She brushed some dust off her sleeve and said, ‘I don’t have an appetite for such things. Why do I need to tell you what you’ve done?’ Seeing the blank look on my face, she sneered, ‘Don’t act dumb with me. Do I have to remind you what you did to Little Tiemei in the barbershop?’
Now I understood. A frightful rumour about me had already begun to spread, thanks to Wang Xiaogai — the guilty one taking a bite out of the victim. I stood there in front of the oil-pumping station in a daze, so angry my limbs felt cold. Li Juhua’s words buzzed in my ears. ‘Go ahead, be as decadent as you want, it’s none of my business. You and I have nothing in common, and I don’t care if you wind up in prison.’
I had no desire to engage Li Juhua in a debate about the false accusation. Instead, I headed angrily to the security-group office to settle scores with Xiaogai. But when I got there, I could see through the window that he was out; Baldy Chen and Scabby Five were in the cluttered office playing a game of chess, head to head and cursing up a storm. A blackboard on the wall above them read: ‘Current security situation report.’ My name appeared below the heading: ‘Ku Dongliang of the Sunnyside Fleet took liberties with a woman at the People’s Barbershop.’ The sight of those scrawled words nearly blew the top off my head. Ignoring the door, I pushed open the window and all but jumped through it. ‘Erase that!’ I shouted. ‘Erase my name!’
Jerking their heads up, they both screamed. Wasting no time, Scabby Five picked his truncheon up off the table and dashed over to me. ‘Well, Kongpi, we don’t have the time to take care of you, so you are on your own!’
I flung my quilt stuffing at Wulaizi, but he ducked, and Baldy Chen rushed up. He was holding a rifle with a glinting bayonet fixed to the barrel. Blinking ferociously, he charged at me. I jumped down off the window ledge and ran all the way to the cotton warehouse, where I stopped and looked back to see Baldy Chen and Scabby Five in the doorway, yelling something I couldn’t hear. Maybe they had decided not to chase me so they could continue with their game of chess. After a quick survey of my surroundings, I picked up an enamel tea cup left on a stool by the gate watchman and took a drink, then wiped my face with a tattered towel. Since I couldn’t hang around here, I decided to go to the chess pavilion.
The area around the pavilion was like a black-market communication hub, where oil truckers pulled off the highway to unload and rest and pick up hitchhikers, taking them as far as Horsebridge or Wufu for fifty or sixty cents. It was an open secret.
I went up to the pavilion, my first visit in years, and was shocked by what I saw. The hexagonal structure now had only three sides, the swallow-tail eaves were gone, and striped plastic sheeting was wrapped around the six stone pillars, their tips peeking through the top to remind passers-by that this had once been Milltown’s grandest spot. This was possibly the most significant event on the banks of the river, and I knew nothing about it. Who was responsible? It had to be Zhao Chuntang. But why? My attention shifted from the pavilion to a slovenly worker crouching on the ground drinking tea and eating a steamed bun; a sledgehammer lay at his feet. I ran over to confront him.
‘Who authorized you to tear down the pavilion? Was it Zhao Chuntang?’ In between bites, he said, ‘It’s not my call, and not Zhao Chuntang’s. The order came from above.’
‘Why would anyone want to tear it down?’ I asked.
‘This is valuable property,’ he said, and I hear they’re going to build a car park. There are so many vehicles in Milltown these days — oil trucks, agricultural transports, even military vehicles — so parking is at a premium.’
‘What’s more important,’ I demanded, ‘a car park or a memorial to a revolutionary martyr?’ It was a delicate question, but I was asking the wrong person. So I softened my tone and asked, ‘What about the memorial stone? Where did they tell you to move it to?’
‘It’s only a stone marker,’ he said, ‘and a tomb with some personal effects. Easy to move. I’m told it’s going to the revolutionary museum in Phoenix.’
My distress mystified the worker. He looked me over carefully, taking in my bag, my clothes and my leather shoes, but he couldn’t figure out who I might be. ‘Who are you, anyway?’ he asked.
I nearly blurted out, ‘I’m the martyr Deng Shaoxiang’s grandson!’ But I bit my tongue. The river flows east for thirty years, then west for thirty more. Now I couldn’t say whose grandson I was. With a sigh I said, ‘I’m nobody, nobody at all. Just a rank-and-file citizen. I was curious, that’s all.’
‘After raising such a stink, now you tell me.’ The worker breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Why’d you get so angry with me? We’re both rank-and-file citizens, so you shouldn’t be asking me questions like that. Go and ask one of the big shots.’
He was right, this was a matter for the big shots. That excluded me, and I had no reason to make trouble for an ordinary worker. I walked back to the pavilion and pulled back part of the plastic to look inside. The smell of alcohol hit me in the face. The man wasn’t alone. Two other workers were asleep on the floor. The remains of a meal lay on an old newspaper, and a pair of geese were picking their way through the lunch boxes and drink bottles. Then I caught sight of a man watching the geese — it was the idiot Bianjin, sitting in a corner, holding a baby goose in his arms as he gnawed on a pig’s foot.
The sight of Bianjin called to mind his backside, and that reminded me of my father’s backside, with its fish-shaped birthmark. He had to contend for his birthright with an idiot, a bizarre struggle that had gone on for years and that could only be classified as humiliation. I had no interest in being around Bianjin. My fear of being subjected to comparative scrutiny was like a conditioned reflex. There were plenty of muddle-headed people on the shore and on the barges who would be thrilled at the prospect of discussing our relative appearance and bloodlines if they saw me together with Bianjin. Who were the real descendants of Deng Shaoxiang — Ku Wenxuan and his son, or the idiot Bianjin? Most of the boat people leaned towards us, while people on the shore tended to favour the underdog by insisting that the idiot’s birthmark more closely resembled a fish. And there were even people who passionately argued that they’d prefer an idiot to be the martyr’s descendant than the degenerate Ku Wenxuan, who would smear the legacy of Deng Shaoxiang.
I stood outside the pavilion observing Bianjin, while several townspeople watched me from a nearby tea stall. The sight of me and the idiot in the same place had them virtually jumping for joy. ‘Look!’ they said. ‘There’s the idiot, and there’s Ku Dongliang!’ They were all talking at once, the topic of discussion, believe it or not, my backside. Some of them were unable to contain their desire to have a peek; their eyes were nearly burning a hole in the seat of my pants. Baldy Chen’s cousin, Four-Eyes Chen, who wore glasses, appeared to be cultured and educated, but he came up, grabbed my arm and made a presumptuous request: ‘Ku Dongliang, your father never comes down off his barge, so his backside is off limits. Why don’t you show what you’re made of by dropping your pants and letting us compare your birthmark with the idiot’s? That way the masses can fairly judge whether you are Deng Shaoxiang’s grandson.’
Four-Eyes was courting disaster. He was no match for me in an argument or in a fight, but I had no desire to get tangled up with this bunch. ‘Get the hell out of here, Four-Eyes, and send your wife over. I’ll give her a look, front and back. She can tell you what she sees.’ My parting shot. A foreboding chill swirling in the early-evening air above Milltown gave me the feeling that this was not the place for me. I had to leave, and leave fast.