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For two weeks exploding firecrackers shredded the winter gloom at
Shaoyang’s Number Two Space Rocket Factory. The fourteenth and last
night was the Lantern Festival: hopeful lovers carried their hearts
in moth-skin lanterns, bobbing like hooked fish on the ends of long
canes. A river of stars flowed through the night, the candles
burned steadily down, and after midnight solitary spirits wandered
the streets with increasing desperation - searching for their
perfect match, who might never come.
The next morning the radio announced the end of the holiday as
children searched in the frost for the last unexploded bangers and
detonated them in a ragged battle of irregular gunfire. At
7-45a.m., Beijing Time, Party Secretary Li woke suddenly from a cold
green dream that had stranded him back in the year 1967, and which
had left him perplexed and nervous. It was the fourth time in as
many weeks that the same dream blown confusion into his sleeping
mind, and this time he lay and shivered and thought hard, testing
himself for any signs of private insanity.
Next to him Autumn Cloud, his wife, lay wrapped in cotton quilts,
her head tilted back and mouth open, asleep. He got up and opened
the window to feel the frost on his skin. There was a chill morning
breeze; firecrackers were sporadically shattering the silence. He
rubbed his eyes as the smell of gun powder smarted in his nostrils;
opened them and saw the white snow sprinkled with the fallen petals
of paper - cold and red.
Party Secretary Li tried to carry on his morning’s activities as if
nothing at all had happened. He cleared his throat into the toilet,
then sat to empty his bowels in one long fluid motion, wiped away
the excess with a strip of newspaper. He examined his old
walnut-wrinkled face in the mirror and rubbed the chin of stubble
that bristled defensively against the cold. He lit a cigarette and
smoked; tried hard to be normal.
At breakfast Autumn Cloud steamed five bread buns full of date
paste; and poured out two bowls of sweet rice gruel, patterned with
red jujubes and white tremella. She slurped expansively, and he
slurped in reply. Slurp, slurp went their morning conversation.
Next door, from her concrete balcony, Madam Fan was serenading the
world with Beijing Opera. Her voice was shrill and beautiful, every
note of the arias perfectly delivered. This morning she sang the
young nun’s soliloquy from ‘The White Fur Coat’:
A young nun am I, sixteen years of age,
My head was shaven in my young maidenhood
Party Secretary Li slurped, and his wife slurped back.
When beauty is past and youth is lost
Who will marry an old crone?
‘She’s been a crone for years,’ Autumn Cloud muttered. ‘Who does
she think she is?’
Party Secretary Li looked up from his breakfast and stared at his
wife; her eyes held his then turned away. The words of the aria
seemed to him very beautiful for an instant.
These candles on the altar
They are not for my bridal chamber
He could picture Madam Fan with her sleeves blowing in the breeze,
her shadow dancing on her concrete step next to her.
From where comes this suffocating ardour?
From where comes this strange, internal, unearthly ardour?
The lonely words drifted across the skyline of grey concrete
tenements and over the Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory’s
roof of corrugated iron; across the river, beyond the East and North
Pagoda, to the hillsides of bamboo and pine, where the north wind
whispered back. He sat for a moment, eyes closed, breathing in
circles, in and out, and felt for an instant a canyon-deep calm.
A young nun am I, sixteen years of age
My head was shaven in my young maidenhood
For my father, he loves the Buddhist sutras
And my mother, she loves the Buddhist priests.
Party Secretary Li laughed suddenly. He stood up and put on his
army greatcoat and Russian fur hat.
‘I’m going to the office,’ he said.
As he left his wife shouted at him, ‘I thought you retired!’
He ignored her as he always did, and walked outside.
‘What good’s a husband who is always away from the house?’ she
cursed his footsteps, muttering as she cleared away the breakfast
dishes. Party Secretary Li startled her so much by coming back and
answering her this time that she dropped the blue bowl, which
shattered, scattering shards across the white tiles, patterning them
with fragments of blue and white. He stood for a moment in the
doorway, and sang to her the line ‘A young nun am I, sixteen years
of age,’ and then left.
She hurried to the door to watch him leave again, and check her
husband hadn’t just gone mad. Who did he think he was? What if
word got around that her husband was singing lines of a young girl?
The offices were closed, so Party Secretary Li walked around the
back of Number 7 block of flats. He stood and surveyed the black
soil of the allotments. Old Zhu was there, raking up dead leaves
into a heap. His white hair, gap toothed smile and skin of a baby.
‘How was Spring Festival?’ he asked Old Zhu.
‘Good!’ Zhu answered. ‘Good!’
‘Did your son come back?’
‘No, too far. Too far. And yours?’
‘No. Had no time off.’
They stood in silence for a while. Young people never came back to
Shaoyang, not even to die. There was nothing here for them here,
except memories. Party Secretary Li watched Old Zhu rake up another
pile of leaves. There were now two piles of leaves; tumbled mosaics
of russet and black and brown. He lit a cigarette.
‘Want one?’
Old Zhu shook his head.
Party Secretary Li lit his own, breathed in and then out in a long
plume of smoke. It tasted stale. He threw it away, his hands
burrowed deep into his trouser pockets. He watched Old Zhu rake up
a third pile of leaves. They made up the shape of a triangle.
Three was a lucky number, but in each pile of leaves he could feel
the chill of his dream: it was in the cigarettes he smoked, the food
he ate, and it coloured his sleep.
‘Did you hear?’ Old Zhu asked, as he straightened his back and leant
on his rake’s shaft.
‘Hear what?’
‘They’re closing the factory,’ Old Zhu said.
‘They’re doing what?’ he asked.
‘Closing the factory.’
‘This factory?’
‘Yes.’
‘Impossible.’
‘It’s true.’
‘It can’t be.’
Old Zhu looked up into the thicket of branches above his head, that
rained the leaves he raked into piles; and said simply ‘It is.’
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Passing
Under Heaven
A
Bend in the Yellow River