Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  ‘Good.’ They stood face to face, awkward and unsure whether to move closer. Yuying rubbed her hair with a damp towel, the only one she could find that the moths had not shredded, and then handed it to him. The sound of her mother crunching seeds echoed off the stone walls.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I can’t complain. I see not much has changed round here,’ he replied, obviously ignoring the bombed-out shops down the street, the flags and banners on every building and the air of disappointment and neglect seeping through the musty old house.

  ‘Not too much. Well, I’d better make a start on dinner.’

  And that was all that was said about his absence. Yuying moved to the kitchen, and added another hunk of wood to the little fire beneath the stove. She did not ask how he had travelled back, how he had survived the eighteen months, though something in her calculated that it might have taken that much time simply to cross provinces now that borders were controlled and communes strictly regulated. It shamed her to think that while she had sat here doubting him he might well have been trying to get to her, forced to avoid every big city and to stop and work in tiny village farms for a month or two every so often to earn enough to keep going. Indeed, with so many sent to the countryside and plans for the issue of urban-residency cards to curb the large exodus of people to the cities, it was exceptional that Jinyi had been able to move so freely. He would never mention how he had managed it.

  ‘Do you want to go back to the restaurant, Bian Jinyi? Yaba is still there. He’ll be back in a couple of hours and he’ll be delighted to see you, I’m sure. He would be glad to have the company in the kitchen, now that so many of the old faces are gone,’ Bian Shi said, following them into the dining room as Jinyi settled at the table.

  He shrugged, and Bian Shi nodded as if she understood.

  Yuying did not ask about the money from the box. She did not ask if he had missed her – the blisters on his feet, the scars on his hands and the tired smile he wore for her were proof enough. He had returned; that was all that mattered – returned with only a pair of trousers and a frayed jacket to his name. They both resolved never to talk of the separation, the seventeen months, one week, two days and five hours that she had counted out while her hands carried red-hot trays of bread from the oven.

  ‘I dreamt that my bicycle could fly,’ she said, as if to herself, as they lay squeezed in her childhood bed. They had not dared to return to the honeymoon room, for fear of both bad luck and any nasty surprises the departing servants might have left. They were pressed tight against the wall, but not quite touching, not quite ready yet. The rain slid xylophonic across the roof and rasped at the cardboard now pasted over the window.

  ‘Maybe you knew, deep down, that I was on my way,’ Jinyi replied. ‘The truth wears such strange disguises.’

  They remained like that, lying on their backs with only an inch of warm air between them, until they fell asleep. They woke up in the morning with their hands entwined.

  Within a couple of months they were allocated a little house near the factory – where Jinyi had been given a job manning an oven by Comrade Wang, who had remembered the words of the inspector. They left Bian Shi and Yaba to the big house, to a past they were happier to erase. Their new home was two square rooms with bare brick walls, the smoke from the wood-burning stove caught by a flue and sent around the house, warming the clay kang bed on which they often sat and talked. It was a good allocation, they were told by their new neighbours: space for lots of cots in the bedroom, a water pump round the corner, and only a short walk to the recently built toilet shack, though admittedly this was nothing more than a hut containing wooden slats criss-crossing over a river of sewage, where local men came to chat and share cigarettes as they squatted above the filth. When the northeast wind blew, they could smell it from their new home.

  This was where they would begin again, three li from the house where Yuying was born, in the city that Jinyi joked was a city of a thousand winters – each time one appeared to finish, another, colder and harsher than before, suddenly began. Jinyi felt childlike again, amazed by the snow now it no longer affected his livelihood, amazed by the cold northern city hazed in white. Together they learnt to look at the world around them anew, to draw from the thousand winters a thousand possibilities. They pointed out to each other the thousand forms of snow: the crystal flecks that inflicted tiny grazes on those braving the streets; the Catherine-wheel fingerprints of thin ice; the haze of dragon’s breath swelling the morning; the thick frosts that claimed the whole horizon; the tangy, tongue-tasted snowflakes; the crunchy duvets of snow that slurped up army boots; the snowmen wandering lost and bemused between parks and communal gardens; and the dry-ice puffs of pale fog with aimless snowballs flitting by. This was to be their thaw.

  Bian Shi visited when the black ice had been swept away and the streets were safe for her tiny feet, in order to tut at the cramped flat and the scrawny sofa they had set between the table and the stove. She brought round a grandfather clock as a gift, to catch their time, and an old ink painting of a pair of cranes to hang on one of the bare stone walls. The three of them sat at the table, discussing Yuying’s sisters and their errant husbands, one hen-pecked and flustered, the other large, stoic and silent, and passed between them a zealous leaflet handed out at the factory.

  ‘Will you teach me to read?’ Jinyi plucked up the courage to ask her again.

  This time Yuying did not even think of laughing.

  ‘I would be delighted to.’

  ‘I mean, if I can’t read, how am I going to know what’s happening? Everyone is talking about the things in the papers, like what we should be doing or the new rules or how we should be helping the country. I’m part of this too – I’ve lived in the countryside, I know what it means to know injustice. If anyone knows about righting old wrongs, it’s me. If everyone is equal now, well, I should be equal too. But without words I’ll be lost in this city soon,’ he explained.

  ‘Don’t worry. Within a year you’ll be flying through the newspapers. We can start after dinner.’

  ‘I always wanted to read,’ Bian Shi chirped, though husband and wife paid her little attention. ‘There were a hundred books in my father’s house, but not one that we were allowed to touch. Books that could bring people back from the dead, dictionaries that had the names of all the animals that lived in this country thousands of years ago, and huge tomes that would slurp the marrow out of winter, he used to boast. But I never even saw a page.’

  ‘Well, you can listen too,’ Yuying sighed.

  ‘Oh no! I’m far too old, and anyhow, some things are better left as wishes. Oh, look, it’s snowing again.’

  Winter seemed to last for years, with its long underwear and the sight of small children swamped in their father’s coats, with its hibernation and huddled nights. Winter is a bet, a challenge, a test of strength. Winter says endure or else give in, for there is no other choice. Winter says give way to death and be born again, that every story must begin with an ending. And if the noise they heard as they drifted to sleep on those long winter nights was not the sound of a hungry demon hitching a ride on the thick clouds, then it must just have been the braying wind easing the hinges a little.

  After work, with their hair still dusted grey with traces of flour, Yuying and Jinyi settled at their fold-out table and the lesson began. Yuying took the stick of ink and rubbed it carefully into a sliver of water on the small porcelain plate. She then let the brush hover for a moment, considering where to begin.

  ‘This one,’ Yuying said, swishing the brush downwards with a flick to the right, then another to the left and a final horizontal strike through the centre, to create what looked to Jinyi like a headless stickman with outstretched arms. ‘Means big. It –’

  ‘Yes, yes, even I know that one!’

  ‘All right. But look, draw another line, a flat roof across the top, and it becomes heaven, sky, day. That’s how you can remember them: this top line is the limit of
vastness, the border of big – for nothing is higher than heaven, and sometimes it can seem like there is no time longer than the span of a day.’

  In this way they worked through the ideograms, piling them together until they had a vocabulary in common, until the intricate brush-strokes had become bridges which they could wander over together. And in the very year they started, a process of simplifying the language was begun in the capital: pruning the overgrown branches into a slimmer script, tidying up the ancient forest so that light could shine between the thick pines. Over a thousand and a half characters in everyday use were simplified. After all, the old words, people agreed, were tainted with the blood of peasants forced to make ink for greedy emperors. The new language would be completely democratic – though, of course, everyone would have to speak the Beijing form of Mandarin, the Party officials agreed – for if people spoke in tongues they could not understand, how would they know what was being said about them?

  As winter huddles turned into summer yawns and the table was edged closer to the stopped-open door, Jinyi graduated to newspapers and leaflets, and they made a game of testing each other. ‘Communism’ – that meant the end of poverty and injustice. ‘Imperial’ – that meant unfair and repressive. ‘Bourgeois’ – that meant anyone who had enslaved the people and made money from their misery. ‘People’s’ – there was People’s Park near where the river curved and pulled its belly in, People’s Square where the flag was flown and where statues were being built, People’s Government, People’s School, People’s Money printed by the People’s Bank in the People’s Republic of China – well, that meant it belonged to them, didn’t it, at last receiving what they deserved.

  Yaba accompanied Bian Shi for dinner more often in the summer. The large-muscled mute helping the hobbling old woman was the only person from the restaurant not ashamed to be seen with his former employers. With his delicate hand movements, he told Yuying about the changes in the layout, the service, the customers and even the menu in the restaurant, and Yuying translated to her husband, while her mother buried her face in her hands in exasperation after every other sentence.

  ‘You still make money from it, Ma, and it’s only changing to make the country a better place for everyone, not just a few of us.’

  ‘Well, it’s just lucky your father isn’t here to see this. He would have gone mad with some of these changes. Those are the oldest dumpling restaurants in this city, remember, and they’ve been in your family …’

  And so the embellished history was rattled out, the one Yuying learnt as a child and could repeat word for word along with her mother. The truth was a little different – perhaps Old Bian was lucky to be gone, but only because otherwise he might have ended up like his friends, the portly businessmen with whom he gambled and smoked, who were now wheezing and straining as they shouldered ploughs through endless brown fields in provinces they had previously never even heard of.

  Jinyi soon joined in, his curiosity getting the better of him.

  ‘The grumpy old head chef, is he still there?’

  Yaba shook his head.

  ‘What about Liu, the waiter?’

  Yaba shook his head.

  ‘Yangchen?’

  Yaba shook his head, his hands swooping up into a salute.

  ‘He’s a boss? Of what? A factory? Huh, seems like he hasn’t done badly out of his brother joining up in the war – it always helps to be on the winning side. Are any more of the old guys still in Fushun?’

  Yaba sucked on a cigarette, and shrugged his shoulders. New times, new faces. He had different expressions for every kind of resignation to the inevitable.

  ‘Oh, well. There must be a word for this kind of sudden change, but I don’t know what it is,’ Jinyi joked, and he and his wife giggled. Yaba threw up his hands, as if to say, ‘Well, words are no business of mine!’

  The language has always been like a South Chinese Tiger – it has no desire to be tamed. Near the beginning of the Qing dynasty, the Kangxi Emperor, keen to ingratiate himself with Han mandarins still faithful to the defeated Ming and suspicious of the Manchus in the palace, set them to work on the compilation of a giant dictionary. On completion, it contained around 47,000 different characters. Just like Chairman Mao, the emperor knew that the way to get people behind him was to give them tasks that kept them occupied while the world around them was irrevocably altered. He must have known that to wield power over language is to wield power over people’s thoughts. He was the longest-reigning emperor in China’s history.

  With dipping brushes clashing like chopsticks and the ink stick mixed and stirred with water, Jinyi and Yuying set about rewriting their history. They drew lines beneath the long months of mourning, of guilt and blame and recriminations and doubt that separated them, and began again. They blotted out the talk of demons or spirits, and started to scribble in the present tense. Each word they wrote was a promise, a vow.

  That’s the funny thing about humans. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was mortal too once, but you remember how well that turned out, don’t you? Now I’m a god I have a different perspective. Humans seem to think they can control their own lives. They think that, somehow, if they act a little differently, they can make everything turn out right. It’s never that simple. You can call it fate, if you like. Or karma, or destiny, or whatever. But something always gets in the way. Isn’t that what history means?

  Even as the summer began to bubble up through the paving stones, they huddled close, thinking that if they were separated even by a couple of inches then everything might fall apart again.

  ‘Promise me,’ Yuying whispered into the dark at night, listening to him breathing beside her.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘We will never leave each other’s side again.’

  ‘I promise. You?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Jinyi, I promise.’

  And then their hands met, and their faces drewer closer, and they would briefly fool themselves into believing that these promises, which would prove impossible to keep, were enough to keep them safe.

  The days stretched out into russet and burnt amber, so sticky that when Jinyi finally emerged from loading trays into the belching ovens and fetching others out all day long, he found his hair turned itchy and damp, and his face transformed into a puffy pink sigh. The factory stayed open another hour with the sunlight. This extra hour of work was greeted by the workers not with annoyance, however, but with celebration. Everywhere people seemed to be excited, awash with energy, saying they would work for free if the Party asked them to and competing to see who could show the most loyalty to the new state, ‘a China finally run by the people’. They stayed in the factory, in the reallocated fields, the food halls and the building sites until all traces of sunlight had disappeared, until their tense muscles had begun to sob, until they were sent home smiling.

  As Yuying and Jinyi soared back through the crowded streets on their shared bicycle, dodging marching soldiers and market officials shepherding crowds back to the greener outskirts, slipping past the last few rickshaw men unsure what to do with themselves now they had been forced to give up their feudal trade, Jinyi had to remind himself to keep pedalling. He was distracted by his satisfaction, by the twenty-one-year-old perched on the handlebars, and by the hopes he had squeezed to fit her life. If he forgot, they would topple into the pavement, where, if they lingered too long, they would be removed from sight. The streets had to be kept clean – appearance was everything. It was only when they turned the corner onto Bian Shi’s street, with the older stone mansions poking out from between the hastily assembled brick huts, that they heard the commotion.

  ‘Aiii! Old woman, you are making no sense! Just give us back our chicken and we won’t report you to the authorities, how about that?’

  Bian Shi was standing in the courtyard of the old house, doing her best to make her small frame fill the large gate. In front of her stood a man and a woman – each wit
h dark faces, red noses and knotted, dirty hair – who could keep neither still nor quiet. From behind her, in the house, the leisurely clucks of a chicken could clearly be heard.

  Bian Shi puffed out her chest. ‘This is my chicken. How dare you accuse me of stealing! I’ve never seen you before in my life!’

  ‘Look!’ They tried agitated reasoning. ‘We were working at the market when we noticed that one of our chickens had escaped, one with white feathers and a black plume. We looked everywhere, and someone on this street said they had seen you pick up a chicken, one with a black plume and white feathers, earlier today.’

  ‘Who? Who told you that? Tell me!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Look, we know you’ve got a chicken in there. We can hear it! Don’t think you can cheat us, just ’cos you’re hungry! You’ve got it easy here, old woman, in your big house – we’re supposed to be equal now!’

  ‘Now, listen to me. I don’t care for your insinuations. It’s my chicken. I’ve had it months. And I certainly don’t intend to eat it. It’s a pet.’

  They poor couple stared at each other with shocked, open mouths. They did not understand. Animals fell into two categories: work or food. Horses, donkeys, oxen and mules comprised the former. Pigs, cows, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, mules, dogs, snakes, rabbits, mice, any kind of bird, cats, squirrels, monkeys and many others made up the latter. To keep a plump, juicy animal and not eat it seemed the very embodiment of the crazy bourgeois they had been warned about.

  ‘You’re crazy! We can’t go back without our chicken – we’ve got quotas to fill, and we’ve already made offerings to the god of heaven and hell to keep our brood safe.’

  ‘Well, you’re not supposed to be following those feudal superstitions anymore, so it serves you right!’

  ‘And you’re not supposed to boss us around anymore. We may be peasants, but we’re also citizens now. We know the cadre in our village – he had supper at our house last year. Ha! Wait till he hears about this!’