One Man`s Bible

43

"You're just using me, this isn't love." Qian lay on the bed, expressionless, but she had said this quite clearly.

He was sitting at his desk by the window and put down his pen to turn to her. For years, he had written nothing, apart from copying Mao's Sayings for the investigation, but that was before he had fled the cadre school. They had spent most of the day walking in the mountains, but on the way back got completely soaked when it started raining. The charcoal fire was burning, and steam was coming from their wet clothes that were drying on a bamboo basket.

He got up and went over to sit on the edge of the bed. Qian was lying under the bedcovers, her eyes staring.

"What are you saying?" he said without touching her.

"You've killed me," Qian said. She remained lying on her back, not looking at him.

What she said hurt him. He didn't know how to respond and just sat there.

In the gully by the mountain, Qian was fine, she was in good spirits and started singing. They went up the slope to where the bushes were withered and no one was in sight, so he got Qian to sing as loudly as she wanted. Her clear voice swept through the gully and faint echoes were borne on the wind. The lower part of the slope was a tangled growth of grass and shrubs, and the clumps of rice stalks in the terraced paddies, still to be plowed in after harvest, made it look even more desolate. In spring, the slope would be covered in bright red azaleas, and the flowering rape in the fields would have turned into an expanse of golden yellow. But he preferred this early autumn scene of decay and desolation.

On the way back, it had started raining. By a creek, she picked some daisies that were still flowering and some dark-red branches of little-leaf box, and these were now in a bamboo penholder on the desk.

Qian was weeping wretchedly, but he couldn't work out why. When he tried to put his arms around her, she resolutely pushed him away.

In the rain, Qian's hair got wet, and rain was running down her face, but she had just put down her head and kept walking. He now wondered if she had been crying then. He had simply said don't worry, I'll light the fire when we get home, and you can warm up. He had never lived with a woman before and couldn't work out why she was throwing a tantrum like this just because she had got wet in the rain. He didn't know what to do. He thought he loved her and had done everything he possibly could for her, but maybe that was the extent of human happiness in the world.

He went out and headed for Maomei's home. Why had he gone to her house and not anywhere else? Because it was the second house into the town, it was still raining, and also because Maomei's mother said if he wanted to eat chicken she would catch one for him. Maomei's mother was in front of the house, getting some vegetables, and said she would get him an old hen right away, kill it, and have it sent over. He said there was no hurry, and that tomorrow would be fine.

When he returned home and pushed open the door, he got a shock. The wet clothes that had been drying on the basket were strewn all over the floor, and the basket had been trampled and flattened. Qian was lying in the bed, her face to the wall. He held back his anger and forced himself to sit at the desk. The rain outside the window kept falling.

With nowhere to dissipate his frustration, he immersed himself in writing and kept writing until he could no longer see and put down his pen. Maomei was at the door, calling out to him. He got to his feet and opened the door. She was holding a plucked chicken and a bowl of innards. Not wanting her to see the clothes strewn on the floor, he took the chicken and quickly went to shut the door. But Maomei had seen it and looked at him in surprise. He avoided Maomei's startled eyes, closed the door and latched it, then sat quietly by the overturned stove, looking at the glowing charcoals on the floor.

"You don't believe in God, don't believe in Buddha, don't believe in Solomon, don't believe in Allah. The totems of precivilization peoples, the religions of civilized peoples, and the even larger number of contemporary creations, like all the idols put up everywhere and the fabulous Utopias in heaven, all mysteriously make people go crazy…" This filled several pages, all written on thin letter paper purchased in the little town. Qian had read this after she had started throwing her tantrum, and it was too late to burn it.

"You are the enemy!" The woman who had slept with him in the same bed angrily spat out this sentence. The woman in front of him, hair disheveled, clad only in her underpants, stood there in her bare feet, petrified with fear.

"What are you shouting for? People will hear, have you gone mad?" He went up to her.

The woman retreated step by step. Huddled close to the wall and brushing so hard against it that bits of sand started falling off, she yelled, "You're a counterrevolutionary, a stinking counterrevolutionary!"

He felt that her last sentence was less rabid, so he said, "I'm a counterrevolutionary, a genuine counterrevolutionary! So what!" He had to keep on the attack in order to control the woman's madness.

"You deceived me, took advantage of my momentary weakness, I've fallen into your trap!"

"What trap? Talk sense. That night by the Yangtze? Or this marriage?"

He had to turn the topic to their sexual relationship to hide his inner terror, and, trying hard to sound calm, he forced himself to say, "Qian, you're talking nonsense!"

"I'm quite clear-headed, I couldn't be more so. You can't hoodwink me!"

"What are you making all this fuss about?" He suddenly got angry and went up to her.

"Do you want to kill me?" Qian asked in a strange sort of way. Probably she had seen the anger flashing in his eyes.

"Why would I want to kill you?" he asked.

"You yourself know best," the woman said quietly, holding her breath, frightened.

If the woman had again shouted he was the enemy, probably he would have killed her right then. He couldn't let her come out with those words again, he had to make the woman feel secure, trick her into bed, make a pretense of being a caring husband. He went up to her and slowly said, "Qian, what is troubling you?"

"No! Don't come near me!"

Qian picked up the chamber pot in the corner and hurled it at him. He raised his arms to fend it off, but he was soaked. The acrid smell was worse than the humiliation. He gritted his teeth and brushed off the urine streaming down his face. His lips were salty and bitter, and he spat out with unconcealed derision, "You've gone crazy!"

"You want me certified as mad, but it's not that simple!" the Woman said with a smirk. "I'm not going to let you off lightly!"

He understood what she was threatening, and, before things erupted, he had to burn up those sheets of paper on his desk. He had to bide his time and he had to restrain himself from charging at her. At that point, the urine in his hair had again reached his lips, and he spat it out in disgust but without making a move.

The woman squatted on the floor and started wailing loudly. He could not let the villagers hear her, and could not let anyone see this sight. He dragged her to her feet, twisted her arm to stop her from stamping her feet, and pushed her onto the bed. She struggled, weeping and yelling, so he grabbed a pillow and pressed it over her mouth. He thought he was in hell. This was his life, yet he was seeking to live in this hell.

"Make a noise and I will kill you!"

He made this threat as he moved away from her, took off his clothes, and wiped the urine off his face. The woman was afraid of being killed, and convulsed as she quietly sobbed. The fat plucked hen, innards removed and feetless legs sticking up, looked just like a woman's corpse. It thoroughly disgusted him.

For a long time afterward, he found women disgusting. He had to use disgust to bury his pity for this woman in order to save himself. Maybe Qian was right, he didn't love her, he had simply enjoyed her, he had for some time needed a woman and needed her flesh. What Qian said was right, too, he had not shown her tenderness, it was contrived, he had been trying to manufacture a make-believe happiness. The expression in his eyes when he ejaculated during intercourse must have betrayed that he didn't love her. However, under the circumstances of those times, terror had induced lust from both parties, which afterward did not become love but, instead, simply left behind the hatred that grew out of carnal release.

Qian sobbed and kept repeating, "You've killed me, I've been killed by you…" Through her sobbing and mumbling, he made out that Qian's father had been chief engineer in a factory during the Nationalist period, and that during the period of purifying class ranks, he had been classified as a historical counterrevolutionary by the Army Control Commission. Qian didn't dare curse the injustice against her father, didn't dare curse the revolution, so she could only curse counterrevolutionaries and she could only curse him. But she was also terrified of him.

"It is this era that has killed you," he retaliated. Qian herself had said something like that in her letter. "The reality is that there is no escape for anyone, and it's our fate to care for one another, so don't talk about love!"

"Then why did you pick me? You could have picked that randy little slut. Why did you have to marry me?"

"Who? Who are you talking about?" he asked.

"That Maomei of yours!"

"I don't have anything to do with that village girl!"

"You're in love with the randy little slut, so why are you using me instead?" Qian sobbed.

"I can't make any sense of all this! We can get divorced right away, we can go to the commune tomorrow and announce we had fraudulently signed our names, say it was all a joke, an abominable farce to give the village cadres and the villagers a good laugh!"

Qian, however, said as she sobbed, "I won't make any more trouble…"

"Then go to sleep!"

He got her to get up, and pulled off the urine-soaked sheet and covers from their nuptial bed. Qian, pathetically, stood out of the way. When he had remade the bed, he threw her some clean clothes from her bag, and told her to get changed and lie down. He got water from the water vat, washed himself all over, and sat on the stool by the fire all night.

Would he go on forever like this, caring for her? Wasn't he just a piece of straw to save her? He had to wait for her to fall asleep so that he could get those sheets of paper from the desk and burn them all. If she had a fit again, he would just have to say that she was psychologically disturbed. He would never write anything down again, he would just rot in this stench.

Qian said she hoped that she would die soon. She would never go with him again to desolate places, along cliffs or riverbanks. He would push her down. He could stop thinking about tricking her to go out the door, she would just stay in the house and not go anywhere!

As for him, he wished that she would drop dead, disappear forever, but he didn't say this. He regretted not having got himself a village girl who was physically and mentally healthy and who had not been educated. She would simply sleep with him, cook, and bear his children, she would never invade his inner mind. No, he hated women.

When Qian left, he took her to the bus stop at the end of town. Qian said, "You don't have to wait for the bus to leave, go home."

He said nothing, but hoped that the bus would move off soon.