Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense.’

  ‘Old woman, I don’t make the rules. This order is direct from Beijing. Tourism is a prime thrust of Socialist Modernisation. We earn dollars from tourists. I know you don’t even know what a dollar is, and don’t even try to understand economics, because you can’t. But understand this: the Party orders you to pay.’

  ‘I’ve heard all about the Party from my cousins in the Village! Your bubbling baths and your flash cars and your queue-jumping and stupid conferences and—’

  ‘Shut your ignorant mouth now if you want to make a living from the People’s Mountain! The Party has developed our Motherland for half a century and more! Everyone else has paid! Even the monasteries have paid! Who are you, or your chicken-fucking country cousins, to dare think you know best? Two hundred yuan, now, or I’ll be back in the morning with the Party’s police officers to close you down and throw you in gaol for non-payment! We’ll truss you up like a pig, and carry you down the mountain! Think of the shame! Or, pay what you owe. Well? I’m waiting!’

  ‘You’re in for a long wait then! I don’t have 200 yuan! I only make 50 yuan in a season! What am I supposed to live on?’

  The official slurped up his noodles. ‘You’ll have to shut up shop and ask your country cousins to let you pick fleas from their sows in the corner. And if your noodles weren’t so salty you might sell more.’

  If I’d been a man I’ve have thrown him into my cess-pit, Party official or no Party official. But he had the upper hand, here, and he knew it.

  I unfolded a 10-yuan note from my apron pocket. ‘It must be a difficult job, keeping track of all the Tea Shacks up and down the Mountain, who’s paid what . . .’

  He swished out his mouth with green tea, and sluiced out a jet that spattered against my window. ‘Bribery? Corruption? Cancer in the breasts of our Motherland! If you think I’m going to agree to postpone the victory of socialism, to smear the bright new age that is our nation’s glorious destiny—’

  I unfolded another 20 yuan. ‘That’s all I have.’

  He pocketed the money. ‘Boil those eggs, and pack them with those tomatoes.’

  I had to do as he said. Once a shit shoveller, always a shit shoveller.

  Two monks ran out of the mist, upbound, gasping.

  Running monks are as unusual as honest officials. ‘Rest,’ I said, unfolding a fresh cloth for them. ‘Rest.’

  They nodded gratefully and sat down. I always serve Lord Buddha’s servants the best tea for free. The younger monk wiped the sweat from his eyes. ‘The Kuomintang are coming! Two thousand of them. The Village was being abandoned when we left. Your father was climbing into his cousin’s cart – they were going into the hills.’

  ‘I’ve seen it all before. The Japanese wrecked my Tea Shack.’

  ‘The Kuomintang make the Japanese look civilised,’ said the elder monk. ‘They are wolves. They loot what food and treasure they can carry, and burn or poison what they can’t. In a village down the Valley they cut off a boy’s head just to poison a well!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The communists are gaining momentum all over China now, despite the American bombs. The Kuomintang have nothing to lose. I’ve heard they’re heading to Taiwan to join Chiang Kaishek, and have orders to bring what they can. They scraped the gold leaf off the temple Buddhas at Leshan.’

  ‘It’s true!’ The younger monk shook some grit from his sandal. ‘Don’t let them get you! You have about five hours. Hide everything deep in the forest, and be careful when you come back. There might be some stragglers. Please! We’d hate to see anything happen to you!’

  I gave the monks some money to burn incense for my daughter’s safety, and they left, running up through the mist. I hid my best cooking utensils high in my Tree, and, asking His pardon, hid Lord Buddha up above where the violets grew.

  The mist cleared, and it was suddenly autumn. When the wind blew the leaves streamed up the path like rats before a sorcerer.

  The trees grew as tall as the Holy Mountain itself. Their canopy was the lawn of heaven. Follow, said the unicorn’s eyes. Lay your hand on my shoulder. Corridors of bark and darkness led to further corridors of bark and darkness. My guide had hoofs of ivory. I was lost, and happy to be lost. We came to a garden at the bottom of a well of light and silence. Over an intricate bridge inlaid with jade and amber, lotus flowers and orchids swayed gently. Bronze and silver carp swam with the dark owls around my head. This is a peaceful place, I thought to the unicorn. Will you stay awhile?

  Mother, thought the unicorn, a tear growing bigger and bigger in her human eye. Mother, don’t you recognise me?

  I awoke with the saddest feeling.

  Hiding in my cave, watching the rain, I wished I could change into a bird, or a pebble, or a fern, or a deer, like lovers in old stories. On the third day the sky cleared. The smoke from the Village had stopped. I cautiously returned to my Tea Shack. Wrecked again. Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most. I set about clearing up the mess. What choice is there?

  The communists came with early summer. There were only four of them – two men, two women. They were young, and wore neat uniforms and pistols. My Tree told me they were coming. I warned my father, who, as usual, was asleep in his hammock. He opened one eye: ‘Fuck ’em, they’re all the same. Only the badges and medals change.’ My father was dying as he had lived. With the minimum effort possible.

  The communists asked if they could sit down in my Tea Shack and talk with me. They called each other ‘Comrade’ and addressed me respectfully and gently. One of the men was the lover of one of the women – I could see that immediately. I wanted to trust them, but they kept smiling while I talked. I’ve always been wronged by smilers.

  The communists listened to my complaints. They didn’t seem to want anything, except for green tea. They just wanted to give things. They wanted to give things, like education, even to girls. Health care, so that the ancient plague of China would be vanquished. They wanted an end to exploitation in factories and on the land. An end to hunger. They wanted to restore dignity to motherhood. China, they said, was no longer the sick old man of Asia. A New China was emerging from somewhere called Feudalism, and the New China would lead the New Earth. It would be here in five years’ time, because the international revolution of the proletariat was a historical inevitability. Everybody would have their own car in the future, they said. Our children’s children would go to work by flying machine. Because everyone would have enough for their needs, and so crime would naturally die out.

  ‘Your leaders must know powerful magic.’

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the women. ‘The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin, and Class Dialectics.’

  It didn’t sound very convincing magic to me.

  My father rolled out of his hammock. ‘Tea,’ he told me. ‘We’re very glad to see the communists bring a bit of order to our Valley and Mountain,’ he said, looking at the girls and picking his teeth with his thumbnail. ‘The Nationalists raped her.’ He jerked his head at me. ‘Must have been desperate.’

  I felt hot shame rising. Had he really forgotten it was the Warlord’s Son? The girl who was in love came over and held my hand. Such a young hand, it was, so pure that I was afraid for it.

  ‘The old regimes violated plenty of women. That was their way of life. In Korea the Japanese Army herded up all the girls in a township, gave them Japanese names, and they spent the whole war on their backs. But those days are gone now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the men. ‘China has been raped by capitalists and imperialists for centuries. Feudalism relegated women to cattle. Capitalism bought and sold women like cattle.’

  I wanted to tell him he didn’t know anything about being violated, but the woman was being so kind to me, I could barely speak. Other than my Tree and Lord Buddha, nobody had ever shown me such kindness. She promised to bring me medicine, if I needed any. They were kind, bright and bra
ve. They addressed my father as ‘sir’, and even paid for their tea.

  ‘Are you going up the Holy Mountain on a pilgrimage?’

  The boys smiled. ‘The Party will free the Chinese race from the fetters of religion. Soon there will be no more pilgrims.’

  ‘No more pilgrims? So isn’t the Holy Mountain going to be holy?’

  ‘Not “holy”,’ they agreed. ‘But still very impressive, for a mountain.’ And I knew right then that even though their intentions were true their words were chickenshit.

  When I wintered in the Village that year, distressing news reached me from Leshan. My daughter, her guardian and his wife had fled to Hong Kong, after the communists had ordered their arrests as enemies of the revolution. Everybody knew that nobody ever returned from Hong Kong. A tribe of foreign bandits called the British spread lies about Hong Kong being paradise, but the moment anybody arrived there they were put in chains and forced to work in poison gas factories and diamond mines until they died.

  That evening my Tree had promised I would see my daughter again. I didn’t understand. But I have learned that my Tree tells truths that don’t make sense until the light of morning.

  The fat girl wore stripey clothes that made her look fatter. She looked at the noodles, steaming and delicious, and looked at me. She slurped up a mouthful, held them in her mouth for a moment, shook her head and spat them onto the table.

  ‘Foul.’

  Her witchy friend took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘That bad, huh?’

  ‘I wouldn’t feed it to a pig.’

  ‘Old woman, don’t you have any chocolate?’

  Nothing was wrong with my noodles. ‘Any what?’

  Fat Girl sighed, bent down, scooped up some dirt and sprinkled it onto the noodles. ‘That might improve the taste. I’m not paying a yuan for it. I wanted food. Not pigswill.’

  Witchy Friend snickered, and looked in her bag. ‘I’ve got cookies somewhere . . .’

  Anger is pointless on the Holy Mountain. I rarely feel it. But when I see food being wasted so wantonly, I feel such rage that I can’t control myself.

  The noodles – and dirt – slid down Fat Girl’s face. Her skin shone under the grease. Her wet shirt clung to her neck. Her mouth was an ‘O’ of shock. She gasped like a surfacer, flapped her arms, and fell backwards. Witchy Friend had leapt up and stepped back, flapping her wings.

  Fat Girl climbed to her feet, red and heaving. She started charging at me, but changed her mind when she saw I had a pot of boiling water ready to douse her. I would have done, too. She retreated to a safe distance, and yelled. ‘I’m going to report you you you you BITCH! You wait! Just you wait! My brother-in-law knows an under-secretary at the Party office and I’m going to have your flea-infested Tea Shack BULLDOZED! With you under it!’

  Even when they were out of sight around the bend their threats floated downwards through the trees. ‘Bitch! Your daughters fuck donkeys! Your sons are sterile! Bitch!’

  ‘I can’t abide bad manners,’ said my Tree. ‘That’s why I left the Village.’

  ‘I didn’t want to get angry, but she shouldn’t have wasted the food!’

  ‘Shall I ask the monkeys to ambush them and remove their hair?’

  ‘That would be a very petty revenge.’

  ‘Then consider it done.’

  The time that famine came up the Valley was the worst of all times.

  The communists had organised all the farms in the Valley into communes. Nobody owned the land. There were no landowners any more. The landowners had been hounded into their graves, had donated their land to the people’s revolution, or were in the capitalists’ prisons with their families.

  All the peasants ate in the commune canteen. The food was free! For the first time in history every peasant in the Valley knew he would get a square meal in his stomach at the end of the day. This was the New China, the New Earth.

  Nobody owned the land, so nobody made sure it was respected. The offerings to the spirits of the rice paddies were neglected, and at harvest time rice was allowed to rot on the stalk. And it seemed to me that the less the peasants worked, the more they lied about how much they worked. When pilgrim-peasants from different communes in the Valley sat in my Tea Shack and argued agriculture, I watched their stories get taller. Cucumbers big as pigs, pigs big as cows, cows big as my Tea Shack. Forests of cabbages! You could get lost in them! Apparently Mao Tse Dong Thought had revolutionised production techniques, and was even spreading to the woods. The commune planner had found a mushroom as big as an umbrella on the southern slopes.

  Most worrying of all, they believed their own chickenshit, and attacked anyone who dared used the word ‘exaggerate’. I was just a woman growing old on a Holy Mountain, but no radish of mine got bigger.

  That winter, the Village was bleaker, muddier, madder than I ever knew it.

  I lived with my cousin’s family. Rice farmers for generations, I asked my cousin’s husband, why had they all become so lazy? The men got drunk most evenings, and didn’t stir from their beds until the middle of the next morning. Of course, the women ended up doing most of the things the men were too hungover to manage.

  It was all wrong. Bad spirits sat with the crows on the rooftops, incubating ill-intent. In the streets, alleyways, and the market square, nobody was walking. Days passed without a kind word. The main monastery in the Village had been closed. I wandered through it sometimes, through its moon gates and ponds choked with duckweed. It reminded me of somewhere else. The Village was suffering from a plague that nobody had noticed.

  I went to speak to the village elders. ‘What are you going to eat next winter?’

  ‘The fruits of Mother China!’

  ‘You’re not growing anything.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You haven’t seen the changes.’

  ‘I’m seeing them now. It’s not tallying up—’

  ‘China will provide for her sons. Mao Tse Dong will provide!’

  ‘When things don’t tally up, it’s the peasants who pay! However clever this Mao’s thoughts are, they don’t fill bellies.’

  ‘Woman, if the communists hear you talk that way, you’ll be sent away for re-education. Go back up your mountain if you don’t like it here. We’re playing mah jong.’

  That same winter Mao decreed his Great Leap Forward. New China faced a new crisis: a shortage of steel. Steel for bridges, steel for ploughshares, steel for bullets to keep the Russians invading from Mongolia. And so all the communes were issued with furnaces and a quota.

  Nobody in the Village knew what to do with a kiln – the blacksmith had been hanged from his roof as a capitalist – but everyone knew what happened to you if the kiln went out on your watch. My cousins, nieces and nephews now had to work scavenging for wood. The school was closed, and the teachers and students mobilised into firewood crews to keep the kilns fed. Were my nephews to grow up with empty heads? Who would teach them to write? When the supply of desks and planking was used up, virgin forests at the foot of the Holy Mountain were chopped. Healthy trees! News came up the Valley, where trees were scarcer, that the communists organised lotteries amongst the non-Party villagers. The ‘winners’ had their houses dismantled and burned to keep the furnaces fed.

  The steel was useless. The black, brittle ingots came to be called ‘turds’, but at least you can use turds for something. Every week the women loaded them onto the truck from the city, wondering why the Party wasn’t sending soldiers to the Village to mete out punishment.

  We discovered the answer by late winter, when the rumours of food shortages travelled up the Valley.

  The first reaction amongst the men was typical. They didn’t want to believe it was true, so they didn’t.

  When the village rice warehouse stood empty, they started to believe it. Still, Mao would send the trucks. He might even lead the convoy personally.

  The Party officials said the convoy had been hijacked down the Valley by counter-revolutionary spies, and that more ri
ce would be on its way very soon. In the meantime, we would have to tighten our belts. Peasants from the surrounding countryside started arriving in the Village to beg. They were as scrawny as chickens’ feet. Goats disappeared, then dogs, then people started bolting their gates from dusk until dawn. By the time the snows were melting, all the seed for the next year’s harvest had been eaten. New seed would be coming very soon, promised the Party Officials.

  ‘Very soon’ still hadn’t arrived when I set off back up the path to my Tea Shack, four weeks earlier than my usual departure. It would still be bitterly cold at night, but I knew Lord Buddha and my Tree would look after me. There would be birds’ eggs, roots, nuts. I could snare birds and rabbits. I’d survive.

  Once or twice I thought of my father. He wouldn’t survive another year, even down in the comfort of the Village, and we both knew it. ‘Goodbye,’ I’d said, across my cousin’s back room. He never stirred from the bed except to shit and piss.

  His skin had less life in it than a husk in a spider’s web. Sometimes his lidded eyes closed, and his cigarette shortened. Was anything under those lids? Remorse, resentment, even indifference? Or was there only nothing? Nothing often poses in men as wisdom.

  Spring came late, winter dripping off the twigs and buds, but no pilgrims walked out of the mist. A mountain cat liked to stretch herself out on a branch of my Tree, and guard the path. Swallows built a nest under my eaves: a good omen. An occasional monk passed by. Glad of the company, I invited them into my Tea Shack. They said that my stews of roots and pigeon meat were the best thing they had eaten for weeks.

  ‘Whole families are dying now. People are eating hay, leather, bits of cloth. Anything to fill their bellies. When they die, there’s nobody left to bury them, or perform the funeral rites, so they can’t go to heaven, or even be reborn.’

  When I opened my shutters one morning the roof of the forest was bright and hushed with blossom. The Holy Mountain didn’t care about the stupid world of men. A monk called that day. His skin wrapped his hungry face tightly. ‘According to Mao’s latest decree, the new enemies of the proletariat are sparrows, because they devour China’s seeds. All the children have to chase the birds with clanging things until the birds drop out of the sky from exhaustion. The problem is, nothing’s eating the insects, so the Village is overrun by crickets and caterpillars and bluebottles. There are locust clouds in Sichuan. This is what happens when men play at gods and do away with sparrows.’