Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘How come?’ Meili asks, her eyes darting from her taut, slippery belly to the grainy image on the screen.

‘Because boys have two testicles, of course! Hah! The baby’s laughing!’ A pregnant woman walks in through the door. Dr Wang looks over her shoulder and says, ‘You’ll have to wait a minute, I’m afraid. Sit by the electric fan over there.’ Meili glances at the woman’s huge bump and muddy shoes then returns her eyes to the screen. ‘But it’s just a tiny skeleton — are you sure you saw it laugh?’ she says to the doctor. She moves her face closer to the screen. ‘You’re tricking me, aren’t you? That’s not my baby. It’s just an image stored on your computer. I dismantle machines like that every day. When I open the memory cards, all sorts of moving images pop up.’

‘But look, when your belly moves, the image moves as well. Are you a complete fool?’

‘I may not be well educated, but my husband is a schoolteacher,’ Meili says indignantly, wiping her damp face.

‘Well, hold the probe and slide it around. See how the image changes?’

‘All right,’ Meili says, reassured. ‘Just tell me if it’s a boy or a girl.’

‘A girl! No doubt about it. But I can put that it’s a boy on the form, if you want. Just don’t tell anyone I filled it out.’ She turns to the other woman and says, ‘If you’ve decided to have the abortion, I can do it straight away,’ then pulls down her face mask and whispers to Meili, ‘That woman’s expecting twins. She’s booked for an induction next week.’ Without her face mask, she looks ten years older.

‘Are they boys or girls?’ Meili asks the woman, sitting up on the bed.

‘One of each,’ the woman answers proudly. ‘Is this your first pregnancy?’

‘No, my fourth. And you?’

‘My third. I used to have two girls, then I got pregnant with twins as soon as I arrived in Heaven.’

‘What happened to the girls?’ Meili asks in the condescending tone she reserves for peasants less sophisticated than her.

‘The eldest lives with my parents, and Dr Wang helped get the second one adopted. We can’t afford to bring up daughters.’

Dr Wang looks down at Meili and says, ‘If you don’t want your baby, I can arrange for her to be adopted as well. They’ll pay you four thousand yuan.’

‘How much do I owe you for the scan?’ Meili answers, wanting to leave at once. ‘Please write that it’s a boy on the form.’

On the way home, Meili feels her belly become heavier and the small of her back begin to throb. When I give birth to the baby girl, Kongzi might sell her to a Welfare Office, she says to herself. And if I tell him now that it’s a girl, he’ll force me to have an abortion. The only safe option is for me to keep quiet and for the baby to stay exactly where it is. She remembers how her belly shuddered when the needle pierced her skin and entered Happiness’s skull. She remembers the smile on Happiness’s face as he lay dead in the plastic bag below her. She remembers Waterborn staring at a lock of her hair as she suckled at her breast. My womb is your refuge, little Heaven, she whispers softly. As long as I’m alive, I will protect you. As she approaches the front gate, she hears barking and quacking, and knows the neighbour’s Labrador must be attacking the duck pen again. Mayflies are hovering outside their front door. A few dead ones are lying on the ground, being devoured by beetles. Kongzi has raised seven ducks. He never lets them out on the river, because except for the plastic rubbish and rotten leaves, there’s nothing in the polluted water for them to eat.

‘It’s a boy,’ Meili announces, surprised by her nerve. Her legs tense as she imagines Kongzi flying into a rage when the baby is born and he sees it’s a girl.

‘A boy!’ he cries out with joy. ‘Wonderful news! My darling wife, everything is in order now! This is the right time, the right place. Hope is in sight. Tonight, I will cook dinner.’ Kongzi grabs the scan results and wraps his arms around Meili. The chemicals in Heaven’s rivers have corroded their boat so badly that he’s had to abandon his water-delivery business and join Meili dismantling machines, so now, like her, his sweat smells of burnt plastic.

‘Well, I won’t be doing any more housework from now on,’ says Meili, lying down on the bed and stretching out her legs. Feeling the baby’s weight press on her main artery, she rolls onto her side, then kicks off her tight sandals and watches Kongzi slice some beef into chunks. ‘I’m not hungry, Kongzi. Besides, I shouldn’t eat beef. The preservatives and tenderisers aren’t good for the baby.’

‘This is a country where everyone is poisoning each other. It’s a game: whoever dies first, loses. Still, this beef cost me a fortune, so you’d better at least try some.’ He pushes his glasses onto his head, drops the chopped beef into a bowl and douses it with soy sauce.

‘There are specific foods women should eat each month of their pregnancy. If you cared a little more, you’d find out what they are and give them to me. You were much more thoughtful before we married.’ Meili is thinking of the time Kongzi bought her her first packet of sanitary towels. Until then, she’d made do with attaching wads of folded toilet paper to a sanitary belt that used to belong to her mother.

‘Daddy, why have you made Mummy’s tummy grow bigger again?’ Nannan asks. ‘Rongrong said it’s because you piss into Mummy’s bottom every night.’

‘What a brat! Don’t listen to her. Hurry up and write your diary. If you want to live in a house that has carpets when you grow up and not a dirt floor like this, you must study hard.’

‘Mummy, can you give Daddy a baby boy and me a baby girl?’

‘Whether it’s a boy or a girl, you’ll be its big sister — that’s all that matters,’ Meili says. The loving embrace Kongzi gave her a few moments ago has left her with a bitter-sweet feeling. ‘I should be drinking prenatal herbal tonics for my sore back and swollen ankles,’ she says in a supplicating tone she hasn’t used since she returned from her one-month absence. ‘I don’t think I’ll go to work tomorrow. Buy me some pork kidneys in the morning. I need to build up my strength.’

‘Whatever you say, my beautiful wife. I’ll look after you. I’ll work my back off to make sure you and little Heaven have everything you need.’

Meili senses that the baby has given their family a new future. What miseries we’ve endured in our quest to find happiness, she thinks to herself. She feels an urge to put her arms around Kongzi and burst into tears. Instead, she stares up at the magazine photograph she stuck to the wall showing a slender woman with glossy blonde hair, a white leather bag slung over her shoulder and large gold earrings sparkling in the shadow of her long neck. Then she looks at the photograph next to it of herself, Kongzi and Nannan standing in front of the Ming Dynasty theatre with Womb Lake in the background. In the room’s dim light, her wide grin shines out like a strip of cloud torn from the sky. Through the open front door she can glimpse a small section of the lake, which conjures up memories of their years on the river. Their corroded boat now lies abandoned on a muddy riverbank. She remembers how frightened and sick she felt the first few days they spent aboard, and how, after just one month, she was able to jump into the water with confidence, and even swim around a little. During those years, the boat rocked her from side to side, and Kongzi rocked her back and forth, until her body flowed like the river. If she hadn’t been constantly afraid of falling pregnant, she would have been able to relax more and enjoy the pleasures of the floating days and undulating nights, the dizzying, watery limbo between sky and land. She thinks of Weiwei and his hand moving over her body. To help erase him from her mind after he left, she made Kongzi make love to her so often that, for a few days, it was painful for her to walk. But since she escaped from the violent assault and arrived in Heaven, she has cast off her former submissive self, and is now determined to become the independent, modern woman Suya told her she could be. She will learn how to type and use a computer, then she’ll enter the complex world of circuit boards where you can find out anything you want and dismantle the entire universe into its constituent parts.