Ma Jian - The Dark Road

Back in the house, the room fills with a sickening stench as she removes his vomit-soaked clothes. When she pulls off his trousers, she sees his shrivelled penis is sheathed in a condom. She freezes in horror and her scalp tightens. Her first impulse is to chop off the penis or set fire to it. She screams and pounds his head and chest until his cries become an echo of her own.

Kongzi pushes her off, sits up and sees the condom lying on the ground. Sperm has escaped and formed a yellow stain on the white mat. Meili grabs her shoe-cutting knife and, as her mind returns to the nightclub boss who raped her, she shouts: ‘You depraved bastard! You ugly, festering lowlife! If you have any balls left, show them to me, come on, pull them out and let me chop them off!’ She raises the knife high in the air then swings it down straight onto her left hand, severing her entire index finger. Her blood splashes onto the mat near the pool of sperm. She drops the knife, flings the door open and rushes blindly out into the rain.

For an hour she walks round the lake in utter despair. Then, feeling that the sky is falling on her head and the earth crumbling beneath her feet, she makes up her mind to go to an empty graveyard and hang herself from a tree. I’ll never trust Kongzi again. The fraud! Going to work in a suit and tie, pretending to be a man of virtue… She sees a telephone booth and steps inside to shelter herself from the rain. The bloodied stump of her index finger hurts so much she’s tempted to chop off the whole hand. Listening to the rain smashing onto the plastic roof, she picks up the receiver and considers phoning Weiwei, or Tang, but every man seems tainted to her now. She puts the receiver to her ear and imagines Suya picking up on the other end. Do you hear the rain here in Heaven Township, Suya? It’s pelting down. You celebrated my birthday with me, and the next day you vanished into thin air. You too were attacked and defiled. But I set fire to the man who raped me, to avenge that crime, and all the crimes that other men committed against you. You were right — this is no country for women. It’s pointless forgiving men and expecting them to change. They never do. They’re filthy scum, every one of them. Where are you now? Can I come and stay with you? I’ve nowhere left to go… Noticing a figure standing outside waiting to use the phone, she puts down the receiver and leaves, concealing her left hand in the crook of her right arm. The rain washes the blood from her wound. What hope is there left? she mutters as she wanders down the deserted street. She feels she’s been born into the wrong time and the wrong place, and is descending into a spiral of misery where the only escape is death.

By the time she reaches the graveyard, the rain has stopped. Through tear-filled eyes, she stares at the rows of granite tombstones and the funeral offerings arranged below them: oranges, apples, sodden cardboard cars and paper women labelled MISTRESS in black ink that has blurred in the rain. She presses the bony stump of her finger and a sharp jolt of pain races straight to her heart, then blood begins to pour from it again like water from a tap. She rips off her sleeve and wraps it tightly around the wound to stem the flow… My life is dripping away from me. This is where I will say goodbye to the world… When she married Kongzi she persuaded herself that although he might not be rich, he was descended from an educated and illustrious family, and that together they could lead a contented life. She never asked for much. She agreed to abandon their village and live as vagrants in order to give him the male heir he yearned for. But over the years, his obsessive desire for a son has blinded and warped him, and he sees her now only as a creature of reproduction. She’d hoped that once little Heaven was born, she could return to Kong Village, open a shop, look after her mother and live in peace. But this hope has vanished. Yes, she should walk straight to the end of her life and step over the edge…

Glancing down at her feet, she sees an imitation wedding certificate with a magazine snapshot of the beautiful film star Gong Li pasted next to a photograph of a wizened old man. Didn’t Kongzi once say that when he reaches the netherworld, he too would like to marry Gong Li? Perhaps in that faraway land, all dreams really can be fulfilled. This isn’t the burial place she’d imagined for herself, but what does it matter? In the end, we must all return to the earth, and one patch of soil is no different from another. She remembers, aged seventeen, sitting in a black car on the way to her wedding, her face caked in thick, itchy make-up. Attached to the roof were gifts of folded bedcovers and a warm, musty-smelling basket of ducklings. Kongzi turned to her and said, ‘Once we’re married, you’ll belong to me, and I’ll be making all the decisions in the family. Don’t even think of spreading your pink blossom over the garden walls.’ He put his hand on hers and she felt sick with shyness. As a child, she loved to hear her grandmother tell her the story of the cowherd and the celestial weaver girl, who crossed the Milky Way once a year on a bridge of magpies just to spend one night together, and she hoped that one day she would experience a love as passionate as theirs. Meili walks to a tree and leans against it. She has no idea what it’s called. It has leaves as large as her hands and smooth, snake-like branches. All she needs to do now is pull her belt off and strap her neck to a branch… Although Tang and Weiwei showed her affection, she has never been unfaithful to Kongzi. To save him distress, she never told him about the rape, and avenged the crime herself. Glancing at her feet, she sees a fat-bellied frog crawling through the grass and feels an urge to stamp on it. Her left hand has gone numb. Blood is dripping from the wound onto the wet, corpse-filled earth. She regrets that her efforts to help Kongzi preserve his family line prevented her fulfilling her duties towards her parents. For years, she’s denied herself luxuries, scrimping and saving so that they can send money home, but most of it goes to Kongzi’s family. She knows her mother would never contemplate drowning herself, as Weiwei’s mother did. She remembers how her mother hugged her with trembling arms the day her friend jumped into a deep well with her four-year-old daughter strapped to her back after finding out that her husband had slept with another woman. Am I afraid of death? Meili wonders, reminding herself that in a few minutes’ time she’ll be hanging from the tree. No, I’m not afraid. I shake with terror at the sight of a family planning officer, but when I look death in the eye, I feel perfectly calm. She pulls off her leather belt. Perhaps she really does have foreign blood in her veins. She remembers hearing how her great-grandmother slashed her wrist after giving birth to a fair-haired child, and wonders whether a tendency for suicide runs in her family… Her brother has been slaving down the mines seven days a week, leaving her father to look after the fields on the weekends, but between them they still can’t afford to pay for the imported drugs that have been prescribed to her mother to keep her cancer at bay. Her brother was considered to be the clever one, and Meili had to leave primary school early so that her parents could afford to send him to high school. But he failed his exams and never made it to university, so their sacrifices were in vain… If she dies in this graveyard, where will she be reincarnated next? All she knows is that if she does hang herself, she’ll never see her parents or Nannan again, and little Heaven will die as well… My baby is still growing inside me. I can’t let it die. I should at least wait until it’s safely born before I end my own life. Oh, this is all Kongzi’s fault! Why should I have to condemn myself to another reincarnation because of his sordid infidelity? Her muddled mind begins to clear. Yes, he’s the one who should be hanging himself from a tree, not me.