The Dark Road Read online

  ‘Agh! So out of tune . . .’ Meili groans. Sensing he wants to make love to her, she pulls the peony-printed sheet over her thighs and tries to change the mood. ‘You must phone home tomorrow, Kongzi. Find out what the situation is.’

  ‘I told you, my father asked me not to get in touch until the baby’s born. All right, I’ll phone them, if you insist, but if the line is tapped and the police track us down, don’t blame me.’ He pinches her arm playfully.

  Meili hunches her shoulders and crosses her legs. ‘Just make sure you don’t tell them we’re in Sanxia,’ she says. In the breeze blowing across her face she can smell the scent of the osmanthus branches she put on the canopy. The smell always transports her back to her parents’ house and her grandmother, who planted an osmanthus tree in the garden the day Meili was born. She remembers how her grandmother always likes to rub the blossom between her fingers and dab the scent behind her ears.

  ‘So black and smooth,’ Kongzi says, stroking Meili’s hair that glistens like the skin of an eel.

  ‘At least it’s easy for me to wash my hair on this boat,’ she says, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. Every morning, she leans overboard and dunks her head in the river.

  ‘And such slender legs,’ Kongzi continues, running his hand up to her thighs.

  ‘Careful of the money!’ Meili gasps, and quickly presses the sachet of cash she sewed into the lining of her knickers to check that it’s still there. As he strokes her thigh she feels her face begin to flush. ‘If I weren’t pregnant, I’d have a slender waist as well,’ she whispers, nuzzling her head into the nape of his neck.

  ‘You’re beautiful from top to toe, but your best part is . . . here.’ He leans down and pulls her knickers off.

  ‘Can’t you even say “I love you” first? Since you watched that porn movie, you think you can just ram yourself inside me and tell me to moan.’ She cranes her neck round to check that Nannan is still asleep in the cabin, then closes her eyes and waits for Kongzi to repeat what he did last night.

  ‘No, my darling wife, all I want is to make you happy,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘That’s why I work so hard every day. I want to give our family a better life.’ Then he mounts her belly and pushes himself inside her.

  ‘No!’ Meili cries, knocking him off. ‘You know I black out when you go on top.’ She rolls onto her side, letting her belly rest on the deck, then reaches for an inflatable safety ring and wedges it under her head. Kongzi puts his arm around her and enters her from behind. Their breaths smell of the fried fishwort they ate for breakfast. Meili’s forehead and cleavage perspire and the blue veins on her belly pulsate. A stench of dead fish rises through the cracks in the wooden deck. The boat rocks from side to side as Kongzi moves in and out of her. A sense of well-being spreads through her soft ample body. ‘Careful of my belly. Gently, gently . . .’ Her head pressed against the bow, she raises her hips and clenches her thighs. With a loud groan, Kongzi releases a river of sperm into her and sinks back down onto the deck.

  Suddenly Meili sees the infant spirit flit before her eyes, laughing inanely. Waking from her daze, she pushes Kongzi back. ‘Get out of me,’ she cries. ‘I don’t want to give birth to a dead child.’

  ‘Stop worrying! Everything will be fine. We’re living on the river now. We’re free! Look at the beautiful view . . . “The distant shadow of the lonely sail vanishes into a blue-green void. / All that can be seen is the Yangtze River flowing to the edge of the sky.”’ He fumbles for his matches and lights another cigarette.

  ‘I just saw the infant spirit again,’ says Meili, still catching her breath. The moon has become hidden behind clouds and the scent of osmanthus in the air seems to be flowing from her skin.

  ‘You were dizzy. Your mind must have been playing tricks on you. I always follow Confucius’s advice: respect the gods and the spirits of the dead, but keep your distance from them.’

  ‘But I saw the spirit. It flickered right in front of me like a candle flame, then drifted to my belly button and vanished. It must have returned to Happiness’s body.’ She sits up and brushes off the insects that have settled on her bump. Then she looks out at the river glimmering in the darkness and sees a white polystyrene lunch box float by. A few days ago, she saw a dead baby with thick black hair float by just as slowly. As it passed, children climbed onto a rocky outcrop and prodded it with long twigs.

  ‘Happiness is punching me again,’ she says. ‘Look, you can see its little fists poking out! It wants me to give birth to it on the river so it can float to the sea and travel the world. It won’t be long now. Just another week or two.’

  Kongzi puts his hand on hers and exhales a cloud of smoke. Inside the cabin, Nannan coughs in her sleep. Meili looks up at the broken town. The ancient houses at the base of the mountain are flattened now, while the jagged edges of the unfinished structures above seem like the ramparts of a ruined city. On this single mountainside the past, present and future appear to have merged. Meili senses that her own future is hovering in the air above her, swirling about like the millions of sperm that are now entering her cervix.

  She lies back, rests her head on Kongzi’s thigh, then wipes her damp forehead and says, ‘Here, give me a puff of your cigarette.’

  KEYWORDS: soldering iron, family planning violators, stationary hands, imported oxytocin, miscellaneous expenses, dewy eyes.

  AT THE END of a long day, looking grief-stricken and dusty, Kongzi shuffles across a raft moored close to the bank, steps onto the boat and collapses into the cabin.

  ‘So you got through?’ asks Meili. When she sees the look of despair in his eyes her heart sinks. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’

  ‘Our house has been torn down. They bulldozed it, just like I bulldoze those buildings up there every day. They didn’t leave so much as a window frame.’ He digs into his large pocket and pulls out a small plastic doll with long yellow hair and a red dress which he found on the demolition site. He taps the dust off its face and hands it to Nannan.

  ‘They’ve demolished our house? What about the walnut wardrobe where I kept my photographs and my grandmother’s bamboo lute?’

  Kongzi lights a cigarette and presses it to his lips. A dragonfly that settled on the side of the boat darts into the air.

  ‘And your parents?’ Meili asks. She sees the ducks she let out to swim a few moments ago head for the shore, and wishes she could return them to their cage.

  ‘Their house wasn’t touched, thank goodness. I phoned Kong Zhaobo as well. He said the family planning squad destroyed the homes of nine families who refused to pay the fines. Li Peisong managed to pay off the remaining nine thousand yuan for Little Fatty’s birth, so he was allowed to keep his house. Of the forty-three villagers who were arrested, nine have been released and the rest are still waiting to be sentenced.’

  Nannan kisses the plastic doll and presses it close to her chest. ‘What’s her name, Daddy?’

  ‘Unlucky,’ Kongzi replies. He lies on his side on the bamboo mat, next to Nannan’s half-eaten banana, a pair of Meili’s knickers and the dirty vest he’s just pulled off.

  ‘Is she real, Daddy? I like her yellow hair. I want wash her face.’

  ‘But why did they bulldoze our house?’ asks Meili. ‘They had no idea I was pregnant. Perhaps the police were monitoring the line when you phoned your father last month.’ Turning to Nannan, she says, ‘Let me wash that doll before you play with it.’ The cabin is suffocatingly hot. Unable to bend down over her pregnant belly, Meili picks up Kongzi’s vest with her toes, folds it and places it on the stool. Then she goes outside, turns her back to the setting sun and inhales deeply. The scorching breeze blows against her sweat-soaked dress. ‘At least the Kong Village police won’t be able to track us down to this place,’ she says. ‘Not from a phone call.’

  ‘Probably not. But I’ve heard that the authorities here are sending police to check the documents of every migrant worker in the county. Our team manager told us to make sure our p
apers are in order.’

  ‘Let’s sail downriver, then. If the inspectors find me, that’ll be it.’

  Meili looks over to the bank and notices some men stepping off a van. Then a white boat approaches and a fat officer standing at the bow shouts out to her: ‘Hey, you with the big belly! Do you have a birth permit for that? Where are you from?’

  Panic-struck, Meili stoops down into the cabin and says, ‘Kongzi, quick! Start the engine. They’ve come to arrest us.’

  Kongzi scrambles to the stern and grasps the steering wheel, but before he manages to pull the start cord, three men from the van jump aboard and yank his arms behind his back. As swiftly and quietly as she can, Meili crawls to the starboard and lowers herself into the river.

  ‘Get back on the boat!’ one of the men shouts at her.

  ‘I’m just having a . . . w-wash,’ she stutters. She’s up to her shoulders in water, quaking with fear.

  ‘There’s no point trying to hide your belly from us. We can still see it through the water. Get back on board and show us your birth permit.’

  ‘She’s not pregnant – she’s just plump,’ Kongzi says, the colour draining from his face.

  ‘We’ll need to take her to the clinic to confirm that.’ As the man speaks, the white boat draws closer and is hooked to theirs. The fat officer at the bow takes a swig from his can of Coke then says to Meili, ‘Get out of the water! We’re from the County Family Planning Commission, and we’ve come to round up every woman in Sanxia who’s pregnant without permission.’ The silver buckle of his belt glints in the sun.

  Kongzi pulls Nannan out of the cabin and says, ‘It’s my wife’s first pregnancy. This girl here belongs to our neighbours.’

  ‘I’m your girl, Daddy, not neighbour girl,’ Nannan splutters, bursting into tears. ‘I not blabbing nonsense. Mummy, Mummy . . .’

  The fat man eyes Kongzi sternly. ‘If we take the girl away with us, will you still claim she’s not yours?’

  A man in black sunglasses steps aboard. ‘Any woman pregnant without authorisation is both violating the family planning laws and endangering the economic development of our nation,’ he says. ‘You think you can turn up here and breed as you wish? This is the Three Gorges Dam Project Special Economic Zone, don’t you know?’

  ‘If you cooperate with us, you won’t have to pay the fine,’ another man says. ‘But if you resist, we’ll get your village Party Secretary to arrest every member of your family.’

  ‘We’re peasants, with rural residence permits, and our daughter here is already five years old, so my wife’s entitled to have a second child,’ Kongzi says.

  ‘Five years old, you say?’ says the man in sunglasses. ‘Three, more like. And who knows how many more children you’ve got hidden away.’

  ‘My wife’s eight months pregnant. Don’t take her to the clinic, I beg you. I’ll pay the fine right now.’ Standing stripped to the waist among the men in white shirts, Kongzi appears feeble and submissive.

  The fat man drops his empty can into the river. ‘We’ve been ordered to terminate every illegal pregnancy we discover. If we let any woman off, our salaries will be docked.’

  The word ‘terminate’ throws Kongzi into a fury. ‘Have you no humanity?’ he shouts. ‘You want to kill our unborn child? Have you forgotten that you too once lay in your mother’s womb?’

  A female officer steps forward. ‘Humanity?’ she sneers. ‘If your baby turns out to be a girl, you’ll throw her into the river, so don’t talk to me about humanity! You migrant workers travel around the country, dumping baby girls as you go. You’re the ones who have no shame! You think we wanted to come here and deal with you squalid boat people? No, the higher authorities sent us here because of all the filth that’s been washing up downstream.’

  Meili remembers the dead baby she saw floating past the other day, and suspects that this is what the woman is referring to. She wishes she could sink into the water and swim away.

  ‘Enough talk!’ barks the man in sunglasses. ‘Take her to the van!’ Four men reach down, tug Meili out of the river and drag her ashore. When she tries to resist, an officer kicks her in the belly. She yells in agony and feels her limbs go limp. After they shove her inside the van, she looks through the back window and sees Kongzi knock an officer overboard with a wooden oar, then two men push him onto the deck and force him into handcuffs. As the van drives off, she hears Nannan weeping inside the cabin.

  The van trundles up through the flattened old town. Each bump on the road makes her aching belly throb. She screams to be let out, punches the window and bangs her head on the glass. The officer beside her grasps hold of her wrists. The van slowly climbs the mountain along a road flanked with new buildings, then turns down a dirt track and comes to a stop.

  Meili can smell a stench of blood which reminds her of Nannan’s birth, but this time fills her with dread. She’s pulled to the entrance of the concrete building but refuses to go in. She knows that this is where they want to rip Happiness from her. But the men push her inside, drag her to an operating room and close the door. A woman in a white uniform looks up from a desk. Meili runs over to her and pulls the woman’s hair. The woman digs her nails into Meili’s hands and shouts, ‘Quick, call Dr Gang!’ Two men yank Meili’s arms behind her back. Forgetting about her belly, she kicks at everything in sight: the men, the woman in white, the air, the stainless-steel surgical table, the walls. Another man tugs her back by the hair. Then the door opens and Dr Gang walks in with a syringe. ‘Hold her left arm out for me,’ he commands. Meili manages to wrench her arms free, but is quickly punched in the small of her back. Startled by the jolt, Happiness pokes a clenched fist through her belly. The woman in white kneels down and grips Meili’s legs. From behind, a man locks his arm around Meili’s waist and another man pulls her left arm out, holds it straight and says, ‘You can inject her now, Doctor.’

  Dr Gang lifts the syringe and stabs the needle into Meili’s upper arm. Meili sees the bulb dangling in front of her and the light filtering through cracks in the steel door begin to splinter and blur.

  ‘Where were you off to when I passed you in the corridor this morning?’ she hears the woman say.

  ‘To the latrines. The wawa I bought yesterday gave me the runs.’

  ‘Tell your wife that wawas must be soaked in boiling water and scraped clean before they’re cooked . . . Right, I think she’s under now. Lift her onto the table . . .’

  The infant spirit watches Mother being tied to the steel surgical table all those years ago, her hands bound in plastic and hemp ropes, her pale, exposed bulge resembling a pig on a butcher’s table.

  A man in a white coat rubs his nose, then plucks Mother’s knicker elastic and watches her flinch. ‘Give her another shot, to be safe,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t kill my baby, don’t touch my –’ Mother splutters, white foam bubbling from her mouth. But the man slides his hands beneath Mother’s bottom and pulls off her knickers. ‘Hooligan!’ Mother weeps. ‘If my baby dies, its spirit will haunt you for eternity.’ She tries to spit the foam covering her mouth onto his face, but it rises only slightly then falls back on her lips.

  The man begins to prod Mother’s belly.

  ‘Don’t do it, I beg you . . .’ she moans. ‘Let me keep this child. I won’t have another, I promise . . . It’s a Chinese citizen. It has a right to live . . .’

  The man is handed a second syringe with a much longer needle. He inserts the tip into Mother’s belly and pushes it all the way in.

  ‘Stop, stop! Don’t hurt my baby . . .’

  The infant spirit observes its first incarnation writhe and squirm as the long needle enters its head. When the cold astringent liquid is released into the brain, the spirit sees the cells shiver and contract, and the fetus flail about in the amniotic fluid, pounding Mother’s warm uterine walls, then gradually grow weaker and weaker until all that moves is its quivering spine.

  ‘Is this what your mothers brought you into the world for?�
�� Mother cries out to the men. ‘To kill babies? Well, you’d better kill me too, while you’re about it . . .’

  ‘Good work, Dr Gang!’ the woman says. ‘You must have been studying me on the sly.’

  ‘It was much simpler than this morning’s one. Look, when you press the belly here you can see the head clearly. It was easy to hit the target.’

  Ignoring her moans and handling her as roughly as they would a corpse, the doctors part Meili’s legs, slide a speculum into her vagina, mop up the discharge, then, when the mouth of the cervix is visible, insert a prostaglandin suppository. Meili tries to scream but can produce only a soft sigh. She tries to roll onto her side but, apart from her neck, nothing will move. ‘Forgive me, Happiness,’ she whispers. ‘I couldn’t protect you. I’d kill myself if I could, so that we could die together, but my hands and feet are bound . . .’ She lifts her head, squeezes her eyes to expel her tears and stares at her belly. A sharp pain shoots through her womb, spreads to her lower back and flows to every part of her body.

  ‘Goddess Nuwa, Mother of Humanity, rescue me!’ Mother wails. ‘Oh, Father of Darkness—’

  ‘What a fine voice you have,’ the man says coldly. ‘Your cries won’t change anything, though. We’ve seen it all in this room: vomit, faeces, blood, urine, screaming tantrums. But however much the women curse and resist, they must all surrender their babies to us in the end. You think you can defy the state? Don’t waste your breath.’

  ‘When we tied you to this table there were two of you, but when you get off there’ll be just one,’ a male nurse in a blue hat tells her softly.

  ‘Devils! Animals!’ Meili moans. She tries to cross her legs to close her cervix, but all she can feel is her toes clench slightly. The hot air in the room smells of deep-fried sausage. ‘May you die without sons or grandsons! May your family lines perish!’ Mother cries, drenched in sweat, her lips the colour of frozen meat.

  ‘If you want to leave this room alive, you’d better shut up!’ the male nurse says, taking off his blue hat and fanning his face with it.