Five Bells (19 page)

 

To show her party allegiance Pei Xing had worn her Youth League badge and the red scarf of her Young Pioneer uniform. She had worn it first as a nine-year-old; she joined the Young Pioneers on 1st July, International Children's Day, in 1960. How proud she had been. With the other children she chanted:
Ten thousand years to Chairman Mao!
In those days she had believed, as she was told, that her scarf was dyed red with the blood of the revolutionary martyrs.

When she was arrested at her home in Autumn Happiness Lane, later to be renamed People's Struggle Lane, she was allowed to bring her standard issue cotton quilted jacket and pants, and a few personal items, a hairbrush and some underwear.
The scarf was her protection. She had once been so fond of it. In this time of profligate symbols and ideas reduced to codes, when so much depended on the mesmerising loyalty to red, here was her conciliating sign of assent. But once arrived at the prison her effort was derided. A female guard wearing a khaki cap with the red star emblem had yanked at the scarf on her neck and slapped her face.

‘Radish,' the woman said with spitting contempt.

Pei Xing felt her stinging cheek and the welt where the scarf had been torn, and held back her tears. This was so small an injury, compared with what was to come. She saw a large banner –
Serve the People!
– as she was hit again.

 

Pei Xing no longer dwelt on the two years she spent in prison. Nor on the injuries Comrade Peng and others inflicted. The days were distinguished only when she was submitted to meaningless interrogation, or beaten in a particularly memorable way. Her compulsory reading material was The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao, which she learnt diligently both from boredom and in an attempt to please her jailers.

When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain.

She was an enemy without a gun, yes, she needed Communist re-education, yes. She had studied English, yes. But she did not help her father spy for the Americans, no; he had never spied, no, she had never spied. No.

Pei Xing believed that if she signed the ‘confession' saying that her father, a ‘member of the stinking ninth category, the intellectual class', had committed a crime, she would be condemning him to death. It made no sense to her, this story that they told. She did not recognise her family in the crude, mendacious version they offered. Only later she discovered her parents had been killed a week after they were taken; her
confession was to provide a retrospective justification. For the paperwork, someone said. To show that the Party was infallible.

 

At first there was only retching despair and a nightmare of foreboding. Pei Xing waited to die. She was cold and cramped and could not imagine a future. She was filled with a grief of monstrous inexactitude. Day and night she heard sobbing, and random brutal shouts. But as the months wore on she found resources of solace and distraction. In her small dim cell, Pei Xing began silently to recite lines her father had once taught her:

Transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry
.

Amazing to consider these were adjectives used to describe snow. Could it be a bad English translation, or remarkable poetry?

Yet it was also the world re-created, the world linguistically new. Pei Xing was not permitted to write, but nothing could prevent her privately remembering. Over the weeks she slowly told herself the story of
Doctor Zhivago
, and when she had finished she began again, embellishing what she had earlier recalled, adding a few Chinese details of her own.
Doctor Zhivago
was her secret life, whispered not into the air, but into the cardinal recesses of her heart, held close as she had been held by her mother and her father. She saw her body becoming straw-thin, felt her painful chest filling with fluid, she forced down the repulsive prison food to keep herself alive, but she also invented a counter-life of familiar characters, a story that became over time more and more incredible.

Pei Xing's
Doctor Zhivago
included her father and her mother, it included her brother riding in the countryside on a Golden Deer bicycle, it included lines of Tang Dynasty poetry, often about nature, or love. In her version Lara and Zhivago played chess and ping-pong, visited Pudong and Puxi, and were educated much as she had been. They knew the great Chinese classics, especially
The Dream of the Red Chamber
, her mother's favourite
book. They knew the plots of Chinese opera and even some quotations from Chairman Mao. And of course they also knew Russia in revolutionary times, and understood the great and improbable outcomes of any fraught nation. In this way, and by small degrees, Pei Xing saved herself. In this way she kept alive in spirit what was dangerously impermissible and communed with her family, who were hungry ghosts before their time.

 

After two years, after – for a second time – she was bashed on the occasion of Mao Tse Tung's birthday, Pei Xing confessed that her brother had been an Enemy of the State. He was abroad and safe, she reasoned; so she concocted a story about his extravagant anti-Party activities in Hong Kong. She was asked to write an account of his perfidy, then signed the form in her flawless handwriting and felt ashamed. It was then they told her that her parents had died. Comrade Peng stood at the door of her cell and announced in the same sentence that she would be released from prison and that her parents had died. When? How? They ignored her questions. Pei Xing felt blank, unmourning, pointlessly relieved. They were free too. They were ghosts she might meet. She left prison in the daze of one unsure of her own measure of reality, stepping into the streets of Shanghai clouded over, like a shadow of herself.

 

There was no rejoicing and there was no true mourning. Something was demolished that could never be rebuilt. Years later, when Shanghai was under reconstruction, when cars largely replaced bicycles and steel high-rise loomed everywhere, Pei Xing saw ‘
cui
', ‘destroy,' written in white paint in a circle on the walls of condemned buildings. Everywhere she saw it:
cui, cui.
And felt as if she too was marked with such a sign.

 

Though released from prison, Pei Xing was sent to the country
for re-education. One month later she found herself joining other ‘educated youths' on a farm on Chongming Island, not far from Shanghai, nestled in the mouth of the Huangpo River. Their revolutionary task was land reclamation. This involved cutting reeds, laying them on salt flats, cutting reeds once again, laying them down once again. Then growing grass, cutting grass, burying grass. Eventually, they were told, this would desalinate the flats and crops would be planted. The reed roots in the bare marshes often cut their soles; some wore thick slabs of rubber tied to their feet, but most had no shoes and ended the day bleeding into the salty water. Pei Xing had not known that cut feet could cause such agony. At night, in the rickety shack that would be flooded at high tide, the young workers sang revolutionary songs, ate meagre meals, then fell into dead-tired sleep upon mats of damp reed. Lice infested them, insects bit at their bodies, many became ill.

Pei Xing no longer told herself
Doctor Zhivago
stories. She was lost to herself. The stories were gone. Her life was a repetitious cycle of brute hard labour, and she was often mistreated by cadre leaders because she was of ‘the criminal class'.

But there was sky and wind and occasions of numinous delight, when a kindness was shown, or solidarity expressed. There was the surprisingly open, capacious view; and here surrounded by the river there was a sense too of distended time. Pei Xing saw birds winging in from Siberia, looking like cut-paper artwork against the sky, watched the currents of water finding their shiny channels and confluences, sometimes trapped a fish, or an eel, or a soft-shelled crab. At sunrise the streaming light across the Huangpo suggested the careless serenity of heaven. At sunset one might believe in the rosy radiance of the future. It was a magnificent thing, the water beyond the marshes, extending into the sky.

Pei Xing was by then only nineteen years old. She had missed
her chance at higher education and wondered, in practical terms, what might become of her. She kept to herself and survived, and when something happened to please her, like a rare bowl of fishhead soup or boiled turtle, like a kind word or the tentative beginning of a friendship, she made herself remember human gratitude and the scale of what might unfold. After two years, Pei Xing's work team were moved into thatched huts with beds, and to other forms of labour. Her sense of relative comfort had so distorted that she wept for joy the first time she lay again on a bed that was dry, above the floor, and under a rain-proof roof.

 

In her fifth year on the island Pei Xing met Wang Xun. A thin man, consumptive, already chalky in complexion, he arrived wearing a badge that said ‘
In the Service of Chairman Mao
'. He was a low-level cadre who had volunteered to work in the provinces. He had been in the remote far north-west, a hardship post, but was then sent south, nearer his home city, when he became ill. His father was high up, they said, big time in Shanghai.

It would always be a mystery to Pei Xing that they met as individuals. She had accustomed herself to the impersonality of the crowd, to the revolutionary work unit and its indistinctive uniforms, and to a kind of habitual loneliness and self-subordination. Prison had taught her to hide inside herself. Work had abridged her conversation and the camp had narrowed and mutilated what might be said. She had not looked into a mirror or imagined herself in the gaze of another for years. That season they were assigned an easy job, the harvesting of corn, and found themselves working together, side by side, in the rustling, strangely private corridors of leaf-light.

Xun was a talker. Others were driven to silence by years of rural labour; he retained a chatty disposition and idealist convictions. He had not lost faith. He did not think the world corrupt. He wanted to be a writer, some day, and tell the
daunting huge story of the great Chinese people. The peasant class, he told her, were remarkable for their courage, they persisted in the face of suffering and endured beyond all reason. ‘They congregate beneath the stars,' he said enigmatically. ‘They understand the sky.'

Xun talked not in Maoist slogans but in a kind of literary language. He talked, Pei Xing thought, as if words mattered, as if they might be relied upon to untie the tongue into praise songs to the world, to describe falling snow, perhaps, or the shifts in fluid light on the surface of the Huangpo River at the very moment at which a migratory flock of birds ascends.

 

One day Xun discovered Pei Xing had also studied English, and that she shared a love of reading. He began talking in a low secretive voice, almost sexual in retrospect, about Jane Austen. His favourite writer, he declared, of all nations and all times.

‘
It is a truth universally acknowledged
,' he announced.

Pei Xing stared at him, disbelieving. What he said was seditious and ideologically unsound. This was a confidence of the most dangerous kind. Had he been discovered talking like this he would be accused of counter-revolutionary sentiments and ‘capitalist-roader' veneration of the despicable Four Olds. Yet Xun trusted her, implicitly, and spoke to no one else in this way. Once he leant so close that she felt his confessional breath upon her cheek; this was the moment in which she was reminded of the softness of her own body. This was a moment – his breath – of sensual implication, and one from which she retreated at first, bewildered and alarmed.

Then there came a further literary revelation: Xun had read her father's translation of
Doctor Zhivago.
Pei Xing quietly quoted a few lines and nervously watched for a response. Xun smiled. He too knew the famous section on
inward music
.

‘It is true,' he told her; ‘
the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
For
all the problems in our country there are still those who know this, still men and women of virtue who will not compromise. We are a great nation. We are a great and full-spirited people.'

Pei Xing had thought this a redundant rhetoric. It gave her pause. She knew that she was not a woman of virtue; she would never tell Xun that she had constructed a false story about her brother. That she had lied, just to save herself. That she had blackened his name.

But still they grew close, in shy and tentative increments, and began to see in each other not only words but a sensibility in common, miscellaneous likes and dislikes, lost and found attachments and expressions. Xun told her that when he went to the North West Provinces the only personal object he had taken with him was a favourite shuttlecock, a Swift Pigeon, slightly damaged, that he had kept from his childhood.

This was the moment in which Pei Xing realised she loved him, when she imagined the man with a handful of ragged feathers, invaluable, saved from the past. The moment when just one toy from his boyhood alighted in her mind, soft and affirming, with a candlelit glow.