Under Fishbone Clouds Page 26

  Here he paused and grinned, almost oblivious to the fact that the small group was trying to inch away from him. Manxin and her bucket were slowly being edged closer to the hiccupy flow of yellowy water. His words were drifting over her head; it was the clearing of throats and rigid shoulders around her that alerted her to the possibility that something was not right. There were three more people in front of her – soon she could go back home. She willed them faster.

  ‘So, what I want to ask all you is, while they are working at the furnace all day and all night to meet their commune’s quota, who do you think is in the fields, who do you think is growing the rice?

  The group shifted as the stocky twenty-something in front of Manxin turned and slipped from his place in the line, clenching his teeth.

  ‘You’re drunk, and you’re making a scene. Pull yourself together! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking like this in front of women and children.’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of the truth, boy,’ the man muttered back. ‘You’re not blind. What do you think is going to happen?’

  ‘That’s enough! Now, we’re going to go back to waiting in line, and you’re not going to say another word. There’s police and soldiers all around who might be interested in your opinion, but we’re not. So why don’t we all forget you said anything, understand?’

  The man opened his mouth to reply, but instead mumbled under his breath before turning and stumbling away. They caught a few words left over as he walked off – ‘trying to be helpful … you’ll see … nothing pretty about the truth … idiots …’

  The whole line seemed to shake itself off, but remained quiet, pensive, though Manxin had forgotten all about the strange conversation by the time she had finished her turn at the tap and hauled the slopping bucket back to her impatient grandmother.

  Yuying returned soon after, and bent straight to the small stove without bothering to remove her jacket. Her hair was tightly bunned, and thin furrows of skin twitched at her smile as she swept through the ragtag clutter of the busy room. She was henlike, happy to be busy, to not have too much time to stop and think, getting lost in the little corners of her own life. She looked at her son and thought of her husband. Her hands tipped the pan to heat the last slither of oil above the fire. She shouldn’t feel this way. This was not what she had wanted for her future: all of them walking all days with hunger churning their bellies; barely seeing her husband or her children because of her shifts at the factory and then at the communal furnace, where they were just as set upon building a new country as she and Jinyi had been of building a new marriage. But, despite it all, she was happy. They were together, still, and coming home late at night to the sound of three children snoring in the dark of her room was all she could ask for.

  While Yuying fried the last of the cornflour batter into pancakes, Manxin pondered why it was that her father, who was the best cook in the house, was also the person who cooked the least. The best things must be stored away or else they will lose their powers, she concluded. To become too good at something can be dangerous. She vowed not to practice too much at anything that mattered.

  ‘Eat up,’ Yuying told her two eldest. ‘This is going to be our last meal at home for a while.’

  They looked at her as if she was joking.

  ‘Is that because there’s no food left?’ Manxin asked.

  ‘No,’ Yuying laughed. ‘Of course there’s food! We’ll still eat, only you and your brother are going to have to eat all your meals at school, and your Pa and I will eat at the factory.’

  ‘But I hate the school food. It’s not fair! Why must we eat it, Ma?’ Dali asked.

  ‘Because we need to take our cooking pots to the furnace. Oh, don’t pull that face, Hou Dali. The sooner we make more steel, the sooner our country will became powerful again. You want to help, don’t you?’ Yuying said.

  Dali nodded sheepishly, but he was not convinced.

  When you have lived as long as I have – which is to say, longer than anyone should be asked to remember – it becomes easier and easier to spot similarities in the smallest actions. The push towards dining halls and communal eating, for example, reminds me of something that happened under the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Now, you cannot unify a huge country by being diplomatic: Qin Shi Huang was ruthless, bloodthirsty and merciless, but he got the job done. Naturally fearing reprisals and rebellions, as soon as he had defeated the last of the resisting kingdoms he sent an edict out around the country: all weapons were to be handed over to his army. This included kitchen knives, garden tools and any other sharp implements that could be misused. Without kitchen knives, communal eating, with meals shared between large groups, soon became a necessity. However, the edict ignored one important point: when deprived, the first thing people do is improvise.

  Both Yuying and Granny Dumpling picked at the edges of the dishes, pushing them towards the two children, who nevertheless complained of unquenched hunger once everything was finished. Yuying noted that her mother had been eating less and less since they had received the news about her middle daughter, Chunlan. She and her husband had died in a local struggle at the beginning of the year. The starving locals in the rural village had broken down the door to their house when they heard that the well-off family had been stockpiling food for themselves during the famine, and, in the ensuing fight for the few measly supplies in the backroom, the villagers had bludgeoned to death husband, wife and their two toddlers.

  Yuying wrapped a single soggy pancake in a sheet of smudged newspaper for Jinyi. She kissed the baby and then searched through the cupboard, to see if there were any knives, nails, keys, spoons or anything else made of metal which she might have missed during the last search.

  ‘Now, you be good for your Granny Dumpling and go to bed when she tells you. If you’re good, I’ll be back to tell you a story,’ Yuying said, hovering by the door.

  ‘Ma, why do we have to burn things?’ Dali asked as she turned to go.

  ‘Why? Well, fire makes things pure, and it helps us,’ his mother replied.

  ‘How?’

  ‘We use fire to change metal, to make new things that help people. But we must be very careful, because fire can become angry and jealous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is so hot. Think how uncomfortable you would be if you were boiling hot and sweaty all day.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dali paused. ‘But why do we have to burn things?’

  ‘Because we want to be good Chinese. Don’t you want to be good too?’ Yuying said, before turning and leaving.

  ‘Why don’t you go too, Granny Dumpling?’

  ‘I’m not strong enough. The ancestors stole my strength when they stole the colour from my hair. But I’m sure you will be strong enough soon. Not long now and you’ll be able to go and help them. Would you like that?’

  Dali did not answer, but looked back down at his collection of aeroplane pictures, his eyes skirting over the smeared whirl of propellers, the slick tilt of lazy wings and, somewhere amidst the blur, the squinting, grinning pilots. After a while, he looked back up.

  ‘Would I have to melt bits of planes?’

  ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t think so,’ she reassured him, but the truth was that the people manning the obligatory furnaces seemed to be melting anything they could get their hands on.

  Fire is not only furious and possessive – it is also the condition of existence. All is burning, the Buddha began the Fire Sermon; our longing for the world is aflame. For where we think fire to be the reckless abandon and impulse of unchecked passion, we are wrong; it is the sober work of the senses, and because of this it is even more dangerous. Longing, greed, suffering, hatred, sorrow – these are fires afflicting every pore of the body, spreading through every crevice of the mind. These are fires that cannot be quenched, that are fed by every attempt to extinguish them. Only by becoming dispassionate, the Buddha noted, by giving up the fiction of the self, the idea of being in the world, can these fires be tamed, managed.r />
  The tumbling gushes of smoke shaded the shrinking moon, and Yuying instinctively covered her mouth as the air became thick and dry. The whole of their block had been organised to man one furnace, and each of the households brought their own possessions, along with an unspoken sense of uncertainty, to feed to the fire. She entered the compound, loosely marked out by a straggly wire fence, and Jinyi waved to her, a lopsided smile spreading across his face. He was sweaty and red beside the puffing brick hulk that the group had hastily assembled in imitation of the one the young army recruits had built near the factory. When Jinyi had begun asking questions about the process, a young soldier had pushed a lump of rough ore into his hands and said, ‘Here’s the science part: keep it fucking hot!’

  ‘You look tired,’ he said, concerned. He dropped the glowing tongs and pulling off a singed glove to wipe the sweat from his face.

  ‘Everyone looks tired. That’s how you know how hard people are working.’

  He laughed. ‘How are the children?’

  ‘They’re good. The baby –’

  ‘We don’t have time for your bourgeois chats!’ A potbellied man with receding hair interrupted. It was Yangchen, the head of the commune now, the friendly manner that he had shown in the restaurant kitchen turned into a semi-permanent sneer. ‘I know you must be finding it difficult, Bian Yuying, following my orders when once your family treated me like a slave. But times have changed, and you will have to accept that. You know the rules. The commune is your family now, so don’t try and pretend you’re any better than the rest of us.’

  Yuying blushed and bit her lip.

  ‘We’ll make the quota,’ Jinyi said. ‘So please forgive me, Comrade Yangchen. It was my fault, and I must have caught my wife off guard. She has had a busy day at the factory and –’

  ‘We’re all busy,’ Yangchen replied. ‘We all must work for the good of the commune, the good of the country, the good of the people. You two are no exception. You may think you are special, Hou Jinyi, but we all know what you really are. Have your little chat; do what you wish, but do not think it will not be noted.’

  Yangchen rolled up his sleeves and huffed along with the furnace, and Jinyi and Yuying muttered to each other in lowered voices, drowned out by the busy movements of the small crowd around the insatiable brick beast.

  ‘They’re good. The baby is eating a lot, which is good.’

  ‘What about Dali? Has he been in a fight again?’ Jinyi asked.

  ‘No. He’s fine. They’re all fine,’ Yuying replied, impatient to be seen to be joining in with the work.

  ‘OK, OK. But how can I know? I’m never there. I’m always either here or at the factory. You know, this isn’t what I expected family life to be like.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You’ll only get us into more trouble. You know you have a family, and that every single one of them looks up to you. You know it all in your heart, even if not with your eyes. Now come on, we’ll talk later, I promise.’

  Yuying strode away towards where the ladders and pipes crossed beside the roaring furnace, and Jinyi tried not to lose his temper. He had spent his youth longing to have a family of his own; now he had a wife and three children, only to be told by the state that the commune was to be his new family.

  The quota would be made, but only if they were to do the same thing they did last month: lie. It’s no big deal – everyone does it, they all assured each other; we are bound to make up the difference next month, oh, without a doubt. What they did not know, though some were beginning to suspect, was that the lumpy pig iron they made was useless – the quality of their finished product was, predictably, poor. The Great Leap Forward, designed to enable China to overtake Britain in steel production within a decade, was in fact driving the country backwards into a squalor of waste and shortage. However, not everyone can share this god’s eye view, and the men and women panting through the long hours in that little compound were usually happy enough to confuse busyness and increased fervour with progress.

  As midnight drew closer, Yuying sidled close to Jinyi, who was standing near where the extracted ooze was cooling. ‘You’re thinking about him again.’

  He shrugged. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can usually guess what you’re thinking. Isn’t that what marriage means? You’re still worrying.’

  ‘No, of course not. I was the same at his age, fantasies and little bits of dream spilling out of my ears. It’s just boy stuff. I’m sure he can take care of himself.’

  She knew he was lying, lying to give her hope, so she thought better of giving her doubts strength by voicing them. Instead she said, ‘So you don’t think he’s –’

  ‘No. Whatever you are going to say, no, I don’t. Worrying about things just makes them more likely, you should know that. Come on, I’ve only got an hour left, and I’ll check on them all when I get back.’

  ‘What about Yangchen?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ll find a way of calming him down. We used to be friends: it shouldn’t be too hard.’

  The muddled group of workers all wore identical outfits, dark trousers and jackets in various stages of decay, though not all had the luxury of shoes. The exhausted faces looked crab-pink in the moonlight, and they scuttled around the furnace as if they were indeed crustaceans, worshipping what could have been a giant husk of shiny shipwreck washed to shore.

  There was something about their son that both Jinyi and Yuying could not place. Perhaps it was the furrowed brow that was often the start of a tantrum, or the sentences he came out with that only made sense to them days after he had spoken. Perhaps it was the unhappiness he never owned up to.

  Jinyi set down the last pile of the night’s freshly chopped logs, and wandered over to where Yangchen was standing watching the other men and women scrabble round the heat.

  ‘Cigarette?’ Jinyi offered his last scuffed half-stub to his old colleague.

  Yangchen took it and lit up without replying.

  ‘Comrade, you remember that night during the civil war when the restaurant’s roof came crashing down, and we were all off work for weeks? Bian Shi kept paying us, and brought food to those of us with families, she –’

  ‘I know where you’re going, Jinyi. That’s your problem, clinging to the old ways. All of that is gone now, wiped clean. We’re remaking the world from a blank slate.’

  ‘I just wanted to apologise, Comrade. You can see we’ve been working hard here; there’s no one come near this furnace who would deny it. Neither my wife nor I will talk out of line again, I swear. Perhaps, if you could spare an hour or two of your time, you might honour us with your presence for dinner some time, and let us prove how devoted we are to the cause.’

  Yangchen weighed it up. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Tomorrow? Well, of course, we would be delighted, but –’

  ‘Then tomorrow it is. Don’t worry, I know where you live.’

  Yangchen threw down the butt, then strode off to shout at a pair of gloved women bickering over the fragile apparatus. Jinyi sighed and set off home, while the rest of the compound families drew closer to the furnace, as if to prove their hearts by enduring its heat.

  It was only a few hours later, after two night feeds and one nightmare, that Jinyi and Yuying awoke entwined, a mess of limbs and tousled hair, with the baby crying and light beginning to haze shyly through the windows. As Jinyi kissed his wife, he whispered of his conversation with Yangchen.

  ‘Dinner? On the only night of the week we don’t have to be at the furnace? Without a wok, without any food? Do you want us to lose face?’

  ‘We’ll take a few bits back from the canteen and make a few cold dishes – cucumbers in chilli oil, a few tea eggs – and the rice wine will make it go down fine.’

  Yuying considered mentioning the children and their endless appetites, the dwindling supply of liquor left from her father’s cellar, or the rumoured shortages sweeping from city to city, but decided against it. She didn’t want to risk the children
overhearing and getting scared.

  Jinyi looked at her and smiled, knowing how to change her mind. ‘I know you, Yu, even if we were starving you wouldn’t turn away a guest.’

  Yuying raised her eyebrows. ‘We couldn’t starve, Jinyi. That’s a thing of the past. The Party will look after us now, as long as we work hard.’

  Jinyi left the bedroom and the waking children to his wife and mother-in-law – this was their part of the day – and picked up the pail to refill it at the nearby tap. Yet as soon as he had pulled open the stiff, unlocked front door, he was confronted with the green shirt and cap of a grumpy postal worker, who shoved a dirty piece of paper into his hand. On one side were a few barely legible characters, and on the other was written ‘Bian Jinyi’.

  ‘Wait. Where’s the envelope?’ he asked the postal worker.

  The grumpy man sighed. ‘Strange thing, actually. This bit of paper was found inside a package sent to the official at the market. It must have been shoved in secretly by someone who couldn’t afford the postage. You’re lucky you only live round the corner, and that there aren’t too many Bians round here anymore.’

  ‘My name isn’t Bian,’ Jinyi said. ‘I mean, it used to be, for a while, but –’

  ‘I don’t really care,’ the grumpy man said. ‘I’ve done my bit.’

  With that he strode down the street, leaving Jinyi holding the dirty sheath in his hands. He finally flipped it over and read through the short note:

  Bian Jinyi. Old Hou wants to let you know your aunt has been shot. Burial on Friday. He is in field hospital here. Farmhouse taken by commune, everything gone. Come as soon as you can. A friend.

  Jinyi drew in breath, and put down the pail. A friend? He didn’t know that either he or his old family still had such things. Auntie Hou, gone at last. Old Hou in trouble. Good. He screwed up the dirty sheet of paper and threw it out into the alley.