Under Fishbone Clouds (20 page)

They set Wawa in the wicker crib they had carried from Fushun, and once they had sung enough lullabies to let his eyelids begin to flutter heavily, Jinyi and Yuying huddled together beneath the sheet that tied their belongings, still dressed and too tired to talk, although neither of them could sleep. The sound of animals scuttling over wet leaves carried miles in the vast pastoral quiet, creeping through the rafters, across the loft, and into their faltering dreams.

Before she had left the city with her husband and baby, Yuying had sat cross-legged together with her sisters on the marriage bed in her room, the baby set in the middle of the straw mattress, where it always slept, indented between jittery bodies.

‘Is this a joke? Does he want you to wear trousers and learn to walk swinging your huge bottom from side to side like a bumpkin?’ Chunlan had asked her elder sister.

‘I think it’s romantic. He’s just trying to look after you, isn’t he? Like a prince taking you to some distant castle. Not that he has a castle, but it will be a change. Who wouldn’t want to be rescued?’

‘Oh, shut up Chunxiang!’ Chunlan had said. ‘It’s not romantic. It’s ridiculous. What’s the point of studying for all these years just to become a washerwoman, with loose flesh jiggling from your arms as you mop a stinky floor! All I can say is, it’s lucky Ma didn’t have our feet bound – you wouldn’t be able to walk a hundred
li
like that!’

‘Come on Chunlan, don’t be like this,’ Yuying had admonished her. ‘What would you do? It’s not safe here, especially for a baby. Look at him. His eyes scrunch up and he kicks his feet every time there’s an explosion or a gun-shot. We’ve already lost one servant in the rubble out there. I think it’s brave of Jinyi. It’s noble. He’s only doing it for us. And when the civil war is finished, we’ll come home and everything will be back to normal.’

‘He’s doing it because he’s scared of Daddy. I’ve never seen the two of them stay long in the same room together. You don’t think that’s odd?’

‘But what about the wedding, wasn’t that Pa’s idea?’ Chunxiang had asked.

‘It doesn’t matter whose idea it was: we’re married now, and nothing is going to change that. So you’ll just have to get used to me being gone. Come on Chunlan, what’s the matter? You’ll be getting married after the Spring Festival, and things are bound to change anyway. So give us a chance.’

Chunlan had not smiled. She had yet to find out where she would be sent for the wedding and which family she would join, perhaps a journey of several days away from her home and her childhood. For once, she had held her tongue – not daring to voice her opinion that everything was different for Yuying, the favourite, and that she was throwing everything away just to please her husband. Ladies do not say these types of things, she had thought to herself. They are silent, stoic, supportive.

‘At least you don’t have to study at home!’ Chunxiang had whined. ‘I swear, I know more than mad old widow Zhang. It should be me getting paid to teach her! I have to sit through her ramblings four times a week. And some of Peipei’s interruptions – I can’t make head nor tail of them. Between the two of them they’d have me
believe that a woman lived in the moon, that the Chinese invented everything and that all the things they didn’t invent should be ignored!’

They giggled. Life had been different since the schools closed. Going somewhere new had to be better than sitting at home all day in the ever more crowded house.

‘You can come and visit anyway. The baby will miss you both,’ Yuying had said, and they had hugged, each sister aware that this would not happen.

Outside, as a flaky cigarette was passed between callused fingers, a similar conversation had taken place.

‘What else can I do? I can hardly run to somewhere new. And now the restaurant has been closed down, I don’t know what to do with myself. I need to be useful. It’s either stay here and hope we don’t get caught in crossfire, or go back and hang my head. I’d rather be humble than have my family shot full of holes.’

Yaba had nodded sagely, and passed him back the cigarette. Jinyi had spoken slowly and hesitantly, unsure of himself and
unaccustomed
to being the main contributor to a conversation.

‘Thanks. I have a history back there: my parent’s house, their land. I’m losing all that here, shedding it like snake skin. I’ve already been forced to give up my name and my dignity. But I can still pass some of it on to my son. I can show him his ancestor stones, and teach him how to survive on his own skills, to live with the land. All he’ll learn here is how to dodge men with guns and juggle ideologies. That’s not what anyone wants.’

Yaba had nodded again, rubbing his hands together for warmth.

‘Yeah, all right, so maybe I’m thinking about myself a little bit too.’ Jinyi had said, leaning closer. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m
standing
in really big shoes, or like my features are blotted out by the huge shadows cast here. I want Yuying to see my – no, our – family as it should be. Not borrowed from anyone. Just us and the baby. I want to be the head of my own family. Surely that’s not too much to ask?’

Jinyi had paused, still clutching the cigarette he had yet to bring to his lips.

‘I know, I’m being stupid. But look at us. You know what people say. “Country boys, hired hands.” “They’ve sold their souls.” People in this house might not think it, but you know others do.
“They don’t belong there, up at the big house.” You’ve heard it too, though you might have pretended not to. Especially since Yangchen joined the Commies. And if you can’t change other people’s minds, how are you going to change your own? That kind of work takes years – rituals, every day, like prayer or piety or anything else you have to do in the gaze of gods – you force yourself to do it until you really believe it, until you don’t have to force yourself anymore.’

Yaba had shaken his head, putting a hand on Jinyi’s shoulder.

‘You know, when I was young, when I was travelling or sleeping on dirty floors and stealing food if I could, all I could think about was having a family. Not to look after me. But so that I’d have something to care about, something that made me feel I belonged. Now I’ve got Yuying, and we’ve got Wawa to think about. The only thing that matters now is the three of us, and I don’t care if I have to take them to the other end of the earth to keep them safe, I’d still do it. This might be my only chance.’

Yuying had taken days deciding what to bring with her on the trip; she must impress her in-laws. She had settled on two pairs of shoes – one bright red, the other deep blue – four long silk dresses slit up to the thigh at the side, a pair of thick cotton longjohns, a lambswool scarf and two hand-embroidered shawls. Then there were the gifts she had to take. Jinyi had tried to stay out of the room while the packing took place. He waited in the hall, where Old Bian and Bian Shi took turns pressing banknotes into his reluctant hands, telling him that they were for the child. How could he say no? After all, they all knew what he earned. Dressed in the same warm patched jacket he had worn for five years, Jinyi found his body bulked up by the tightly balled wads of cash bulging from his four front pockets.

Yaba had shaken Jinyi’s hand for almost a minute, and bowed low before Yuying. He then kissed Wawa just above the baby’s bushy eyebrows, just as he had kissed the child’s mother seventeen years before. The hair in the mole on Yaba’s neck stretched out between them, a solitary shrivelled whisker linking the child to the past.

This was the image Jinyi and Yuying carried away with them of the world they left behind: a tall, silent man almost in tears while the rest of the household stood emotionlessly at the door, seeing them off. Her father had been inside somewhere; her mother had
her hands on her hips, her eyes half closed; her two sisters yawned through what seemed to them the longest of drawn-out farewells; and Peipei, the nurse, waved earnestly as she pushed to the front of the gathering group of servants eager to steal a five-minute break.

However, after this the couple’s thoughts diverged: at night, lying together with the little crib between them, there were other images that poured into their minds. Jinyi’s were of food, of hands slapping dough and tugging out noodles from sheets of flour. Yuying’s were of dragons on silk jackets, silk dresses and Japanese textbooks, of the last minutes of light and the baby’s face squeezed up into a smile or a yawn. And in those seconds, before wakefulness trailed out like the last lines of smoke from a snuffed-out candle, their legs twitched, kicked, then slumped.

The next morning Wawa woke them with coughs and cried, and Jinyi scooped him from the crib and held him tight against his chest as the first light of dawn spilled between the slats in the rickety old barn.

‘Brave little thing, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe he wants to go home,’ Yuying said as the baby looked between the two faces staring down at him and began to gurgle and grin.

‘He is going home. He’s just eager to get going, isn’t that right?’

As if in answer to his father, Wawa thumped his arms up and down, as though everything was decided.

They splashed water onto their faces from the rain-filled trough behind the house, thanked the family, and started off again, their bags padded down with steamed corn bread that they felt guilty for accepting. They continued steadily, quietly counting off scores of two-house villages as if they were lost hands of a card game played solely to kill time.

The great river followed them through the counties, past hills, forests, fields, paddies, forests, valleys, hills and fields; at times they could not work out which part was reflection and which was real. It was possible to believe that each was simply a reflection of the other, and that even they themselves existed only in their
mirror
image; that for all their blistered feet and cramps and stitches,
somehow, parted from their usual surroundings, they were no longer real. The dirt tracks they followed were scars mapped across the flesh of the province, while the shrubs and hunchback cedars, the gingko trees and the litter of needles, the dead grass clumped across the path, all were scabs grown over the uneven ground.

Following Jinyi and Yuying on their travels, I was reminded of another journey made by pimple-speckled young men and women over a decade earlier. After brief periods of coexistence, the Kuomintang, led by Chang Kai-shek, had begun a series of purges in an attempt to destroy the Communists. By 1933, around half a million Kuomintang surrounded the city of Jiangxi, one of the last strongholds of the Communists, aiming to stop the vital flow of trade and force them to surrender in a war of attrition. At the end of the next year, the weakened and starving Communist forces, sick of the humiliating failure of their attempts to attack the
surrounding
army, had little choice but to mount a full-scale retreat towards Hunan, leaving Jiangxi to the sieges of the Kuomintang. That was the beginning of what became known as the Long March.

And because they could not take bodies with them, instead of leaving them lying in fields, they slid their friends beneath the water, then waded through themselves, as the corpses bobbed downstream. The water stopped at the tops of their stomachs, their chests, and they were thankful for that. Time to pick up pace. They too avoided the roads, ploughing instead through forgotten villages where there was no difference between electricity and magic, for both were the stuff of legends. Coughing fits, gangrene,
exhaustion
, trench-foot, babies abandoned in fields (their cries would give the troops away), landmines, dodgy amputations carried out by people with little to no medical training, shrapnel, barbed-wire gashes, traitors turning in the soldiers for a pocketful of change, flu, measles, heart attacks, heatstroke, leeches, fleas, worms,
pneumonia
, malaria, frostbite, diarrhoea, dehydration and too many other dangers to mention. This was the red army: bloody, battered and unrepentant.