Authors: Andy Oakes
Piao shook his head.
“I am not going to Fudan University tomorrow. I am going to my cousin’s funeral. The cousin who died for keeping your son’s body in his warehouse.”
He moved down the stairs towards the car, aware only of her beside him. Her hand on his arm, the rough material of his jacket between her fingers.
“I am sorry, it was selfish of me. If I may, I would like to come and pay my respects?”
He pulled away. She let go of his arm. Watching as he stepped into the car. Watching as he turned the ignition key. Piao winding down the window as the car slowly moved off.
“Wear white,” he shouted above the slaughter of traffic noise.
“In China, white is the colour of death.”
The city, the countryside. Both have lives that are different. Deaths also.
In the city, if you die, you will be cremated … it’s mandatory. Land that can grow rice and cash crops cannot be lavished upon those who life no longer possesses. In the city, the elaborate and costly funerals, the very substance of China’s native religion, the cult of the ancestors … have been simplified; pruned back to the heartwood.
In the countryside, the party’s edicts slow in the mud of the fields; mellow in the nicotine yellow fingers of the peasantry. At sixty, the number of years considered to be the normal life cycle, the grandmother will still save for the eighty Yuan that will purchase the fine camphor wood coffin, storing it in readiness in the corner of the family’s single room. And when the grandmother is no longer in possession of life she will be laid out for the traditional three days in front of the Buddhist star that was so carefully hidden from the Red Guards during the shudder of the Cultural Revolution. Her favourite foods will be placed in three clay bowls around her. At night her spirit will be guarded by her sons and grandsons. The last night before the funeral, she will be placed in the camphor wood coffin which will be propped up on a chair … the oldest son will sleep beneath it. The demons kept at bay. A practitioner of the ancient wisdom of Feng-Shi, the geomancy of the ‘spirits of wind and water’, will decide the favourable site for the grave. The funeral procession of close relatives dressed in white robes, white caps, strips of white paper over their shoes, will wind their way above the village, and she will be buried amongst the fir trees on the hillside.
Above the lakes, above the valleys, beyond the confines of the starry spheres.
For seven days close relatives would be forbidden to eat meat. For forty-nine days the sons and the daughters, would be forbidden to bathe or wash their hair. If you died before reaching the age of sixty, the intricate scaffolding of the funeral rites would be brutally demolished. You would be called a ‘short-life devil’. Someone who must have committed some terrible misdeed in this or in previous lives to have been cut down at such a premature age. Your body would not be honoured within the family house. It is known for peasants who have died young, run over by a truck, to not be honoured with a funeral at all. Their bodies left where they fell.
The festival of Qing Ming, in early April, honours the ancestors. It is a time to visit the low brick tombstones of the ancestors … sweep them, clean them of weeds, tell the stories out aloud, make the children aware of the rivers that flow through their lives also. Underline the reality of the days now being lived by what has gone before. It is a comfort. A thumb in the mouth.
When you leave the tombs you place a paper flower on them to mark them out, to show that they have been visited, cared for. That the ancestors are still with us; they breathe, they live.
Red flowers, blue, green, yellow, white flowers.
The Party do not give the peasants a holiday for the festival of Qing Ming. It is a superstitious custom. It honours the ancestors. It raises the hanging tree of religion. Above all, it interferes with work. But go to Quanzhou on the day of Qing Ming, to the hillsides hugging hillsides. Each lazy arc a darker grey than the last. See the paper flowers?
Red flowers, blue, green, yellow, white flowers.
*
Gashed to the colour of worn leather; running to a horizon obscured by pillow hills, the fields had been worked, ploughed, planted to within inches of the cemetery boundary. Inside the graveyard, it was as if the heavens had opened up and wept, spotting each tomb with paper flowers of red, blue, green, yellow, white. There was a rustle with each breeze. Paper on paper. Colours colliding. Polite applause of gratitude from the ancestors.
*
The line of mourners, like doves, moved through the graveyard, across the fields, back toward the house sitting at the edge of the village. The smell of the house was of wood fires and tears. Piao refused tea, preferring Dukang. It was where it always had been. He helped himself. The rice spirit was fire, it would dull the knife-edge of pain within him.
*
A dull light played from the ceiling of the attic, swinging on a flex tethered by cobwebs. Piao gently placed the bottle of Dukang onto the floor, the glasses also, beside the sleeping bags; empty bottles of Qingdao beer, bowls of congealed rice with slicks of red pepper sauce, littering the wood boarded floor.
“I see you’re are out of beer?”
A bottle spun from Piao’s foot, rolling against Yaobang’s sleeping bag. The Big Man stretched his back; bones colliding and crunching into place.
“Out of beer, out of patience, out of fucking vertebrae.”
He grimaced. His teeth looking like the soles of shoes.
“Out of toothpaste?”
Yaobang rubbed his front teeth with a discoloured finger.
“Toothpaste?”
He examined the finger carefully.
“Never use the stuff. Bourgeois shit, used by queers and capitalists …”
Piao could still taste the mint from his own toothpaste on his tongue. The Big Man wiped his finger across his shirt front.
“… what was the funeral like, Boss?”
Piao finished his drink, filling his glass and the other two. The Dukang’s hue, that of smelted lead.
“Funerals. Just filler to cover over the waste. Depressing. Fucking depressing …”
He took the drink through clenched teeth, across his tongue; a rye and sorghum bushfire out of control.
“… the only good thing about funerals is the drink.”
The Big Man nodded in agreement, raising his glass and draining it before slamming it down for a refill; the tears haemorrhaging to the corners of his eyes.
“Nothing to be gained by being depressed Boss. What does it fucking give you? Only the shits and the sleepless nights?”
“It gives you less distance to fall,” Piao whispered. There was silence. A silence as if he were already falling. The Senior Investigator re-poured.
“Dukang, or do you only drink Coca-Cola, like other students?”
The Senior Investigator held the third glass of spirit towards the shadow beyond the Big Man. The liquid as grey as wet slate. Pan Yaobang shifted uncomfortably on his haunches, the side of his face catching the light. Piao knelt in front of the student, pressing the glass into his fingers; his own hands wrapped around Pan’s.
“Let us play a game. I will be honest, completely honest for two minutes. I would appreciate it if you would too …”
Between them, from the rafters, dust in a slow and balletic fall. Dark to light … light to dark. Piao continued.
“… you are scared, alone, and angry. So angry. One moment you are a student, university is simple. Minimal study, no responsibilities, no ties, the future looking secure, safe. And the girls … ‘the girls’. The next moment you are in a world where people are torn in half like so much waste paper; crumpled up. In the night you are moved from safe house to safe house. Shut away in rooms that have no windows. Living with strangers. What is the future now? Life is dark … under threat. You are being followed. People around you are being killed …”
The student’s eyes were closed. Tears … hot, fierce, clamped tight. Piao could smell their warmth, the salt in their sting, the fear at their root.
“… and I am the one you blame. It is my fault …”
Pan’s eyes opened, the tears set loose.
“… drink the Dukang. Alcohol can help, when you do not need it to help …”
The Senior Investigator raised the student’s hands to his lips. Drinking, coughing … tears running into the rice spirit. Piao wiped Pan’s face with his cuff.
“… my fault student? Eight bodies split like bean pods and thrown into the river. Two men, one my cousin, buried outside. Strung up like pork carcasses on meat hooks. Two hours, that is all. If you had been in the warehouse two hours longer you would have joined them. But you were not, and so there are more days in which life has possession of you, of us. More days to seek those who kill … and who would kill us. That is all that I wish to do …”
A breeze sighed through the large loft. For a few seconds they seemed to be held solely in its grasp. There was no world. No sky, no earth. No broken bodies.
“… I am no hero, but I know heroes. They are too scared to be cowards …”
He reached down for his drink, it had spilt, the glass tipped to the floor. A mercury pool slowly shrinking through the floorboards. A gift to the ancestors.
“… so what do you do, close your eyes, walk away? We live in a country that ‘kills the chicken to scare the monkey’. I know, I have killed enough chickens in my job. But there comes a time when one can’t close one’s eyes, when someone has to say ‘enough’?”
Piao looked away, his attention summoned by a distant car horn. Knowing that the Shanghai Sedan that had followed them would still be parked in the shadows on the twist of the Lushin Road. Its occupants taking turns to sleep. One always awake, watching. In the hours that deserved respect, cigarettes would burn angrily. Talk would be of disembodied tits, pussies. And there would be a smell that cars with such passengers always smelt of … cold noodles, cold sweat, and the hint of violence served cold. Now, right now, they would be watching. But watching for what, an Investigator, investigating? Or watching an American, an American with official status who still had the cold tears of a dead son in her eyes? Perhaps a Senior Investigator in the Homicide Squad was just the side-glance, a flicker of disinterested attention. But such an American, now there is an object worth the full and studied glare.
Pan raised his head. Eye contact for the first time. He looked tired. It was obvious that his sleep was ragged. His words slow, strung out, like clothes hanging from a washing line on a still morning.
“Have you ever seen cowboy films, American films, westerns?”
Piao shook his head, feeling the effects of the Dukang. Giving every word an echo, every movement of his eyes a feeling of nauseous acceleration.
“No, I do not care for American films. I saw one once,
Love Story
… my wife’s choice. A film for a woman. I remember that she cried a lot.”
“I like cowboy films. In cowboy films the bad men wear black. Always black. Even their horses are black. The good men wear white. Always white. White hats, jackets, and they ride white horses …”
He stopped to lick his lips. Dukang makes your mouth feel dry … so dry.
“… what are we?”
Piao laughed. A half Chinese cowboy detective riding a white horse through the cityscape of Shanghai. It would have had interesting possibilities if he had been able to ride.
“Senior Investigators do not wear hats, neither do students. But we are the good men …”
He halted for a second, the laugh fading, but its memory etched into the blue of his eyes.
“… in this case.”
“But we will win. The cowboys in the white hats always win in the end?”
“Winning might be several different things, in this case. If you are really asking me if you also will end up in the river or hanging from a meat hook, I can answer you, if you want me to?”
Pan nodded.
“You will live, student. I promise it, live to an old age. Live to see the Party crumble and every family realise their dreams of owning their own video recorders, their own cars, their own overdrafts …”
He patted Pan on the cheek.
“… you will live, cowboy.
Ku-hai yu-sheng
. Alive in the bitter sea. Now get on your white horse and talk to me of the words that dead bodies speak.”
*
Estimated times of death. So much to take into account. Cooling when naked is half again as fast as when clothed, and when in water, in the Huangpu, twice as fast. The physique of each victim to be noted. The ventilation and temperature of rooms, if that is where the body has been discovered. Allowances to be made for all of these corrective factors. And all adding up to nothing more than a ‘peak of probability.’ All of the eight sharing the same peak of probability. Eighteen to thirty-six hours. Rigor had still been present. The skin markedly wrinkled on the hands and feet. No discoloration at the root of the neck. No discoloration or swelling around the face or neck. Yes, eighteen to thirty-six hours. That was how long they had been dead.
Pan took some more Dukang, coughing. His notes flapping in his hands like the wings of baby birds.
The girl, she had been pregnant, probably around twenty-one weeks. A needle mark still visible on her abdomen from an amniocentesis that would have been performed between the sixteenth and eighteenth week of gestation. The Senior Investigator finished another drink, the Dukang wet on his lips … his fingers suddenly nervous, not knowing what to do with them. He poured another glass.
“If it’s such a common test, how come I’ve never heard of it?”
The student looked up. At last, a subject that he knew.
“They are getting more common, yes. Twenty to thirty millilitres of amniotic fluid is withdrawn from the amniotic sac. It is then bio-chemically analysed and foetal cells are cultured for chromosomal analysis. From this, foetal abnormalities can be detected. Down’s Syndrome, as well as helping us to detect some genetic disorders … haemophilia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs Disease …”
He looked back to his notes, his spectacle lenses now taken up by lines of writing … words, like black beetles, scrolling across the glass.