Under Fishbone Clouds (51 page)

‘If the wind stops licking at our backs, and the spring rain holds off, then I’ll agree. It beats hoeing and sowing anyway: my back doesn’t take kindly to them. Not after a year’s worth of bending down to scrub those stinking latrines. Hell!’ Turkey replied.

They stopped for breath at the top, looking down to the
geometrical
order of the paddies below and behind, the fumbling lines of irrigation and the sharp, slicing paths, the type of order only man knows, imposed from the outside on the tangled wild. They then began to descend on the other side, a steep crisscross of ferns and burr. With every twist in the thin path between the greedy
vegetation one of them stumbled or tripped, so they closed in until they were almost shoulder to shoulder among the animals, a chain gang of flapping tongues and bristles and blisters.

‘Is this it?’ shouted the Bow Lake cadre.

After a ragged afternoon and a chunk of evening, they had made it to Bow Lake Village, but the cadre there, shaking a stump where his right hand should have been, did not seem as grateful as they had imagined.

‘A bit mangy, aren’t they?’ the one-handed cadre continued,
flipping
the ears of the beasts, and staring into their milky eyes. He listed their defects with a grim relish. ‘This one’s covered in fleas; this one’s got a bit of a limp; this one’s got a swollen ball bigger than my fist; this one smells worse than death; this one’s got skin like a crumpled snot-rag. What’s the matter, you couldn’t find any that were actually dead? I’m surprised this lot survived the journey. Well, they’ll have to do, I guess.’

The three men did not know how to respond to the unimpressed cadre. He finally glanced at them and sighed. ‘I hope these animals have more life in them than you three. Come on, I’ll show you where we eat, and then to the barn – we’re a bit crowded here right now, but the straw’s pretty soft, and I expect you’ll be heading back early in the morning anyway.’

Jinyi cleared a space among the loose straw and dirt and
surrendered
himself to the lice, nits, fleas, bedbugs, earwigs, woodworms, money-spiders and ants in the ancient barn. The oxen, meanwhile, began their new life by lowing a mournful song until the
moonlight
finally quieted them.

The journey home was the same slipshod scenery replayed
backwards
, first snowball blossoms pouting on the trees, the air ripe with manure and their steps matching the accompanying percussion of the three men’s rumbling stomachs. The way the wind whipped the frail branches of the shorter trees called up a shrill, reedy voice, and Jinyi pictured a eunuch singing to a deserted palace garden after his imperial masters had left for a war they were certain to lose. He picked up a stick and beat back the weeds and thorny bushes that overhung the mule track, poking for high berries and
trying to become forgetful again. But though he could swipe away weeds and thistles, he could not clear the clutter of his thoughts, which returned again and again to his wife, his promise; the silly hopes he had placed in her palms.

The afternoon gave in to evening without a fight, and in a few hours darkness descended in a cloak of angry rainfall. The three of them scurried down into a small enclave between the rocks, spraying each other every time they rustled their heavy, drenched clothing.

‘Where do you think it came from?’ Bo said, settling down on the stony ground.

‘The storm? West of here, I guess,’ replied Jinyi.

‘No, I mean really came from. Listen, you know a few years back the American president came here? Well, what if they were trying to trick us, and what he really wanted to do was to fiddle with our weather?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just change the weather.’

‘Of course you can. You’ve heard about all the technological things they have there.’

‘He might be right,’ Turkey said. ‘You hear all kinds of things about what those foreigners are up to.’

‘Well, even if they can, why would they want to mess around with our weather?’

‘Why? Because we make them nervous. They see us and the
wonders
of our country, with everyone working together and living in peace and harmony, and they get jealous,’ Bo replied.

‘He’s right again,’ Turkey said. ‘Remember what happened when we went to go and help out our brothers in Korea, only for America to come and split it in two and take over the south? They would have swallowed it all if it wasn’t for us. And Taiwan too.’

‘They love money more than people, you see,’ Bo stated, as if he was a professor lecturing a particularly hopeless class. ‘But I’ll tell you what, if invading armies do turn up here, we’ll smash them mercilessly!’

‘I agree that whatshisname – Nixon, yes? – well, he might have been up to something. But if you ask me, he only came to try and find out how China has become so great, so he can copy what we’ve done back in America. And anyway, do you really think a couple of Americans can trick our mighty leaders? Don’t be silly. Premier
Zhou Enlai alone can speak six languages, so nothing could get past him!’

The others nodded, convinced.

The rain continued, and Jinyi, Turkey and Bo found themselves wondering whether they ever would return home. They could not know that it would only be a few more years until Mao died, the Gang of Four were arrested and families began to be reunited. Too many dead, too many disappeared, too many unrecognisable, too much destroyed, to be able to expect anything of tomorrow. Streams of rainwater skirted up to the entrance of the enclave, and trees whined and hawed to them from afar. Better to live in history than in your heart: this was the lesson of the countryside
communes
.

‘In a storm like this,’ Turkey ventured, ‘paths might get washed away, repainted with mud and glut.’

Jinyi stared out at the grey scribbled haze and picked up the thread. ‘Men out in the gales might get swept into a river and washed away.’

‘Or tumble down some hill, or freeze in some cave,’ Turkey said.

Bo looked at them both and shook his head. He had not followed the unspoken implication – that the three of them might wear the storm as a disguise, and escape under the veil of the assumptions it might conjure. The cadre would assume they’d died in a flash flood or hillslide, and soon forget them. They could find their homes again, their children, their wives.

Yet it was just a joke, nothing more; each village was a facsimile of the last, each new face in each new place treated with equal
suspicion
and contempt. It was not only geography that imprisoned them, however, but also psychology: to run would be to surrender the little parts of themselves, of their old lives, that they had spent the long seasons trying to cling to; to escape would mean that they had been prisoners all along, rather than men bettering themselves to better the country.

‘There are places where it hasn’t stopped raining for a thousand years, where the locals wade to work and the dogs feed on fish they catch in courtyards,’ Turkey said, rubbing his eyes.

‘Hmm. A thousand years, eh? We could be here a while then.’

The three of them huddled and shivered on the damp stones, drawing close for warmth and watching for signs of respite in the
wash of dragged leaves and trees bent double. The far-off thunder sounded like the crackle of a transistor radio, waiting to pick up the hint of a voice. The drab stretch of hills and fields had been reimagined by a drunken Impressionist, transformed into a slur of greys and midnight blues. They sat in silence as the storm took over the night, hoping that some break in the clouds would render the world familiar again.

Instead of feeling downhearted, I only felt more determined to prove the Jade Emperor wrong. I lived inside Yuying and Jinyi’s heads for weeks, months on end, returning only to my own little kitchen in heaven to reflect on the story and get some rest, for it is impossible to relax for even a second amid the hurricane of the brain’s constant chemistry. The mind is a maze – though plenty of orders regularly pulse up from the heart, there are so many attics, corridors, locked doors and dead ends that some feelings
inevitably
become lost and never find a corresponding thought or prompt to action.

One night, after Jinyi and the other men had fallen asleep on the wooden floorboards in the little hut above the paddies, I crept outside and soon found myself staring up at the sky, remembering the poet’s advice to pay attention to the little details that carry us along. Suddenly I saw a rip between the stars, and I soon made out a large trail of dust clouds and pawprints as a great lolloping dog started towards the overripe full moon.

I leapt to my feet, determined to fly up and catch the panting stray before it reached the moon. However, as soon as my feet had ascended from the ground, I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me back down.

‘He’s a rascal that one – you’ll never stop him!’ a gruff voice said, and I turned around to see the heavy-set man whose strong grip held me back. His features looked as if they had been badly
chiseled
into his face as an afterthought, and he had a dark third eye set in the middle of his forehead. He was wearing an old soldier’s uniform.

‘I know you,’ I said. ‘Erlang Shen, right?’

He grunted an affirmation. Erlang Shen, nephew of the Jade Emperor and a great warrior. He had fought to subdue the Monkey
King back when he was causing problems for heaven, he had ventured into hell many times on various missions, and
everyone
knew that it was he who controlled lightning bolts, which he directed at naughty children. His main job, however, was fighting demons and other devilish creatures, which he did with the help of his trusty black dog …

‘Hey! That’s your dog, isn’t it?’ I looked up, aghast to see the large hound gobbling a fat chunk out of the moon.

He laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s right. He does it every night, I’m afraid.’

‘What do you mean? You let him take a bite out of the moon every night? What will you do when he finishes it?’ I asked in horror.

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that. After a couple of weeks his stomach will get so full that it will be fit to burst. He can’t digest it you see, all that chalky crumbly mush. He howls and writhes about, making a right old fuss, until it occurs to him to spit it out, which he does every night until he feels comfortable. Then he’ll suddenly realise his stomach is empty and feel famished, so the whole damn thing will start again. But like I said, there’s no stopping him.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked.

‘Oh, a couple of billion years, give or take,’ he said.

‘Don’t you get bored with the same thing happening every night?’

He looked at me and laughed again. ‘But he always eats a
different
bit. There’s always a bit of unexpected variation in everything; that’s what keeps all of us going.’

He whistled, rattling the long lead in his fat hands, and I left him, feeling a little more confident about my task.

10

1977 THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE

There are spirit voices, writes Marco Polo, that call travellers from their paths and lure them to disaster. When crossing the shifting deserts of the Silk Road by night, he tells us, men separated from their party often stray from the track to follow the low chatter of disembodied voices. They may hear the voices of their
companions
or loved ones, or else the distant chatter of drums, the frantic shouts and screams of far-off battle; anything that might drive them deeper into the unknown depths of the dunes. The men who follow these calls are never seen again. For this reason, Polo advises, stay close to those you travel with, and do not be tempted to strike away on your own, however much your senses urge. The traveller that Polo posits is someone who seeks his own reflection: he does not so much fear being lost as he fears losing himself. Take a man away from his home, from his language and from his fellow men, and how much of the man remains?

Marco Polo recorded with awe the Chinese use of paper money as a substitution for gold and jewels; the Mongols’ many wives and fiery alcohol brewed from mare’s milk; the great Khan’s ten thousand white horses; snapping fire crackers and sparking rockets in the new capital, Beijing; the magic black stone that sustained fire; and the strange and detailed calendar used by the court. And yet the magpie eye of the traveller who never settles in one place often sees only novelty and wonder, and not the hunger and sores and scabs and turds lurking behind the carefully constructed sets. It is both the privilege and the punishment of us gods that we see everything.

What, you may ask, has this long-dead Italian got to do with Jinyi and Yuying? All three were called by spirit voices. All came close to losing themselves in the places they encountered. None returned the same as when they left.

Jinyi started wondering, as he made the long journey home, whether everything had been real or just part of his fevered
imaginings
. All he knew was that the only reason he had kept going when others around him had fallen in the fields was longing.

Scholars debate whether Polo ever really made it to China or not; what they forget is that, more often than not, histories are written in the heart.

The Jinyi who journeyed back to Fushun looked like a ragged, withered uncle of the one who had left. His receding black mane was sparked with white, the fringe dusted with tobacco yellow. His eyebrows now threatened to meet in the middle of his face, which managed both to pull tight around his eyes and sag limply around his cut-glass cheeks. Save for a single week each year (if he was lucky), he had not been home since the heyday of the Red Guards. His hands, wrinkled like prunes, fumbled with the stiff door handle; he was old.

Of the nine years he had been in the fields what more can be said? Imagine lying so still that grass grows up through your pores. This is how the time had passed. Now Mao had died and been gutted and pumped with preserving fluids and stuffed and boxed and shoved into a mausoleum in the centre of Tiananmen Square, where his faithful vigilantes had a decade ago gathered for a glimpse of his smile and wave; the old Chairman’s wife had been blamed for the mayhem and was being prepped for the show trial of the century; and those left of the lost generation were slowly being allowed to trickle home.

Jinyi joined a ragtaggle band of emaciated workers begging for lifts from every truck, van, army car, motorbike or rusty bicycle that passed them. The huge migration mirrored the birds that had just fled the winter, seeking out some familiar warmth. Is it that I have successfully reformed, Jinyi asked himself, or have they given up on reforming people? He hitched rides through small towns decked with patchy lanterns and strings of withered red chillies, over rickety river bridges, beside dipping paddies, fields and plains, around half-logged forests, past wide-eyed villages and smoke-stack cities, and into the coal skies of the familiar north. He concluded that he did not care.

Despite having no money, trading on the kindness of strangers for a shared bowl of noodles in village rest-stops or a bite of
someone’s
apple or
mantou
in the back of a cramped pick-up, Jinyi spent the journey home thinking about the feast that he would prepare for the Spring Festival the following month, the treats and dishes he would craft for his newly reunited family. He would cook his wife’s favourite dumplings. He conjured up the smile he would see on her face, and the thought warmed him more than a hot meal might have. At crowded country canteen tables and in grubby
seatless
bus stations he attracted stares from the hundreds of other returning undesirables as his hands unconsciously rehearsed the action of kneading the dumpling dough, scooping in the filling and pinching tight the shell-like skin. Must have rats nibbling between his ears, onlookers muttered loud enough for him to hear. Again, did not care.

Jinyi finally managed to open the stiff door and collapsed inside, his bones chilled by the January frost, only to find that the house was empty.

‘Dali? Manxin? Liqui? Xiaojing? Is anyone here?’ he tried to shout, but finding his voice frozen tight in his larynx, he settled instead for a hoarse whisper. There was no reply.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Jinyi registered a lopsided wooden table, evidently second-hand and poorly restored, surrounded by four mismatched chairs, each a different size and design. He sank into one, and wondered whether it was the chair or his back that creaked. A rusty kettle was slumped on the stove, talking to a wok upturned on the floor beside it. A drooping picture hung on the main wall, capturing Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai
approaching
the microphone in Tiananmen in 1949, whole lifetimes ago. Great men, Jinyi thought, set to live out their next incarnations in textbooks, posters, movies, poems and watch-faces.

Suddenly he was grinning, remembering how as a child he had believed that the spirits trapped in pictures would creep out at night to do as they pleased. He had even blamed them when confronted by his enraged uncle over the bite marks in the corn bread. It must have been those tiny monks and their fat cows from that picture, he had wailed as the fist bore down. After all, his aunt had warned
that boys who were naughty would get trapped in the mirror for sixty-four years, so why couldn’t it work both ways? Remembering this, Jinyi almost laughed, but stopped himself. Then he
reconsidered
, looking around to check that there was no one near who might hear or report that Hou Jinyi was laughing. So he guffawed and giggled and hee-hawed, ten years of laughter spurting out like shaken-up cola, until he was exhausted.

The shelves had even been refitted, and both a wooden cabinet and a fuzzy brown fold-out futon had appeared. The bread factory had continued to pay his and Yuying’s wages to the children each month, and Dali, Manxin and Liqui had since been allocated their own factories, making army coats, tinned foods and notebooks respectively. The factories had faces and hands and big plans; they could replace families before you could even salute.

Jinyi wandered through to the bedroom and slipped onto the still warm
kang
, content that this corner at least was the same as when he had left, a small slice of his old self hung up like a forgotten coat that twitches restlessly on the hanger, begging to be worn again. Jinyi wrapped himself in one of the girls’ sheets, giving in to the deepest of sleeps from which he would later re-emerge as a father, a husband, an ordinary bread-oven man and the inconspicuous
tenant
of 42 Zhongshan Lu.

‘Pa.’ He was woken by a hand on his shoulder, shaking the dust from the long sleeves of his dreams. ‘How are you feeling?’ It was Manxin, her eyes peering out anxiously from under a pushed-back bob. Jinyi rubbed his eyes – at twenty-four, his eldest daughter looked startlingly like a stockier version of her mother.

‘Pa, say something.’ Liqui had appeared at Manxin’s side, her mouth knotted into a ball of nerves as she worried her plait.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t fuss,’ Jinyi said.

He raised himself up as his youngest, Xiaojing, her hair cropped above her equine face, entered with a bowl of rice broth which she pushed into his hands. His three daughters were lined up in front of him like soldiers awaiting inspection.

‘Where have you been?’ Jinyi asked the gangly girl at the end of the line.

‘At the middle school. Manxin took me to queue up to register. It’s going to open again after the holidays and I can go! I am
thirteen
now, after all,’ Xiaojing answered.

Thirteen. Jinyi nodded; he had missed more than half her life. What had this lanky teenager done with the lisping little girl who used to trail a battered doll around and teach it how to make tea? Did she even recognise him?

‘Of course. You all look so strong, so healthy. Daughters of steel and iron, isn’t that what they say? You make me feel old.’ He tried to smile.

‘You’re not old yet, Pa,’ Manxin chided.

‘So where is my son? His life is busier than even mine was at that age. Last time I came back for a visit he was working night shifts so I never saw him, and the time before he was away with a volunteer group in the countryside. I can’t even remember the time before that. He can’t still be at work at this hour, can he?’

The girls shuffled nervously, a row of bit lips and fidgety hands.

‘Listen, Pa. We didn’t tell you any of this before, because we didn’t want you to worry when you were so far away, but Dali never worked nights, he never visited the countryside.’

‘Then where was he? Come on,’ he said, his voice rising
uncontrollably
. ‘Where is he, dammit? A secret is like a demon trapped in a wine bottle – the longer you keep him in there, the more havoc he’ll cause when he escapes.’

Yet he did not need to be told. He remembered the last few times he had seen Dali, how his slow grunts and hunched-up shoulders had deflected any questions, how the corners of his dark eyes had danced with fire. Jinyi had, however, slept too deeply during those brief visits to hear his eldest son pacing at night, tugging greasy clumps of hair from his scalp as he frantically listed and re-listed his troubles under his breath.