Ma Jian - Red Dust

‘Do you know Old Xu?’ I continue. ‘He’s a friend of Yang Ming’s. Works for Guizhou Press. No? Never mind. So, tell me about Guiyang.’

Li Zhi shoots a furious glance at his children. I can tell they are in for a beating when I am gone.

‘Of the artists, Tang De is quite good, and Dong Kejun is listed in the World’s Who’s Who. Everyone else is crap. Tian Bing is the only poet now that Huang Zhang is in prison. The writers are shit. I am the only famous person in Guiyang, really.’

The boys start throwing paper darts at my head.

‘Have you somewhere to stay tonight? No? I’ll take you to Tang De then. He’ll put you up. As for you rascals, just wait until I get home!’ The little monkeys slip through his hands, leap up to the gallery and giggle, their faces as scrunched as their father’s masks.

On Saturday afternoon, Tian Bing takes me to a quiet, forested park in the outskirts of the city. As the rain clouds clear, we head for the park’s highest hill. The smell of dust fades slowly as we climb. I have been staying with Tian Bing and her husband Tang De for a few days now, and have found a job making sofas. Tang De is a woodcarver. The whorled patterns he creates echo the lines of his face. Tian Bing is a poet and a reporter for Guiyang Television. She boiled all my clothes this morning, and gave me a new pair of jeans. She tells me Yang Ming is coming to visit her next month. They were at university together in Chengdu.

Halfway up she stops and shouts, ‘Slow down, will you!’ Her skin looks transparent in the sun, the downy hairs on her face sparkle with sweat. Sometimes she reminds me of a sick chicken. We sit under a tree. She is as damp as the bark. ‘Gorgeous view, isn’t it?’ Her Sichuan dialect reminds me of Ai Xin. I keep seeing visions of that beautiful poetess waving at me from the wharf.

‘Everything looks nice from a distance. See that yard over there? That’s where I make the sofas.’ Then, turning to her, I say, ‘Why did you move here, Tian Bing?’

‘One grave is as good as another,’ she sneers. Last night she showed me her poetry. I pencilled some corrections and her face went red with fury. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she said. ‘You Beijing writers are all the same. The arrogance!’ She has been sharp with me ever since.

‘You don’t seem at home here. You are too sophisticated. This place is so cut off, everyone is slightly strange. I haven’t been able to think straight since I arrived.’

‘Stop thinking then! You’re so self-important, wanting to meet every little intellectual in town. So much for detaching yourself from the mundane world!’ This fragile-looking woman has a spirit of steel. ‘I didn’t like this place at first,’ she concedes, ‘but I am a woman after all, and where my man goes, I go.’ She tears a handful of grass and scatters it over my trousers. I think of the line from her poem: ‘The lover’s zip has rusted.’

‘I like that line: "A woman as strong as rock." ‘ Then I pause and say, ‘Tang De is a good man.’

‘I like the way he sits around all day smoking and drinking. I can’t bear those polite men who help with the cooking and washing up. If it weren’t for Tang De I would have left years ago.’

‘But what brought you here in the first place?’ The saying goes that in Guiyang, you never see three days of clear sky, three li of flat land, or three coins in your pocket.

‘My first boyfriend moved back here after university. I joined him later, six months pregnant, only to discover he was living with another woman. Son of a bitch.’ Her eyes begin to redden.

‘Bastard.’ I imagine he is one those cringing young men who become transformed into petty tyrants on home ground.

‘You mysterious wanderer, dropping into our lives like a gift from the sky. Tell me, is there any cure for jealousy?’ When she fixes her eyes on me, she looks like a little girl whose neck still smells of milk.

‘Control your desires. If something does not belong to you wipe it from your thoughts.’ My voice is trembling.

Suddenly she puts her arms around me and kisses my lips. I hold her for a second, then she breaks free and walks away. The blades of grass in the sun still sparkle with raindrops.

Two tourists with backpacks walk past a goldfish-shaped dustbin.

She leads me back to the town centre along the banks of the Nanming River. Her jeans are identical to mine.

‘This river is disgusting,’ I say. ‘There must be half a century of rubbish buried in there.’

The men digging muck from the riverbed are covered in mud. The stench is vile. Old women scavenge on the banks for wire and umbrella frames, and pile their loot on the pavement. It is already four o’clock, but people are still sloping out in their slippers to brush their teeth by the riverside.

‘Each work unit has been assigned a section to clean. We have contracted some peasants to do our share of the work. It means no bonuses for two months though.’

The town centre is so crowded we can hardly move. An ear cleaner waves his twig and shouts, ‘One mao an ear!’ A blind masseur in dark glasses rubs his hands, waiting for his next customer. A spit-patrol officer grabs a middle-aged man and charges him a one-yuan fine. A beggar plays a three-stringed lute on the street corner and sings with his eyes shut: ‘Chairman Mao’s kindness is deeper than the sea. He comes like thunder in spring to rescue the Communist Party. .’

‘What did Old Mao do for him, for God’s sake!’ I shout over the clatter of bicycles. By the time I have bought my socks and gloves the sky is already dark.

We sit at a street stall and share a plate of tofu. ‘It’s stuffed with chilli sauce and big enough for two, so they call it lovers’ tofu,’ she says with a smile.

A bicycle mender crouched below us is removing drawing pins from a rubber tyre. I lean down and whisper, ‘Bet you sprinkled those pins on the road yourself, little devil.’ He pulls his cap round and shoots me a sideways glance.

Tian Bing kicks my foot. ‘Don’t pick a fight in Guiyang,’ she says. ‘Everyone carries knives. Someone got stabbed yesterday in the train station, and all they wanted was his watch.’ Splinters of light flash from an electric welder across the road.

‘This chilli’s hot. So who else writes poetry in Guiyang?’ I ask distractedly. The crowds of the city appear to be closing in on us.

‘Look at these wastrels! What kind of shit do you expect them to write? When you give your lecture at the university, whatever you do, don’t talk to them about poetry.’ Her voice sounds as angry as it did last night. It seems that, like me, she is not at home with herself either.

A few days later I move in with Zhou Long, a friend of my workmate, Fu Yi. He is a member of the provincial acrobatic troupe and has a large bald patch from years of balancing urns on his head. He puts his mattress on the floor for me and says he will sleep on the wooden boards of his bed. His girlfriend is a tightrope walker, and lives in the room across the corridor. In the evening Fu Yi, Zhou Long and I go out for a beer. We order a plate of ‘cloth dolls’ — small pancakes which we fill with one of thirty stuffings laid on a table before us. They swig the beer and start a drinking game, waving their fingers in the air and shouting, ‘One: bed! Two: lovers! Three: mouths! Four: feet! Five: legs! Ha ha!’ A cold wind blows up. After my lecture this morning at Guizhou Normal University the students took a collection for me, much to my embarrassment. I will buy them a dictionary with the money. I stand up and suggest we take the beers back to Zhou Long’s room.

When I am out making sofas every day, my hair and nostrils fill with fluff and sawdust. I cut timber into planks, fix springs, and help Fu Yi attach fake leather covers. For this I earn eight yuan a day. Our yard is heaped with timber, metal rods and wadding, and the ground is strewn with sawdust and string. When my hands get tired I join Fu Yi for a smoke and a cup of tea and we while away the time watching the girls walk by. In their shiny black leggings, they look like little black ponies from behind.