The Incarnations (12 page)

‘On the nights your husband doesn’t go home to you,’ she said, ‘he is with me. In the apartment he rents for us both. I thought you ought to know.’

Wang Hu’s mistress paused to measure the effect of her words. Shuxiang blinked as though a gust of wind had blown up in her face, but was otherwise impassive. The young boy at least had the sense to look intimidated. Lin Hong patted her brand-new corkscrew perm (she had gone to the beauty parlour that morning, with a photo of her favourite Cantopop star clipped from a magazine). She smiled again. She then announced to Shuxiang that not only was her husband cheating on her, but she (the mistress) was now pregnant with his child. Wang Hu had a new family now, and Shuxiang should expect her husband to leave her any day soon. The girl waited, expecting tears and devastation. Denial and rage. But there was none of that. Calm, and not flustered in the least, Shuxiang said, ‘Congratulations. I wish you the best of luck.’

The malicious look faded from Lin Hong’s eyes. Thrown, she had wobbled away on her high heels, looking very silly and young. Wang looked at his mother after the girl was gone. He could tell Shuxiang’s mind was now turning away from the confrontation, to other things.

‘Is Ba going to leave us?’ he asked.

‘No. He will force that girl to have an abortion.’

They had continued walking home.

August 1988. Twelve-year-old Wang cycled home from his middle school in Dongcheng every afternoon, the wheels of his Flying Pigeon spinning, his satchel thumping his side. He locked his bike up in the shed, rushed into Building 16 and up four flights of stairs, blinking as he entered the smoky apartment. Shuxiang had been on her own all day. Sitting at the table, littering her ashtray with filters. Wang pulled the curtains wide and Shuxiang flinched in the daylight. He opened the windows to let the smoke escape. Though Shuxiang was thirty-eight now, her face was obstinately childish and round.

‘What did you do today, Ma?’ Wang asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

Wang resented her. He resented her for sooting up her throat and the recesses of her lungs with cigarettes. He resented her when she murmured, ‘What they teach you at school is a pack of lies, Little Bear. Every lesson is to brainwash you.’ Wang resented her for the fact he did not fit in, which he knew to be the fault of his isolated childhood. He rolled up his sleeves and washed the dirty crockery in the sink. He bought meat and vegetables from the stall, and cooked them shredded cabbage in sesame oil and pork dumplings. Shuxiang rarely had an appetite. She prodded at the pork dumplings with her chopsticks.

‘What are you thinking, Ma?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

For years, Shuxiang had been a recluse, her one companion her young son. But as the heat of the summer faded away, she changed her agoraphobic ways and roamed the communal yard. Everyone was surprised to see her out and about, with her cardigan buttoned up wrongly over her frock and her hair in need of combing. Her hectic eyes and purposeful stride prompted people to ask, ‘Where are you going in such a hurry, Li Shuxiang?’ But she behaved as though she had neither seen nor heard them. She charged out of the housing-compound gates with a sink plunger in her hand, deaf to the laughter in her wake. (‘A plumber now, is she? Whose toilet is she going to unblock?’)

One afternoon Wang returned to an empty apartment, then rushed back out to look for her. She was in none of her usual haunts, so Wang returned home to wait for her, scared that something bad had happened. Half an hour later there was a knock at the door. It was Shuxiang and two men from the Residents’ Committee. Grey-headed, retired factory workers now volunteering to protect the harmony of the community. Shuxiang was drenched, the hem of her coat dripping puddles about her bare feet.

‘Your mother was wading in the Liangma River,’ one man said. ‘Up to her waist.’

‘The river is dirty and polluted,’ said the other. ‘Not for swimming.’

‘My shoes are missing!’ Shuxiang blurted. ‘I put them on the riverbank and a thief stole them.’

She was outraged, as though the theft of her shoes was the scandal here. ‘Your mother is not well and needs to see a doctor,’ the grey-headed men told Wang. ‘She needs supervision during the day.’ Did Wang’s father know about her eccentric behaviour? Wang lied that he did. Shuxiang nodded, and they continued to discuss her as though she was not there, which was partly true.

They travelled backwards in time, mother and son, back to the days before Wang was of school age, though now the roles were reversed. Wang stayed home from school to care for her, his world shrinking to the shadowy, curtained rooms of Apartment 404. He cooked her rice porridge for breakfast, then rubbed a damp flannel over her face and brushed her teeth over the sink. Though she was a distracted listener, he read passages out of her old classic novels to her, wanting to occupy time in a meaningful way.

Wang came to understand the tedium of caring for a small child. How thankless children are. How slow the passage of time when punctuated only by repetitive tasks. He resented Shuxiang for what she had become, but caring for her exaggerated his love for her too, into a fierce, protective breed. He brushed her hair before bed every night. He covered her with blankets when it was cold. His mother was his burden and sorrow now.

When Wang had to go to the market he locked her in, so she couldn’t escape. But one day in December he returned to the compound and discovered that this was not precaution enough.

‘There he is. That’s her son.’

Entering the gate with a bag of shopping, Wang saw the crowd by Building 16 and, sensing the atmospheric disturbance, the thrum of something out of the ordinary in the air, hastened over. Heads turned towards him. Security guards, the man from the vegetable stall, old women with dogs on leashes and mothers jiggling babies on hips. ‘She needs to see a doctor,’ he heard. ‘Wrong in the head.’ The crowd parted for Wang, and he looked up at the object of the communal gaze. Shuxiang was standing naked in the window of the fourth-floor balcony. The pale winter sunlight fell through the glass, illuminating the thickness of her hips, her dangling breasts and the dark pubis that reminded him of documentaries about primitive tribes. But Wang knew the most obscene thing about Shuxiang was her smile. She smiled as though her indecent exposure was for exhibitionist kicks, but Wang knew this was not the case. There was no provocation or perversion in her stance. Lost in her own world, Shuxiang had no idea of her effect on the crowd gathered four storeys below. But the crowd did not know this. They flattered themselves that her nakedness was for them. Wang muttered an apology and rushed into the building. After he was gone, the crowd neither dispersed nor stopped gawking up at the nude woman behind the glass. ‘Outrageous,’ they whispered. ‘Ought to be locked up.’ They stared on and on. They could not drag their eyes away.

Wang ran into the bedroom and threw a bedsheet over her shoulders, as though putting out a fire that threatened to burn the apartment down. He pulled her back from the window, out of public view, not caring when she lost her footing and stumbled. He was angry enough to slap her.

‘Everyone saw you! Everyone was looking at you and your disgusting body!’

She glanced at him, as unabashed by her nakedness as a cat or a dog, the burden of shame her son’s alone. Taller than his mother now, Wang lowered his face to hers. ‘
Why can’t you be normal?
’ he shouted. She said nothing, didn’t even flinch. The bedsheet slid from her shoulders. Her skin was goosepimpled, her nipples erect in the chilly air.

‘You shouldn’t be a mother,’ Wang said. ‘I should never have been born.’

This remark had some effect on Shuxiang, and she looked at her son.

‘Yes, it would be better if you had never been born,’ she agreed. ‘Being born into this world is hell. You will be crushed with countless millions all your life long.’

Shuxiang went to the bed, pulled back the covers and got in. Then she held up the bedspread with her arm, making enough room for her son to crawl in beside her. ‘Come to bed,’ she said. Wang stared at her body in the shadows. No way, he thought. But they had shared a bed when he was a child. Back when Shuxiang used to look after him, and not the other way around. And Wang was tired. He was tired of worrying. Tired of the anxiety of what she might do next. So he went to the bed, slipped under the bedcovers and rested his head on the pillow beside hers. He had on a jumper and old school trousers. The fact he had clothes on, he decided, compensated for the fact that she did not. At first he was tense with the strangeness of it. But Shuxiang was not tense. Shuxiang was sleeping. The rhythm of her breath lapped at him like waves against a shore. Lulling him to calmness, lulling him to sleep. Wang lapsed in and out of consciousness, waking to the darkening sky and lengthening shadows as the earth spun away from the sun. Waking to the nearness of Shuxiang and her mouth slackened by gravity. Waking to sulphurous breath, rising from her stomach’s gastric pit. Shuxiang’s hands were in prayer, her body in a loose foetal curl. They were not touching at first, but her body moved to his, seeking him out. She gathered him in her arms with a protectiveness she lacked in waking life, and slept on. Wang drowsed, the sounds of children playing in the yard drifting in and out of his hearing. But he did not hear the key in the lock. He did not hear the front door clicking open.

They were not woken when the quilt was tugged off them. They were not woken by the bloodshot, caffeine-sharpened eyes staring down at them. They were cleaved to each other, mother clasping son in a tight embrace. On the pillow their parted mouths nearly touched. The blood-capillaried eyes bore into them, until Wang’s father could not stand what he saw a moment longer. His thick knuckled hand reached down and dragged his twelve-year-old son up by a fistful of hair. Wang screamed as his scalp lifted and short dark hair ripped out from the roots. Shuxiang leapt up, her bare chest heaving as she slapped at her husband, shrieking at him to stop. Wang Hu hurled the boy from bed to floor, then fell on him. Blow upon blow upon blow. When he was done, and the boy near unconscious, he turned on Shuxiang, who had been hitting him throughout. ‘Shut up,’ he said, and hit her so hard her screaming stopped. Then he threw her on the bed and unbuckled his belt.

Wang was sent to a boarding school, north of Beijing. After eight weeks at the school his father came to visit and told him his mother had died from the pneumonia she caught after swimming in the Liangma River on a freezing January night. Father and son were in an empty classroom, loaned to them by the headteacher, to allow Wang Hu some privacy to break the tragic news.

‘The funeral was three days ago,’ Wang’s father said. ‘We didn’t want to interrupt your schooling. It was very depressing. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted you there anyway.’

It irritated Wang Hu to see that his son’s dislocated shoulder still hadn’t healed and remained in a sling. He should have recovered weeks ago, he thought. The boy’s stubborn as a crooked nail that won’t hammer flat. For appearances’ sake, Wang Hu sat with his son for another twenty minutes, before getting back in his BMW and heading back to Beijing. It was the last time Wang would see his father for several years.

SPRINGTIME. THE CITY
is thawing. Beijingers shedding coats and scarves and other woollen armour in the battle against the cold. The scenery of winter, the roadside oil drums of foil-wrapped baked potatoes and the heavy quilts over supermarket doors retiring from view.

Gobi dust billows in the sky. The city suffocates under the haze of pollutants, the smog burning the back of Wang’s throat. He streaks the tissue he blows his nose with into black, but with a mental shrug lights another Zhongnanhai from a pack left by a fare. The shadow in his lungs will worsen anyway. What difference will one more cigarette make?

East Third ring road, the digital Olympic clock counts down the seconds until the Games. Billboards of athletes leap over hurdles and somersault through the air, China’s national heroes, muscles rippling and taut, holding up cans of Coca-Cola midjump. Throughout Beijing renovations are underway. The polluted façades of buildings are being repainted. Millions of empty flowerpots line the streets, waiting to be filled.
One World, One Dream. Remaking the Environment Benefits the People. The Olympics Unites You, Me and Him
. The slogans are everywhere.

Passengers come and go. The destinations are far and wide. Nanluoguxiang, the courtyards renovated into overpriced boutiques and tourist shops. Babaoshan cemetery. The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, and the undercover-police-surveillanced expanse of Tiananmen Square. The affluent gated residences of Shunyi. Desolate regions of the Great Wall. The vast sundial of the Millennium Monument, casting no shadow under the sun-bereaved sky.

A westerner slides into the back seat with a beautiful girl. Wang watches the couple in the rear-view. The man is fortyish, with toady eyes and the broken thread veins of alcoholism in his large meandering nose. The girl is in her twenties, with a sugar-frosting of make-up on her pretty face. How can she let him put his hands on her? wonders Wang. For what? Money? Status? A US fiancée visa? The man has a proprietorial hand on her knee and the smirk of one who thinks his own charisma has won him his trophy, and not the charisma of the West.

An official in an expensive tailored suit, his hair dyed an inauthentic black, flags down Wang’s cab outside a government building in Jiangguomen. As Wang drives him, the radio news talks of the Toxic Dumpling Incident. Fourteen people in Japan are sick in hospital after eating dumplings imported from China that were contaminated with pesticides.

‘Sabotage!’ says the official. ‘They are poisoning our dumplings to make China look bad.’

‘Really?’ Wang says. ‘You think the Japanese would poison their own citizens?’

‘They are an evil race.’

‘I’ve met some Japanese,’ Wang says. ‘They don’t seem so bad.’

‘Driver!’ snaps the official. ‘Didn’t you study the War of Resistance against the Japanese at school?’