The yellow plateau resembles a wind-dried skeleton, and its insides are as pitted as an ants’ nest. After days of tramping the empty road I long to see a sweep of houses.
Sometimes I see shepherds and sheep searching for grass, but at dusk they all scurry back to their holes. When night falls I switch on my torch and keep walking.
Finally I reach Suide and go to find Sun Xi’s friend, the poet and doctor, Yan Hu. He lets me stay in his room in the hospital dormitory block, and in the evening invites his literary friends over to meet me. We finish four bottles of rice wine and litter the floor with cigarette stubs and owl bones. We stole the bird this afternoon from a glass jar in the hospital dissection lab. It reeked of formalin, but after braising it in ginger and soya sauce the taste was quite bearable. We embrace for jovial group photographs, then everyone starts accusing me of being a fake and a scrounger. ‘Swanning down here from the big city looking for your bloody roots. What a joke!’ Then Yan Hu mumbles from the floor, ‘I’m the only real poet in this room.’ His ambition is to secure a transfer to a Xian hospital.
Before my departure, Yan Hu agrees to show me the maternity ward. I have always wanted to visit one, but would never get a chance in a city hospital. The ward is so crowded the women have to sleep two to a bed. Four women lie in the delivery room with their legs wide open. A piece of string tied to a jar of water dangles from one woman’s vagina. Drops of blood fall into a washbowl below. Yan Hu tells me the other end is hooked to a five-month-old foetus. ‘She’s an unmarried mother. Doctors don’t have time to give women like her a proper abortion, so they just attach the string and let gravity do the rest.’ I watch her pale, damp face stare at the ceiling and wish someone would put an end to her agony.
The woman on the next bed screams as a doctor drops a slimy infant into the nurse’s hands. Another child born to gather firewood by the roadside and watch the traveller pass.
When I come out of the hospital my bag is packed with frostbite ointment and a roll of bandages. Yan Hu has some fresh placenta that he will use to stuff dumplings tonight.
I leave Suide in the dawn mist. The wind is north-easterly in the morning and south-westerly in the afternoon. The road south to Yanan follows tributaries of the Yellow River through a maze of dry ravines. Everything that grows on the yellow soil is yellow too. In the north, the Chinese eat yellow gruel, drink yellow wine and when they die they go to the Yellow Springs. I never used the colour in my paintings, it set my nerves on edge, but now I have grown numb to its effects. Life is so precarious here that people learn to change with the wind. Sons of men killed by the Party work for the Public Security Bureau. Families destroyed by Mao Zedong hang posters of him on their walls. Because they all know Chinese history changes as frequently as the Yellow River floods its banks.
I reach Yanan at last, and decide to stay a few days. Mao Zedong’s ten-thousand-kilometre Long March came to its end here. He chose to build his communist stronghold in this town, because he knew that once he controlled China’s heartland the empire would be his.
My doss-house is in a cave in the hills above the town. The tap in the yard leaks and the frozen puddle below is dotted with tea leaves and melon seeds. When the ice melts at midday I have to throw down a path of cabbage leaves before I can walk over to wash my face. At night the yard is pitch black. When I finish cleaning my teeth on the second night, a cold wind blows me back to the room. The light in the cave is dim but I can see each face clearly.
The middle-aged man stirring the pot of noodles on the stove is still wearing his nylon jacket, his shirt collar is black with grime. He sells cats for a living. There are three cages of them stacked by the door. I ask how much they cost and he says he buys them for two yuan each, and sells them for ten.
‘Why do people need cats?’ I ask. Behind the chicken wire, the cats’ eyes sparkle like glass balls.
‘Rat poison can kill farm animals so it’s safer to use a cat.’ He asks me what I do for a living and I tell him to take a guess.
He glances up from the pan of noodles and says, ‘You sell nylon rope.’
I remember the rope seller I saw in the market today, and can think of nothing that was particular about him.
The cat seller says you can buy rope wholesale from government depots at two mao a metre, and make a fortune selling it in the markets.
The peasant on the brick bed removes his padded jacket and starts squeezing his fleas.
‘Aren’t you cold like that?’ I ask him, scratching my legs.
‘It’s boiling in here. This is the hottest room I’ve been in.’
Next to the fire under the brick bed are bags of rice and pork scratchings, and a horse’s bridle that stinks of urine. There is a mound of quilts on the bed, but I prefer to sleep in my coat. The bed is only big enough for four, but there are five sharing it so we have to sleep diagonally. I will do what I did last night and wait for the others to nod off then stretch out on top of them.
The room warms up once the door is closed, but the smell of charcoal smoke and dirty feet is so strong I have to soak my nostrils in tiger lotion. The man in the purple jumper sells peacock feathers for a living. He says business is bad.
I advise him to hawk them outside universities, or the hotels where foreigners stay. He says he tried selling them on Mount Hua, but was arrested by the police and fined twenty yuan. He says he has a hundred feathers left and when they are sold he will start selling women instead.
The boy warming his hands over the stove is still chain-smoking. I ask him to show me his calendars and he passes me one with a photograph of a blonde woman standing on a beach in a swimming costume.
The peasant has never seen a foreign woman before. He examines the picture, and mumbles, ‘She won’t get a husband now — flashing her arse like that.’
‘You can have one for two yuan. It has Western and Chinese dates.’ The boy fails to mention it is last year’s calendar. I want to say something, but keep my mouth shut.
‘I have nowhere to hang it,’ the peasant says. ‘Besides, if the police saw it they would put me in handcuffs.’ His fingernails are filled with the blood of squashed fleas.
The calendar seller is not ugly exactly, but there is something not quite right about him. He looks as though he was moulded by a moron. It is hard to pinpoint the problem. Perhaps his chin is too large for his shoulders. The uncertainty makes one long all the more to squash him into a ball and start again.
The peacock-feather trader cleans his teeth with some scouring powder he has stolen from the kitchen.
‘That’s for scrubbing saucepans!’ I tell him.
‘Never mind,’ he says. And suddenly I think of a way to make money.
The peasant snuggles under the quilts and laughs. ‘City folk only wash their teeth because they eat too much good food!’
‘Brushing keeps teeth clean and white,’ I say. ‘Haven’t you noticed what white teeth the city people have?’
The conversation soon dries up. My roommates have little to talk about, as their only concern is to make money and stay out of trouble. An hour later, I stretch over the snoring bodies and let my mind drift to Hangzhou. I picture myself sipping brandy in Wang Ping’s room. I am sitting on her chair, wearing her slippers. I wake up to find someone’s dirty sock stuffed up my nose.
In the morning I buy two mao’s worth of scouring powder and a sheet of red paper. I fold the paper into a hundred small envelopes and fill each one with a pinch of powder. Then I amble through the street and quietly tout my wares. Three university students in sun hats who are travelling in search of their roots buy two envelopes from me. I tell them it is particularly effective against tobacco staining. I only sell ten that day, but I find the street inspector, give him a pack of cigarettes and he says I can set up business on the pavement tomorrow.