Decoded (2 page)

It all happened so long ago that everyone who saw her suffer and die is now dead themselves, but the story of the terrible agony that she endured has been passed down from one generation to the next, as the tale of an appalling battle might have been. As it was told and retold, the story became more refined and more classic in its details, until it became almost like an event in the sagas. As you might imagine, her sufferings in childbirth were horrific – by all accounts her screams resounded constantly for two days and two nights, as the stench of blood pervaded first her room at the hospital, then the corridor, before finally making its way out onto the main road. The doctor tried the most advanced techniques of the time, and the most stupid of birthing methods, to try and help the baby to be born, but the head still would not emerge from the womb. To begin with the corridor outside the delivery room was crammed with members of the Rong family – and the paternal Lin clan – waiting for the baby to be born, but as time went on they gradually dispersed until there were only a couple of female servants left. Even the toughest were appalled by the length and difficulty of the labour; it became clear that even the joy of welcoming the new arrival would not be able to make up for the horror of the death of his mother. Sometimes her death seemed imminent, at other times it appeared as if she might pull through, as time marched inexorably on towards its merciless decision.

Old Mr Lillie was the last to arrive in the corridor, but he was also the last to leave. Before he left, he said: ‘Either this baby is going to be a genius, or a devil.’

‘There is an eighty to ninety per cent chance that this baby is never going to be born,’ the doctor said.

‘She will have the baby.’

‘No she won’t.’

‘You don’t understand, she is a really remarkable woman.’ ‘But I do understand women and if she has this baby, it is going to
be a miracle.’

‘She is the kind of person that miracles happen to!’

Old Lillie wanted to leave once he had said his piece.

The doctor prevented him from going. ‘This is a hospital and you
need to listen to what I have to say. What do you want me to do if she really can’t give birth to this baby?’

Old Lillie was silent for a moment.

The doctor persevered: ‘Do you want me to save the adult or the baby?’

Old Lillie said without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Of course you save the adult!’

Of course, in the face of all-powerful destiny and fate, how could old Mr Lillie’s wish be taken into account? At dawn, the woman in labour found her strength totally exhausted after yet another night of struggle, and she slipped into unconsciousness. The doctor roused her by dousing her with ice-cold water and injecting a double dose of stimulant, preparing for the final push. The doctor explained it quite clearly: if this last attempt did not work, they were going to have to abandon the baby in order to save the mother’s life. Things did not go at all according to plan; it was the mother who suffered organ failure as she made that final attempt to give birth. In the end, the baby’s life was saved by an emergency Caesarean section.

This baby was born at the cost of his own mother’s life, from which you can see how much she suffered in the process. After the baby was finally born, everyone was shocked to see how massive his head was. Compared to her son, her head was nothing! To have a first baby with such an enormous head, not to mention the fact that she was almost forty at the time, was pretty much guaranteed to kill the wretched woman. There are times when the workings of fate seem really mysterious: a woman who could send a couple of tons of metal up into the sky ended up as the victim of one of Nature’s practical jokes.

After the baby was born, even though the Lin family chose all sorts of names for him – nicknames, style names, formal names and what have you – they quickly discovered that it was all a wasted effort – his huge head and the horrible story of how he had come into this world ensured that everyone called him ‘Killer Head’.

‘Killer Head!’

‘Killer Head!’

It was a name that no one ever got tired of.

‘Killer Head!’

‘Killer Head!’

His friends called him that.

Everyone called him that.

It is hard to believe, but nevertheless it is a fact that eventually everyone called him ‘Killer’, and he deserved the name, for he did some truly terrible things. The Lin family was the richest family in the provincial capital and the shops they owned filled both sides of a two-kilometre-long stretch of one of the big boulevards. However, once the Killer grew up, their vast holdings started to shrink rapidly as they had to pay off his gambling debts or get him out of other kinds of trouble. If it hadn’t been for the whore who picked up a knife and stabbed him to death, the Lin family would have lost their house along with everything else. The story goes that the Killer first got involved in criminal activities when he was twelve, and he was twenty-two when he died. During that decade he had participated in a dozen or more murders and had seduced and abandoned countless women. At the same time, he gambled away a mountain of money and a whole street’s-worth of shops. It was very shocking to people that such a remarkable woman, a genius such as comes along maybe once every thousand years, could produce such a wicked son.

The Lin family breathed a sigh of relief when the Killer died; only to find themselves being pestered by a mysterious woman. She arrived from somewhere outside the province and demanded to see the head of the Lin family. Once he admitted her, she just got down on her knees without another word and started to cry. Pointing to her protruding belly, she said: ‘This is young Mr Lin’s baby!’ The Lin family knew that if you wanted to put all the women that the Killer had seduced out to sea, you would have enough to pack out half a dozen boats; but so far none of them had turned up at the house claiming to be pregnant. What is more, this woman came from another province, so they were suspicious as well as angry. They literally had her kicked out of the door. The woman thought that the kicking would result in a miscarriage, a prospect that did not particularly bother her. However, in spite of the bruising and the pain that she had suffered, the baby stayed put. She balled up her fist and punched herself hard in the stomach a couple of times, which also had no effect. She was so upset that she sat down in the middle of the road and started bawling. She ended up being surrounded by a circle of onlookers, one of whom felt sorry for her and suggested that she go to N University to try her luck there. After all, they were the Killer’s family too. The woman staggered off to the university, to kneel in front of old John Lillie. Old Mr Lillie was a very upright and highly principled man who was deeply upset at any evidence that other people had behaved badly. He was very sympathetic to anyone who had suffered an injustice, so he took the woman in. The following day, he ordered his son, Rong Xiaolai – the one that people called Young Lillie – to take her to his old home town of Tongzhen.

The Rong mansion at Tongzhen occupied half the village. The roofs of the different buildings were still as closely packed together as the scales on a fish, though they were starting to get old. Flaked-off bald patches had appeared on the paintwork of the pillars and eaves, making it clear that times were changing. After Old Lillie set up his academy in the provincial capital, many members of the Rong family moved there to study with him, which began the decline of the mansion from its glory days. One of the reasons for this precipitate decline was that very few of the young people who had left were interested in returning to carry on the family business. Furthermore, things were looking very bleak anyway – after the government introduced the state monopoly on salt, the Rong family were deprived of their chief source of income. The attitudes of many of the members of the Rong family who studied with Old Lillie were deeply affected by these developments: they had become interested in scientific method and upholding the truth; they were not at all interested in making money and living in the lap of luxury. Isolated in their ivory tower, the collapse of the family business and the concomitant decline in their fortunes did not seem to affect them in the slightest. Within a decade, the Rong family lost virtually all that they had once owned, though they did not like to talk openly about how this came about. In fact, everyone could see the reason hanging up over the main gate to the mansion. It was a placard with five huge words picked out in gold: ‘Supporter of the Northern Expedition’. There was a story behind this. Apparently, when the National Revolutionary Army reached C City, Old Lillie saw all the students out in the streets collecting money for the cause, and he was so moved that he went back to Tongzhen that very night to sell the docks and half the shops that represented the business empire the Rong family had built up over the generations. He used the money to buy a boatload of ammunition for the Northern Expedition, for which he was rewarded with this placard. Because of this, the Rong family came to be regarded as great patriots. Unfortunately, not long afterwards, the famous general who wrote the calligraphy for the inscription became a wanted criminal, on the run from the KMT government, which significantly dimmed its lustre. Later on, the government had a new placard made with exactly the same wording and identical gilding, but with different calligraphy. They asked the Rong family for permission to exchange it for the old one, but Old Lillie simply refused. From that moment on, the Rong family seemed to get into endless trouble with the government, so their business was guaranteed to suffer. Old Lillie didn’t mind the business suffering, but he did want the placard to stay. He went so far as to say that the placard would be taken down only over his dead body.

The Rong family had to accept that they were getting poorer all the time.

The Rong mansion, which had once been bustling with life as masters and servants went about their business, was now desolate and quiet. When you did see people about, it quickly became apparent that many of them were old and that there were far more women than men, far more servants than masters. The place was obviously falling into ruin, as things went from bad to worse. As fewer and fewer people lived there, particularly young lively people, the house seemed even larger than normal and much more silent. Birds built their nests in the trees, spiders spun their webs in front of the doors, the paths between buildings became lost in the weeds as they wound their way into the darkness, the pet birds flew off into the sky, the artificial mountain became a real one, the flower garden became a wilderness and the rear courtyards turned into a maze. If you say that in the past, the Rong family mansion had been like a beautiful, elegant and brightly coloured painting, you could say that now, although the traces of the original pigment still remained, the lines of the earlier sketches had reappeared, blurring the purity of the finished work. If you wanted to hide an anonymous and mysterious woman with an unsatisfactory background, you could not have found a better place.

Young Lillie really wracked his brains over how to make Mr and Mrs Rong accept this woman. All the members of the seventh generation of the Rong family were now dead, with the exception of Old Lillie living far away at the provincial capital. That made Mr and Mrs Rong the undisputed heads of the Rong clan in Tongzhen. Mr Rong was now well on in years and had had a stroke, which had destroyed his faculties and forced him to spend all his time in bed. He was reduced to the status of a cipher; all real power had long ago slipped into Mrs Rong’s hands. If it was indeed the Killer that had got this woman pregnant, then Mr and Mrs Rong were indisputably the baby’s aunt and uncle, but that didn’t mean that they were going to like it. Remembering that Mrs Rong was a devout Buddhist, Young Lillie started to feel the beginnings of a plan germinating in his mind. He took the woman straight into Mrs Rong’s prayer chamber and there, wreathed in incense and accompanied by the sound of her tapping a wooden fish, Young Lillie and Mrs Rong began their discussion. Mrs Rong said, ‘Who is she?’

‘A woman.’

‘Whatever it is that you want, you had better make it quick, because I want to get on with reciting my sutras.’

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘I am not a doctor, what do you want me to do about it?’

‘She is a very devout Buddhist and grew up in a nunnery. She isn’t married, but last year she went to Putuo Mountain to pray to the Buddhist statue there. When she got back, she discovered that she was pregnant. Do you believe her?’

‘Does it matter whether I believe her?’

‘If you believe her, then will you take her in?’

‘What happens if I don’t believe her?’

‘If you don’t believe her, I will throw her out onto the street.’

Mrs Rong spent a sleepless night, and the Buddha was no help at all in making up her mind. However, at noon, just as Young Lillie was pretending that he was getting ready to throw the woman out of the house, she suddenly made her decision. She said, ‘She can stay. Amitabha Buddha, bless his holy name.’

I spent every holiday for two years on the railways of southern China, travelling the country to interview the fifty-one middle-aged or elderly eyewitnesses to these events; it was only after having compiled thousands of pages of notes that I finally felt able to sit down and write this book. It was my experiences of travelling round the region that meant that I came to understand why the south is different. In my own personal experience, after arriving in the south, I would feel as though each one of my pores was tingling with life – breathing deeply, enjoying every minute, my skin became smoother, even my hair seemed to become more glossy and black. It is not difficult to understand why I decided to write my book in the south

– what is harder to understand is why having moved there, my writing style also changed. I could clearly sense that the soft air of the south was giving me courage and patience in my writing – a task which I normally find extremely troublesome; at the same time, my story began striking out in new tangents, just like the lush growth of a southern tree. The main protagonist of my story still has not appeared yet, though he will soon arrive. In one sense, you could say that he is already here, it is just that you have not seen him; in the same way that when a seed begins to sprout, the first shoots are invisible below the surface of the well-watered soil.

Twenty-three years earlier, the brilliant Rong Youying had gone through appalling suffering to give birth to the Killer; everyone must have hoped that such a thing would not happen again. However, a few months after the mysterious woman went to live with the Rongs, history repeated itself. Because she was so much younger, the mysterious woman’s screams had a redoubled power, like a knife shrieking against the grinder. Her screams floated through the darkened mansion, making the flames of the lamps flicker and dance, making even the flesh of the crippled and dazed Mr Rong creep. First one midwife came and went and then another, sometimes they emerged to swap one cloth for fresh one, but each one left the room with the heavy stench of blood clinging to her body and splashes of blood everywhere, like butchers. The blood dripped from the bed down onto the floor, only to spread across and out over the doorsill. Once out of the room it continued to seep into the cracks between the dark stones set into the path, and on until it reached the roots of a couple of old plum trees growing amid the mud and the weeds. Everyone thought that those blackened plum trees in the overgrown garden were dead, but that winter they suddenly burst into flower – people said that this was because they had supped on human blood. But by the time that the plum blossoms bloomed in January, the mysterious woman was long dead and her soul had flown off to become a hungry ghost haunting some desolate stretch of hillside.

Those who were there at the time said it was a miracle that the mysterious woman was able to give birth to the baby at all; some of them also said that having given birth to the baby, for the mother to survive would be adding one miracle on top of the other. That didn’t happen here – the baby was born, but the mysterious woman suffered a haemorrhage and died. It is not that easy to have one miracle happening right after the other. That was not the real problem though

– the real problem was that when the midwife cleaned the baby of blood and slime, everyone was shocked to discover that he looked just like the Killer: the thick mat of dark hair, the huge head, right down to the shape of the Mongolian spot above his buttocks: the two were the same. Young Lillie’s innocent little deception stood revealed now as a nasty trick; the mysterious baby born after his mother’s pilgrimage turned in the blink of an eye into the illegitimate brat of a murderer foisted on his long-suffering relations. If it had not been for the fact that Mrs Rong found some resemblance in the baby to his grandmother, the sainted Miss Lillie, even she would have steeled herself to abandoning him in some uninhabited stretch of wilderness. In fact, it seems that when the question of simply getting rid of the baby was seriously mooted, it was his connection to his grandmother that saved his life and ensured that he was brought up in the Rong mansion.

The baby survived, but this certainly wasn’t a matter of congratulation for the Rongs – they did not even recognize him as a member of the family. For the longest time, anyone who wanted to talk about him called him the ‘Grim Reaper’. One day, Mr Auslander happened to walk past the front door of the old servant couple who were tasked with looking after the baby and they politely invited him in, hoping that he could choose a new name for the child. They were both pretty elderly by this time and found it most unpleasant to speak to the baby like that, as if he had come there to kill them. They had been thinking about changing his name for a while. To begin with they had tried to come up with a name themselves – the kind of baby-name that other children in the village had – but they couldn’t find anything that really seemed to stick; they used it but no one else did. Hearing their neighbours call him the ‘Grim Reaper’ all the time gave both of the old people the willies and they found themselves often having nightmares. That is why, for want of any better suggestion, they were forced to ask Mr Auslander to think of something, something that would appeal to everyone.

Mr Auslander was the foreigner who all those years before had been invited to the house to interpret Grandmother Rong’s dreams. Grandmother Rong adored him, but he was certainly not every rich man’s cup of tea. There was the time when, down at the docks, he interpreted the dream of a tea merchant from another province: that earned him a crippling beating. Both his arms and legs were broken, but that was not the half of it: one of his bright blue eyes was put out. He crawled back to the Rong family mansion and they took him in, thinking of it as a good deed that would help the old lady to rest in peace. Once he had entered their household he never left again. Eventually he found himself a job to do which suited him right down to the ground – as befitted such a wealthy and prominent family the Rongs decided that they needed a genealogy compiled. As the years went by, he came to know the various different branches of the family better than anyone. He knew the history of the clan, the men and the women, the main branches and the illegitimate offspring, which ones were flourishing and which had failed, who had gone where and done what: everything was sitting in his notes. So when it came to this baby, other people might be completely in the dark, but Mr Auslander knew exactly which branch of the family he came from and what scandals surrounded his birth. And it was because he knew exactly who the baby was that picking the right name for him was such a ticklish issue.

Mr Auslander thought about the matter and decided that before choosing a proper name for the baby, they would have to deal with the issue of a surname. What was the baby’s surname? Of course, he ought to be called Lin, but to put it mildly that surname now had unfortunate connotations for everyone. He could take the surname Rong, but it would be most unusual for someone to take their grandmother’s maiden name – it didn’t really seem suitable. It would of course be perfectly acceptable for him to take his mother’s surname, but what was the mystery woman’s name? Even if they knew it, it would hardly be appropriate to use it: that would be rattling the skeletons in the family closet with a vengeance! Thinking about it carefully, Mr Auslander decided to put the issue of choosing a proper name for the baby to one side for the moment and concentrate on finding a suitable baby-name for him. Mr Auslander thought about the baby’s huge head and the suffering that he would face having lost both his parents so young, how he would have to make his way without any help from his family, and suddenly an idea flashed into his mind. He decided to call the baby ‘Duckling’.

When this was reported to Mrs Rong in her prayer chamber, she sniffed the incense meditatively while she spoke: ‘Although people called his father horrible names too, in the case of the Killer, he was actually responsible for the death of his mother, a truly wonderful woman and a great credit to the Rong family. You could not find a better name for him if you searched for a month of Sundays. On the other hand, this baby was responsible for the death of shameless whore. That woman dared to blaspheme against the Buddha, a crime for which she deserves a thousand deaths! Killing her doesn’t count as a crime: it’s a work of merit. Calling the poor little thing the Grim Reaper does seem a little unfair. In the future we can call him Duckling, though it is hardly likely that he is going to grow into a swan.’

‘Duckling!’

‘Duckling!’

No one cared where he came from or who his parents were. ‘Duckling!’

‘Duckling!’

No one cared about whether he lived or died.

In all that great mansion, the only person who treated Duckling

like another human being – who treated him as he would any other child – was Mr Auslander, who had drifted there from the other side of the ocean. Every day after he had completed his morning tasks and had his midday siesta, he would walk along the dark little pebble path overhung with flowers to where the old servant couple lived. He would sit down next to the wooden crate in which Duckling was playing and smoke a cigarette, talking in his own language about the dream that he had had the night before. It seemed as though he were talking to Duckling but in fact he was talking to himself, because Duckling was still too little to understand. Every so often he would bring the baby a rattle or a little pottery toy, and bit by bit Duckling came to adore the old man. Later on, when Duckling learned to walk, or to be precise when he learned to crawl, the very first place he went on his own was to Mr Auslander’s office in the Pear Garden.

The Pear Garden, as the name suggests, was named after its pear trees: two hundred-year-old pear trees. There was a little wooden house in the middle of the garden, the attics of which had been used by the Rong family for storing their supply of opium and medicinal herbs. One year, a female servant disappeared in mysterious circumstances – to begin with they imagined that she had eloped with some man; later on they discovered her body, already badly decomposed, inside this building. The woman’s death was impossible to cover up: soon every single member of the Rong family and their entire staff knew all about it. Subsequently the Pear Garden became the subject of ghost stories and people were scared to go there; people would change colour when its name was mentioned and if children were being tiresome, their parents would threaten them, ‘If you don’t stop that immediately, we’ll leave you in the Pear Garden!’ Mr Auslander took advantage of other people’s fear of the place to live quietly and without interference. Every year when the pear trees flowered, Mr Auslander would look at the misty sprays of blossom and smell their intensely sweet fragrance with the feeling that this place was exactly what he had been looking for all these years. When the pear flowers fell, he would sweep up the fallen petals and dry them in the sun, before placing them in the building that he might enjoy the fragrance of the blossoms all the year round – a kind of eternal spring. When he wasn’t feeling well, he would make tea with the flowers. He found it very settling for his stomach; it made him feel a lot better.

After the first time that Duckling came, he came every day. He would not say anything, but he would stand underneath the pear trees and watch Mr Auslander in silence, timidly, like a frightened fawn. Since he had practiced standing up in his wooden crate from a very young age, he walked a little bit earlier than most other children. On the other hand he was much slower at learning to talk. At past two years of age, when other children of the same age were stringing together their first sentences, he could only make one sound
–
jia
. . .
jia
. This made people wonder whether he might not prove to be mute. However, one day when Mr Auslander was taking his lunchtime siesta on a rattan chaise longue, he suddenly heard someone call out to him in a desolate voice:

‘Dad . . . dy!’

‘Dad . . . dy!’

‘Dad . . . dy!’

Mr Auslander realized that someone was trying to call him

‘Daddy’. He opened his eyes and saw that Duckling was standing next to him, tugging at his jacket with his little hand, his eyes wet with tears. This was the first time in his life that Duckling had ever called out to anyone, and he thought of Mr Auslander as his father. Since his father had seemed to him to be dead, he started crying, and when he cried, he brought his father back to life. That very day, the foreign gentleman took little Duckling into the Pear Garden to live with him. A couple of days later, the eighty-year-old Mr Auslander climbed up into one of the pear trees to hang a swing, to be little Duckling’s present on the occasion of his third birthday.

Duckling grew up surrounded by pear flowers.

Eight years later, just as the pear flowers were beginning their annual dance off the trees, Mr Auslander looked up at the flurries of petals whirling through the sky. Moving along with tottering steps, he carefully mulled over every word he planned to use. Every evening, he wrote out the lines that he had composed during the day. Within a couple of days he had formulated the letter which he sent to Young Lillie – the son of Old Lillie – at the provincial capital. That letter resided in a drawer for more than a year, but when the old man realized that he did not have much longer to live, he took it out again, telling Duckling to put it in the post. Due to the war, Young Lillie had no fixed abode and often moved around, so the letter did not reach him for a couple of months.

The letter said:

To: The Vice-Chancellor of the University

Dear Sir,

I do not know if writing this letter to you will be the last mistake I ever make. It is because I think I might be making a mistake, and because I would like to spend more time with Duckling, that I will not immediately put this letter in the post. By the time this letter reaches you, I will be dying; in which case – even if it is a mistake – I will no longer care. I can use the special powers granted to those who are about to die to refuse to carry any further the burdens life has placed upon me. These burdens have been, if I may say so, quite sufficiently numerous and heavy. However, I am also planning to use the all-seeing eyes supposed to be granted to the dead to check up on how seriously you take the points raised in my letter and what you propose to do about them. In many ways, you could say that this is my last will and testament. I have lived on this difficult and dangerous planet for a long time – almost a century. I know how well you treat the dead in this country, not to mention how badly you treat the living. The first is entirely praiseworthy; the latter is not. It is for this very reason that I am certain you will not disobey my final instructions.