Under Fishbone Clouds (50 page)

‘She’s better off this way,’ they heard the woman with the claw telling the others as they stooped to the picking; no one argued with her.

The ‘Long River’, the Yangtze, dissects the country in a horizontal squiggle, its slow dive from the Sichuan mountains to the Shanghai coast resembling the whirling nosedives and leaps of a kite the wind has tugged from a child’s hands. It has more than seven hundred tributaries which irrigate a million plots, and even now trickle through ten million dreams. It is dragon, god, king – bestowing grace or punishment on the little lives it holds tight, according to some unknown plan. Yangtze River dolphin, Yangtze porpoise, alligator, sturgeon, carp, mullet, swordfish, Chinese paddlefish and a million others.

Like those branded undesirable and exiled to the countryside, be they loose-tongued urban workers or wily Party men like Deng Xiaoping sent to be reformed through labour, Qu Yuan, wandering along the banks of another river over two thousand years earlier, would not have dared imagine the dramatic rehabilitation he would later receive. He was watching the egrets swooping over the trawl, singing some of his freshly composed verses to himself when he heard a voice behind him.

‘Hey! I know you, don’t I?’ The speaker was an elderly fisherman; his skin wrinkled and patchily sunburnt, his frail body a marked
contrast to his rippling, bulky arms. The ambling poet and scholar was, by contrast, pale and nervy, his long knotted beard speckled with premature grey.

‘No, I am afraid that you must be mistaking me for someone else. I am sorry. Am I in your way?’

‘Nah. Not at all.’ The old fisherman grinned, showing his
toothless
gums, as he began to stride down the bank to where his thin boat was moored, hidden behind a strut of tall reeds. Then suddenly he turned back. ‘Wait. I do know you. You’re that official, aren’t you? Yes, yes, I’ve heard all about you. You’re Qu Yuan. Why, my son can even recite some of your poems, though they’re a little beyond an old man like myself.’

Qu Yuan coloured a little as the old man retraced his steps to face him.

‘But here’s the thing, my friend. This whole county is mostly fishermen or tea-pickers or, if you’re lucky, sow-breeders. Now, tell me, what’s a renowned man like you doing round here, eh?’

Qu Yuan ran a hand through his beard as he considered his reply. He had until recently been a chief minister in the government of the state of Chu, and what was more had been one of the king’s most trusted advisers. Yet the king had gone against his advice and attended a meeting in another state. There, a trap had been sprung and the king captured, only to die in the foreign jail before the demanded ransom could be paid. Qu Yuan had urged the king’s son, who became the next monarch, to build up the army to avenge this humiliation. However, the new king had put his trust in more sycophantic ministers, who advised caution and, jealous of Qu Yuan’s past favour, argued for the minister’s exile. The new king had agreed; after all, he did not wish to risk humiliation himself.

When Qu Yuan spoke, his voice was hoarse and throaty, despite his careful enunciation and obvious gravitas. ‘Where everyone is dirty, I alone stay clean; where everyone is drunk, I alone remain sober. That is the reason I have been banished here.’

The old man laughed. ‘Don’t be so stuck up! Surely a wise man like you knows that you have to move with the times. If everyone around you is getting tipsy, why not at least have a little tipple yourself? No one’s perfect, you know. If you ask me, sir, you only have yourself to blame.’

‘If a man had just washed his hair, you would not expect him to
then put on a filthy hat; if he had just bathed, you would not expect him to then dress in dirty clothes. I would rather throw myself into the river than sully myself by rolling in the dirt with those hypocrites in the government,’ Qu Yuan replied.

The old fishermen sighed and wandered back down the bank to free his boat, shaking his head as he went.

Before the sun had sunk into the flow the next day, Qu Yuan had proved himself true to his word by wading down into the water and letting the current take hold of his wandering thoughts and pull them toward the ocean. When the elderly fisherman came to tar his trusty boat, he was struck by the silence, the absence of that sonorous voice singing strange and hopeless poetry. Realising what had happened, he called together as many others as he could, and they took to the river in rickety rafts, battered canoes, crammed rowboats and leaky cobbled-together crafts, to search for the body. The elderly fisherman pounded an old skin drum, sending a rattling beat between the boats and urging the rowers faster as they
desperately
tried to catch up to where the famous poet’s body might be.

After hours of trawling oars through weeds and around the
darting
schools of sparky bronze fish that on other days they would have been delighted to find, the men were becoming desperate. One of their number began to sing:

The elderly fisherman recalled his son singing that same verse, part of Qu Yuan’s epic lament,
Sorrow in Exile
, and he finally
understood
. He called to the others.

‘We have searched all day, and found nothing. We’re not going find him now. But don’t give up hope. Though we can’t bring back his body for the proper funeral rites, we can still do good and show our respect. Take out the rice you brought for your lunch – come on, I know those of you with wives have had something prepared for you – good, that’s it. Now chuck it in the river!’

No one moved. Eyes glanced round nervously, each man holding covetously onto his food.

‘Come on! Do you want the fish to eat his body? What kind of ignoble ending would that be for such a great man? Throw your rice in and give the fish something else to eat, and then they’ll leave Qu Yuan alone, and his body can at least have some rest!’

The old man then threw his own lunch, wads of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, into the river. The young man who had been singing some of the poet’s verses followed suit,
prompting
others around him to do the same. Soon the dingy afternoon was filled with the plop and splash of food being thrown to the gathering fish. The fishermen went home that night hungry and downhearted.

Yet they did not forget Qu Yuan. People found his longing,
idealistic
rhymes spilling from their lips as they sailed, sowed, harvested and hoed, regardless of whether they had meant to memorise them or not. And as successive governments fell to corruption,
mismanagement
or military hiccups, Qu Yuan’s prudence and sobriety was mourned even more. Thus the next year, on the very same day, the fishermen gathered once again to take to the river, drums and packages of rice in hand, this time joined by men and women from neighbouring villages.

Happiness is the easiest thing to lose. Sorrow, on the other hand, is impossible to forget.

It was the day before the fifth of the fifth, the Dragon Boat Festival which commerated Qu Yuan, but Jinyi could not keep track of dates. It was spring, his sixth year away, and nothing else mattered. Jinyi would not be back with his family for the Tomb Sweeping Day, Worker’s Day, Double Ninth Day, the Mid-Autumn Festival or even for National Day, the only one he was certain was still being celebrated. He was allowed one visit home a year only, seven measly days including the two at either end it took to make the journey. Yet still he kept his hopes of returning to Fushun for the next year’s Spring Festival held deep in his holey pockets, along with the words he always wanted to say but instead had to store up under his swelling tongue, along with his children’s faces, which he called up whenever he closed his eyes.

That was why they were there: to let go of everything that they thought they knew, then remake themselves. Passing from
acceptance to resentment to contentment, then veering back, Jinyi zigzagged through emotions that he thought he had tamed and caged. He had even started biting his nails again, something he had not done for close to thirty years, though he still had the
will-power
to make sure he only did it when he thought no one was watching.

‘Coming for water?’ Bo pulled him back from his trance.

Jinyi nodded and got up from the long bench in the cramped village canteen, clutching his wooden bowl tightly as he stepped around the slippery spills and spit covering the floorboards. He
followed
Bo and Turkey out into the dusk.

‘I’ve got dust in my teeth; I can feel it. Dust and grit, from that bastard wind today,’ Bo muttered. As he had grown older, he had become more vocal, although only around those he had spent a long time with. He had recently turned sixteen, though he had told no one. Guessing some milestone, Jinyi and Turkey had saved up their allowances to present him with a packet of cigarettes that was almost full.

‘Dragon’s breath,’ Turkey said, thrusting his chin towards the red mop of molten cloud stretched across the dark.

‘Dragon’s breath? You might as well say that these dusty gales have been huge dragon farts! You two sound like my grandmother. Come on, you’re not that old!’ Bo said.

‘We are old,’ Jinyi said. ‘You know when you’re getting old, don’t you? It’s when you’re stuck halfway between getting annoyed about all the things you suddenly can’t remember and getting
angry
about all the things you can’t forget. Damn it if I don’t feel old too. I’m nearly halfway to a hundred.’

‘Pah. Our noble Chairman is older than you and me combined, and so is Comrade Zhou Enlai, one of the greatest and fairest men this country has ever seen. They’re both still going strong,’ Bo countered.

Jinyi laughed. ‘Ha. I reckon you could get us all in a lot of trouble if you were heard comparing us to the beneficent leaders in Beijing.’

They stopped at a long metal trough and skimmed their hands through a pool of misty starlight. Each of them scooped up a
bowlful
of fuggled rainwater, which they swirled around until it had mixed with some of the burnt rice stuck to the side and soaked up the bland taste of that day’s dinner.

They drank. That was what the moon must taste of, bitter and thick, the sour zest of longing and leftovers.

‘Drink up. We’ll need the strength for tomorrow,’ Jinyi warned.

He was right. By the time they ate the next meal, a late
breakfast
of hard buns speckled with green onion, they had passed the rocky plain and begun an ascent of a bramble-knotted hill. Six oxen (which Bo had been quick to nickname Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Bethune and Lei Feng, if only to upset the delicate patriotism of his two companions) slapped their fly-squatter tails against ruddy flanks as they sauntered between the sweaty men.

‘Why us?’ Bo moaned as they slipped into single file around the turns of the muddy track, sandwiching the oxen between them.

‘You should be happy. Nothing better than being outside on a day like this. You can’t tell me you’d rather be sitting around thinking about the past than being busy. Plus, it’s is an important delivery – it shows the cadre trusts us,’ Jinyi said.

‘Either that or he wants us to fail so as to find an excuse to punish us,’ added Turkey. These days, however, the others were never sure whether Turkey’s words were a product of a knowing humour or an excess of bile. His expression always hovered somewhere between smile and grimace.

Jinyi could no longer be bothered to point out the obvious: that they should not be talking like that. Yet as the months piled up, he was increasingly unsure of everything. The oxen, he reasoned at last, would not rat them out. Someone must keep them buoyant though.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Jinyi sighed. ‘We know the oxen, we’re always with them, so who else was he going to ask? And anyway, Bow Lake Village needs them, so we’re doing some good by
delivering
them. That ought to be enough.’