Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

‘That’s an easy thing to say,’ Dongming replied. ‘But then you’ve never said where you came from in the first place. You’ve seen our house: my grandfather helped build it when my dad was a child and the backyard was full of fields.’

  ‘You’re lucky. No one goes anywhere they don’t have to.’ Jinyi picked up another stone and rolled it between his fingers, studying the way its surface jittered in the slats of light between the clouds.

  ‘So, I was right. You are running away. It’s not that easy, saying you’ve got no history and suddenly making it so, is it? I was born here. And if I’m born again, I’ll be born again in the same house, by the same crooked table and tame fire, amid the same stink of coal and sweat and mothy fur. That’s just how it is. You’re crazy if you think it’s going to be any different anywhere else.’

  ‘But how can you know anything if you never leave this place?’ Jinyi said.

  ‘The next town will be the same as here, probably worse. You think all the people passing through looking for work have found it? They don’t just head one way, you know. There isn’t work anywhere, and that’s not going to change with all this fighting. If you ask me, the only option is to just get on with life. That or join the war. Oh, Jinyi, stop thinking about yourself. You think life’s difficult? You don’t know shit. A few starved corpses and executions in the schoolyard. That’s just the beginning. Haven’t you heard about what they do to people up north? There’s only so far you can run, you know,’ Dongming said.

  ‘I’m not running away.’

  The older boy snorted contemptuously. But he quickly checked himself, and turned to his friend. ‘What do you think you’re going to find? What is it you want? No, wait. I don’t really want to know. All those daydreams – I’m not sure it can be right, giving in to all those fantasies.’

  ‘What else is there?’ Jinyi said.

  Dongming grinned, then spat. ‘You dig your heels in, and live.’

  Jinyi shrugged, still rolling the stone between his fingers. He rubbed his thumb over its rough edges, then put it back down.

  ‘Look, let’s go to a restaurant,’ Dongming said. ‘I’ve still got enough change to get us drunk enough to at least believe we’re in another city. Not that it’ll take you much to get that way. But someone’s got to teach you to drink before you run off somewhere else. Come on.’

  Streams of dirt were collecting between the crooked paving stones, so the two boys slipped into the first dingy restaurant they came to. There was no menu – they got what they were given, and paid with the last of the coins dug from their pockets. The liquor was sour and stank of long-rotten cereal (only the Japanese were now allowed to eat rice), but they sipped it regardless, sitting with the potato-nosed man who was owner, chef, waiter and tin-bucket dishwasher rolled into one. All three of them drank in silence.

  The rain began to fall, a thousand spiders shimmying down translucent threads. Neither of them had had enough to drink to restart their conversation. Instead they watched from the window as a young woman walked shakily down the street, every few steps putting a hand out as if to steady herself against an imaginary wall, or raising the other to push back the stray wet hairs stuck to her forehead. Her left eye was dark and swollen, and a thin cut tugged at the top of her mouth. Recognising her from the Celestial Gardens, Dongming turned away and poured another drink into each of the three chipped glasses.

  ‘If you ask me, there is only one way out of here,’ Dongming said. He waited, and then looked at Jinyi, who, not used to the liquor, had his eyes half closed and his thick dark eyebrows sloped together above his pale face. Dongming was repeating himself, and he knew it, pitching himself towards the distance to see if his thoughts would carry his words that far.

  ‘My brother, he was a stupid bastard. Lazy too. The whole house used to curse him for keeping us awake with his snores. I swear they made the walls shake. My dad once threw a bowl of water over him to shock him out of it. He woke up all right, but he just wiped his face with his sleeve, turned over and started snoring again. My dad used to get so mad with my brother that he’d lash out at the lot of us. But now that he’s gone, no one remembers any of that.’

  ‘So?’ Jinyi said, unwilling to consider the fact that his own uncle and aunt may now be missing him. He sipped at the liquor and shuddered as it burnt the hollow of his throat.

  ‘So, why shouldn’t I follow him? He’s not the only one who can do something. Something real, I mean,’ Dongming slurred.

  ‘Real? What about your speech – digging in your feet and getting buried in shit?’

  Dongming laughed, rubbing his fingers round the swollen rim of the glass. ‘That was for you. There is a difference between leaving with a purpose and leaving because you have no idea what your purpose should be. Most of those people we passed out there on the streets, they’ll be gone by morning, and we all know why. They’ve got no choice, but you have, yet you still haven’t said why you want to leave. Do you really think you’ll find work and food and riches in another city? Do you really think other towns have more crops, more machines to work, more coins to spend? Perhaps they do, but what if they don’t?’

  ‘That “perhaps” is enough for me. It’s the biggest word we’ve got. You’ve noticed it hanging on the edge of every sentence, like vultures over the shacks of the starving. Maybe. Perhaps. There are whole worlds inside those words, you’ve just got to prise them open,’ Jinyi replied.

  ‘No, Jinyi. They mean “No, not a chance in hell.” That’s all. They’re just a way of saving face. If we can beat the Japs – even just force them back up north – then we’ll have the whole place right in no time. Then there won’t be any maybe or perhaps. Then everyone will say is or for sure or without a doubt. If you ask me, it’s either fight or watch the city get washed away by dirty rain and rusty guns.’

  ‘You could always come with me.’ Jinyi looked at the table as he spoke, and the older boy turned away too, for this was the furthest this point could be pressed.

  ‘I can’t run away from my family. I either stay here and rot or go the same way as my brother, wherever he is. I’m not even sure what it is you’re expecting to find.’

  ‘When I get there, I’ll know. And then I’ll be able to come back, and hold my head up a little higher when I do. Places chew you up and make you part of the scenery. You’re not yourself: you’re just someone’s uncle’s cousin, or someone’s grandson. There must be places where there is just half a jin of opportunity – that’s all I’m looking for. A place where you can write your own story instead of getting stuck in a web of memories.’

  ‘But this country is made of memories. Even if a man can’t read or write, he still knows the name of his great-great-grandfather’s uncle’s half-brother and everything he did in his sorry life! You could come with me, Jinyi, and turn those memories around, like my brother.’

  ‘Can you see me with a gun in my hand?’

  The drinks were almost finished, and the streets outside were strangely peaceful in their evening glow, despite the hiccupping engine of a military truck skirting the outer walls.

  ‘You’re going to end up part of one of those stories, whatever you do,’ Dongming replied. ‘So you’d better choose a good one. Places make stories out of whatever they can. Think of my family sitting mulling over my brother every night. Or think of Old Li – you know, that thin businessman with the face full of ink-stain birthmarks. He spends all his time wondering if his wife will ever return, and, every time he looks into people’s eyes, he sees that no one else has forgotten it either. Look at the trees, the river, everything. I must have heard a hundred different stories about things that used to happen in the forest before it got torn up, and how people swear the river changed course after that girl threw herself into it. Oh, what was her name?’

  ‘Stories are like that. People bend their memories into stories to make themselves feel content, or to disguise the horror of everything around them. I don’t want to be like that. That’s why I left home in the fi
rst place.’

  ‘So we’ll both go.’ Dongming looked at the younger boy as if for assurance.

  ‘You’re suddenly serious. I was waiting to see what that looked like,’ Jinyi said.

  Dongming showed a fake smile, all yellow teeth and embarrassment. ‘Yes, I’m serious. If my useless brother can rewrite his story, then I can too. At least then there’ll be something to come back to.’

  ‘All right. Let’s stop talking about it and do it.’

  ‘All right. Sure. We’ll both leave this shitty little town.’ They raised their glasses and sank the scummy dregs of the bristly liquor.

  Neither dared ask exactly where the other planned to go. There were gaps and holes in everything Jinyi took for granted, and this, he felt, should be no different. When they left the shop a couple of hours later night had nuzzled up into the nooks and corners of the way home. The restless calls of the cats crept over the eaves above them. The two boys eluded the pair of soldiers on night duty by skirting through deserted courtyards, steadying each other so they didn’t trip over broken stools and empty chicken coops. When the time came to part, they were awkward, the alcohol wearing off into tiredness and despondence. Finally they bowed to each other. Both suddenly embarrassed by this, they turned and walked until they could no longer hear the lazy beat of the other’s feet against the soggy stones.

  Before the year was out Dongming and Jinyi’s former boss would jump from the highest stone bridge into the river, having never learnt how to swim. The same day his brightly feathered birds escaped from their cages and lived in the town’s trees until winter, when they suddenly departed. No one was able to explain how they continually managed to evade the Japanese’s persistent attempts to catch them, or why the birds, which had spent all their lives caged in a stuffy room, should survive so well in the wild. Both would eventually be attributed to the fact that, unlike every other bird known to the city’s inhabitants, they never emitted even the smallest sound, neither morning song nor warning squawk.

  It was the men in Dongming’s family who would die first, starved and exhausted, working for scraps on the building sites the soldiers had taken over. The asthmatic grandmother and the unmarried aunts survived in their papery skin a little longer. No one was left to witness them mixing sawdust into their stingy bowls of millet after the little sitting-room Buddha was requisitioned by troops as they took it to the town centre to be pawned.

  Dongming would head south, hiking through villages the Japanese had not bothered with, and circling down toward Chongqing, the Nationalists’ capital since they fled Nanjing in the wake of the invasion. Chongqing was then a city divided in half by the fast-flowing Yangtze river, the longest in China, and buffeted between the mountainous plateaus of Tibet to the west and south and the Japanese-controlled areas to the east. Even seventy years later the stretches of grassland amid the hills would remain cordoned off because of the amount of mines laid by the retreating army to protect their last base.

  Perhaps Dongming died crossing the expansive minefield, something even the Japanese did not dare to attempt. Perhaps he joined the ranks of the Nationalists and, when both the world war and the civil war were finished, fled with the rest of the higher-ranking officials to Taiwan. Perhaps he worked in one of the prison camps that sat at the top of some of Chongqing’s mountains, collecting mist and guarding the Communist prisoners until their executions. Perhaps he was imprisoned by the Communists when the People’s Republic was created, and was re-educated, sent to the fields or shot. In all likelihood, he never made it as far as Chongqing. But because Jinyi did not hear from him again, he must remain as a ghost to us, on the other side of knowledge. There are some things that even I am not allowed to tell.

  Jinyi followed the thin river which skittered beneath the mountain ranges. On the high ridges, stretches of the Great Wall had already crumbled into a few decayed teeth stubbing out of rocky gums. He had decided to head north because south would be back towards his uncle, his aunt, the dregs of his family. North was the edge, the wall; where the past spilt over into today. Besides, it would be madness to follow the Japanese south, and, if there was to be no escape, why not go against the grain, towards the eye of the hurricane: Manchuria, which grew closer and closer each day.

  Occasionally he strayed close to the train tracks he had once longed for, but he always backed away, so as not to be mistaken for a deserting railway worker. The only things that seemed to rush past him were goods trains, carrying coal. Some days he passed villages where rickety stalls served watery dumplings and dried-flower tea brewed from warmed-up rainwater, villages too small for the invading troops to have bothered stopping at as they marched through. Half starved, he would eat until he felt ready to retch. He stole sleep on porches and in railway storehouses. Just a bit further, keep going, I’ll get there soon, he told himself.

  He stopped in small cities, towns, villages. He worked as a servant, a childminder for a rich family, a farm hand, an oddjob man on building sites, a carpenter’s apprentice. Yet in every place his feet would begin to itch, his hopes would carry him on. He kept walking. The seasons changed from bracken to jasmine to gingko. His bare feet blistered into hooves.

  His seventeenth birthday snuck up on him and yet he kept on pushing north, pursuing that part of him he could not yet name, following dirt roads etched through the granite and long grass by the stubborn steps of driven mules. Wheat fields, barley fields, whole days spent longing for his parents.

  And as he walked, Jinyi thought of those snippets of conversations he had heard in the backrooms of restaurants: that the Communists would bring the country a new beginning so that getting a job wouldn’t depend on knowing someone’s uncle or brother or providing them with a fistful of cash; so there wouldn’t be any more foreigners squeezing the marrow out of the country; so rice would be shared equally between everyone. Jinyi’s stomach whined, moaned. He found these ideas hard to believe, knowing, after all, that with a little rice wine and the promise of better things people can get carried away. If it were possible to swap lives, he reasoned, the whole world would already have become an electric storm of flitting souls.

  Walking is hard work. I should know, I trudged behind him most of the way. Why did I bother? I know what it is like to spend your life chasing an elusive dream. And since we’ve got a little time, on the long trek between Hebei and Manchuria, I may as well tell you how I ended up here too.

  My real name is Zao Jun, and before I was the Kitchen God I was an ordinary mortal, just like you. I assume you are already familiar with my face, my finely curled moustache and long black goatee, for there was a time when every house in the country kept my likeness above the stove, and quite a few are now doing so again. There are many who wish to slander me for reasons I cannot quite fathom – if they envy the gods then they have no real idea of what we do – and have put about a story that depicts me as a horny old fool. They assert that I abandoned my wife after falling in love with a beautiful young woman; that I was then visited by bad luck, and lost the young woman, all my money and even my sight; that I stumbled starving through the forests until I was finally taken in and fed by a sympathetic woman who I confessed my sins to; that in doing so I cried such remorseful tears that my eyes were healed and I saw that the woman who had treated me so well was my old ever-loving wife. They go on to say that I was so overcome by shame that I then threw myself into the stove. However, let me tell you that there is no truth in this tale – its only purpose seems to be to tarnish my reputation.

  I would never have abandoned my wife for someone else, for my wife was the most beautiful woman in our village. I loved her the first moment I saw her, following her father to the market where her family would trade corncobs for some of the plump red chillies my family laid out on our flat roof. Sometimes I would lie up there myself in the dusty sun of those long childhood afternoons among the peppers. From there I could watch her bag-laden family, the stooped father and his three daughters, as they made their way down the r
ocky path toward the fallow stretch where everyone would gather to haggle every month after the new moon. Her long plait used to swish down to the small of her back, a smile always flittering around the edges of her lips. She had inch-long eyelashes and tiny feet, and every time my eyes met hers in the market I would blush, despite being five years older than her and nearly a full-grown man.

  Yet my feelings would have come to nothing had her father not been the worst gambler in the province. He left his daughters when he fled his debtors and, thanks to the local matchmaker, I got married only a few weeks later.

  When I think back now to the early days of our marriage – the shy way in those first weeks that my new wife always looked at the ground when speaking, or the way she would cling onto my body at night as if I was a raft in a storm-churned ocean – I am never sure whether to smile or cry. For those first, innocent days did not last long.

  We married in summer and kept each other warm through the long, bitter winter that followed. Our field was covered in frost until close to halfway through the next year and, after only a few weeks of sun, rainstorms washed the soil and the half-grown seeds away. We resorted to gathering shrubs and firewood in the forest, but in that second winter my mother died from the shortage. After the next short summer when the field was attacked by clouds of tiny green aphids, sucking the juices from the chillies and leaving them shrivelled and inedible, my sister followed her.

  We took to scavenging for food, hunting for hedgehogs and mice in the forest, making soups with leaves and grasses. My brother became so desperate that he tried to steal from our landlord’s house up on the mountain. He was caught and disembowelled, and we were turfed out of the house I had been born in.

  For close to a year we traipsed around other nearby villages, tending to my maddened father as if he was our child and searching for a second cousin he was convinced would help us. We did not find him; instead, after three hundred days of drinking murky puddle water and eating mushrooms and unripe fruits pinched from vines, after a miscarriage and countless days in which we would wash away each other’s dirt and sweat in the salty brine of our own tears, we had come almost full circle, and arrived at a town on the same mountain range that overlooked our former home. We could go no further.