Ma Jian - The Dark Road

Just as Meili is placing Nannan’s birthday cake onto a plate after returning home from work, the landlord runs into the compound and tells her that he’s heard Kongzi has been arrested. She leaves Nannan in his care, rushes to the police station and finds Kongzi lying semi-conscious in the waiting room. While she pays the thousand-yuan fine before taking him off to hospital, the sergeant behind the desk tells her that Kongzi confessed to sleeping with a hair-salon prostitute. ‘You think we beat him up for no reason?’ he says. ‘No, he attacked us and we fought back in self-defence. He’s lucky we’re letting him go. But when he wakes up, tell him this: next time we find him in a gambling house, he’ll get ten years behind bars.’

When Kongzi returns from hospital two weeks later, the electrical burns on his lips and tongue have almost healed, but he’s still unable to speak. This episode has cost them a total of eleven thousand yuan. Meili had to take time off work to look after him in hospital, and Nannan had to stay with Lulu. The events have upset her greatly. She went missing yesterday. Meili searched for her for several hours, and found her at last standing all alone on a riverbank.

Although Kongzi is on the mend, Meili is on the verge of a breakdown. The morning of Kongzi’s birthday, she takes out the ‘Fishing Boat Lullaby’ CD she gave him when they were living on the sand island, and attacks it with the kitchen cleaver. She tolerated him watching porn movies, but the thought of him sleeping with a hair-salon prostitute is too much for her to bear. She deplores the police’s brutality but loathes Kongzi’s degenerate behaviour even more. The village teacher she once worshipped has become a man who fills her with disgust. She looks down at him now and spits: ‘What were those sayings you kept rattling off? “Cultivate yourself and bring order to your family, and the nation will be at peace…” and “The gentleman embraces virtue and the sanctions of the law…” Huh! You foul hypocrite!’ She stares into his eyes and asks him if he did indeed sleep with a prostitute, and he looks back at her and calmly shakes his head. She knows it’s possible that the sergeant was lying when he told her about the confession, but suspects that he wasn’t. When Kongzi first returned from hospital, the sight of his gruesomely swollen face aroused her pity, but as soon as he was able to take his first sip of milk, she felt like grabbing her shoe-cutting knife and plunging it into his neck.

As evening falls, Mother continues to curse Father, tears streaming down her face. ‘You spineless rat! You heartless, brainless bastard! Drinking, gambling, sleeping with prostitutes! Where did you get all the energy? Did you really think that there would be no consequences?’ Father opens his eyes feebly then closes them, unable to respond… ‘Filthy sod! Not satisfied with eating from the family wok, you have to scoff from the dirty saucepans as well! Womb Lake is just out there! I wish you’d fling yourself into it and drown… Kong the Second Son, indeed! Remember what they used to sing about Confucius? Kong the Second Son was an evil man. He spouted righteousness from his mouth, while concealing ruses in his heart. How right they were!’ Mother dances around the room, singing the Cultural Revolution song, her hands cupping her swollen belly. Nannan peeps out from under her blanket. Father stays still, his eyes tightly closed. Several hours later, the lights are finally switched off. In the darkness outside, the wind sways the strings of dried chillies and shrivelled red and pink balloons hanging from the front door, then races out through the gates, lifts chewed sugar-cane pulp from the pavements and swirls along the riverbank, tossing scraps of tarpaulin into the river.

KEYWORDS: dirges, black coffin, wild ghost, gold-rimmed glasses, lotus pond, funeral objects, mandarin ducks.

AFTER SHE FINISHES work for the day, Meili decides to go to the market to buy chicken blood and chives for tonight’s dumplings. Spring Festival is only a few days away, but she still hasn’t prepared a decorative table display. She’s bought New Year sticky rice buns and some dates to make the traditional ‘give birth to a noble son’ cakes. Little Heaven has now been inside her for two years. It thoughtfully keeps itself tightly curled up, so her bulge is much less noticeable. When Kongzi’s mouth was injured, Meili began having long conversations with the infant spirit instead, and this has continued even now that Kongzi is able to speak again.

On her way to the market, she strolls down Magnificent Street. The sparkling jewels and designer clothes in the shop windows and the bright hoardings overhead divert attention from the peasants selling oranges on grubby carpets, and the oily smells of grilled mutton wafting from the street stalls. Between the Cloudy Mountain Printers and the Friendship Hotel is a winding lane Meili went down last week to check out a noodle shop that was up for rent. The shop itself was all right, but she was put off by the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases next door, and its large notice that said WE SPECIALISE IN SKIN COMPLAINTS. Since Kongzi’s arrest and hospital treatment ate up most of their savings, Meili has wanted more than ever to give up work and open her own shop. Knowing that it’s a short cut to the market, she turns into the lane and immediately hears funeral wailing, then sees a large white mourning tent erected further down. A lead runs from the window of a house to a bulb on the tent’s roof. The wailing is coming from a cassette player. She thinks at once of her grandmother and feels her eyes fill up. Without hesitating, she strides into the tent and introduces herself to an old man in white mourning dress who’s standing beside an open coffin. ‘I can sing funeral laments,’ she says to him, glancing down at the corpse. It’s a woman in a white robe. She looks about fifty and has a big smile on her face. Roasted heads of a chicken and a duck have been placed on her chest. There are eight banquet tables of guests, all dressed in white. Plates are clattering, everyone is chatting noisily. ‘Fill your glasses,’ someone shouts. ‘Drink! Drink!’

‘What do you charge per hour?’ says a middle-aged man standing in front of a large photograph of the deceased. Meili assumes that he’s the husband.

‘Two hundred yuan,’ she replies, sweeping her gaze over the bright interior.

The husband goes to fetch his father-in-law who asks her in a thick southern accent, ‘Can you sing “The Memorial Altar” and “Soul Rising from the Coffin” sutras?’ He has white hair and is holding a walking stick with a dragon-head handle.

‘Yes, I can sing dirges for fathers, husbands, mothers — the whole repertoire. How many children did your daughter have? If you tell me some interesting events from her life, I can weave them into the lament.’

‘Our family’s from Chaozhou,’ he answers. ‘We don’t understand your northern dialect, so sing what you like. Improvise as you go along.’ He coughs loudly into his hand. A woman walks up and leads him back to one of the tables.

‘The funeral band we hired has been delayed and won’t be here until ten,’ the husband says. ‘So, yes, you’re welcome to sing for a couple of hours. I’ll fetch you a microphone.’ As he walks off again, Meili suddenly regrets offering to sing, but knows it’s too late to back out now. Although she watched her grandmother perform at funerals, she has never sung at one herself.

Meili takes off her jacket and drapes a white funeral cloak over her shoulders, and remembering the white turban her grandmother used to wear, ties a large napkin around her head. She steps nervously onto the dais, takes a deep breath and sings into the microphone: ‘ My dearest mother, what grief we feel! You’ve left this world before you’ve had a chance to savour one moment of joy …’ Real tears begin to run down her face. She closes her eyes and listens to her high-pitched lament pour out of the loudspeakers, pound the walls of the tent and flow into the lane outside. She feels herself drown in the deafening noise… ‘ Sparrows search for their mothers under the eaves of roofs. Pheasants search for their mothers in bramble bushes. Carps search for their mothers among river weeds. But where can I go to search for you? …’ When she comes to the end of ‘Yearning for My Departed Mother on the Twelfth Lunar Month’, she sits down on a stool, wipes the tears from her face and looks out at the guests seated before her. Some are still wolfing down their food, shoulders hunched over their plates, some are deep in conversation, but most are looking up, staring straight back at her. She has no idea what these southerners made of her performance. She’s never sung with such intense grief before. Feeling another wave of sadness take over her, she sinks her head into her hands. Someone taps her shoulder and gives her a bottle of mineral water. She takes it without looking up, but feels too weak to open it. She thinks of how Kongzi, the only person she thought she could rely on, sold her baby daughter, and has very probably slept with a prostitute. She thinks of how the nightclub boss pinned her to a single bed and raped her, and how the government pinned her to a steel table and murdered her newborn son. Unable to control herself, she kneels beside the black coffin and weeps: ‘ Beloved husband, five hundred years ago, our marriage was predestined in Heaven. In this lifetime we met at last and became as inseparable as two mandarin ducks. But now you’ve released your hand from mine and returned to the Western Paradise. Who will feed the geese and chicken in our backyard? … I hope that evil bastard burned to death in the fire…’ Harrowing images flash through her mind. She weeps about her grandmother’s corpse being dug up and burned, about Happiness lying on a riverbed, about Waterborn’s unknown fate, and about her fear of giving birth to Heaven and of Heaven’s fear of being born. Moaning and sobbing, she cries herself into a stupor.