The Dark Road (17 page)

She peeps back into the shelter. Nannan sits up and says, ‘I want to cuddle Daddy.’

‘No, you’ll wake him up,’ Meili replies.

‘I want to tell him I not going wake him up, then!’ Nannan says, leaning over to hug Kongzi’s head. Meili puts a second jumper on Nannan, then shuts the door and goes down to the beach. Hugging herself against the cold, she watches the rising sun stain the horizon red and pour its soft light over the river, the banks and the distant bridge. Once more, she feels an urge to tell Kongzi that she’s pregnant, just to see the look of joy on his face. Then she considers keeping quiet about it, and getting rid of the fetus on the sly by swallowing some castor oil. No – I will have this baby, she says to herself, digging her toes into the sand. Once it’s born, Kongzi will leave me alone, and I’ll never have to get pregnant again. Suddenly she sees a vision of herself as a girl, leaning over an enamel basin and splashing icy water onto her face before setting off for school. She remembers the coldness of the water seeping through to her cheekbones.

Smells of fish and duck shit begin to rise from the ground. The ducks in the pen preen their feathers and ruffle their wings. Meili sniffs the stale sweat on her skin and longs for a shower or a bath. She knows that although the town’s public bathhouse doubles as a brothel, it has warm pools in which visitors can bathe for just six yuan if they bring their own soap and towel. She hasn’t dared go there yet, as she hates the thought of having to undress in front of strangers. The river has been too cold for bathing. But winter is over now. She grits her teeth and steps in up to her ankles. The cold refreshes and invigorates her; her feet transmit forgotten memories to her brain. She feels fully awake, conscious of the beating of her heart and the ticking of each passing second. She wades deeper into the river and feels the coldness dragging her further into her past. She is aware of being, at the same time, both a woman and child: her daughter’s mother and her mother’s daughter. She remembers the day twenty years ago, during the osmanthus-blossom season, when she accompanied her mother to the dentist to have her molar capped, and realises that she is now as old as her mother was then, and that in another twenty years she’ll be as old as her mother is now, and that all that will await her after that will be old age and decrepitude . . . As her thoughts begin to freeze, she glances over her shoulder and sees the ducks force their way out of the pen and wade into the shallow water.

Kongzi rolls out of the shelter and rinses his mouth. Meili walks up to the stove, opens a bag of slops she bought from a restaurant yesterday and ladles some into the bucket of duck feed. A large container ship shrouded in diesel smoke chugs past, blasting its horn. The huge wake it leaves behind surges onto the beach, floods the shelter then recedes, taking Meili’s flip-flops with it. Meili goes into the shelter to brush her teeth, but discovers that her toothbrush has been washed away as well.

As usual, during the few minutes before dusk, the wind drops and the river becomes calm. Kongzi is sitting at the bow of their boat, gazing at the ducks and the back of Meili’s neck as she stands knee-deep in the river, her skirt hitched up to her waist. In her rippling reflection, her skin is the same colour but her white skirt is slightly darker. Nannan lies in the cabin, gazing at her plastic doll in the red dress and singing a nonsense song she’s made up: ‘
A-da-li-ya, wah wah!
. . .’ A golden, late-spring haze spreads over the river, making the watery landscape resemble a blurred and muted colour photograph.

By the time Kongzi walks down the beach with the bucket of shredded cabbage for the ducks’ last feed, the evening sun is so low in the sky that his silhouette is dragged halfway across the river. With sudden alarm he notices six or seven ducks being swept downstream. He wades into the river, scrambles onto the boat, and tries to shoo them back towards the beach with the long bamboo pole. In the commotion, the boat becomes untethered and it too starts to drift downstream. Kongzi turns on the engine and drives it back to its mooring, while Meili chases after the errant ducks and tosses pebbles at their heads to encourage them to swim back. The ducks shake their wings in a fluster, splashing water into the air.

‘Call them back, Kongzi!’ Meili shouts.

‘“What passes is just like this, never ceasing day or night . . .”’ Kongzi yells, quoting a line from the
Analects
as he gazes with excitement at the current. ‘Don’t worry, Meili, I’ll put some food on the beach. That’ll bring them back.’ He leaps off the boat, making it rock so violently that Nannan is knocked onto her side. Meili strides further into the water, positions herself in front of the ducks and with open arms shoos them back. At last, they turn round and swim to the beach, then they shake their feathers dry and wobble off towards Kongzi’s bucket.

An hour later, the river sinks into darkness and the island becomes shrouded in a cold dank mist. The kerosene lamp shines on Kongzi’s and Chen’s weathered faces.

‘Beautifully recited, my friend,’ Kongzi says, then swigging some beer stares at Meili’s backside as she bends over the stove. ‘Now let’s hear another one.’

Chen crashed his boat into a ship last week, and it will take a month to repair. After Nannan burnt her foot, he bought her a new pair of flip-flops. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll try “Feelings on a River in Early Winter”, by Meng Haoran. Here goes: “Trees shed their leaves, wild geese fly south. / Rivers shiver in the north wind. / My home is far away, at a bend of River Xiang / In the Land of Chu, high above the clouds. / A melancholy vagrant, whose tears have run dry, / I fix my gaze on a solitary boat at the edge of the sky. / Having drifted off course, I long to find my way home. / Before me stretch the flat sea and the endless night.” Ah, I remembered every line! You really are a fine tutor. Would you consider teaching my daughters as well?’ Chen has a gold tooth which at night always glints in the lamplight.

‘Yes, I could give them lessons every morning. They may be black children with no residence permits or legal status, but you must think of their futures. At the very least, they should learn to read and write.’

‘How lucky we are to be able to rub shoulders with a scholar of your calibre – a descendant of Confucius, no less! Come, a toast to you, my friend!’ Chen’s face crinkles into a broad smile. As he munches one of the deep-fried silkworm pupae he’s brought, a pungent yeasty smell fills the air around him.

‘Teachers are the least respected and most poorly paid members of society,’ Kongzi says. ‘Chairman Mao called us the “stinking Ninth category”. But teaching is my vocation. I don’t care about the money. As Confucius said, “A noble man should seek neither a full belly nor a comfortable home.”’

‘Why you not a doctor, Dad?’ asks Nannan, stroking her doll’s red dress.

‘Because I wanted to be a teacher, and I’m too old to change professions now.’

‘Wen’s cat died today. You must make it better. When I had big burn, you made my foot better.’

‘You’re right, Kongzi – our pockets may be empty but our will is strong,’ says Chen. ‘When our children grow up, they can find jobs in factories that provide free food and lodging. They won’t have to live like tramps any more.’ Since he crashed his boat, Chen has been going over to the town every day to look for work. Kongzi has been busy as well. This morning he hauled a cargo of asbestos to a Sino-Hong Kong flagstone factory three kilometres away.

The island has suffered many disruptions this week. River police, municipal police and family planning officers have turned up repeatedly to check boat licences, residence permits and birth permits. Two days ago, Bo and Juru and Dai and Yiping packed their bags and left. Kongzi now uses their abandoned shelters as supplementary duck pens.

Meili clears away the bowls and chopsticks and says to the men, ‘You stay here and chat. I’ll go and sleep in the cabin.’

‘The gods haven’t favoured us,’ Kongzi sighs, watching Meili hitch up her skirt and wade over to the boat, her bottom swaying from side to side. ‘I still haven’t managed to get her knocked up.’

‘I just hope our one will be a boy,’ Chen says. His wife Xixi is due to give birth to their third child any day now.

‘Meili was born in the birthplace of Goddess Nuwa,’ Kongzi says. ‘The Yin forces of the area are too strong. Every name has a female connotation: Dark Water River, Riverbrook Town, Pool of the Immortals Mountain. Women from such a place are clearly not meant to produce sons.’

‘Without a son, a man can never stand tall,’ Chen says. ‘The bloody family planning policies have ruined our lives! Back in the village we owned two hundred turtles – they were worth eight thousand yuan – but after our second daughter was born, the officers confiscated the lot.’

Chewing angrily on a pupa, Kongzi says, ‘Not even the most evil emperor in China’s history would have contemplated developing the economy by massacring unborn children and severing family lines! But today’s tyrants murder millions of babies a year without batting an eyelid, and if a baby slips through their net, they cripple its parents with fines and confiscate their property.’

‘I’m your baby, Daddy, so why you want another baby?’ Nannan says, perching on an old motor cylinder beside him.

‘Don’t interrupt when the grown-ups are talking,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘It’s time you went to sleep. Go and join Mum on the boat.’

Nannan wraps her arms around Kongzi’s neck. ‘I eaten so much food, I’m a grown-up too, now. Daddy, why you got hair in your nose?’

Kongzi pulls Nannan onto his lap and gently tugs her ear. ‘A grown-up, you say? Then how come you still wet your bed every night?’ Since Nannan burned her foot, he has become much more affectionate towards her.

‘When you’re here, I like you. When you’re not here, I like Mummy.’ The bottoms of Nannan’s long trousers are damp and her bare feet are stone cold.

KEYWORDS:
spouse’s return, hairy armpits, water burial, Dragon Mother, corpse fisher, dead fish.

ON A SWELTERING
day, while Kongzi is having a lunchtime nap in the cabin, Meili sees a man on the bank waving his bag and shouting out to them. ‘Wake up, Kongzi!’ she says. ‘I think someone wants to hire our boat.’ In the last month, she’s sold thirty ducks for two hundred yuan, and Kongzi has made three hundred yuan delivering cargos of watermelons injected with growth chemicals, and batches of last year’s mouldy rice which unscrupulous traders milled and waxed so that it could be sold as new.

Meili steers towards the bank. Kongzi’s gold-rimmed spectacles fell into the river last week, so she’s been driving the boat since then. The man jumps aboard and says, ‘I need a ride to Yinluo.’ He is tall, with unkempt greying hair, a goatee and tortoiseshell glasses. His white shirt clings to his sweaty back.

‘What, there and back in one day?’ Meili asks.

‘I don’t know yet,’ the man says, wiping his wet forehead.

‘What cargo are you picking up?’ Kongzi asks sleepily, drawing back the door curtain. He’s crouching down, unaware that his penis is hanging out from the open zip of his shorts.

‘I’m not picking up any cargo. I’m looking for my mother. She drowned herself in the river last week. I want to find her body and give her a proper burial.’

‘You want us to transport a corpse?’ Kongzi says, stepping out onto the deck. ‘Never! I’ll transport fake goods or contraband goods, but not dead bodies.’

‘I know it’s an unusual proposition, so I’m prepared to pay you eighty yuan for the day.’

‘It’s not a question of money,’ Kongzi says, softening his tone a little. ‘Don’t you know it’s bad luck to bring a corpse aboard a boat?’

‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ the man says. ‘Let’s say ninety yuan, then. All right?’ He’s now so drenched in sweat, he looks as though he’s just emerged from the river.

Kongzi thinks it over for a moment, and says, ‘I’d want one hundred yuan. No less. And I’ll need to pay the twenty-yuan administrative fee at the inspection post, and the mooring fee at the Yinluo pier.’ The truth is, Kongzi never moors at the pier, he always anchors along the banks further down.

‘Please, brother, do it for ninety. I’m just a humble schoolteacher. I don’t have much money.’

‘Let’s take him,’ Meili says, squatting behind the engine, her bare feet forming sweaty footprints on the deck.

Hearing that the man is a teacher, Kongzi feels unable to refuse. ‘All right, ninety it is,’ he says. ‘Meili, you and Nannan stay on the island and look after the ducks.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be safe for you to drive the boat without your glasses,’ she says. ‘Xixi can take care of Nannan and the ducks. Her baby’s four months old. She can strap him onto her back now and walk around.’

They sail to the island, leave Nannan and the ducks in Xixi’s care, then set off for Yinluo. ‘I’m a teacher as well, as it happens,’ Kongzi says, crouching down next to the man.

As the boat moves downstream, a cool breeze blows through the hot air and rustles the tarpaulin canopy. Meili stands at the stern, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding down the back of her cotton dress so that it doesn’t fly up in the wind. She wonders why the man’s mother chose to drown herself. Back in Nuwa Village, a few women killed themselves by jumping into a well and one or two hanged themselves from trees, but most women committed suicide by drinking pesticides.

‘. . . I’ve been searching the Xi River for ten days, but haven’t seen any sign of her,’ the man says. ‘I was told that near Yinluo there’s a stagnant backwater where bodies often wash up.’ Meili glances at the man through the corner of her eye. Although his face is grimy and his hair dusty and unkempt, he has a distinguished air about him. He pulls off his round tortoiseshell glasses and mops the sweat from his brow.

‘Yinluo’s not too far,’ Kongzi says, taking the cigarette the man offers him. ‘We should get there in two hours.’

The man has relaxed a little. He looks no older than forty. He’s wearing sports sandals that have labels printed with foreign letters. His grey shorts are mud-splattered and his white shirt has a frayed collar and ink stains, but together they still look quite stylish.