They came, just as he’d said.
Four men were the first to arrive: Wang Xiaogai, Scabby Five and Baldy Chen of the security group appeared on the embankment, along with the head of the Milltown police department, all of them looking very businesslike. I saw that Baldy was holding his rifle, a glinting bayonet in place. Without a second thought, I ran over and pulled up the gangplank. Scabby Five saw what I was doing and dashed up, but found nothing but empty air. ‘Kongpi,’ he growled, ‘where did you get the guts to steal Deng Shaoxiang’s memorial stone? Why the fuck don’t you go to Tiananmen Square and steal the Monument to the People’s Heroes?’
No time to reply. I picked up our axe and attacked the mooring hawser. Running away is always the best strategy; we had to get the boat away from the pier. ‘Dad,’ I shouted towards the canopy, ‘we have to get out on the river!’ Then I grabbed our punting pole, which we hadn’t used in years — with no tugboat, that was our only means of getting going. We moved four or five metres away from the pier under the helpless stares of the four men, who began arguing about how to get on our boat. Scabby Five, first again, took off his shoes and rolled up his trouser legs, planning to wade over to us. ‘Damn, this water’s cold!’ he groused. ‘And where did those little whirlpools come from?’
‘Don’t talk like an idiot,’ Wang Xiaogai said. ‘How can there be whirlpools so close to shore? You ought to be brave enough to walk in water that shallow.’
But Scabby Five was having none of it. ‘It’s cold and it’s deep,’ he said, ‘and the air pump is sucking my legs down. You’re the leader of this group, the one who’s supposed to be so brave, why don’t you come down here?’
Xiaogai, not about to take the bait and having no luck with Scabby Five, turned his attention to Baldy Chen. ‘That’s a rifle you’ve got, not a fishing pole, so shoot.’
If I hadn’t been afraid before, I was now. I crouched down and waited. Nothing happened. Then I heard Baldy say, ‘Shoot what? You need bullets for that, and they wouldn’t give me any.’
‘Kongpi! What a stupid arsehole! Go on, try to run away,’ Xiaogai shouted to me. ‘The river won’t help you. The Golden Sparrow doesn’t belong to you, and how far do you think you’ll get with a punting pole? You could punt all day and still be in Milltown’s waters. Even punting for a whole month and getting off the Golden Sparrow won’t do you any good. One phone call to alert the emergency defence forces, and you’ll fall into our hands. But go ahead, try, maybe you’ll make it to the Pacific Ocean! But not to the Atlantic. Or maybe you’ll reach the shores of the American imperialists. Well, so what? We’ll fire a missile and wipe you off the face of the earth!’
Police Chief Xiao remained calm the whole time. He knew what to do. Rolling up a magazine to serve as a makeshift megaphone, he stood on the riverbank and shouted, ‘Barge number seven, Father and Son Ku, be warned. Seizing a revolutionary historical relic is a crime. If you don’t want to be guilty of a crime, come back to shore. Turn back and the shore is at hand.’
We weren’t about to turn back, because the shore was theirs, not ours. The battle for the memorial had begun. I felt a great sense of urgency. For all my eleven years on the water we’d plied the river behind a tug boat, and punting was something I’d never done. But I tried my best, pushing with all my might until I was bent over the fantail, and then walking towards the prow. That’s how other people did it. But the barge refused to cooperate. When I walked, it stayed stubbornly where it was, lying perpendicular to the shore and trying my patience. ‘Go over to the starboard side!’ Father yelled. ‘Get over there!’ I dragged the pole over to the starboard side, but unfortunately that didn’t work either. Father, who didn’t know a thing about punting, was giving me useless commands. Then the boat began to move — floating back towards the shore! ‘Now go back to the port side!’ he shouted. So there I was, running helter-skelter from port to starboard, to the uproarious delight of the men on shore.
‘Quit wasting time and energy, Kongpi, the picket ships are on their way, and when they get here it’ll be like a racehorse chasing a turtle. Then where do you think that rust bucket will take you?’
I continued my fight with the barge. There was no time to worry about Father and the memorial stone. I could not have told you what was going on under the canopy, because by then I could hear the motor of the picket boat far down the river, which elicited whoops of joy from the shore. But they died out as quickly as they came. ‘The canopy!’ they shouted. ‘Ku Wenxuan!’ They started running parallel to our barge, saying something as they ran. I turned to look, and saw that confusion was setting in on the shore, as the first group was joined by several policemen; longshoremen, attracted by the commotion, had also come running. They were craning their necks to one side to see what was happening under the canopy.
The police chief stepped on to an oil drum and once again raised his magazine megaphone; but this time a note of anxiety had crept into his shouts. ‘Comrade Ku Wenxuan, calm down, please calm down. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Kongpi, are you a fucking idiot? Stop poling and go and stop your dad!’
I threw down my pole and ran over to the canopy, just in time to see Father, his arms wrapped around the memorial stone, about to fall into the river. I couldn’t believe my eyes, I didn’t think he’d have had the strength, and I’d never imagined that the battle over the memorial would end like this. My father, Ku Wenxuan, had tied himself to the stone and inched his way to the edge of the deck with it on top of him. The stone was crushing him. I couldn’t see his head or his body, only his feet. A sandal was on his right foot; his left foot was bare. I ran up and grabbed one of his feet. ‘Dongliang,’ he said, ‘I’m going down, I’m going down.’
Was this another miracle? In the final seconds of my father’s life he was bound to the memorial stone, the two together a true giant. I couldn’t hold him. A giant was falling into the river. I couldn’t hold him. Now my eyes beheld nothing. The surface of the Golden Sparrow River exploded, sending a pillar of water into the air, accompanied by frantic screams from the shore, and my father was no more; neither were the memorial stone or the giant. I couldn’t keep Father with me; all I held was a single sandal.
Fish
I SEARCHED FOR Father in the Golden Sparrow River for several days.
The riverbed was a vast world unto itself. Its scattered rocks longed for mountains in the upper reaches of the river; broken pottery longed for old masters’ kitchens; discarded brass and corroding iron longed for the farm tools and machinery of an earlier time; broken skulls and frayed hawsers longed for boats on the surface; a dazed fish longed for another fish that had swum away; a dark section of water longed for its sunlit compatriot; I alone scoured the riverbed, longing to find my father.
On land, tortoises that, according to popular legend, travelled far with memorial tablets on their backs were enshrined in temples. But the chances were there was only one human who had carried a memorial stone into the river, and that was no legend, for that person was my father, Ku Wenxuan. No temple wanted to enshrine him, so he rested at the bottom of the Golden Sparrow River.