The Dark Road (2 page)

‘But my bulge is definitely noticeable now. And when I was walking through the village yesterday, I had a bout of morning sickness and vomited in the lane. Kong Dufa’s wife passed me and gave me a suspicious glance.’ Meili shines a torch on Nannan, who is still outside, squatting beside the low wall that runs between their house and the home of Kongzi’s parents.

‘You idiot! What if she’s reported you to the police? They pay a hundred yuan for public tip-offs now.’ Seeing Nannan walk in and sidle up to him, he says, ‘Off to bed now, or you’ll catch cold.’

‘My bottom did big pee, Daddy,’ she says, treading over a bundle of cables. ‘Me thirsty.’

Kongzi looks away and flings his hands in the air. ‘Abortions, sterilisations, IUDs! What has this country come to? Confucius said that of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst. Now, two thousand years later, I, his seventy-sixth generation male descendant, am forbidden to perform my sacred duty to bring his seventy-seventh generation male descendant into the world.’

‘I don’t want to be dragged to the school tomorrow,’ Meili says. ‘I’ll hide in the dugout.’

‘The rabbit breeder in Ma Village hid in her secret dugout for two months, but the family planning officers found her yesterday. They pulled her out, took her off to be sterilised and confiscated her three hundred rabbits.’

Meili feels a sickening, rotten taste fill her mouth and her nose, and wonders if it comes from the darkness outside or from the depths of her own body.

‘Look, Daddy, my tummy can go big too!’ Nannan says, lifting her jumper and sticking her belly out.

‘Bed! Now!’ Father shouts.

Nannan bursts into tears and rushes into Mother’s arms. ‘Me hate that daddy,’ she cries. ‘Me want different one!’

Mother carries Nannan to her bed, tucks the quilt around her and brushes out her thin plaits.

Travelling in reverse motion, the infant spirit has retraced Mother and Father’s journey, floating upstream along the watery landscapes down which they drifted for nine years. Now, it has finally reached its place of origin. This is the rightful home of Mother’s second child, whom the infant spirit was assigned to inhabit until it achieved a successful birth.

Only scenes that took place in the darkness are now clearly visible to the infant spirit. It sees shadows tremble, as though stirred by the wind, and hears echoes from the past drift through the now windowless and roofless house, and linger near a patch of mosaic still stuck to a crumbling wall. The yard is pitch black, and empty, apart from a date tree which lies bent over the ground, a few leafless branches rising from its trunk . . . Father said that when he found out that Mother was pregnant for the second time, he planted a date tree in the yard to ensure the child would be a son, and buried a longevity locket in the soil beneath to grant the child a safe birth. Mother said that before the date sapling was planted, she took it to Nuwa Cave and rubbed it across the sacred crevice so that, in years to come, all her children would be born under the tree and receive Goddess Nuwa’s blessing. Father also mentioned that in the secret dugout under Nannan’s bed there is a red lacquer chest containing an ancient edition of Confucius’s
Analects
and a bound volume of the Kong family register. The red chest is still there, buried now under the smashed bed and the thick rubble of a bulldozed wall. Piercing black eyes of mice glint through the weeds and broken roof tiles above.

In the lane behind, a willow tree rises from a mound of singed cobs like a graceful fairy frozen mid-dance. Further away, beyond a red compound wall, are two small osmanthus trees and the public road that leads out of the village.

KEYWORDS:
IUD, Fucking Communists, flames, fallopian tubes, Kong the Second Son, class enemy.

DISTRAUGHT RESIDENTS OF
the village sit crammed on Meili and Kongzi’s bed, on the sofa opposite and on the floor. Almost every one of them is, like Kongzi, a member of the Kong clan, direct descendants of the most celebrated Kong: Confucius. Meili is perched on the end of the bed, her hands carefully crossed over her belly. She suspects that Kongzi’s parents have guessed that she’s pregnant. His father is sitting by the headrest, shooting furtive glances at her as he sucks on his cigarette. He was village head for twenty years, and although he retired recently, he still commands respect, which explains why so many villagers have gathered here tonight to vent their anger.

Kong Qing, a former artillery soldier, is slumped in the corner, weeping and cursing, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head. ‘Fucking Communists,’ he cries, ‘depriving me of my son. My branch of the family has been extinguished . . .’ When the family planning squad came banging on his gate yesterday, he and his wife, who was heavily pregnant with their third child, escaped through a secret tunnel and fled to the tall reeds near the reservoir. In the evening, his father took them food, unaware that the police were trailing him. He quacked like a duck – their usual secret signal – and as soon as Kong Qing and his wife emerged from the reeds they were pounced upon by the police. The wife was dragged to the school, where family planning officers strapped her to a wooden desk and injected two shots into her abdomen. The aborted fetus is now lying at Kong Qing’s feet in a plastic basin. It has its father’s flat nose and small eyes. Scraps of congealed amniotic fluid are still stuck to its black hair.

‘Former Village Head, you must stand up for us,’ says Kong Zhaobo, a prominent member of the clan who attended high school in Hexi and now owns the only motorbike in the village. ‘Filial piety demands that we produce sons and grandsons. The male lines must continue. We can’t let the Party sever them.’

‘And anyway, the authorities said that we peasants can have a second child if our first one is a girl,’ says a man nicknamed Clubfoot, who is sitting by the television clutching his walking stick. ‘So why are they bunging IUDs in women who’ve only had one child? If this carries on, we’ll become a village where the children have no brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts. What kind of future is that?’ Clubfoot is always searching for ways to make money. Last year he bought a desktop computer, surfed the internet and informed everyone that a fortune could be made rearing a breed of wild duck that lays golden-yolked eggs. His house stands on the site of an ancestral temple to Confucius which was built by Kongzi’s grandfather and demolished in the Cultural Revolution.

A frail, spindly woman, whose third daughter, Xiang, Kongzi once taught, speaks up. ‘The family planning squad came to our house today and demanded a 10,000-yuan back payment for Xiang’s illegal birth. She’s twelve years old now, for God’s sake! I told them we didn’t have any cash on us, but they searched our house, and found the two thousand yuan my eldest daughter sent us after slaving in a Shenzhen factory for a year. They took the cash, our bags of rice, our pots and pans, even our kitchen clock, and they want us to pay them the rest of the money by the end of the week.’

‘And you know where all that money will go?’ Clubfoot says, rubbing the handle of his walking stick. ‘Straight into the mouths of the corrupt bureaucrats in Hexi Town. Have you seen the new District Party headquarters they’ve built themselves? It’s vast. As grandiose as Tiananmen Gate. And after they’ve guzzled our money, they come to murder our babies. Well, this time, we can’t let them get away with it. We must fight back!’

‘No, that would be madness,’ says Kongzi’s father, stubbing out his cigarette and smoothing back his white hair. ‘The road out of the village has been blocked and a police boat is patrolling the reservoir. We’re trapped. If we put up a fight, they’ll crush us.’

‘The squad officers have the names of the one hundred women of childbearing age in the village,’ says Kong Wen, chair of the village family planning team. ‘We had to send them the list last week. Forty of the women will be subjected to an IUD insertion, and the sixty who have two or more children will be sterilised.’ Kong Wen worked in a Guangzhou clothing factory for three years, sewing zips into trousers. Almost every woman in the village is now wearing a pair of the Lee jeans she brought back with her. When she was informed that this crackdown was imminent, she gave her pregnant sister a letter of introduction stamped with an official seal and told her to escape to Beijing. As a result, she’s been given the minor role of record keeper during this crackdown, and once it’s over will probably be sacked.

Yuanyuan pushes her way into the house, reeking of rotten cabbage. She’s eight months pregnant. Her home doesn’t have a dugout, so she’s been hiding in her neighbour’s vegetable hut. Squeezing down next to Meili, she announces: ‘I’ve just seen a woman halfway up a tree. She’s out of her mind! Refuses to come down. She says her baby’s up in the branches.’ Yuanyuan went to Guangzhou with Kong Wen and found a job in an Apple computer factory, where she plans to return after the birth of her child. She looks at her now and says, ‘You sucked up to the cadres when you came back here, hoping they’d make you village head. Well, are you happy now, helping them kill our babies? We’re women of Nuwa, descended from Goddess Nuwa, who created the Chinese people from the yellow soil of this plain. And now the government wants to stop
us
having children! Are they trying to eliminate the Chinese race?’ Yuanyuan is the only woman in the village to own a pair of knee-high leather boots. Meili longs for the day when she too can own a pair.

The villagers in the yard who’ve been unable to squeeze into the house poke their heads through the open windows. ‘Even dogs have the right to bark before they’re slaughtered!’ one of them calls out. ‘Kongzi: why don’t you take the lead and speak out on our behalf?’

‘Yes, Kongzi!’ Kong Zhaobo agrees, running his hand along the turtleneck of his black sweater. ‘You’re eloquent and well read, and you’ve always had a rebellious streak.’ Kongzi’s defiant nature was recognised at the age of nine. When the entire school sang ‘
Lin Biao and Confucius are scoundrels
’, Kongzi dared change the words to ‘
Confucius was a gentleman and a sage
’, and was taken to the district police station. Thanks to his father’s back-door connections, he was released the next day, on condition that he sing the song correctly one hundred times. Kongzi’s real name is Kong Lingming, but after his courageous expression of support for his ancestor, everyone began to call him Kongzi – Confucius’s more common name. Sometimes they call him Kong Lao-er, meaning Kong the Second Son, the derogatory nickname given to the sage during the Cultural Revolution, or just Lao-er for short, which also means ‘dick’. As he grew up, his interest in his ancestor deepened, and he became the village authority on the sage’s life and works.

‘You’ve studied Sunzi’s
Art of War
,’ says Kong Dufa, a po-faced Party member who is married to the village accountant. ‘Just choose one of the thirty-six strategies and write out a plan.’

Kongzi raises his palms. ‘No, no, I may be a teacher, but I have no formal training. I’m just a simple peasant, a farmer who’s read a few books. I can’t come up with any ideas . . .’

Desperate to prevent him from becoming involved in a political protest, Meili throws Kongzi a meaningful look. He fails to notice. So, to attract his attention, she leans over to Nannan, who’s curled up in the lap of Kongzi’s mother, and gives her a sharp pinch.

‘Ouch!’ Nannan shrieks. ‘A mouse bit me, Grandma.’

‘Shh, little one,’ Kongzi’s mother says, rubbing Nannan’s arm. ‘Here, have a malt sweet.’

‘No, me want chocolate.’ Nannan hates the way malt sweets stick to her teeth. Villagers traditionally offer them to the hearth god at Spring Festival to make sure that when he meets the Lord of Heaven he’ll be unable to open his mouth and utter any inauspicious words.

‘I’ve heard peasants have poured into Hexi Town to protest against the crackdown,’ says Li Peisong. ‘They’ve stormed the Family Planning Commission and smashed all the computers and water dispensers. We should sneak out of the village tonight and go and join them.’ During the Cultural Revolution, Li Peisong was head of the village revolutionary committee and in 1966 was sent to Shandong Province to help Red Guards destroy the Temple of Confucius in the sage’s native town of Qufu. While swept up in the revolutionary fervour, he changed his name to Miekong – ‘Obliterate Confucius’. But by 1974, when the Campaign against Lin Biao and Criticise Confucius was in full swing, he’d undergone a change of heart. Not only did he fail to denounce Confucius at public meetings, he changed his name back to Li Peisong and married a member of the Kong clan. They now have two sons. The second son, Little Fatty, is two years old, but they still haven’t paid off the fine for his unauthorised birth.

‘What’s a water dispenser?’ asks Scarface, a man whose forehead is badly disfigured by a childhood burn. He is destitute, and can only pay for the education of his three daughters with beans adulterated with sand.

‘You know – those large plastic canisters that cadres have in their offices, filled with mineral water that’s supposed to cure a hundred illnesses. It works out at one mao a cup!’ This burly man, Kong Guo, went to Wuhan last year to work on a construction site but was arrested for not having the necessary temporary urban residence permit, fined two thousand yuan and escorted back to the village by the police.

‘So, they’re just drinking all our money away,’ says a mild, gentle man who cycles around the village every morning collecting eggs to sell in the county market. His fists are resting on the metal table, tightly clenched.

A dishevelled peasant called Wang Wu stands up, unable to contain his rage any longer. ‘They wanted twenty thousand yuan for the illegal births of my two younger daughters. I told them I don’t have enough money even to buy seeds. So they tied one end of a metal cable to the central eave of my house, the other half to their tractor. When the tractor reversed my entire roof came off. Where do those bastards expect us to live now?’