Under Fishbone Clouds (38 page)

Jinyi came home with a new burn swelling across his palm, and pockets crammed with the stale bread destined for the factory bins. There must be interesting things that can be done with hardened crusts, he told himself. Dali and Manxin, as if drawn by some extra sense that would be lost in adolescence, left Granny Dumpling and the paper lanterns they were crafting in the bedroom to line up beside the table in a mock military formation. And just like new recruits they were both expectant and naively eager.

‘Where’s the guest, Pa? Is he invisible?’ Manxin asked a quarter of an hour later.

‘Invisible? Of course not, all the invisible guests are already here. Why don’t you and your brother take a little food and go and
entertain
them in your bedroom with Granny Dumpling, eh?’

Yuying, sweeping through the room while repeatedly unknotting and retying her hair, amazed at the recurring dust that no one else seemed to notice, nudged her seated husband, knocking his elbows out from where they were propping up his cheeks.

‘If we’re lucky, he’ll just have been winding us up. I’m not sure he’d really have the nerve to come round here.’

‘Well, if he’s not coming, then he’s not coming. Give the food to the kids, they need it.’

‘It’s bad luck,’ Granny Dumpling called from the bedroom. ‘A guest who does not arrive is as bad as a hungry ghost, a wind stuck in a room and swirling a whole house towards disaster, or things crawling out from children’s nightmares to take shape –’

‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ Jinyi huffed. ‘It’s bad luck. But it would also be bad luck for him to catch sight of you again – it might
remind
him too much of the old days. Yaba will be waiting for you.’

It was only a few minutes after Jinyi had led his hobbling
mother-in-law
out of the door that it swung open to reveal Yangchen and another taller man with a dark moustache, both dressed in crisp navy blues.

‘Ah, Comrade, please come in, we –’ Yuying said, rising from the table.

‘Good evening, Comrades,’ Yangchen interrupted. ‘This is my brother, whom I am sure you have all heard about.’

The tall man nodded curtly, his moustache bristling.

‘General, we are honoured that you have joined us,’ Jinyi said, frantically trying to remember the general’s name – after all, he had probably been told it a hundred times. ‘May I introduce my children: this is Dali, my son, and these –’

‘Yes, yes. I’m sure we’ll have a chance for that later. We don’t have much time; my brother is a very busy man. I am sure you can imagine,’ Yangchen said with a wave of his hand, and seated himself at the table. His brother followed suit.

‘Why don’t you go and look after the baby in the bedroom?’ Yuying whispered to Manxin and Dali. They grimaced, but did as she said, pulling the door closed behind them.

‘So, General, you must have lots of important local matters to deal with,’ Yuying said as she placed the lukewarm dishes onto the wooden table.

‘Yes,’ the general grunted. ‘And all of them confidential. Is this it?’

‘I’m afraid so. Please forgive us, if we had known you were coming …’ Jinyi said, seating himself next to the general, leaving his wife to settle, uncomfortably, next to Yangchen.

‘It will suffice. Now I recognise you. Used to work in the kitchen with my young brother here, didn’t you?’ the general said.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Yangchen said. ‘Hou Jinyi. Or is it Bian Jinyi? I can never keep up with all the changes. Yes, Jinyi has always been a dedicated worker – he even went as far as to marry the boss’s daughter.’

Both Yuying and Jinyi began to blush, waiting for their guests to pick at the dishes before they themselves could begin. A nervous silence descended like a layer of mould over the plates and
wobbling
piles of lotus roots, stale buns and chilli-dressed cucumbers.

‘A toast,’ Yangchen said with a leer. ‘To the Great Chairman, who has helped us to be rid of the cruelty of landlords and the bourgeois.’

The three men drank in silence, the general coughing on the liquor to make clear his disapproval of its quality.

They ate quickly, Jinyi and Yuying pushing around the dishes and topping up the thimbles with rice wine. Jinyi tried to think of a way to make a joke about the old days in the kitchen, to find a fond shared memory, something to bridge the years between them.
The chopsticks clicked and snapped in double-time; if even the officials are this hungry for our poor scraps, Jinyi thought, then perhaps those rumours of countryside famines are not so far from the mark.

‘Passable,’ the general commented, to no one in particular,
following
a loud belch.

‘So, Jinyi, whatever happened when you left the restaurant? One day you were there, the next you’d left town. Everyone knows what happened to me, especially after the revolution rewarded my loyalty and faith. But I heard at one point that your wife had arrived back in Fushun alone. Surely that must just be a horrible rumour, for who could leave such a beautiful, well-bred woman, hmm?’ Yangchen said.

Jinyi looked at his wife, noticing the colour welling up on her cheeks again. So this is why he agreed to come here, Jinyi thought; not to make up with us, but to humiliate us for some ancient slight.

‘I stayed to help my family. They were suffering from a poor harvest and other troubles. Luckily, the revolution soon came and solved all their problems, so I could then return.’

‘Interesting. Very interesting,’ Yangchen replied.

‘So, General, do you have any children?’ Yuying asked, trying to change the course of the conversation.

‘No. My brother and I have found that we devote too much time to the motherland to have any to spare for other trivialities,’ Yangchen replied for his elder sibling. ‘Perhaps you might care to come and see my office some time, Comrade Yuying, to learn more about the important work we are carrying out. I think I could teach you quite a lot.’

‘Perhaps … sometime … of course that would be very generous of you,’ Yuying replied, her head lowered. ‘But, maybe it would be best to wait, as we are so busy at the moment, with the factory and the furnace and sending things to my sister’s village to help her out during the food shortage there –’

‘There is no shortage!’ the general snapped. ‘That is just defeatist talk, rightist propaganda. Everything is fine. Read the newspapers, listen to the radio, look around you. The country is in a better shape than it has ever been.’

He thrust himself up from the table. ‘We have other business to attend to. Good night!’

The general marched out of the door, with Yangchen behind him, followed by Jinyi and Yuying as they garbled their thanks for the honour of his presence.

Yuying turned to her husband. ‘We can’t let them just go like that.’

‘They’re officials. They’ve probably got somewhere else to be. They only came here to get some free food and drink and make fun of us.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll lose face. At least find Yangchen and apologise for the poor dishes. We can’t afford to upset him,’ she pleaded.

Outside the last threads of light were already nuzzling the rooftops. Jinyi sighed his way through the smoke from the local furnaces, dodging the packed-up stalls and marching cadets. Pasted on almost every wall, colourful posters showed rosy-cheeked peasant girls pouting among a bumper crop, or strong hands holding out a platter of glowing corncobs, barley, glistening apples. Despite having just eaten the meagre dinner, Jinyi tried to stop himself from licking his lips.

He hated having to apologise. And now he would have to think of excuses to stop Yangchen spending time alone with his wife. He jogged through the streets, looking for anyone plump among the stickmen still outside. After twenty minutes of looping circles around the furnace, Jinyi gave up. They have obviously decided to disappear into our worries instead, he thought.

The few men he saw on his way back avoided his gaze,
suspecting
that he too, being out at that hour and not beside a furnace or a family or on a night shift, must be up to something not approved by state legislature. He kept his eyes trained on the distance, on the next street up from his where buildings and fields took turns overrunning each other as the dirt road eventually trickled into shanty huts and empty pig-pens.

Yuying sent the children to bed without letting them eat the leftovers; for even if they would be stale tomorrow, even if they would taste like shreds of hardened newspaper, well, that was still better than getting used to being completely full, because then the
children would come to expect that feeling of a satisfied stomach and measure every other miserable meal against it. She then took the black soap and washed her face in the night bucket before
joining
Jinyi in the wooden bed, both of them too tired and
embarrassed
by the evening to risk talking about it. Jinyi kept his eyes open, seeing the leaping red of furnace flames in the movements of the lazy moths and the window’s shadows, thrown from a world which, in its race ahead into the future, would not allow itself to rest for even a second.

‘Of course, China has always been ahead of the rest of the world; it is just that the rest of the world has not always known it,’ Teacher Lu was fond of saying. He made all his students memorise the four great inventions of the ancient Chinese and made sure they remembered the way they were claimed by foreign powers centuries later.

The compass: a floating lodestone first used to divine iron in mountainous Taoist temples, then later used to draw the world along its axis. Gunpowder: Qin Shi Huang’s search for an elixir of immortality had inadvertently led to the creation of fireworks, a source of beauty and enjoyment until foreigners took the stuff and used it to create modern warfare. Printing: wooden blocks arranged to stamp down characters over a thousand years ago. (Movable clay type was also created, and then quickly abandoned – it would never catch on, the printers agreed.) And paper: the eunuch Cai Lun’s experiments with hemp and bamboo, with silk and mulberry bark, led to the first crisp sheaths. This careful art was later taken abroad after the kidnap of Chinese papermakers by Arabs, spreading that most dangerous invention of all (and if you still think that
gunpowder
is more powerful, then you have not been paying attention).

Teacher Lu paced in front of the class, peering down at the rows of bowed heads, many freshly shaved for the lice season. He was worried that the swift whip of his ruler, the trusted slap when the back of a head met the back of his hand, and even the corkscrew twisting of an ear between thumb and finger, were losing their effect. What was more, there was no one he could complain to, despite knowing the cause of his class’s recent concentration problems. Teacher Lu knew that dissent was a dirty word, and these days, so
was hunger. Keep your head up, and keep quiet, and you’ll do well in life, Headteacher Han often said to both his staff and his pupils. Teacher Lu heard muffled voices from somewhere in the back row, but tried to ignore them. After all, with his stomach mewing and his mouth slathering, he was also having trouble keeping his mind on the question in hand: If Farmer Wang brings ten
jin
of rice to the collective, and Farmer Bai brings fifteen, then …

Hearing the rush of students from other rooms, the sound of doors being battered back, the whooping from the first off the mark and the cries and whines of those knocked over or trapped at the back of the pushing crowd, he let his class go.

‘Ah, lunchtime. Now, please, stand in formation and –’

He did not get to finish his sentence as the children rushed out around him, and he felt dizzy and confused as to how they still had energy left. The logic of the world was slipping away from him, and it was all he could do to keep the times tables from running themselves backwards toward zero.

If the mad scramble to the canteen showed the optimism untethered from memory possible only in the very young or very old, then the subsequent retreat to the classrooms showed the bitterness of experience. Water and potato flour made into a flat pancake and blackened in an oil-less pan, or cups of soapy broth in which bobbed a few hardened flecks of millet, or rubbery boiled potatoes that had been waiting in cellars from back when there were still good harvests: even the teachers wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to eat nothing at all than to share so little that the stomach was tempted and awakened without being sated.