Under Fishbone Clouds (47 page)

However, the crowd showed no sign of dispersing. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Turkey said, and saw from the cadre’s bared upper gums that this was perhaps a mistake. He continued nonetheless, ‘I think he’s having a heart attack.’

‘You’re new here, aren’t you, Turkey?’ the cadre spat back. ‘Fresh from the city and thinking that you know how everything works, is that it? You’re an intellectual, right? I suppose you think you know better than even Chairman Mao. Well, let me tell you something. You know nothing. China is big, and you are small. The people’s will is enormous, and you will bow to it or be crushed. All of you traitors here will learn that you are nothing if you are not working for the people, with the people.’

The cadre paused and looked down at Lard to see his hair matted with sweat, his eyes rolling and air rushing noisily in and out of his flaring nostrils. ‘And if you have to be broken down completely and put back together again in order to learn this, then so be it. You, Turkey, will be on night duty, cleaning the latrines.’

Lard’s twitches began to lessen, his moans shrinking to
mouse-like
rasps. The cadre turned to leave once again, but this time there were murmurs from the villagers.

‘We can’t leave him here.’

The cadre sighed. ‘When he stops fucking around, he can get up and walk back to the dorm. Until then, he stays where he fell. No one’s going to pick him up as if they were his bloody servant.’

‘No.’ An old man raised his hand. ‘We cannot let a man die here, on the fields. The crops will stop growing, and then we’ll starve. This is well known.’

Others nodded and added their voices to the protest. ‘The fields will dry up and the rain will avoid this very spot – it has happened before.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right. We can’t let him die here.’

The cadre was beginning to feel red-faced himself. Superstition,
as he well knew, was dangerous and proscribed; but there were also quotas to meet, expectations that could not be dashed.

‘Fine. But he’s not to be taken inside till he can get there himself – I don’t care if he has to drag his fat face through the mud to do it.’ And with that the cadre marched back towards his hut.

The sinewy old man bent and gripped Lard’s right leg, yanking it into the air and producing a sudden moan from him.

‘Come on then.’ The old man encouraged the crowd, and more stepped forward; a stocky woman with a broken nose gripped an elbow, a short man hoisted up a shoulder, and a strapping teenager yanked up the left leg. Jinyi, seeing that he did not have time to argue with them or debate the merits of this idea, quickly darted forward to cradle Lard’s lolling head as his body was wrenched up to waist-level.

Lard’s breaths came quicker, shrill wheezes sending spittle
dribbling
from his tightly scrunched lips.

‘Get a move on, he’s too fat to lug around for long,’ the old man snapped, and the group stumbled awkwardly to the left, in the direction that the old man had thrust his head. They pulled and tugged the body between them, drawing low moans as they staggered across the uneven ground, avoiding patches of ice,
toe-crippling
lumps of rock and the last unhardened rivulets of
rainwater
snaking to the paddies. Jinyi kept his hands round Lard’s fleshy neck, supporting the heavy head as the body was jostled between slipping hands, and he was reminded of the way he had held each of his children, plump and pink and newborn and so fragile he had been afraid to even breathe on them.

‘Wait!’ The stocky woman suddenly shrieked and stopped, sending the rest of the group toppling forward, fighting to retain balance while keeping a grip on Lard, whose eyes had now closed completely. ‘We’re not going towards our house! Oh, no! We don’t want a city spirit hanging round us, giving the jitters to all the sows. Turn him around.’

They wheeled clockwise and set off in the opposite direction. The rest of the villagers were still standing by the converted grain stores in which the bourgeois visitors from the city now slept, and were watching the wobbling procession.

‘Where are we taking him?’ Jinyi asked, noticing that they were moving further away from the line of stilted houses and shacks
that might, if he stretched his suspension of disbelief to breaking point, have contained someone with a vague understanding of medicine or resuscitation. When he was a child, after all, there had been a blind man in a nearby village who could tell a person’s
ailments
simply by squeezing their pulse from their wrist, and would recommend herbs and grasses accordingly.

‘To the dried up riverbed in Dead Man’s Valley, of course!’ the old man answered impatiently, enunciating each character in the patronising tone the villagers had unanimously adopted when imparting seemingly obvious bits of wisdom to the backward strangers now working among them.

‘But it’s deserted down there, isn’t it? There’s nothing but rooks and slate. We won’t find a doctor anywhere near there.’

‘A doctor? He doesn’t come till Sunday. A doctor! Ha! You city folk haven’t got a brain to share between you. Whatever next?’ the stocky woman laughed.

‘Wake up, boy,’ the old man said, bewildering Jinyi, who had not been called boy for at least the last twenty years of his life. ‘Of course it’s deserted. That’s where we make all the pyres these days.’

Jinyi looked down at the head clasped in his hands, and gave thanks that the eyes were completely closed. ‘But he’s not dead yet!’ he whispered fiercely.

‘Just a matter of time. You don’t want to have to make two trips, do you?’

Jinyi realised that there was nothing he could do. He kept his curses firmly under his breath, and the dying man’s head in his grip.

They descended in a cloud of slate dust and skidding gravel, each face whitened by the smoky spray as they fumbled quickly down the beaten path. As soon as they had side-stepped their way past tree stumps and rabbit warrens to the bottom, the group slumped the body onto the ground and squatted down around it. Jinyi felt Lard’s wrists, his neck. He wanted to ask whether any of them knew his real name, but could already predict the answer: they neither knew nor cared.

It was at times like these that Jinyi did all he could to try not to think about Yuying and their children, to stop himself wondering whether he had let them all down, utterly, completely. The words of their promise echoed around his head. That’s the peculiar thing about mortals, if you ask me – stick them in the shittiest place
on earth, make their lives a misery, and instead of trying to cheer themselves up they’ll go out of their way to make themselves feel even worse.

To calm himself Jinyi clung to his own logic: China is such a vast country, he reasoned, that everything that happens probably has a counterpoint or alternative in another town in another province. If I am suffering here, then others must be happy and content. If I am hungry, somewhere else others must be stuffed full. If I am cold, others must be warm. What other reasoning could there be for sending so many city people to the fields, for showing them the obverse of their lives, if not to prove this syllogism of opposites? For each and every action there must be an opposite action
occurring
in another place. If it is hell here, he thought, then that only proves that somewhere else might be heaven … please let it be where my wife is, where my children are.

‘He’s got a pulse. And I think he’s still breathing,’ Jinyi reported, though none of the villagers seemed interested.

‘Then we wait,’ the old man replied. The sun was bubbling under the line of houses at the top of the slope, the frost bristling and itching for another night in which it would consolidate its
two-pronged
attack, inching further down the hill and climbing further up the cracked walls.

People spend their lives waiting for things that never happen. This, though, was inevitable. Jinyi wondered how Turkey had known what to call the sudden spasm and collapse; he himself had heard the phrase ‘heart attack’ before, and knew what it entailed. In another century, he mused as the four villagers bent close and muttered amongst themselves, we might still have believed in the terrible fiction that there is no end – then I might have whispered in his ear, told him who to look out for. My parents, my aunt, my father-in-law, my two small sons; the corpse I saw on a dirty track somewhere between my youth and my marriage; the dead man whose face I shaved when I was still a teenager; half my friends now, gone or as good as. Better this way, though, better to keep them as memories, nothing more. You can keep memories safe, even if you cannot always control them.

‘Shouldn’t we try to do something?’ Jinyi finally snapped,
interrupting
the low murmurs of the villagers.

They stopped talking to stare at him. Finally the old man reached over and cuffed him round the ear. Jinyi bit his lip till he drew blood,
not wanting to enflame the situation, knowing he would be blamed for whatever happened since his name was already tarnished.

‘You’re here for an education, right? Well, listen up. We don’t
tolerate
any of that intellectual crap round here. You ought to know that by now. Raising the dead, that’s beyond even the power of the great Chairman, so it certainly can’t be done by the likes of you.’ The old man paused to hock up what sounded like a larynx full of flotsam, and spat out the ball of sticky phlegm with a look of
satisfaction
. ‘Magic. Immortality. Those stories are dangerous, young man. Best to just keep your mouth shut.’

They sat in silence, Jinyi’s ear reddening in the dusk chill. It was hard to tell exactly when Lard died, to measure out the last of the spasms, tremors and gases that the limp body expelled, to record the moment when the heart shuddered down to the slow closing beats of an ellipsis at the end of a sentence. They checked and rechecked, pressing ears to the fat man’s lips and chest, until they were finally satisfied and the sour smell of death and loosened bowels assailed them, at which point they rose and shook themselves off – come on, time for bed, busy day tomorrow. Jinyi held back and, when the others were not looking, rearranged the dead man’s hair into something resembling a side parting, then folded his pale hands across his defeated chest.

And if you are wondering what we gods know about death, then I am afraid I cannot tell you. I get different reports all the time, and, frankly, none are trustworthy. My own experience was of waking up and finding myself transformed into a god – this, however, is a rare occurrence and probably should not be expected by the
majority
of people – I do not want to be responsible for any false hope. My department has always been responsible for watching, studying and reporting, and owing to the intense rivalries between departments up here, it is hard to know what is currently happening in other, more shadowy areas. Let me just say this: life, in all its manifest forms, is complicated – why should death be any simpler?

Lard’s dead eyes stared out from the hastily constructed funeral pyre the next day; strips of wood and scraps of hacked-down
evergreen
formed a squat bed for the impressive girth of the dead
rightist
. Despite not wanting to waste a day when more important jobs
could be attended to, the locals had been cajoled down to the
valley
by the cadre and stood with their arms folded while he made a speech. Jinyi, Turkey, Bo, and the twenty others sent from distant worlds for their spirits to be stripped away and remolded, hung their heads, each aware that it might be them next.

The cadre cleared his throat. It was current practice for the Party to pass judgment on a person’s life after their death, and this was exactly what he intended to do, despite not only knowing nothing about the man’s life prior to his arrival in the village seven months ago, but also not remembering his real name.

‘Our comrade here has reminded us of the work we still need to do. Everywhere are imperialists, capitalists, intellectuals, followers of Liu Shaoqi. Together we can strike them down; we can change their polluted minds and set their hearts aflame with the spirit of Mao Zedong Thought. Dare to criticise, dare to fight! Though there are many men like him, clinging to the old and corrupt world, together we can kindle the flames of this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and transform the whole of society, the whole of our mighty country. The toll of revolution is blood and sacrifice. Each of us must work harder, do more, strive and steel ourselves – or die.’

The cadre cleared his throat once more, and pulled out a polished silver lighter, embellished with a picture of Chairman Mao, rays of light jetting out from behind his moon-shaped face. He clicked it once, twice, three times and, sparking a flame, crouched to start the fire. As his flesh began to crackle and brown, Lard became one of the lost and forgotten.

It is difficult to estimate how many people disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, how many never made it back home. The number would have to include not only the first wave of the
bourgeois
, rightists, moderates, intellectuals, writers, artists,
Soviet-followers
, actors and politicians who had in some way aroused the envy or petty jealousy of Jiang Qing (Mao’s second wife), and even Party members themselves who dared criticise the government, but also the second wave of teachers, businessmen, doctors and
professionals
, and finally the third wave consisting of the Red Guards themselves, finally deemed too dangerous to be allowed to form large networks and therefore dispersed to the countryside to embark on an alternative schooling. Countless numbers fell prey to dysentery,
diarrhoea
, flu, tetanus, TB, malaria and other germs they were not used
to; heart failure, malnutrition, scurvy, broken bones, torn ligaments, sustained violence, strokes, epilepsy, breakdown, rape and suicide claimed countless more. Take Yuying’s youngest sister, Chunxiang. On that very same day she collapsed in a field in Anhui, broken by sunstroke and the memory of having been raped and beaten by boys young enough to be her children. It is not known how many
hundreds
of thousands never found their way home from the blind spots of the map, for the majority of those who did survive the Cultural Revolution wished never again to speak of those bitter years.