Part 11 (1/2)

I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. So intent are they on getting what they both want, they didn't notice me until I was at the chicken coop. 'Tea?'

They spring apart. Big Ears blushes like a tomato. Does she thank me for guarding her honour? No. She looks at me, arms folded, quite unabashed, though her legs are as wide apart as a man's. 'Yes. Tea.'

They come around to the entrance to the Tea Shack. She sits down, crosses her legs, and pulls lipstick and a mirror from her shoulder bag. He sits opposite her, and just stares, like a dog at the moon. 'Radio,' she orders. He gets a s.h.i.+ny little box out of his bag, and slides out a long wire. She takes it, touches the side, and suddenly a woman's voice is on the path, singing about love, the southern breeze, and p.u.s.s.y willows.

'Where's she coming from?'

The girl deigns to notice me. 'It's the latest hit from Macau.' She looks at the boy. 'Haven't you heard it?'

''Course I have,' he says, gruffly.

There are things I will never understand.

My father shrieked at me and the chickens squawked. 'You little s.l.u.t! You little fool! After everything I've done for you, after the sacrifices I've made, this is how you thank me! If it had been a boy, the Warlord's Son would have showered us with gifts! Showered us! We could have lived in his castle! I would have been appointed a dignitary with servants! Fruits from the islands! But why would anyone want to acknowledge that!'

He jabbed his fingernail into my baby's loins. My baby howled. Only five minutes old, and already learning. 'You've sold your chances of a decent marriage for a nightpot of watery s.h.i.+t!'

One of my aunts led him out.

The Tree was looking in, and smiling. 'Isn't she beautiful?' I asked.

The shadows and light on my baby's face were leafy and green.

A few days later, it was agreed that my daughter would be raised with relatives living three days' ride downstream. A large landowning household, one more daughter could be slipped in without much fuss. An uncle told me that the distance would conceal the shame I'd inflicted on our family's honour. My chast.i.ty was gone for ever, of course. Perhaps in a few years some widower pig farmer might be persuaded to take me in as a mistress and nurse for his old age. If I was lucky.

I resolved then and there not to be lucky.

These same uncles all agreed that the j.a.panese would never get this far down the Yangtze, nor this far into the mountains. And supposing they did? Everyone knows how j.a.panese soldiers need more oxygen than humans, so they could never get up the Holy Mountain. The war had nothing to do with us. Many of the village sons were conscripted by the Warlord, and sent to fight on the side of some kind of alliance, but that was beyond the Valley, where the world is less real. Places called Manchuria, Mongolia, and further.

My uncles never knew truth from chickens.h.i.+t. I dreamed of a clay jar of rice in the cave. When I asked a monk what it meant, he told me it was a suggestion from Lord Buddha.

When the Holy Mountain is windy, sounds from afar are blown near, and nearby sounds are blown away. The Tea Shack creaks my lazy father never lifted a hammer in his life and the Tree creaks. That's why we didn't hear them until they had kicked the windows in.

My father was climbing into the cupboard. I listened, nervous, but already resigned to whatever fate Lord Buddha had laid out for me. I wrapped my shawl around me. They didn't speak valley language. They didn't even speak Cantonese, or Mandarin. They made animal noises. I spied through the cracks in the planking. It was difficult to see in the lamp light, but they looked almost human. My village cousins had told me that foreigners had elephant noses and hair like dying monkeys, but these ones looked a lot like us. On their uniforms was sewn insignia that looked like a headache a red dot with red stripes of pain flas.h.i.+ng out.

Lights were shone into our faces, and rough hands hauled us downstairs. The room was full of beams of lantern light, men, pots and pans being overturned. Our moneybox was found and smashed open. That headache insignia. A thing with wings swung above. The smell of men, men, always men. We were brought before a man with spectacles and a waxy moustache.

I was the breadwinner, but I looked at the floor.

'A nice cup of green tea, perhaps,' my father wrestled through a stammer, 'sir?'

This one could speak. Strange Cantonese, squeezed through a mangler. 'We are your liberators. We are requisitioning this wayside inn in the name of His Imperial Egg of j.a.pan. The Holy Mountain now belongs to the Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity. We are here to percolate our Sick Mother China from the evil of the European imperialists. Except the Germans, who are a tribe of honour and racial purity.'

'Oh,' said my father. 'That's good. I like honour. And I'm a sick father.'

The door banged opened I thought it was a gunshot and a soldier wearing a gallery of medals came in. Waxy Moustache saluted Medal Man, and shouted animal noises. Medal Man peered at my father, then at me. He smiled from the corner of his mouth. He made some quiet animal noises to the other soldiers.

Waxy Moustache barked at my father. 'You have harboured fugitives in your inn!'

'No, sir, we hate that goatf.u.c.king Warlord! His son raped my daughter here!'

Waxy Moustache translated this into animal noises to Medal Man. Medal Man raised his eyebrows in surprise, and grunted back.

'My men are pleased to hear your daughter provides comfort to pa.s.sers-by. But we are displeased to hear your slur of our ally, the Warlord. He is working with us to purge the Valley of communism.'

'Of course, when I said-'

'Silence!'

Medal Man forced the mouth of his gun into my father's mouth. 'Bite,' he said.

Medal Man looked into my father's eyes. 'Harder.'

Medal Man uppercutted my father's chin. My father spat out bits of tooth. Medal Man chortled. My father's blood dripped to the floor in flower-splashes. He staggered back into a tub of water, as though he had rehea.r.s.ed it.

The soldier holding me relaxed his grip as he laughed. I staved in his kneecap with a bottle of oil and sent the lamp in my face flying across the room. Whoever it hit screamed and dropped something that smashed. I ducked and ran for the door. Lord Buddha slipped a bra.s.s chopstick into my hand, and opened the door for me as my fingertips touched it, and shut it behind me. There were three men outside one got a good grip, but I stuck the bra.s.s chopstick through the side of his mouth and he let go. The j.a.panese soldiers followed me up the path, but it was a moonless night, and I knew every rock, curve, bear path and fox trail. I slipped off the path, and heard them vanish into the distance.

My heart had slowed by the time I reached the cave. The Holy Mountain fell away below me, and the windy forest moved like the ocean in my dreams. I wrapped myself in my shawl, and watched the light of heaven s.h.i.+ne through the holes in the night until I fell asleep.

My father was black with bruises, but he was up and limping through the wreckage of the Tea Shack. His mouth looked like a rotting potato. 'You caused this,' he scowled by way of greeting, 'you fix it. I'm going to stay with my brother. I'll be back in two or three days.' My father hobbled off down the path. When he returned he had become an old man waiting to die. That was weeks later.

My daughter was blossoming into a local beauty, my aunts told me. Her guardian had already turned down two proposals of marriage, and she was still only twelve. The guardian was setting his sights high: if the Kuomintang forces took over the Valley soon, he could possibly arrange a union with a Nationalist administrator. He might even get himself a fat appointment as a clause in the marriage negotiations. A photographer had been paid to take her picture, which was being circulated amongst possible suitors in high places. When I wintered in the Village an aunt brought me one of these photographs. She had a lily in her hair, and a chaste, invisible smile. My heart glowed with pride, and never stopped.

My daughter's father, the Warlord's Son, never lived to see her blossom. This causes me no sorrow. He got butchered by a neighbouring Warlord in alliance with the Kuomintang. He, his father, and the rest of his clan were captured, roped and bound, slung onto a pile at a crossroads down in the Valley, doused in oil and burnt alive. The crows and dogs fought over the cooked meat.

Lord Buddha promised to protect my daughter from the demons, and my Tree promised that I would see her again.

Far, far below, a temple bell gongs, the surface of the dawn ripples, and turtledoves fly from the wall of forest, up, and up. Always up.

A government official strutted downbound out of the mist. I guessed he'd been driven to the summit. I recognised his face from his grandfather's. His grandfather had sc.r.a.ped a living from the roads and market-places in the Valley, shovelling up manure and selling it to local farmers. An honest, if lowly, way to get by.

His grandson sat down at my table, and slung his leather bag onto the table. Out of his bag he produced a notebook, an account book, a metal strong-box, and a bamboo stamp. He started writing in his notebook, looking up at the Tea Shack from time to time, as though he was thinking about buying it.

'Tea,' he said presently, 'and noodles.'

I began preparing his order.

'This,' he said, showing me a card with his picture and name on it, 'is my party ID. My identification. It never leaves my person.'

'Why do you need to carry a picture of yourself around? People can see what you look like. You're in front of them.'

'It says I am a Local Cadre Party Leader.'

'I dare say people work that out for themselves.'

'This mountain has been incorporated into a State Tourism Designation Area.'