The Dark Road Read online

  ‘Former Village Head, you must stand up for us,’ says Kong Zhaobo, a prominent member of the clan who attended high school in Hexi and now owns the only motorbike in the village. ‘Filial piety demands that we produce sons and grandsons. The male lines must continue. We can’t let the Party sever them.’

  ‘And anyway, the authorities said that we peasants can have a second child if our first one is a girl,’ says a man nicknamed Clubfoot, who is sitting by the television clutching his walking stick. ‘So why are they bunging IUDs in women who’ve only had one child? If this carries on, we’ll become a village where the children have no brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts. What kind of future is that?’ Clubfoot is always searching for ways to make money. Last year he bought a desktop computer, surfed the internet and informed everyone that a fortune could be made rearing a breed of wild duck that lays golden-yolked eggs. His house stands on the site of an ancestral temple to Confucius which was built by Kongzi’s grandfather and demolished in the Cultural Revolution.

  A frail, spindly woman, whose third daughter, Xiang, Kongzi once taught, speaks up. ‘The family planning squad came to our house today and demanded a 10,000-yuan back payment for Xiang’s illegal birth. She’s twelve years old now, for God’s sake! I told them we didn’t have any cash on us, but they searched our house, and found the two thousand yuan my eldest daughter sent us after slaving in a Shenzhen factory for a year. They took the cash, our bags of rice, our pots and pans, even our kitchen clock, and they want us to pay them the rest of the money by the end of the week.’

  ‘And you know where all that money will go?’ Clubfoot says, rubbing the handle of his walking stick. ‘Straight into the mouths of the corrupt bureaucrats in Hexi Town. Have you seen the new District Party headquarters they’ve built themselves? It’s vast. As grandiose as Tiananmen Gate. And after they’ve guzzled our money, they come to murder our babies. Well, this time, we can’t let them get away with it. We must fight back!’

  ‘No, that would be madness,’ says Kongzi’s father, stubbing out his cigarette and smoothing back his white hair. ‘The road out of the village has been blocked and a police boat is patrolling the reservoir. We’re trapped. If we put up a fight, they’ll crush us.’

  ‘The squad officers have the names of the one hundred women of childbearing age in the village,’ says Kong Wen, chair of the village family planning team. ‘We had to send them the list last week. Forty of the women will be subjected to an IUD insertion, and the sixty who have two or more children will be sterilised.’ Kong Wen worked in a Guangzhou clothing factory for three years, sewing zips into trousers. Almost every woman in the village is now wearing a pair of the Lee jeans she brought back with her. When she was informed that this crackdown was imminent, she gave her pregnant sister a letter of introduction stamped with an official seal and told her to escape to Beijing. As a result, she’s been given the minor role of record keeper during this crackdown, and once it’s over will probably be sacked.

  Yuanyuan pushes her way into the house, reeking of rotten cabbage. She’s eight months pregnant. Her home doesn’t have a dugout, so she’s been hiding in her neighbour’s vegetable hut. Squeezing down next to Meili, she announces: ‘I’ve just seen a woman halfway up a tree. She’s out of her mind! Refuses to come down. She says her baby’s up in the branches.’ Yuanyuan went to Guangzhou with Kong Wen and found a job in an Apple computer factory, where she plans to return after the birth of her child. She looks at her now and says, ‘You sucked up to the cadres when you came back here, hoping they’d make you village head. Well, are you happy now, helping them kill our babies? We’re women of Nuwa, descended from Goddess Nuwa, who created the Chinese people from the yellow soil of this plain. And now the government wants to stop us having children! Are they trying to eliminate the Chinese race?’ Yuanyuan is the only woman in the village to own a pair of knee-high leather boots. Meili longs for the day when she too can own a pair.

  The villagers in the yard who’ve been unable to squeeze into the house poke their heads through the open windows. ‘Even dogs have the right to bark before they’re slaughtered!’ one of them calls out. ‘Kongzi: why don’t you take the lead and speak out on our behalf?’

  ‘Yes, Kongzi!’ Kong Zhaobo agrees, running his hand along the turtleneck of his black sweater. ‘You’re eloquent and well read, and you’ve always had a rebellious streak.’ Kongzi’s defiant nature was recognised at the age of nine. When the entire school sang ‘Lin Biao and Confucius are scoundrels’, Kongzi dared change the words to ‘Confucius was a gentleman and a sage’, and was taken to the district police station. Thanks to his father’s back-door connections, he was released the next day, on condition that he sing the song correctly one hundred times. Kongzi’s real name is Kong Lingming, but after his courageous expression of support for his ancestor, everyone began to call him Kongzi – Confucius’s more common name. Sometimes they call him Kong Lao-er, meaning Kong the Second Son, the derogatory nickname given to the sage during the Cultural Revolution, or just Lao-er for short, which also means ‘dick’. As he grew up, his interest in his ancestor deepened, and he became the village authority on the sage’s life and works.

  ‘You’ve studied Sunzi’s Art of War,’ says Kong Dufa, a po-faced Party member who is married to the village accountant. ‘Just choose one of the thirty-six strategies and write out a plan.’

  Kongzi raises his palms. ‘No, no, I may be a teacher, but I have no formal training. I’m just a simple peasant, a farmer who’s read a few books. I can’t come up with any ideas . . .’

  Desperate to prevent him from becoming involved in a political protest, Meili throws Kongzi a meaningful look. He fails to notice. So, to attract his attention, she leans over to Nannan, who’s curled up in the lap of Kongzi’s mother, and gives her a sharp pinch.

  ‘Ouch!’ Nannan shrieks. ‘A mouse bit me, Grandma.’

  ‘Shh, little one,’ Kongzi’s mother says, rubbing Nannan’s arm. ‘Here, have a malt sweet.’

  ‘No, me want chocolate.’ Nannan hates the way malt sweets stick to her teeth. Villagers traditionally offer them to the hearth god at Spring Festival to make sure that when he meets the Lord of Heaven he’ll be unable to open his mouth and utter any inauspicious words.

  ‘I’ve heard peasants have poured into Hexi Town to protest against the crackdown,’ says Li Peisong. ‘They’ve stormed the Family Planning Commission and smashed all the computers and water dispensers. We should sneak out of the village tonight and go and join them.’ During the Cultural Revolution, Li Peisong was head of the village revolutionary committee and in 1966 was sent to Shandong Province to help Red Guards destroy the Temple of Confucius in the sage’s native town of Qufu. While swept up in the revolutionary fervour, he changed his name to Miekong – ‘Obliterate Confucius’. But by 1974, when the Campaign against Lin Biao and Criticise Confucius was in full swing, he’d undergone a change of heart. Not only did he fail to denounce Confucius at public meetings, he changed his name back to Li Peisong and married a member of the Kong clan. They now have two sons. The second son, Little Fatty, is two years old, but they still haven’t paid off the fine for his unauthorised birth.

  ‘What’s a water dispenser?’ asks Scarface, a man whose forehead is badly disfigured by a childhood burn. He is destitute, and can only pay for the education of his three daughters with beans adulterated with sand.

  ‘You know – those large plastic canisters that cadres have in their offices, filled with mineral water that’s supposed to cure a hundred illnesses. It works out at one mao a cup!’ This burly man, Kong Guo, went to Wuhan last year to work on a construction site but was arrested for not having the necessary temporary urban residence permit, fined two thousand yuan and escorted back to the village by the police.

  ‘So, they’re just drinking all our money away,’ says a mild, gentle man who cycles around the village every morning collecting eggs to sell in the county market. His fists are resting on the metal table, tightly clenche
d.

  A dishevelled peasant called Wang Wu stands up, unable to contain his rage any longer. ‘They wanted twenty thousand yuan for the illegal births of my two younger daughters. I told them I don’t have enough money even to buy seeds. So they tied one end of a metal cable to the central eave of my house, the other half to their tractor. When the tractor reversed my entire roof came off. Where do those bastards expect us to live now?’

  Suddenly, loud clanging thuds can be heard, the front gate swings open, and district policemen sweep inside followed by members of the family planning squad. The women in the house scurry into the kitchen and the men rush outside. Before Wang Wu gets a chance to launch into a tirade he’s bashed to the ground. Kongzi’s father steps onto a bamboo stool and shouts, ‘No fighting. No violence!’

  Clutching the plastic basin containing his aborted son, Kong Qing yells, ‘Fascist slaughterers! I’ll have my revenge! A life for a life!’

  Old Huan, director of the Hexi Family Planning Commission, steps out from behind the policemen. ‘I warn you, Li Peisong,’ he says, jabbing his finger aggressively. ‘If by tonight you haven’t paid the remaining nine thousand yuan for Little Fatty’s birth, we’ll confiscate your stove, pans and wok, and pull down your house!’

  Kong Guo elbows his way to the front and butts in, ‘Go ahead! If you tear our houses down, we’ll just come and move in with you.’

  The policemen head for Kongzi’s front door, shouting, ‘Yuanyuan was seen entering this compound. We must search the house.’

  ‘Step inside and I’ll kill you!’ Kongzi yells, waving a kitchen cleaver, unrecognisable when compared to the teacher in the grey nylon suit who walks to school every morning with his black briefcase. This is not his first experience of protest, however. In 1989, he travelled to Beijing to visit the man he still calls Teacher Zhou – a former urban youth who was sent to Kong Village in the Cultural Revolution and taught Kongzi in the village school. Together, he and Teacher Zhou marched through the streets of Beijing with the student protesters, waving banners and shouting slogans in support of democracy and freedom. The County Public Security Bureau has kept a detailed file of the subversive activities he engaged in during his month in the capital.

  In the yard, which is only half laid with concrete, the crowd grows agitated. Villagers begin to push and shove, knocking into the date tree sapling that’s propped up with bamboo sticks. Children and barking dogs climb onto a mound of broken bricks in the corner to escape the crush.

  District Party Secretary Qian, the most senior member of the squad, emerges from the crowd, accompanied by a hired thug, and shouts, ‘Kongzi, as a Party member, you have a duty to assist the squad with its efforts. If you don’t behave, we’ll fling you behind bars.’

  ‘Don’t you dare threaten my son, Mr Qian,’ Kongzi’s father says with quiet authority, dropping his cigarette stub and grinding it into the ground with his heel. ‘Get out of this yard.’

  Kongzi goes to stand beside his father. ‘Yes, this is my home!’ he says. ‘A Kong family home, and in here, the Kongs make the decisions. I’ve committed no crime. So, get out, and take your rotten minions with you!’

  ‘You want to start a fight, then?’ says the shaven-headed officer who arrested Fang two days ago. ‘We’ll bury you alive.’ He throws the hired thug a glance, signalling for him to give Kongzi a beating.

  But before he has a chance to strike, Kong Qing, who’s standing behind him, raises his basin in the air and, shouting ‘Fuck you!’ at the top of his voice, thrashes it down onto his head. Immediately the villagers grab bricks and shovels and attack the officers and policemen. The children perched on the compound walls hurl stones at Secretary Qian’s back. Inside the house, Kongzi’s mother crouches with the other women in the kitchen, holding Nannan tightly in her arms, while Meili cowers in the corner of the bed, pressing the folded quilt close to her belly, her eyes squeezed shut.

  Kongzi runs back inside to help Yuanyuan into the dugout, then grabs a spade, charges out again and strikes Old Huan on the shoulder. Dusty and beaten, Wang Wu swings a hoe at a policeman’s chest shouting, ‘May your home lie in ruins too.’ The shaven-headed officer grasps his arm and twists it up behind his back but is then struck in the ribs with a shovel. In a sudden rush of courage, the spindly mother of Xiang pounces on a policeman and sinks her teeth into his shoulder. The burly Kong Guo grabs an officer in an armlock and wrestles him to the ground, shouting, ‘Fuck your mother, you crooked bastard.’ Finding themselves outnumbered and overpowered, the panicked intruders flee. Kong Zhaobo and Li Peisong see Old Huan sprawled in a corner moaning, so they pick him up and fling him out onto the lane as well.

  ‘Bolt the gate, Meili!’ Kongzi’s mother says, once everyone has left. Meili opens her eyes at last, takes her torch and ventures outside. The red-and-gold Spring Festival couplets which she hung on either side of the door have been ripped to shreds. The date tree sapling has been knocked right over and Kong Qing’s aborted son lies trampled on the ground. As a piercing gunshot explodes in the distance, she quickly bolts the gate, then wedges a spade against it and runs back into the house.

  In the lanes outside, angry villagers pour out of their houses with hoes and spades and march to the school, Kongzi and his pupils leading the way holding rocks and sticks. When they reach the school’s compound walls, the policemen guarding the gates raise their batons and lash out at them.

  ‘Run, Teacher Kong!’ the children shout. The marchers scatter in panic. Little Fatty tries to keep up with his father Li Peisong, clutching the corner of his jacket, but is knocked over by the fleeing crowd, pulling his father down with him. Another procession of angry villagers emerges from a lane to the north, holding the old seamstress’s corpse in the air and shouting, ‘Every murder must be avenged!’ and ‘Give us back our property!’ Enraged by the sight of the corpse, Kongzi and his pupils turn round and attack the policemen at the gates. Young boys stuff a bundle of straw under a police car and toss lit matches onto it, while Clubfoot chases a police dog away with his walking stick. The women who’ve been locked in the school kitchen bash their way out into the playground, throw chairs at the family planning officers, then run off to grab bags of rice and fertilisers that were confiscated from their homes. The police sergeant fires another gunshot and the women drop the bags and retreat. Outside in the lane, the police car becomes shrouded in black smoke then, with a deafening bang, explodes into a ball of fire. The young boys light torches from the flames and toss them over the compound wall into the playground. ‘That man’s from the District Family Planning Commission!’ a voice shouts. ‘Chase him! Kill him! . . .’

  The infant spirit sees once more that February night nine years ago when Kong Village became a battlefield. Mother has come out to look for Father. She’s wearing a white down jacket. The north wind is whipping up her hair. When a gunshot rings out, she drops to her knees and shrinks into a tight ball, shivering with fear and cold . . . A man in a sergeant’s uniform switches on a megaphone and shouts: ‘Villagers! If China’s excessive population growth isn’t curbed, the whole of society will suffer. Our nation won’t be able to achieve sustainable economic development and take its rightful place in the world. Deng Xiaoping has commanded us to take effective measures to ensure the birth rate is brought down. An enemy of the family planning policies is an enemy of the state. A class enemy. The masses must not allow themselves to be manipulated by a small band of troublemakers. The grain and furniture we’ve confiscated is now state property. Do not touch them . . .’ Blazing torches fly into the playground, lighting up piles of doors, aluminium window frames and wooden rafters expropriated from the demolished houses. Below a locust tree further away, flames begin to rise from a heap of confiscated wardrobes, bookcases, fridges, enamel basins and trussed pigs. A cluster of ducks and chickens scurry off to a dark corner, frightened by the noise, while the family planning officers dart about, trying frantically to put out the flames. Outside in the lane, an angry mob swing their hoes a
nd spades at a white slogan painted on the compound wall which reads: SEVER THE FALLOPIAN TUBES OF POVERTY; INSERT THE IUDS OF PROSPERITY. A crack opens which grows larger and larger until the whole wall tumbles down. Fearing for their lives, the family planning officers run to a ladder and escape over the back compound wall.

  Mother stands by the gates and watches villagers surge into the playground and search through the piles, pulling out their spades, basins or chairs. Holding a kitchen clock close to her chest, a frail, spindly woman wanders through the crowd shouting, ‘Xiang, Xiang, where are you?’ Two boys in army caps waving long sticks herd a flock of mongrel ducks over the rubble of the fallen wall and off into a dark lane. Unable to find Father, Mother hurries home. Still gripping her electric torch, she runs down the treeless lanes that are illuminated by the fires’ orange glow. In a corner buffeted by the north wind lies a swept-up heap of snow scattered with dog faeces and the red shells of firecrackers that were detonated at Spring Festival.

  KEYWORDS: birth permit, Dark Water River, family planning office, propaganda van, Sky Beyond the Sky, subversive slogans.

  JUST AS DAWN is beginning to break, Kongzi creeps back into the house, collapses on the bed and pulls off his grimy glasses. ‘The county authorities are sending a thousand riot police to the village and a truckload of Alsatian dogs. We must escape at once.’

  ‘Where to?’ Meili says. ‘Why don’t we just hide in the dugout?’