Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Who are you looking for?’ Tang asks.

‘I was just thinking about someone. A man I met. His mother was ill, and she drowned herself so that he wouldn’t be burdened with her medical fees and could send his son to university. He travelled up and down the river for weeks, searching for her. I don’t know if he ever found her.’

‘People usually commit suicide to escape pain. But the pain doesn’t go. It’s just passed on to the relatives they leave behind.’

When Meili returns home an hour later, Kongzi is busy correcting homework. She takes a deep breath and says, ‘An inspection team swooped into the shop today and confiscated my goods,’ then waits for him to explode. But he remains silent, takes a last drag from his cigarette and flicks the stub onto the floor. Meili squats down, picks it up and drops it in the bin.

‘My eyelid keeps twitching,’ she says, flopping onto the bed in an exhausted heap. In the corner, the television is buzzing and white snowflakes are flashing across the screen. The room still smells of the five-spiced tofu they ate for supper yesterday. ‘It’s my right eye. I forget, is that supposed to be a good or bad omen?’ Heaven presses against her spine, cutting off the oxygen to her brain. She feels faint, and rolls onto her side, then reminds herself that Tang will pay her fine, saving her from financial ruin, and sighs with relief.

‘If a man’s right eye twitches, it’s a good omen; if a woman’s right eye twitches, it’s the reverse,’ Kongzi says blankly. He has cut a cardboard box in half and is lining up Nannan’s textbooks inside, their spines facing outwards. ‘So, what did they take?’

‘All the milk powder. A thousand yuan’s worth.’ She waits again for an angry outburst. A few days ago when he saw a photograph online of the Temple of Confucius in Qufu being ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, he kicked their bookcase onto the ground, incensed that this humiliating episode in the Kong family history is now available for the whole world to see. Meili looks down at the cups, toothbrushes and socks soaking in an enamel basin, then at his books stacked up in the corner near the shattered bookcase. On the table, next to Nannan’s satchel, three green caterpillars are crawling about in a paper cup.

But tonight, Kongzi doesn’t explode. He goes into the yard, sits down on a chair and pulls out a bottle of beer from under the pile of plates beneath the gas stove. Since his mouth was electrocuted by the police, his ulcers have become so chronic that he’s almost given up smoking and can only eat small amounts of food.

‘Mum, I’m hungry,’ Nannan whines, crawling sleepily onto Meili’s lap.

‘I’ve got some delicious steamed pork with sticky rice and hot-sour noodles for you.’

‘But I only want fish and chocolate.’

Meili pulls the table over to the bed, opens the cartons she brought back from the restaurant, empties the contents into two bowls and calls out to Kongzi. ‘Come inside and eat… Are you still sulking about your sister’s baby? Don’t worry, his name won’t be entered in the Kong Family Register. And anyway, she can’t be the only Kong in China who’s had a child with a foreigner. You should learn to move with the times.’

‘Mum, how come your baby still hasn’t come out?’ Nannan asks, swaying from side to side as she tucks into the food.

‘Perhaps it’s afraid it will be as unlucky as Happiness was, and be strangled before it takes its first breath.’

‘When I grow up I want to live in a country that doesn’t kill babies.’

‘Well, if I make enough money, you can go and study abroad when you’re eighteen,’ Meili says. ‘Look, even your little green caterpillars know they need to find the right place to live. When we’re all tucked up in bed, they’ll climb out of the cup, crawl over to that nice bush out there, weave themselves into chrysalids, then ten days later they’ll turn into butterflies and fly away.’

‘If I lie down on this bed long enough, will I turn into a boy?’ Nannan asks.

‘It’s not so bad being a girl. When you grow up you can wear earrings like mine, and necklaces and nice long dresses.’

‘Mum, Daddy said that after Heaven is born we can go home. You’ll have a son and a daughter, and everyone will be happy.’

‘But we don’t have a home to go back to,’ Meili says. ‘That’s the price we had to pay to bring Heaven into the world.’ Meili feels a sudden sense of pride that for three years, her belly has given Heaven a safe refuge. She wants to blurt out that Heaven is a girl, but stops herself. During the day, she pushes Heaven to the side so that it hugs her hips, making her bump much less visible.

After Nannan falls asleep, Meili pours herself a glass of beer and lies down on the bed. A man on the television sings, ‘ Let the moonlight bring you peace, let the sunlight bring you joy …’ and is then abruptly interrupted by an advert for Wahaha children’s sausages. She switches off the television, lies in the dark, and suddenly sees an image of Weiwei’s tortoiseshell glasses. That encounter happened years ago. How come her thoughts still return to it? All he did was stroke her in the dark. She remembers the sudden downpour that fell that night as they lay in the cabin, and the sound of the rain battering against the canopy, then forming a swishing pool above her that crashed onto the stern when the boat rocked to the side. But she knows that memory can’t be right. The canopy always leaked, so if it had been raining, water would have dripped down the rusty pipes of the cabin’s frame and seeped across the wooden deck all the way to her thighs… In her dream, she sees a banana tree tilt under the weight of its heavy fruit. She runs towards it and dissolves into a swarm of butterflies. She enters a desert cave, climbs up a sand dune and hears a voice whisper, ‘You’ve returned to your place of birth…’ Then she raises her head and sees herself looming above like a steel tower, her iron legs planted firmly in the ground and her vagina arching through the blue sky like a rainbow.

KEYWORDS: deep well, foreign blood, index finger, telephone booth, pink blossom, tiger and dragon, paper women.

AS MEILI IS about to kick off her high-heeled shoes after returning home from a long day at the shop, Cha Na rushes in and says: ‘I’ve just heard that Kongzi’s lying blind drunk outside the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour. You’d better go and rescue him. Nannan can spend the night with us.’ Meili grabs an umbrella and heads for Hong Kong Street where, sure enough, Kongzi is lying conked out in the rain below the massage parlour’s entrance, his head resting on the front step. His drenched clothes seem to be weighing him down, because though he’s not a heavy man, Meili is unable to lift him onto her back. She tries dragging him along the pavement, but his bare feet become bloody as they scrape against the concrete. The girls in the massage parlour stare mockingly at her through the window. Summoning all her energy, she grabs his hands, swings them over her shoulders and with a flick of her hips manages to shift him up onto her back. Like a farmer carrying a pig to market, she lugs him to the end of the street and hails a taxi home. It’s her birthday today. Tang wanted to invite her to a French restaurant in Foshan, but she persuaded him to take her for a simple dim sum lunch in Heaven instead. She knew Kongzi would forget that it’s her birthday, so she’d planned to tell him she wasn’t up to cooking supper, and suggest that they go to a Cantonese restaurant called Lured by the Fragrance, You Dismount your Horse. She thought she’d be brave and order dog hotpot, and ‘tiger and dragon fight to the death’, a local speciality of fried cat and snake meat which is believed to help rebalance the body’s yin and yang.