‘I’d like to take a television correspondence course,’ Meili says, glancing back at the professor on the flickering screen. ‘I venerate learning, but I’m so uncultured and poorly educated. I only went to school for two years . . . Kongzi doesn’t know I’ve had an IUD fitted. Please don’t tell him.’
‘Your secret’s safe. I’ll be leaving tomorrow and will probably never see either of you again.’
‘I know you look down on us peasants. Once you’ve gone, you’ll forget all about us.’
‘No. I’ll never forget you. I’ll leave you my address. You and Kongzi would be more than welcome to come and stay with us.’ Their eyes meet as they inhale the smell of each other’s sweat. ‘You really are beautiful,’ he says. ‘How easy life would be if I had someone like you by my side.’ In the dim light, Weiwei’s hair looks shinier and less grey. ‘You have something caught . . .’ He points at her mouth, but before she has a chance to touch it, he reaches over and picks out from between her front teeth a strand of spinach. Meili jumps to her feet and asks Kongzi, who’s just walked in, where the toilet is.
‘Don’t go. It’s pitch black out there. Wait until we’re back on the boat.’ She can smell that he’s just vomited. His face is purple and bloated.
‘It’s so quiet now,’ Weiwei says, ‘I feel much better after that swim.’ Meili watches the water drip down his bare back and hands him a towel. Then she goes into the cabin, slips off her wet dress, dries herself quickly with a sheet and puts on Kongzi’s long white vest. ‘You can sleep in here with us,’ she says, poking her head round the door curtain. ‘We’ll have to squeeze up, I’m afraid.’
The night is breezeless, but a faint smell of osmanthus seems to be moving through the still air. Meili and Weiwei are now lying on either side of Kongzi, who’s quietly snoring. Meili can sense that Weiwei is still awake. When they returned to the boat, Kongzi crashed out in the cabin, and she jumped into the river for a swim, having noticed when they arrived at dusk that the water was clean. Weiwei jumped in after her. It was too dark for her to see the expression on his face; all she could make out in the light from the restaurant was the dark outline of the boat.
‘I’m so sorry to have inconvenienced you like this,’ Weiwei whispers to her across Kongzi’s sleeping body.
‘Don’t worry. It would have been too dangerous to sail at night. This boat is wooden, and would fall apart if it collided with anything. We’ll sleep here and head back to Xijiang in the morning.’ Although the smells around her are familiar, the cabin feels strangely different. She can’t sleep. Kongzi’s snoring is embarrassing her. ‘You don’t snore, do you?’ she asks Weiwei. She wedges a jumper under her pillow to raise her head a little, then flaps her damp sheet in the air so that it falls flat over her body.
‘No, I don’t snore,’ Weiwei whispers. ‘But I’m finding it hard to fall asleep. I’ve never spent the night on a boat before.’
‘I couldn’t get used to it either, when we first moved onto the boat,’ Meili says, her nose touching the back of Kongzi’s head. ‘But now, unless I’m rocking from side to side, it takes me hours to drop off. Are you hot? Our electric fan’s broken, I’m afraid. Here, use this bamboo one. I suppose you town dwellers all have air conditioning on at night.’
‘No – not many people can afford to have it installed. And even if they can, they’re afraid to use it because the electricity costs so much.’
‘Which university did your wife go to?’ Feeling her hot skin begin to stick to Kongzi’s, she edges back a little, then pulls her squashed right breast out from under her side.
‘We went to the same university, but were assigned jobs in different towns. She’s the sub-director of a circuit board factory in Dunhuang. Her salary’s much higher than mine.’
‘You may live apart, but at least you’re still married.’
Kongzi has sunk into a deep sleep and is snoring his head off.
‘Doesn’t feel like we’re married. When I phoned her to tell her my mother had killed herself, she didn’t offer to come down and see me. She doesn’t care about me any more.’
‘Marriage is for life. Perhaps you should show her more affection, try to win her round. Persuade her to move back in with you.’ Meili is embarrassed by the smell of alcohol on Kongzi’s breath. She knows that town people brush their teeth twice a day.
‘No, she wouldn’t give up her job for me. She didn’t want to go to Dunhuang at first, but we needed the money to support our family. Now she’s so used to it there she doesn’t want to come back.’
‘You don’t know how important something is until you lose it. You mustn’t let her slip away. Even if a woman flies off for a while, she’ll always want a nest to return to.’ Meili remembers the woman with the crimson lipstick she met on the boat to Sanxia, and suspects that her husband in the countryside had no idea she worked as a hair-salon prostitute.
Suddenly Meili wishes she could put her arms around Weiwei. Her body feels as hot as beans frying in a scorching wok. She picks up a jacket lying beside her and drapes it over Kongzi’s chest, letting her hand brush against Weiwei’s. Immediately, he grasps hold of it, and she feels the heat inside her explode. His hand then slides over her body, moving slowly, then fast, then slowly again. She curls up and lets him caress her to sleep, as she rocks dreamily back and forth inside the dark cabin . . .
At dawn, Weiwei leaves his address, telephone number and two packs of cigarettes on the bamboo stool beside her, and stands at the stern, his face looking slightly calmer than yesterday.
Meili goes out to join him. ‘You should give up your search and go home now,’ she says. ‘Your mother will be more at peace in the river than she would be buried in the earth.’
‘No, I must keep searching until I find her, for my own peace of mind,’ he replies, then without saying goodbye, he steps onto the jetty, climbs up the bank and walks away.
Meili grabs a bag of preserved mustard greens from the galley area, runs up the bank after him and tosses it into his hands. ‘Soak them in water overnight, then simmer them with beef and tomatoes – the longer the better.’
‘I’m a terrible cook,’ Weiwei says.
‘But you must eat them. I preserved them myself.’
He turns and continues along the path. As she watches his departing figure, her stomach churns as though a mudfish were writhing inside it. Without stopping to think, she chases after him, grabs the tortoiseshell glasses from his face to keep as a memento and runs back to the boat with them.
KEYWORDS:
metallic, marshy beach, handicapped, groping hand, rotten shrimp paste, cross-infection.
‘
THERE’S GOING TO
be an almighty downpour any minute!’ Kongzi says, pointing to the leaden sky above Dexian. Seconds later, the dark clouds crack open and unleash torrential rain. ‘The deck’s too slippery,’ Meili cries out to Kongzi. ‘Quick, come into the cabin.’ The rain crashes against the bow then streams into the river. Inside the bamboo cage, the ducks shake their wings and hoot.
‘Look, the rain’s so polluted, it’s almost metallic,’ Kongzi says. ‘The boat will get corroded if we stay any longer. Let’s lift anchor and get going to Guai Village. Pass me my straw hat and raincoat.’
‘But you won’t be able to see a thing through this rain,’ Meili says. ‘What if we crash into something?’ Kongzi transported a cargo of quicklime this morning, and when the rain makes contact with the powder that’s fallen into the cracks of the deck, white fumes reeking of rotten eggs rise into the air. Nannan vomited last night and has eaten nothing all day apart from a dry biscuit and a cauliflower floret. She’s lying on her back in the cabin, gazing out at the pelting downpour through a gap in the door curtain.
Kongzi wipes the lenses of the metal-rimmed glasses he bought last week, then shoves away from the bank. For hours they sail through heavy rain along a bewildering maze of waterways. Occasionally, Meili calls out: ‘Be careful, the water smells muddy here – we’re probably too close to the bank. Steer to the right a little.’ When they pass beneath a bridge and she hears the engine’s rumble echo against the concrete arch, she feels anxious and locked in.
After taking Weiwei to Yinluo, they returned to the sand island to find the river police knocking down their shelter. They grabbed a handful of ducks from the pen, collected Nannan from Xixi, then sailed downstream, picking up and delivering cargos as they went, until they reached the dirty industrial town of Dexian in Western Guangdong Province, where they anchored for the last week. Although Kongzi was able to pick up delivery jobs there, it was not a pleasant place to stay. At night the paper factories would spew into the river foul waste water that smelled of rotten shrimp paste and caused the three of them to cough and gag in their sleep.
On their second day in Dexian, Meili bought a pregnancy test in a dockside pharmacy. After she dipped the test stick into her urine and saw the plus sign appear, she wondered why her IUD hadn’t worked. Forgetting that her period was already three weeks late when she met Weiwei, she presumed that his groping hand had dislodged the device, allowing Kongzi to impregnate her during the following days. Weiwei’s touch awakened feelings she had never known before. In the week after he left, she no longer pushed Kongzi away when he wanted sex, but instead pulled him close to her and told him to move harder and faster. She suspects that it was on one of those nights, between a moan of pleasure and a sharp intake of breath, that Kongzi’s sperm penetrated her egg, and the infant spirit once more descended into her womb.
When she told Kongzi she was pregnant, he said that they must find a safe place to live until the baby is born. He asked around and found out about a village called Guai, thirty kilometres downstream, where the family planning policies are not strictly enforced. But the village is set a kilometre back from the river, so for the last few days, he’s been wondering how he’ll be able to make a living there.
‘Look, that must be Guai Village!’ Kongzi says, seeing beyond the dust-covered trees on the left a distant huddle of houses spiked with satellite discs.
‘It’s larger than I expected,’ Meili says. ‘Are you sure we’d be safe living there? If this baby’s ripped out of me, I won’t have another. The village looks depressing. I’d prefer to stay by the water and have the baby on the boat. You did say we’ll call this one Waterborn, after all.’ She glances at the litter-strewn bank and a dusty stack of cabbages on the field above, and feels a wave of revulsion.
‘All right, we’ll stay on the boat, but we must find a safe place to settle. Happiness died because we chose the wrong place. We can’t make that mistake again.’
From under a blanket, Nannan says sleepily, ‘I’m hungry, Daddy. I want some nice food. No more dirty fish.’ Last night, Kongzi cooked a fish he’d caught in the polluted river, and he can still taste its foul odour in his mouth. It was Meili’s birthday. She spent the whole day sulking in the cabin. Kongzi went into Dexian and bought her plates, pans, an electric heater and a pocket mirror, to replace the ones they had to leave on the sand island, but she didn’t show any gratitude. Kongzi complained about the Weiwei trip, moaning that not only did they receive no payment, they lost their home as well. Meili is angry that she allowed Weiwei to fondle her that night, and hates him for taking advantage of her.
An oily film of pollution hovers on the river’s surface. Along the bank, the willow’s branches bend under the weight of litter while their tips struggle upwards towards the sun. Kongzi drives the boat under another bridge, steers left down a narrow creek and stops below a flight of steps leading to what he thinks must be a path to Guai Village. Dogs, ducks and chickens watch them from the bank. ‘I heard the village sells handicapped children to criminal gangs,’ Meili says. ‘Apparently most of the crippled kids you see begging in train stations around the country come from round here.’
‘That’s just hearsay,’ Kongzi replies. ‘See those children up there? They look fine to me . . . So we’ve made it at last! What a journey it’s been. It reminds me of that poem: “Mountain after mountain, river after river, it seems there is no way out. / But beyond a shady willow and a tree in bright blossom, another village finally appears.” I’ll go up and have a look around.’ He fetches the gangplank and slides it onto the lowest concrete step.
‘Dad, I wait here for you,’ Nannan says, peeking round the door curtain at the unfamiliar surroundings outside.
Rising onto her toes, Meili sees, on the large field above, patches of unharvested crops, two tarpaulin shelters, a duck pen, a coiled black hose lying beside an empty ditch and a storehouse with bricked-up doors and windows. Painted in white on the red walls is a notice that says
TO AVOID COMMON GYNAECOLOGICAL COMPLAINTS AND VENEREAL DISEASES, IT IS IMPORTANT TO MAINTAIN GENITAL HYGIENE, WASH PUBIC AREA FREQUENTLY AND CHANGE UNDERWEAR DAILY. TO PREVENT CROSS-INFECTION, REFRAIN FROM SITTING ON TOILET SEATS . . .
The reflection of the red walls and the blue sky above them waver on the creek’s oily surface. Scraps of white plastic float by like a raft of ducks.
Kongzi soon returns with a fisherman who leads him onto the bridge and says, ‘See that marshy beach further down the creek? No one’s renting it now. It has a pond where you can keep your ducks.’ On a road far behind them, a red car drives slowly past.
Meili sits at the bow and begins to remove dead leaves from a bunch of spinach.
‘If I wash the spinach in that water, the spinach get clean but I get very dirty,’ Nannan says, pointing to the muddy creek.
‘Oh, stop talking nonsense,’ Meili says irritably.
Kongzi jumps aboard and drives the boat towards the place the fisherman indicated. The banks here are so darkened by dust and pollution that, compared to them, the fumes billowing from the far-away factories look clean. Sickened by the scenery, Meili stares down at her shoes and reflects on her predicament. To protect what might be Kongzi’s precious male heir, she’ll have to spend another eight months lying low. When she discovered she was pregnant, she suggested they go straight to Heaven Township, where she knew they’d be safe. But Kongzi said the journey would be too long and arduous, and insisted they find a hiding place closer by. Meili’s only hope now is that she’ll suffer a miscarriage before the government has a chance to tear the baby out. Inside her wet shoes and socks, her feet feel cold and pinched.