Under Fishbone Clouds (40 page)

8

1967 THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP

Jinyi heard the slap of the front door suddenly snapping back against its hinges, then the muffled voices and whispered orders: the checklist of little signs he had been expecting. He had not slept in weeks, anticipating the event, playing out the possible
accusations
and outcomes in his head, rehearsing the lines he had
committed
to memory. By the time they called out, he was already up and at the bedroom door, having lain fully clothed in the dark. On the lukewarm
kang
were his three daughters: Manxin, almost fourteen; Liqui, nine, and the newest, Xiaojing, four. His son was not home, for which Jinyi counted his blessings before slipping through to the main room. He was sweating already, damp in the early summer humidity, and if someone were to tell him that on the other side of this tangled planet they were calling this the
summer
of love, he would not know whether to weep or die laughing.

The truth was that Jinyi had not slept properly for close to eight months. He felt dwarfed by the wooden bed with no one beside him. When he was not troubled by the indecipherable auguries of bad dreams, he would lie and watch the children sleeping, trying not to think about where their mother was. It had all happened so quickly. Of course, they had read the banners and newspaper reports and proclamations, and Jinyi had whole-heartedly agreed with everyone else that something more drastic needed to be done about the imperialists and bourgeois who had caused the famine and were trying to undo the work of the revolution. But he hadn’t thought they were referring to people like his wife.

Following the Criticism Meeting in the local food hall, she had been told to ‘have a rest, take a break’ from work, and their friends had slowly stopped talking to them. After even the traders in the covered market had started either spitting at her or pretending she was invisible when she went to buy vegetables, Yuying had taken
to sitting at home all day. Until the truck had arrived one morning and taken her away.

‘Close that door. We don’t want to wake your children, uncle. Please, sit down.’

The politeness confused Jinyi; this was not how he had imagined it, being offered a seat at his own kitchen table. He hesitated, then sat.

There were four of them, teenagers in identical dark green jackets, somewhere between forest fern and dank emerald seaweed, collars folded carefully down away from faces wearing false smiles. Each had a green flat cap with the five sharp points of a tawny-yellow metal star studded at the front, and red cotton armbands sewn on below their shoulders. They had spent hours in the half-light of shared
bedrooms
patiently embroidering these with the yellow lettering that announced their status: ‘Red Guard’. Two boys and two girls, and three of the four, Jinyi quickly noted, were taller than him.

The speaker was a stocky boy with an oily fringe and his two front teeth missing – the other three hovered around him, twitchy and impatient, watching for signals that would allow them to leap in.

‘I must say, uncle, this is a fine little house you have, though you seem to have misplaced your picture of our great Chairman, which I would have thought you would have hanging in pride of place instead of these … these funny birds,’ the leader said, motioning to the scroll hanging on the wall.

Jinyi patted his top breast pocket, from which the frayed corner of a palm-sized book peaked out, thin and greasy sheaths stuffed between a waxy red cover. ‘His words are always with me, close to my heart. It is his ideas, after all, that are of importance. Not that he himself is not important, I mean; we would all still be slaves of the Japanese and landlords were it not for his great strength. But where are my manners – can I get you some tea?’

‘Anyone can profess respect for our great Chairman: it is only action that counts,’ the oily-haired leader sneered, and the others allowed themselves to grin with satisfaction. ‘Yes, a fine little house. But I can’t help but wonder, if you and your family have been living here, what you have done with all your riches? I don’t imagine you’ve just given them away. Come now, no need to be coy. We have heard all about you from Comrade Yangchen. He really is a fountain of knowledge.’

Jinyi tried to keep smiling. He was not surprised to hear Yangchen’s name again – it was he who had complained about Yuying.

‘We don’t have any riches.’ Jinyi resisted the urge to add: if you know so much about us, you ought to know that already.

He forced a small smile, then regretted it, knowing he must have looked as pathetic as he felt. But he knew there was no other choice.

Only last week he had bumped into Teacher Dong, a physics expert from his children’s high school, limping back from the hospital. It was shameful to see a man still in his thirties without any teeth. He was using a knobbly branch as a crutch, his face a murky pool of purples and reds. Teacher Dong had not managed to see anyone at the hospital: too full, too busy. He would go back to the abandoned schoolhouse and rest: perhaps when things calmed down some children might return for lessons, he had said. He had then stumbled at the crossroads, and whispered, blushing, to Jinyi to point him in the right direction towards the schoolhouse, because they had smashed his glasses. That was what had marked him out as bourgeois: a twenty-year-old wire-rimmed pair of scratched spectacles. Jinyi had led him for the first few steps, then fallen back in case anyone was watching, anxious to rid his mind of the coincidence that some of his children had been out until after twelve with their own factions the night before.

‘If you’re not going to be honest, uncle, then how can we help you?’ The leader leaned closer. He cracked his knuckles and waited for an answer, while a few of the others began to search through the cupboards, in the flues of the fireplace and in the old pots and boxes stacked in one corner.

The leader prided himself on his strict adherence to the words of the Chairman. His group believed in justice, in punishing crimes that could no longer be ignored. Many of the other groups that visited households or dormitories late at night acted differently: bursting down doors to start the beating as soon as possible, or else letting the public declarations of guilt slip into retribution far too quickly. This was foolish, the gap-toothed leader considered, though he admired their spirit and the zeal with which they took to the task. He preferred to weigh up evidence, as the Chairman might, before deciding the level of punishment. Was it fitting to break the ribs of both a rightist and a traitor, an intellectual and a critic, a nationalist and a collaborator? He thought not. His group
picked the parts of the body they would work over according to the particulars of the crime they sniffed out.

‘I swear, I am being honest. There are no riches: my wife’s father was wealthy, I admit, but he squandered his money just like the rest of those filthy bourgeois, without a care for anyone else. But that was before I joined the family,’ Jinyi said.

‘And I bet that annoyed you, didn’t it? Because you did all that work, sucking up to the rich, kissing arse – yes sir, no sir, of course sir – to wheedle your way into a bourgeois family, only to find that you weren’t going to be as rich as you thought you were going to be. Yes, Comrade Yangchen told us everything. You must have craved wealth pretty badly, to give up your home, your family, your noble peasant’s way of life, even your name, all to get your hands on a little gold. What kind of man are you?’

‘It wasn’t like that. Before the Chairman and the great
revolution
, life was difficult, it was unfair. I had to leave the countryside because of the landlords and the corruption, so –’

‘That is no excuse. Members of the Party were risking their lives at that time, for all of us. Why didn’t you join up if life was so hard for you?’

‘I, well, I wasn’t sure how to. Who could I ask? If I went up to
someone
on the street and said, “Are you a Communist?” they might have attacked me, or else suspected me of being a Nationalist spy.’

Jinyi’s mind was rushing forward, trying to stay a few steps ahead of his mouth. Yet he was painfully aware that his words sounded less believable out loud than when he had practised them in his head.

‘There’s nothing in any of these.’ This time one of the girls spoke, turning to the leader from the pile of boxes and cupboards in the corner. As she turned, a single plait whipped across her shoulder, hanging limply from her cap. Two beady, blinking eyes stared out from her equine face, searching for further instructions.

Jinyi knew what they were looking for. Only last year Mao had announced that although the bourgeois had been defeated in the revolution, their ideas had not. Books, antiques, portraits, poetry; anything that looked suspiciously like the culture of imperial China was not to be trusted. Like most families in the
neighbourhood
, Jinyi had, at that time, gathered together all their books, old paper banknotes, photos and relics from the restaurant era, vaguely colourful clothes and whole generations of school notebooks. He
had stuffed these down his trousers and tucked them under his jacket and had then walked with a false, play-acted calm through the busy alleyways until he had reached the bonfire outside the university where two teachers had been killed and twelve others hospitalised the week before.

The leader seemed to have read his mind. ‘Of course there isn’t. They may be bourgeois, but they aren’t completely stupid. They
probably
destroyed anything they shouldn’t have. They’re sneaky, crafty, liars, the lot of them. You should know that, Comrade Weiwei.’

‘Yes, Comrade.’ Weiwei returned to the group which now encircled the table where Jinyi was sitting, his hands folded in front of him.

‘Listen, Comrade.’ Jinyi knew this was a dangerous tactic,
speaking
directly to them, but he was worried that their contempt for his wrinkles and grey tufts, his forty-something years lived without revolutionary activity, would soon brim over, and he felt he had to do anything he could to try and placate them.

‘When I was born, there was nothing but struggle. We didn’t call it class struggle then, but we did everything we could to survive. Struggled to eat, struggled to live. Struggled not to get shot by the Japanese. I didn’t have my own pair of shoes until I was almost thirty, and a married man.

‘Listen, I even stole, only ever from the rich though, you
understand
: a bit of bread in a mansion’s window or swiped from the kitchen of a posh restaurant. Life was bought and sold, and so was my marriage. It wasn’t done for my benefit, let me tell you – Old Bian already controlled an empire of restaurants, and I was just someone he could boss around. It was as simple as that: he gave an order, and you did something. There was no other choice back then: he was one of the most powerful people in the city, and if I wanted to work or eat or even take a shit in this city again then I had to do as he said.

‘Comrade, I am grateful for the revolution. It’s made this country fair, and I thank Chairman Mao every day that things are different for my children, for my brothers in the fields, for my comrades in the countryside. But I am an honourable man, and I got married, and there’s no turning back from that.’

The leader shook his head. Jinyi felt his mouth fill with saliva, the sour taste of jittery nerves.

‘Honour, uncle, is serving your country, is helping your comrades, is fighting for the revolution. You’re just a typical rightist.’

Jinyi became aware of a drop of sweat snaking into his eyebrow, and resisted the urge to wipe it away. A rightist. There, it had been said, and it could not be taken back. They had labelled him, and with one stroke repainted his skin, resculpted his life into
something
he could not quite recognise.

The other boy, bug-eyed and pudgy, then took a turn to speak. ‘Why is it that you turned your back on your country, on your
comrades
? Your generation had the chance to change the world, and you failed.’ He spat, a large gob of yellowy jelly.

Jinyi was unsure whether they were really trying to fathom his life or were simply toying with him, enjoying the build-up before the real action began. He let his eyes run over each of them in turn.

And in a flash Jinyi began to understand the enraged hunger in their eyes: he had been the same when he was young, wanting to redraw the boundaries between knowledge and possibility. Yet they truly believed they possessed the ability to split the world into black and white, to take this bulging, rippling, monstrously overgrown country and hold it in the palms of their hands, to strip down millennia of formalities and rituals into a list of rules that could be flexed by a fist.

‘Well, what’s your answer,
Comrade
?’ the leader leaned forward and hissed through the gap where his front teeth should have been.

‘Why did you neglect the Party, turn your cowardly back on
revolution
and class struggle when others like you were on the front line? Tell us,’ and here he allowed himself a smile, ‘what you really think of the Chairman.’