Think or Swim: Part VII

"My parents weren't political at all, you know," said Mao Kelly.
It was early morning and they were in a small bar on the Cours Masséna.
Yvette had ordered two different types of absinthe and was sipping hers tenderly. Mao hadn't touched his.

She had seen dark hair before but nothing quite like the blackness of the mane that sprouted from his head, fell to the left and right and encircled his face. She tried to imagine him without clothes.

"My mother was the only girl in her family," he continued. "Which was very lucky for her because if she'd had an older sister, I wouldn't have had a mother. If you know what I mean."

"What do you mean?" asked Yvette.

"They'd have strangled her, of course," said Mao. "It's called gendercide in English. The Chinese prefer boys, always have, and then there was the one child policy..." He trailed off and they looked across the table at each other.

Perhaps Sun Jen and Hu Xinpeng had looked at each other like that once. In China. They worked on a collective farm, Mao explained, and it was love at first sight. Jen was the most beautiful woman Xinpeng had ever seen and he was unable to eat for three days after they first met, at a tractor repair class.

A week later, he contrived for the imported Russian machine, a DT-20 made by Harjkovskii Traktornyi Zavod, to stop as it passed the irrigation works that Jen was overseeing. He insisted that it was a chassis problem in the hope that she would join him under the machine. Which she did. And she didn't slap him as he placed his hand on her thigh and planted a kiss on her lips.

They made such a fuss of pretending to coax the machine back to life that a crowd gathered. Oil and water levels were checked twice, the fan belt was removed and replaced and the battery plugs were inspected from different angles. Then, banging down the hood, Xinpeng mounted the tractor, switched it on and the engine growled to life. The spectators clapped and cheered, delighted by the drama that had taken them away from their mindless, back-breaking chores.

Three days later, at the collective's monthly production discussion, after a visiting party official had spent an hour denouncing teachers and bureaucrats, and calling selected Communist Party leaders "capitalist roaders", Jen and Xinpeng were suddenly called forward.

Had someone seen them kissing under the tractor and betrayed them? Would they be sent to re-education camps? Might they be indoctrinated to death?

"Comrade Sun. Comrade Hu," began the official. "Your conduct has been brought to my attention."

They looked at each other and Jen almost fainted with fear.

"You put the knowledge gained in the tractor repair class to the best possible use. By repairing the people's machine, which was acquired at great expense, you helped your community to meet its production target, and as a token of our appreciation, I hereby present each of you with a copy of our Dear Leader's thoughts."

At this, a pale functionary, wearing very thick glasses, and unknown to all in the room, rose, walked forward to the two barely-literate peasants and handed them copies of a little red book. He then asked then to hold them up and another man approached and took two photographs.

"You haven't touched your drink," said Yvette. "Do you mind if I order another?"
"Not at all," said Mao, who had never revealed the family story to a stranger, but felt unable to suppress the torrent of words that kept gushing out.

"And did they get married and become happy communists?" Asked Yvette, sipping her second absinthe.
"Not quite," answered Mao.

His father, he said, became quite friendly with the local party bigwig after he'd repaired the man's bike and one evening, he invited Xinpeng to meet him at his home for a "discussion".

He began with the theory of ownership and its evils, but stopped abruptly as if someone had cut off his information supply.

"That's enough of that," he said. "Let's try something that's not as dry" and he winked at Xinpeng, who had no idea what he was referring to.

The man produced a bottle, opened it and filled two small rice bowls with a crystal clear, aromatic liquid. He offered one of the flowing bowls to Xinpeng, who drank it down in a gulp and began to cough uncontrollably.

"Easy, easy. That's very good stuff. You're not supposed to treat it like a pig treats swill."
"I'm sorry," said Xinpeng, who had never tasted anything with such a remarkable flavour before.

"Would you like a cigarette? It might help stop that cough of yours," said the official, and he handed Xinpeng one that was white, quite unlike the yellow ones everyone else smoked.

"Now, what do you think of this?" asked the official, as he pulled out a newspaper clipping showing a photograph of Xinpeng and Jen at the collective's meeting. "Tractor heroes drive production forward", was the headline.

"That's lovely," said Xinpeng, who would have liked to say more but the aromatic liquid seemed to be affecting his concentration and clouding his thoughts.

"Yes, she is a beauty, isn't she?" said the official. "Did you know that there's a shortage of marriageable women in the capital?"

Xinpeng shook his head, which felt heavy. "Some VIP there saw this photo, apparently. He likes country girls. Likes to 'break them in', is what I've heard and he then passes then on to a party member who needs a wife because if you don't have a wife you don't get invited to important social gatherings."

Xinpeng puffed his cigarette in the hope that it might help him think clearly so he could make sense of what he was hearing.

"Yeah. That's how it works. Here, have some more. Anyway, he's sending some of his men next week and they're going to take her. Abduct her, so to speak."

Xinpeng's heart almost stopped.

"No!" said Yvette.
Mao raised his glass and drained the absinthe with one swallow.
"I think I'll have another," he said.