Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘What superstitious nonsense! If the feng shui was so good, how come the temple was destroyed by the Red Guards? Besides, you may be a Kong, but you don’t exactly abide in prosperity, do you? Hah! If it turns out that I am pregnant, you wouldn’t even be able to find a safe place for the child to be born.’

‘What are you talking about? Heaven must be the safest place in the whole country! There are eighty thousand migrant workers living here. The family planning officers wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up too early. I’ve gone six months without having a period before. Perhaps the chemicals in the water have affected my hormones.’

‘How did you get pregnant, Mum?’ Nannan asks, turning round to look at her.

‘I ate some Kong family seeds and one of them has sprouted inside my tummy.’

‘And it will get bigger and bigger until you explode?’

‘No, when it reaches the right size it will come out, just like Waterborn did.’

‘Well, I won’t eat any more sunflower seeds from now on! Daddy, I miss Waterborn. I want to let her play with my dolly.’ Nannan picks up the plastic doll in the red dress and cradles it in her arms.

‘Waterborn won’t be coming back,’ Father says, scratching the sole of his foot, his flip-flop dangling from his toes.

‘Is it because of me you got rid of her?’ Nannan asks.

‘It’s time for bed now, Nannan. Mummy and Daddy will be going to sleep, too.’

‘But you and Daddy always sleep in the boat and leave me here on my own.’

‘The bed’s too small for the three of us. All right, I’ll squeeze in with you tonight, then. Quick, put on your nightdress.’ Mother pours some water into a plastic bowl, dunks a flannel into it and says, ‘Let me wash your feet, Nannan.’

‘When people die, do their brains still have thoughts, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, perching on the edge of the bed, her large red flower hairclip drooping over her forehead.

‘She hasn’t written her diary, yet,’ says Father, opening the brown notebook. ‘See what she wrote yesterday? She couldn’t remember the characters for “car” and “crash” so she wrote them in roman letters.’

Mother takes the diary from him and reads the passage out loud: ‘“Today, I opened the umbrella and ran down the street. I couldn’t see where I was going and I was afraid a car would crash into me. Daddy held my hand and Mummy walked behind me really quickly…” Not bad, Nannan. When I was your age I couldn’t even write my name, let alone recite the Three Character Classic . If you went to school, I’m sure you’d be top of your class.’

‘I want to go to school, Mummy.’

‘I’ve told you, we don’t have a local residence permit, so you can’t. But with Daddy teaching you at home every day, you’ll learn much more than you would at any school. Now, lie down, there’s a good girl.’ Mother strokes Nannan’s head, puts a blanket over her and gives her a small sausage to chew on. ‘When you’ve finished eating it, close your eyes.’

‘Nannan, you have your whole life ahead of you,’ Father says, ‘so stop talking about death all the time.’

Fallen willow leaves and polystyrene scraps drift under the metal hut. The infant spirit sinks into the river’s blank water and momentarily loses all sense of time… ‘Even after I’ve washed, I still stink of burnt plastic,’ Mother says, running her fingers through her wet hair, a towel wrapped around her waist. She lifts her arm to smell her skin, exposing the tuft of black hair in her armpit.

‘You used the bottle of tap water your workmate gave you, didn’t you?’ Father says, letting his gaze rest on Mother’s bare breasts. ‘I’ve told you: it’s no use. All the water in this town smells the same.’

‘Well, at least the smell of sulphur puts me to sleep at night.’ Mother pulls on a sleeveless nightdress and takes a sip from Kongzi’s bottle of beer. Nannan is asleep now, her mouth wide open and her hand still clutching the sausage.

‘Come and sleep with me on the boat. We can have a nice roll around.’

‘Why do you insist on having sex every night?’ Mother says, applying varnish to her toenails. ‘Can’t you give me a night off?’

‘Fine. If you’re not in the mood, I’ll go to a hair salon. The girls there only charge ten yuan for a full service.’

‘You dare! You have me to torment every night — that should be enough for you. And why would you want another woman, anyway? Once we take our trousers off, we’re all the same.’

‘No, every woman has her own particular scent. And I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do two women at the same time.’

‘What? You listen to me, Kongzi! I let you watch those porn films in the grubby video halls. I let you flip me onto my front, shove my legs in the air and enter me from all angles. But I will never, ever tolerate you sleeping with a prostitute. Try it once, and you’ll never see me again…’

Another patch of fallen leaves drifts along the moonlit river. Inside the boat’s cabin, Father presses Mother onto the bamboo mat, pushes into her and rocks back and forth. The boat gently sways, creating waves that expand in concentric circles then softly break against the black reeds along the banks.

KEYWORDS: toenails, win — win, rustic wine, red congee, fetus soup, yellow hair, castor oil.

AS SOON AS Kongzi has sailed off with Nannan, Meili pulls out the red journal. Finding Suya’s handwriting much easier to decipher now, she opens a page at random and reads a passage out loud, smoothly and with expression. ‘“Women should be learned and erudite, able to talk about the sciences and arts with authority and grace. What man could tire of such a woman?… Her face may not be the most refined, but there’s an air about her that’s pleasing both to the mind and the eye. She knows nothing about fashion, but has flair and a sure sense of style. She’s subtly intoxicating, like a mellow, rustic wine…”’ Meili opens a dictionary and looks up a few words she doesn’t know: ‘erudite’, ‘mellow’, ‘intoxicating’. I remember Kongzi complimenting me once on my mellow voice, she says to herself. Intoxicated: inebriated, drunk. Drunk? But my face turns red when I drink alcohol. Is that considered attractive? Meili’s heart beats faster. Yes, this is exactly the kind of woman I want to be: unique, independent, worthy of admiration. She imagines herself as a company director, strolling down a corridor in a white tailored suit, a Louis Vuitton handbag swinging from her gold-braceleted hand.

Bloody liars, telling me it’s impossible to fall pregnant here! It must have happened that first night we arrived, which means this little Kong is more than four months old now. The thought that the infant spirit has once more descended into her womb terrifies Meili. Now that she thinks about it, she realises she’s had to loosen her belt two notches in the last month. She closes her eyes and tries to decide what to do. She wishes she could tear her womb out and throw it away. She’s twenty-four years old. She wanted to work hard, make lots of money and enjoy herself while she was still young, but now she’ll have to put everything on hold and go back to raising another child. Her scalp tightens. The baby must not be born. She must harden her heart and end the pregnancy at once. And Kongzi must not know a thing.

She puts on her straw hat, buckles her sandals and sprays her neck with the perfume she brought back from the landfill site. Then she leaves the hut, locks the door behind her and walks to the backstreet clinic she passed the other day. The lane is filled with heaps of scrap computers, broken phones and televisions. Men sit bare-chested among the waste, smashing, chopping, sawing and smelting. At the end of the lane she sees outside three front doors, small tables stacked with empty pill boxes — the secret sign of an unauthorised clinic. She chooses a door and enters.