formed on the inside of her cheek.

‘These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’

‘After the officers left, we wanted to give Grandmother a proper burial. Her body was so charred and mangled by the fire, we couldn’t put a white funeral robe on her, so we just laid it over her charred remains, then wrapped her in a big cloth and buried her under the peach tree.’ He wipes his eyes, spits onto the floor again, then grinds the saliva into the ground with his shoe.

‘What day did they burn her?’ Mother asks.

‘Three days after she died. October the 12th. I hadn’t returned to the coal mine yet.’

Mother feels her hair stand on end. Three days after my birthday? she mutters to herself. That’s the day I set fire to the nightclub, and Grandmother’s face appeared before me crying: I’m burning, burning… After a long pause, she looks up at her brother and says, ‘There’s a photograph at home of Grandmother when she was twelve, with a flower in her hair, standing in front of the entrance of Nuwa Temple. Make sure it’s put in a safe place…’

The brother pours himself some tea and changes the subject. ‘The Nuwa County authorities are giving tourism a big push,’ he tells Father. ‘The reservoir near Kong Village is a pleasure lake now, with three barges, a small pier and a ticket office. Cao Niuniu designed it. He’s the son of that guy, Old Cao, who did the mural for you, isn’t he? Well, Niuniu’s a successful painter now. He has a studio in Beijing’s 678 Art District. He even has an American girlfriend. He drove down to Kong Village last year in his expensive jeep, followed by TV crews and packs of journalists. He’s bought the hotel you both worked in, and has got a hundred young locals to live there and churn out copies of Western masterpieces: Lunch on the Grass, The Last Supper — or is it The Naked Lunch ? I forget the names. So, Kong Village is now a famous artists’ colony!’ The brother’s eyes light up.

‘So, is Old Cao still living in his son’s apartment in Nuwa County?’ Father asks.

‘I don’t know. But I have some other news from your village. The local police uncovered a secret plot to subvert state power. It was all over the Public Security Evening Post . The ringleader was a guy called Kong Qing. He had some gall, that man. But he’s behind bars now, serving an indefinite sentence. He formed a secret cell of three hundred peasants who called themselves the China Fertility Freedom Party. Every member wore a yellow thread around their left arm. They planned to take over the County Family Planning Commission on National Day, and declare a Fertility Freedom Law which would grant the Chinese people the right to decide how many children they have.’

‘Oh, Kong Qing?’ says Father, glancing nervously at Meili. ‘I don’t know him very well. He was an artillery soldier, I think. His wife was given a forced abortion before we left, and she never got over it. Who knows, if we hadn’t escaped the village when we did, perhaps I too would have started an uprising.’

KEYWORDS: dark road, waste channel, semicircle, river dragon, Heaven Township.

‘ARE WE THERE yet?’ Meili calls out from the bow. She stands up, takes a deep breath and feels the tart, bitter, sour night air slip down her throat like a foul medicinal brew. Yes, this is just the kind of air that could kill sperm, she thinks to herself. ‘So, this must be Heaven Township, where no woman need ever worry about falling pregnant!’ she says out loud. Afraid that Kongzi might have heard her, she closes her mouth, then inhales deeply through her nose, expels the air through pursed lips and feels the toxins stream into her blood. With a rush of excitement, she gazes out at the ragged river that is leading them to their new home.

‘Careful of that wreck!’ she shouts. The crumbling frame of a boat lying half-beached among the reeds on the right looks like the skeleton of some mythical river dragon. Above it stand two dilapidated, roofless houses. Kongzi proceeds cautiously downstream, his hand over his mouth to block out the chemical stench. The river narrows sharply. There are recently built tiled villas on both sides now, interspersed with ancient grey houses. A few tall pine trees stab into the night sky like masts of a ship.

‘No, this can’t be right,’ Kongzi says. ‘This isn’t a river, it’s a waste channel. We must ask for directions before we go any further. I’ll try to stop over there.’ He turns off the engine, crouches down and shines his torch over the bank.

A girl is squatting in the mud, scrubbing clothes on a stone slab. There’s a red plastic bucket beside her. A semicircle of river in front of her has been cleared of floating rubbish.

‘Is this Heaven Township?’ Kongzi shouts out, his torchlight falling on her yellow rubber gloves. She lifts her face and lowers it again. Her gloved hands continue to dunk the clothes in the dark water and rub them against the stone.

‘This must be it,’ says Meili. ‘Look how peaceful it is — almost other-worldly.’ She takes the torch from Kongzi, lets the beam wander over the buildings then rest on a whitewashed wall with a blue notice that says: USING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY, OUR DEVICES MAKE YOUR ENERGY METER TURN BACKWARDS INSTEAD OF FORWARDS.

‘Well, I can’t moor here, there’s too much rubbish in the way,’ Kongzi says. He starts the engine again and keeps going, leaning over the side of the boat to check that the hull isn’t scraping against the riverbed.

A stone bridge appears ahead, with two boats tethered beside it. At one end of the bridge is a kiosk lit by a naked bulb. Meili sighs with relief. This must be the River of Forgetting, she says to herself, and that is the Bridge of Helplessness. Old Lady Meng is probably waiting beside it with her five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia.

Once they’ve sailed under the bridge a vast lake spreads out before them. Lights twinkle on buildings reflected around the margins. The water is as tranquil as a womb. As they breathe the sulphurous stench, Meili and Kongzi feel they’ve been banished from the sky and the earth and have slipped into an underworld city, a peaceful haven where they can safely settle down and put an end to their floating life. Meili’s face glows with joy. She coughs into her sleeve and hugs Kongzi’s thigh. ‘We’re in Heaven at last — we’ve found it!’ she cries. ‘The only place in China where women can never fall pregnant!’ As soon as these words come out, she bites her lip, taken aback by her daring.