Under Fishbone Clouds (22 page)

The river slinked towards the distance, a coiling tail with flinty scales shimmering in the loose shifts of light. Rivers are controlled by the spirit dragon, which also has power over the rain. When the dragon is angry, rivers flood. Jinyi stumbled, sinking deeper, and his knees quickened. He walked as if gravity had been
forgotten
and the world was suddenly heavier. The dragon-god purred, its currents driving faster past the fields. The water sloshed up to Jinyi’s chest, pulling to his left, and he held on tightly to his bag to stop it being tugged away by the tow.

Yuying juddered above his head, in the hard square of straining shoulders. Her round face peered out, somewhere between nervous and stubborn. Jinyi silently dared her to look down at him as they slowly crossed, but her eyes remained fixed on the steep and muddy tracks of the banks at the other side. The chair overtook him, and he struggled to find his footing, to push on with the bag held ever higher against the flow.

It was as the four men were rising on the bank that Jinyi slipped completely, and ducked under. His head rose quickly, spitting out sour water as the heavy bag trawled behind him. He gripped it with both hands, and his eyes opened to a burning blur; he could just about make out a furious, shoving movement on the banks. The one idle man had already dived into the water, and the other four turned and dropped the sedan chair, letting it thump and slip back toward the water. Yuying screamed and called out for help,
echoed by the baby’s shriller imitations, as the chair slid
backwards
, skidding down the wet soil, tilting back until a pole caught and suspended them in the mud. The water licked at her ankles and pulled at the trails of her skirts as she felt the pole begin to shudder; it would only be seconds before the river claimed them both from the almost-overturned chair and swept them away. Yet the five men had forgotten her, and were already sloshing through the water towards Jinyi, elbowing and punching each other out of the way.

Jinyi tried to shout – Don’t be idiots, forget me, help my wife and my son! – but then he looked around. It was not him they were coming for.

The pockets on the front of his waterlogged jacket had burst open, and paper money was swimming out from him in all
directions
, as hard to grasp as handfuls of oil. The last bits of cash that Old Bian had given to Jinyi were now bobbing off with the current. Their were so many banknotes floating out on the surface of the river that if I had still been mortal, you can bet that I’d have been scrabbling around in the water too. The five men were pushing back through the flow, and suddenly Jinyi was surrounded.

He pushed his head up higher as the splashes of the men whipped up around him, trying to keep his wife in sight. While keeping the wailing baby held close to her chest, Yuying was attempting to struggle up from the abandoned sedan chair as it slipped backwards. She couldn’t manage it. Each time she put out a foot she skidded in the streams of mud building up around her. He had to get to her.

Yet for a second something stopped him. He reached out a single arm, not daring to let go of the bag. Heaving himself forward he grabbed one, two, three banknotes, but soon there were twelve scrabbling hands sifting angrily through the water and clawing for the cash. He flung out his elbow, smacking one of them in the back of the head and sending him reeling backwards into the water. His grabbing hands latched onto another note, then another. Jinyi tried to think of what some of his friends had said in support of the Communists – that they would do away with money altogether, that money would become meaningless, unnecessary, because if everyone worked together then everyone would have everything they needed. They were fools, he decided, as he thrust his hand out once again.

Then her scream caught him. It snapped him back and he realised it was he who was the fool. Though the men were still splashing around for the last of the cash, Jinyi made a choice; he bit his tongue, grunted, and pushed past them, towards his family. There was nothing else he could do.

Jinyi put his arms around her and hauled her up to the top of the bank, where the pair of them slumped onto the waterlogged bag. Wawa stopped crying, kicked his feet, and stared up at the two soaked adults peering down at him. He smiled. They could still hear the men in the river fighting over the last of the banknotes.

‘I know!’ was all Jinyi said. There were a few seconds before the inevitable.

‘What are we going to do now? What about the money?’

In place of an answer Jinyi picked up the two bags and started along the track, resisting the urge to turn back and kick the abandoned sedan chair into the river. Yuying had no choice but to follow, her cheeks welling up red as their feet sloshed through the colourless patches of grass and over the stone. In the river behind them, limbs still flailed and splashed.

They squelched away along the track, damp and angry. Wawa began to cry again. Yuying had to summon every last reserve of will power to prevent herself demanding to be taken back home, right now. The sun began to simmer down lower in the sky, and her temper bubbled and hissed like a pan of oil left unattended on a hot stove.

‘I can’t believe –’ she began.

‘Don’t, Yuying. Just don’t. All right?’

‘But how are we going to –’

‘Don’t do this, I’m begging you.’

‘I mean, what on earth –’

‘Stop!’ Jinyi dropped the soggy bags at his feet and spun around to face his wife. His face was red and blotchy, his clothes dripping. ‘What do you want me to do? Go back and wrestle every bloody note from their hands? I’m sorry. Is that what you want? Does that make it all better?’

No, it did not. They both seethed in silence. She wanted to stamp her feet and summon a carriage to go back home. But there were no carriages. There weren’t even any donkeys. Just the dull grey track and her wet husband and her bawling baby.

‘Look, the money’s gone, so let’s try and leave it in the past. We’ll be at a village soon, I’m sure of it. Let’s just keep walking.’

Yuying nodded, and her husband picked up the bags. She wanted to ask why it was she who had to leave her hopes behind while they went in search of the past. Yet, even though they had only been walking a few weeks, she was beginning to understand the pull that home has on the soul, and the infuriating way that the things you promised to escape from snag in your mind.

They walked on without words, and eventually Wawa slipped into a grumbling half-sleep at his mother’s chest.

Don’t you know I’m only doing this for you, Yuying wanted to say. Because I was told that love blossoms only in the fertile earth of sacrifice. Because I know you want to protect me. Because I want you to protect me. But she did not say it – instead she bit her lip until it bled.

Jinyi listened to her shoes slopping against the stone and gravel, the bitter coda of their day. Don’t you know that I’m only doing this for you, he wanted to say, but did not.

The money had been worth less and less anyway. In the weeks they had been travelling the value had halved, and then halved again, until they did not know whether anything could still be bought with a whole wad of grubby cash. With the inflation caused by the re-ignition of the civil war spilling through the cities, people had to fill baskets with crumpled notes for the simplest of
shopping
trips. Even in large cities, markets and reputable shops had backtracked to allow bartering – a couple of eggs for half a cup of cornflour – while cobblers exchanged their work for home-made envelopes pressed full of tea leaves or sunflower seeds. Throughout the country, everyone was saying the same thing: these notes are only good for one thing. And what that thing was, well, that is best left to your imagination.

In the next few hours they saw two other families heading in
different
directions, each choosing the stony mule-track rather than the road a couple of
li
to the west. Their faces were masks of exile, their sagging clothes maps of the places they has passed through and the people they had left behind. There was no communication between the scattered travellers as they passed each other – each
journey was made up of private regrets and hardships which could not be shared. The flow of people indicated one thing, however: that up ahead there must be a village large enough to be able to provide the straggle of broken stories with beds for the night.

Jinyi and Yuying walked with their heads down, ignoring the hills dipping and reaching into fog beside them, the river rushing further behind. Instead they watched the track scuff and narrow under their feet. Was the landscape still beautiful? No, it had changed. Nothing is beautiful without being seen; which is to say that only by looking at something does it become real. The surroundings faded to the colour of rust, to ruined canvases forgotten in attics. Jinyi wondered again whether this was all a mistake, trying to prove who he was by dragging the three of them back into the heartland he had abandoned as a teenager. He pushed to the back of his mind his fear about what they would find of each other when their journey reached its close. Yuying kept her mouth shut, stroking Wawa’s hair and ignoring the sighs and rasping coughs of her husband.

What was it Peipei used to say? That the perfect wife had no tongue, but six hands. A pair to cook and clean, a pair to nurse and raise, and a pair to hold and caress. The image of the Guanyin, a bodhisattva in the Chinese Buddhist pantheon, with eyes
burning
through each of her hundred outstretched palms, passed briefly through Yuying’s mind. And perhaps it should not surprise us that this goddess of mercy was first depicted as male, before going through a sex change around a thousand years ago. Compassionate, many-armed, merciful, and with the strength of men, Guanyin gave up the blissful nothingness of nirvana in order to help others, to guide people through the dizzy cycle of reincarnations. Her name means paying attention to sounds, hearing prayers. She listens, but does not speak. A lovely lady, take it from me.

The inhabitants of Putuoshan, an island off the east coast, have their own story about the origins of this Bodhisattva, who they say was incarnated in China around two and a half thousand years ago. Where the rustling baritones of the wheat-thick plains in the cool northeast met the shrill whispers of paddy fields in the humid south, there lived an old king. Of his three daughters, only the youngest was still unwed, and so the king was busy examining the
extravagant gifts and proposals received from the various princes of neighbouring states, having forgotten which of these he was
presently
at war with. Yet when his daughter, Guanyin, announced that she intended to become an initiate in a distant temple, he said nothing. For days he paced the endless corridors of his home, clenching and unclenching his fists, grinding his teeth until his servants had nightmares of chain gangs grinding rocks.

In the end he relented. Go to the temple, he told her, but you must work there cleaning the latrines everyday. She went. Weeks later, when she had not appeared back in front of him with her resolve broken, his calculated smile began to slip into a scowl. This had not happened before. As always seems to happen, the king was faced with two choices: let her remain in the temple and lose face with the warring kingdoms bordering his own, or have her executed for disobeying him?

Late that night, two soldiers were sent to the temple, disguised as pilgrims, with swords hidden under their saffron robes. After a show of exaggerated prostration and prayer, they crept between the buildings until they found the dormitory floor on which the
princess
slept, and, luckily for them, found her curled closest to the corridor, the more ample floorspace taken up by an array of snoring nuns. Yet when the first soldier swung the sword down to the girl’s neck, it shattered into a thousand pieces. They looked down to see the shards of metal fallen from the sword were nothing more than drops of water reflecting the pink-tinged moonlight around her head. With this they flew from the temple and returned blabbering and incoherent to the king, only to find out the hard way that the second soldier’s sword did, indeed, cut through flesh.