Waiting

1

Bensheng accompanied his sister Shuyu to the army hospital in July i984, but he stayed only a day, having to return home to attend to his business. The year before, the commune had been disbanded and he had opened a small grocery in a neighboring village, mainly selling candies, liquor, cigarettes, soy sauce, vinegar, and spiced pumpkin seeds. During his absence, Hua was taking care of the store, but he couldn't set his mind at rest and was unwilling to be away for long. Hua hadn't passed the entrance exams the previous summer, and fortunately she could work for her uncle instead of going to the fields.

At the hospital, nurses, doctors, officers, and their wives were all amazed to see Shuyu totter about with bound feet, which only a woman of over seventy should have. She always walked alone, since Lin wouldn't be with her in the presence of others. Whenever she crossed the square before the medical building, young nurses would gather at the windows to watch her. They had heard that a woman with bound feet usually had thick thighs and full buttocks, but Shuyu's legs were so thin that she didn't seem to have any hips.

A few days after she arrived, a pain developed in her lower back. It troubled her a lot, and she couldn't sit on a chair for longer than half an hour. It also hurt her whenever she coughed or sneezed. Lin talked to Doctor Ning about Shuyu's symptom and then told his wife to go see the doctor. She went to the office the next morning; the diagnosis was sciatica, at its early stage. She needed electrotherapy.

So she began to receive the treatment. The nurses were exceptionally kind to her, knowing Lin was going to divorce her soon. After the diathermic light was set, they would chitchat with her. Lying facedown on a leather couch, Shuyu would answer their questions without looking up at them. She liked the lysol smell in the air, which somehow reminded her of fresh almonds. She had never been in a room so clean, with cream-colored walls and sunshine streaming in through the windows and falling on the glass-topped tables and the red wooden floors. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. Outside, cicadas buzzed softly in the treetops; even sparrows here didn't chirp furiously like those back home. How come all the animals and people seemed much tamer in the army?

In the beginning, she was rather embarrassed to loosen her pants and move them down below the small of her back, and the infrared heat on her skin frightened her a little, but soon she felt at ease, realizing the lamp wouldn't burn her. She enjoyed lying on the clean sheet and having her lower back soothed by the heat. A sky-blue screen shielded her from people passing by. When nobody was around, she would close her eyes and let her mind wander back to the countryside, where it was time to harvest garlic and crab apples and to sow winter vegetables – turnips, cabbages, carrots, rutabagas. She was amazed that people in the city could have so many comforts, and that the young nurses always worked indoors, well sheltered from wind and rain. They were never in a hurry to finish work. What a wonderful life the girls had here. They all looked nice in their white caps and robes, though some were sickly pale. When they gave her an injection, they would massage her backside for a few seconds; then with a gentle slap they plunged the needle in. They would ask her whether it hurt while their pinkies kept caressing her skin near the needle. The tickle made her want to laugh.

A nurse once asked her if Lin had bullied her. Shuyu said, "No, he's a kind man, always good to me."

"Does he buy you enough food to eat?" another nurse put in. She was holding a syringe, its needle connected to a phial filled with pinkish powder.

Shuyu replied, "Yeah, always white steamed bread, or sugar buns, or twisted rolls. I eat meat or fish every day. Here every day's like a holiday. Only it's too hot at noon."

The nurses looked at each other. One giggled, then a few followed suit. "What does he eat?" asked the nurse holding the syringe.

"I don't know. We don't eat together. He brings everything back for me."

"He's a good provider, eh?"

"Yeah, he is."

They all tittered. They were somewhat puzzled by Shuyu's words. Even though Lin held a rank equal to a battalion commander, his wheat coupons couldn't exceed twelve pounds a month. How could he feed his wife with such fine foods the whole time? Where had he gotten all the coupons? From Manna? It was unlikely, because she had overtly declared she would have nothing to do with Shuyu. What did Lin eat then? Did he eat corn flour and sorghum himself? What a weird man. He must have saved a lot of wheat coupons for Shuyu's visit. It seemed he still had some affection for his wife, or he wouldn't have treated her so well.

Shuyu liked the nurses. Yet however hard they begged her, she would not take off her small shoes, of which they often sang praises. They were all eager to see her feet.

One day, after the treatment, Nurse Li, a bony girl from Hangzhou who had never seen a bound foot, said she would give Shuyu a yuan if she showed them her feet. Shuyu said, "No, can't do that."

"Why? One yuan just for a look. How come your feet are so expensive?"

"You know, girls, only my man's allowed to see them. "

"Why?"

"That's the rule."

"Show us just once, please," a tall nurse begged with a suave smile. "We won't tell others about it."

"No, I won't do that. You know, take off your shoes and socks is like open your pants."

"Why?" the tall woman exclaimed.

"'Cause you bound your feet only for your future husband, not for other men, to make your feet more precious to your man. By the way, do you know what this was called in the old days?" She patted her left foot, whose instep bulged like a tiny knoll.

They all shook their heads. She continued, "It's called Golden Lotus, like a treasure."

They looked at her with amazement, winking at one another. Nurse Ma asked, "Wasn't it painful to have your feet bound?"

"Of course it hurt. Don't tell me about pain. I started to bind my feet when I was seven. My heavens, for two years I'd weep in pain every night. In the summer my toes swelled up, filled with pus, and the flesh rotted, but I dared not loosen the binding. My mother'd whack me with a big bamboo slat if she found me doing that. Whenever I ate fish, the pus in my heels dripped out. There's the saying goes, 'Every pair of lotus feet come from a bucket of tears.'"

"Why did you bind them then?" a ruddy-cheeked girl asked.

"Mother said it's my second chance to marry good, 'cause my face ugly. You know, men are crazy about lotus feet in those days. The smaller your feet are, the better looking you are to them."

"How about Doctor Kong?" Nurse Li asked earnestly. "Does he like your small feet?"

The question puzzled Shuyu, and she mumbled, "I don't know. He never saw them."

The girls looked at one another, simpering, their eyes full of amusement. One of them sneezed loudly, and they all laughed.

Because the divorce wouldn't fail this time, Lin had been trying to have Shuyu's rural residential status changed to urban. The army would sponsor such a change only if the officer had served longer than fifteen years or held a rank higher than a battalion commander. Lin was qualified, having been in the service for twenty-one years; so the office in charge of this matter was cooperative. He wanted Shuyu to have a residency card, which would enable her to live in any city legally. Besides, their daughter Hua needed such a certificate as well; according to the law, she would follow her mother and automatically become a city dweller if Shuyu's residential status was changed. With such a card in hand, Hua would have a better chance for employment in Muji. Since she couldn't go to college now, this was her only chance to leave the countryside.

By no means could Lin make Shuyu understand the necessity and complexity of the process, but she complied with whatever he said. If he told her, "Don't fetch hot water – I'll do that," she would never take either of the thermos bottles out of the room. If he handed her some pills and said, "Take these, good for you," she would swallow them without thinking twice. To her, his words were like orders, which she couldn't imagine would do her any harm.

One morning he gave her a one-yuan note and told her to have her hair cut at the barbershop, which was behind the hospital's tofu mill and was run by three officers' wives. The moment he left for work, she set off for the shop.

Unlike back home where Hua would cut her hair with a long comb and scissors, here a haircut cost thirty fen. When a plump young woman in the shop told her the price, Shuyu felt uneasy, as though they were overcharging her. She had never spent money so lavishly; for thirty fen she could buy half a cake of Glossy soap, which would last at least two weeks. Nevertheless, she agreed and sat down on a leather chair.

A large kettle began whining from the coal stove outside the door. The middle-aged woman with bobbed hair went out, removed the seething water, and banked the fire with three shovels of anthracite mixed with yellow mud. Then with a poker she drilled a hole through the wet coal. She came back into the room, threw a white sheet over Shuyu, and fastened its ends at the nape of her neck with a wooden clothespin.

"What hairstyle do you want, sister?" she asked Shuyu, raising a red plastic comb.

"I don't know."

Two male customers laughed, sitting on the other adjustable chairs.

"How about a crew cut like mine? It feels cool in the heat," said one of them, who was the swineherd, the most famous man in the hospital. He had raised a pig weighing over twelve hundred pounds; several major newspapers had reported his accomplishment. Children called him Pigman.

"Come on," the woman said to Shuyu, "it's your hair. You must tell me how to cut it."

"Well, how about like yours?" She pointed at the hairdresser's bobbed hair.

The plump young woman chimed in, "She'll look nice with that."

"Are you sure you want my kind of hairdo?" the middle-aged woman asked Shuyu. "You'll lose your bun."

"Sure, cut it as much as you can." She wanted her hair to be short, so that she wouldn't have to come to the barbershop too often and waste money.

The woman untied her bun and began combing the tangled hair while Shuyu sucked her lips noisily. The initial strokes of the comb pulled her scalp and hurt her a little, but in a moment she got used to it. She began to wonder how come the hairdresser could click the scissors so rhythmically, without stopping. In the right corner of the room a tailless cat was sleeping, now and then stretching out its limbs; its ear went on twitching to shake off flies. Shuyu was impressed by the bowl of sorghum porridge near the door. City people were so rich, feeding a cat like a human. No mice could live in this room with a cement floor, why did they need to keep a cat?

While trimming the ends of her hair, the woman asked Shuyu, "Is Lin Kong good to you?"

"Yeah. "

" Do you two live in the same room?"

"Yeah. "

"How do you sleep?"

"What you mean?"

"Do you and Lin Kong sleep in the same bed?" The hairdresser smiled, while the two younger women stopped their scissors and clippers.

"No, he sleeps in his bed and me in my own bed."

"Do you know he's going to divorce you?"

"Yeah. "

"Do you want a divorce?"

"I don't know."

"Tell you what, climb into his bed when he's sleeping at night."

"No, I won't do that."

Everyone laughed. Shuyu looked at them with confused eyes.

The haircut made her look almost ten years younger. Her face appeared egg-shaped now, and her eyebrows seemed like two tiny crescents.

The hairdresser poured some hot water from the kettle into a bronze bucket hanging on the wall and added three scoops of cold water. Then she had Shuyu sit over the sink and put her head under a rubber hose attached to the bucket. While soaping Shuyu's hair, she said to her again, "Don't be a fool, sister. Sneak into Lin Kong's bed at night. If you do that, he can't divorce you anymore."

"I won't do that. "

They laughed again.

"Oh my eyes," Shuyu cried, "stinging from the soap."

"Keep them shut. I'll be done in a second." The woman let the remaining water run over her head, then wiped her eyes and face with a dry towel, which smelled clean and delicious, still warm with sunlight.

"How are your eyes now?"

"They're okay."

Shuyu returned to the barber chair. The woman combed her hair to one side and praised its fine texture. She even applied a few drops of sweetish perfume to the hair.

When Shuyu took out the one-yuan note, the woman said, "No, elder sister, you don't pay for the first visit. You pay next time, all right?"

Shuyu thanked her and put the money back into her pocket. The woman raised the comb to put a lock of hair behind Shuyu's ear, saying, "You know, you look good in this hairdo. From now on you should keep your hair like this." She turned aside and held up an oval mirror. "Now, how is that? Good?"

Shuyu smiled and nodded.

Thanking the woman again, she rose from the chair and limped out of the shop. Her hips hurt a little from the half-hour in the barber chair.

When Shuyu was out of hearing, the people in the shop began talking about her. They all agreed she actually was not bad-looking, but she didn't know how to dress and make up. The cut of her dark-blue jacket was suitable for a woman of over sixty, with a slanting line of cloth-knots on the front instead of real buttons. If she hadn't worn the puttees, which made her trousers look like a pair of pantaloons, her bound feet would not have attracted so much attention. Probably womenfolk in the countryside had different taste in clothing. Another cause of her unusual looks might have been that she had worked too hard and burned herself out. They had noticed cracks on the backs of her hands and a few tineal patches on her swarthy face.

Gradually their topic shifted to the marriage. How could she survive by herself if Lin Kong divorced her? What a heartless man he was. Shouldn't the Political Department protect the poor woman by ending the relationship between Lin Kong and Manna Wu? This was a new society, in which nobody should found his happiness on another person's suffering. Besides, a married man ought to be duty-bound and must not be allowed to do whatever he wanted, or else families would break up and society would be in chaos.

By the next day Shuyu's answer – "I won't do that" – had become a catchphrase among the hospital's staff. When turning someone down, young nurses would utter that sentence jokingly, stressing every word and giving a long lilt to the final "that." Laughter would follow.

Under cover of darkness, a few curious young officers even went to the long dormitory house in which Lin had been assigned a room recently. They stayed outside at the window and the door, eager to find out whether the couple slept in the same bed. They stuck their ears to the keyhole and to the window screen, but the room was as quiet as if it were uninhabited. Three nights in a row they heard nothing except for a cough made by Lin. One of the men sprained his ankle on the granite doorsteps, having trodden on a sleeping toad; another had his eye whipped by a twig in front of the house. So they gave up and admitted the couple had done nothing unusual.

Word spread – "They don't do that."

2

Lin and Shuyu were sitting at the dining table, on which was a white enamel plate containing a melon, cut in half and with its seeds removed. They were having a talk because their court appearance was scheduled for the next morning. The room looked brighter after all the propaganda posters left by the former residents had been removed from the whitewashed walls. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights again drew Shuyu's attention. She raised her head to see whether a mosquito was in the air. Outside, in the cypress bushes below the window, an oriole was warbling now and then. The fragrance of early chrysanthemums wafted up from the roadside, where the long flowerbed was mulched with pulverized horse dung.

"Shuyu, have you ever thought about what Hua should do in the future?" Lin asked.

"No. I guess she can work at Bensheng's store. He's good to her and pays her well. He bought her a hooded overcoat last winter. "

"No, no, she shouldn't remain in the countryside. I want to get her a job here. She's our only child and should live close to us in the city, don't you think?"

She made no answer.

He went on, "Tomorrow when the judge asks what you want from me, say you want me to find a good job for Hua, all right?"

"Why you want me to do that? I never wanted anything from you."

"Look, I've been in the service for over twenty years. According to the rule, the army should take care of our child. Trust me, they'll find her a job. This is her only chance. Please tell the judge you want that, all right?"

"Okay, I'll do that."

He took a bite of the melon in his hand. "Try this. It's very sweet," he said, pointing at the other half.

She didn't touch it, saving it for him.

Early the next morning, Lin went to fetch breakfast for Shuyu and himself. Hundreds of people were eating in the mess hall. From inside the kitchen came the brisk clank of a shovel stir-frying something in a cauldron. The air smelled of sauteed scallions and celery. Manna turned up with a lunch tin in her hand. Coming up to Lin, she tried to smile, but the effort distorted her face, two wrinkles bracketing her nose and mouth. Her eyes were shining, glancing left and right; apparently she was uneasy about meeting him in this place. He noticed a flicker of resentment pass over her face, probably because he had not seen her for several days.

She said to him, "Don't talk too much in court, all right? And don't argue with the judge." She bit her lower lip.

"I know. There's no need to worry. I talked to Shuyu yesterday evening. She agreed to stick to her word this time. It's final."

"I hope so," she muttered. "Good luck."

She walked away, not daring to talk with him longer than necessary in the presence of so many people, some of whom had already begun darting glances in their direction. Since Shuyu's arrival, Manna had kept a low profile. She avoided meeting others, not going anywhere unless she had to, and wouldn't even eat lunch in the mess hall. As a result she looked anemic.

Lin brought back to the dormitory four steamed buns, half a pot of rice porridge, and a tiny cake of fermented bean curd. For the first time since she had come, he and his wife ate together.

While eating he had a strange realization. These days he had seldom met Manna, as though she were gone on vacation somewhere. He had stopped walking with her in the evening for fear that people would gossip about them and exert pressure on the leaders to stop the divorce. Somehow this temporary separation from Manna didn't bother him at all, just as sleeping in the same room with Shuyu did not discomfort him either. To tell the truth, he didn't miss Manna, though he felt sorry for her. Is this what love is like? he asked himself. No wonder people say marriage is the death of love. The closer we are to getting married, the less attached I feel to her. Does this mean I don't love her anymore? Don't be a fool. She and I have waited for each other so many years. Now it's time to be united. Yes, true lovers don't have to stay together looking at each other all the time; they look and move in the same direction. Who said that? It must have been a foreign monk. How about Manna, what does she think of my staying with Shuyu in this room? Is she irritated by it? She must be. Does she miss me?

His mind turned to the divorce, which became almost an inevitable thing to him now. He didn't need to make any effort to bring it about, as though the whole matter was like a ripe fruit that would fall after being touched by frost. He felt as if there was some force beyond his control, of which he merely served as a vehicle, that would realize the divorce and start him on a new life. Perhaps this force was what people called fate.

As soon as Shuyu had done the dishes, a Beijing jeep pulled up in front of the house. She put on the yellow taffeta shirt Lin had bought her a week before. The couple got into the jeep, which drove them to the courthouse next to the city Police Station. Together with them, in the front seat, was Ming Chen, representing the hospital. He was the director of the Political Department now; he had grown stout with thick shoulders and a fleshy face.

It was half past eight. The poplar-lined street was speckled with people bicycling to work or returning home from their midnight shifts. The concrete buildings, their red tiles covered with dew, were steaming and glistening in the sun. As the jeep was passing an elementary school, groups of boys were playing soccer on the sports ground, shouting and chasing five or six balls. Girls were skipping ropes or kicking shuttlecocks. Obviously the pupils were at their first recess. At the corner of Peace Avenue and Glory Street a walking tractor was lying on its side, knocked over by an East Wind truck. Zucchini were strewn on the ground; a crowd gathered there watching and chatting; the truck was left on the sidewalk, its fender bent against a thick tree trunk. Several old women were pushing carts, each of which was loaded with a sky-blue box; they were shouting, "Milk and chocolate popsicles, ten fen apiece." A siren was screaming a few blocks away, growing louder and louder. The jeep carrying Lin and Shuyu nosed through the crowd and then turned left into West Gate Road to the Police Station.

At the entrance to the courthouse, which was a chapel built by Danish missionaries in the 1910s, Lin saw a young couple coming out. The husband looked sullen, while the wife sobbed into a white neckerchief and was supported by an older man, apparently her father. A guard told Director Chen that the judge had just turned down the woman's plea for a divorce. She had accused her husband of physical abuse and stealing her money. The judge had not agreed with the latter part of the accusation. As a married couple, they lived under the same roof, slept in the same bed, and ate from the same pot; of course they should share a bank account. By no means should the husband be charged with theft.

Several rows of benches occupied the center of the courtroom. A long table covered with green velveteen stood on a low stage in the front. Above the table, a sign with these giant words was suspended from an iron wire: Secure the Law like a Mountain. Beyond the slogan, on the front wall, the national emblem – five stars embraced by fat wheat ears – held the position once belonging to a crucifix. Lin was impressed by the chevron-shaped windows, the crystal chandeliers, and the high ceiling, which didn't need a single pillar to support itself despite the massive, well-hewn beams and rafters. He wondered what the chapel would have looked like if all the lights had been on and if there hadn't been any of these metal-legged chairs and tables. It must have looked splendid.

After everybody was seated in the front row, the judge, a middle-aged man with a wispy mustache and narrow eyes, walked onto the low stage and sat down at the table. He poured himself a cup of tea from a white porcelain teapot. To his right sat a fortyish woman, who was the court clerk, and to his left was seated a young man, the scribe, with a felt-tip pen in his hand. The judge coughed into his fist, then asked the husband to present his case.

Lin stood up and spoke. "Respectable Comrade Judge, I am here today to ask your court to allow me to end my marriage. My wife Shuyu Liu and I have been separated for eighteen years, although we have stayed in marriage nominally. There has been no love between us since our daughter was born. Please don't mistake me for a fickle, heartless man. During the eighteen years, I have treated my wife decently and had no sexual contact with another woman." He reddened at the word "sexual" and went on, "Please consider and approve my request for a divorce."

The judge had read the written petition, so he turned and asked Director Chen to testify to the truth of Lin's statement. Ming Chen didn't bother to stand up, because he held a higher rank than the judge. He said in a strong voice, "What Comrade Lin Kong said is correct. I have been his superior for many years. He has been elected a model officer several times, and there has been no serious problem in his lifestyle. He's a good man."

Lin cast a sidelong glance at Ming Chen. So I have "no serious problem," he thought. That means I have some small lifestyle prob lems. No wonder they haven't given me a promotion for the last ten years.

The judge asked the director sternly, "Do you, the hospital leaders, approve this divorce?" He lifted his teacup and took a sip.

"Of course we don't advocate divorce, but the couple have been separated for a long time. According to our rule, after eighteen years of separation, an officer can terminate his marriage without his spouse's consent. Lin Kong has been separated from his wife since 1966, already long enough. So we see no reason to decline his request."

The judge nodded as though he was familiar with this rule. He turned to Shuyu and asked what she would say.

"He can divorce me," she said unemotionally. "But I want something from – "

"Stand up when you speak," the judge ordered. She got to her feet.

"Now, what's your request?" he asked.

"We – we have a daughter, a big girl, almost eighteen. She's his child. He should get her a good job in the city."

Director Chen threw up his chin and laughed sonorously, the flesh on his neck folded. The judge looked puzzled. Ming Chen explained, "Our hospital is trying to have Shuyu Liu's residential status changed. This means their daughter will join her here, and we'll help the girl find a decent job. Because she is Lin Kong's child, she will be treated the same as the other officers' children. No problem, we'll see to this matter."

The judge then announced that according to the law Lin had to pay Shuyu thirty yuan a month in alimony. Lin agreed readily, but Shuyu waved her hand.

"What do you want to say?" the judge asked. "You want more?"

"No. I don't need so much. Twenty's enough. Really I don't need so much money. "

The woman clerk and the scribe chuckled, and the three guards guffawed from the back of the courtroom, but they stopped at the stare of the judge.

Then the couple were asked whether they had property under dispute. They both shook their heads. Shuyu owned nothing, and the house in the village belonged to Lin.

The judge signed two divorce certificates, pressed a large seal into a case of red ink paste, stamped it on them, and handed the couple one apiece. He stood up and spoke in a resounding voice. "Although you two are divorced, you are still comrades belonging to the same large revolutionary family. Therefore you should treat each other with respect, care, and friendship."

"We will, Judge," Lin said.

"Good. The case is now settled. "

The judge stood up; so did the woman clerk and the scribe. Another petition for divorce was waiting to be heard that morning, and the court had to hurry up a little.

Moving toward the entrance, Lin couldn't help feeling amazed by the whole process, which had turned out to be so easy. In less than half an hour, all the years of frustration and desperation had ended and a new page of his life was ready to start.

After the divorce, Shuyu didn't return to the country. She moved into another room in the same dormitory house. From now on she cooked her own meals and lived by herself. A young officer was assigned by the Political Department to deal with the district police in charge of residential registry and with the Splendor Match Plant, which was asked to employ Hua.

It occurred to Lin that his daughter might refuse to come to the city, because she must have been angry with him. When he returned home in the past few years, he had tried to talk with her and find out how she felt about his divorcing her mother, but she had always avoided being with him, saying she had to feed the pigs or go wash clothes in the creek. She seemed to have grown more and more remote from him. So now he decided to write a letter begging her to come to Muji.

At night when he sat at the table holding his Gold Dragon fountain pen, he was overwhelmed by the realization that this was the first time he had written to his daughter. What an awful father he was! Why had he been so absentminded all these years that he had never thought Hua might like to hear from him? No wonder she had been resentful.

He wrote:

Uncertain whether she could be persuaded only by his words, he wrote another letter to Bensheng, asking him to urge Hua not to miss this opportunity.

Putting down the pen, he yawned, interlaced his fingers, and stretched his arms above his head until two of his knuckles cracked. He enjoyed the peaceful night and felt his mind was more alert when he was alone. A rustle of tree leaves attracted his attention to the window, whose panes were blurred with dewdrops at their corners. Outside a few maple leaves were falling. He stood up, wiped his face with a wet towel, then went to bed.

Some officers asked Lin when they could eat his wedding candies; he said it would be in a few months. Manna and he agreed that they should wait a while so as to prevent others from talking about their building a happy nest on the ex-wife's miseries.

Within two weeks Shuyu's residential status was changed, and all the procedures for Hua's employment were carried through. But Lin hadn't heard from his daughter yet and was worried.

Then, as he feared, her letter came, saying she was not interested in living in "an overpopulated city." She claimed that because the working class consisted of both peasants and workers, she decided to stay in the country as "a socialist peasant of the new type." Lin could tell that was a phrase she had picked up from a newspaper, and he was angry, but he didn't know what to do. Not having heard a word from Bensheng, he suspected that his brother-in-law must have played a negative role in this matter – trying to hold Hua back and keep her working for him. Even Shuyu couldn't help calling their daughter "a stupid egg."

When Lin talked with Manna about this impasse, she suggested he go and fetch his daughter personally. It seemed to be a good idea, because he also needed to sell the country property to get the cash for the wedding. So in the early fall he took annual leave and went back to Goose Village.

3

A dozen people were gathered in his yard when Lin arrived home. The afternoon heat had subsided, but flies were still droning madly. On the ground, near the wattle gate of the vegetable garden, was spread a bloody donkey's hide. It was almost covered up by dead greenheads. Judging by the sweetish odor still emanating from the skin, a lot of dichlorvos had been sprayed on it to prevent maggots. The air also smelled meaty and spicy, with a touch of cumin, prickly ash, and magnolia-vine. Hua, a violet towel covering her hair, was stirring something in a cauldron set on a makeshift fireplace built of rocks. Against a blue wheelbarrow leaned a signboard that carried these words in black ink: "The Best Delicacy – Donkey Meat on Earth like Dragon Meat in Heaven! Two-Fifty a Pound!"

At the sight of her father, Hua put down the shovel and went up to him. With a grin she said, "I'm so glad you're back, Dad." She took the duffel bag from his hand.

"What are you doing? Why are so many people here?"

"Uncle Bensheng's donkey died. I'm cooking five-flavored donkey meat for him. They're waiting to buy some."

"Where is he?"

"He's in our house talking with somebody. Let's go in now." She turned and put the wooden lid on the cauldron, but left a crack between the lid and the rim.

Lin wasn't happy about the scene, wondering why Bensheng had not used his own yard as a meat shop. What a greedy devil, he thought. He always tries to profit at others' expense. If I had come back a few days later, he'd have turned this home into his own.

Bensheng's only donkey had died two days ago. It had run out of its shed after midnight, gotten into a meadow, and then broken into a vegetable garden, where it ate a lot of alfalfa and beans without drinking any water. As a result it became too bloated to stay on its feet. A boy saw it lying behind the village's millhouse the next morning, and he ran to inform its owner. When Bensheng arrived to help the animal, it was breathing its last, its stomach burst. Ben-sheng was very upset, because he had depended on the donkey to transport groceries from Six Stars. All he could do now was sell its meat to get some money back. Though a few villagers wanted to buy raw donkey meat, he would only sell it cooked, figuring that in this way he could make more money. He told them, "I don't deal in raw material, only the finished product."

As Lin entered the house, he heard Bensheng speaking to someone in the main room. "I'll give you the donkey's hide, okay?"

Lin and Hua stopped to listen. Another voice countered loudly, " No, that won't do. Your beast destroyed my garden. I don't want its skin. What can I do with it? I can't even sell it at the salvage station."

"You can make a mattress out of it, can't you?"

"No. Who wants to sleep on a stinking ass? If it were a roe deer, I would take it."

"Some people don't even deserve the company of a dead donkey. "

"I just don't want to have anything to do with it."

Lin stepped into the room, but the men didn't notice him. He recognized the other man as a neighbor, Uncle Sun. Bensheng said to the old man, "How about eight pounds of donkey meat, braised?"

"No, ten pounds."

"Nine."

"Damn it, I say ten!"

"Nine and a half. "

"Ten!"

"All right, I'll let you have that much, Uncle Sun, only because I respect your old face."

Hua interrupted them by saying, "Uncle, my dad is home."

Both men turned to Lin. The old man looked a little embarrassed, flashing a toothless smile, and then said to Bensheng, "I must be going. I'll send my grandson over for the meat." He clasped his hands behind him and strode out with measured steps. A tuft of white hair peeked through a hole at the top of his felt skullcap.

Bensheng himself looked like an old man now. His forehead was seamed with wrinkles, and his thin eyes were dimmer than the previous year and slightly sunken, as though he hadn't slept for days. He seemed disturbed by Lin's sudden appearance, but quickly regained his composure. "Is Shuyu back too?" he asked Lin.

"No, I came alone to fetch Hua." He glanced at his daughter, whose face showed little response to his words.

Bensheng frowned, then said plaintively, "I received your letter, elder brother. I understand you got what you wanted. But we're still one family. "

"I feel the same way," Lin managed to say, somewhat softened by his pity for him.

"My sis isn't here, so you come eat with us, all right?"

"Well… "

"Please Dad," Hua broke in. " I've been staying at Uncle's these days. We're one family."

"All right, I will."

Bensheng was apparently pleased with Lin's agreement. After telling Hua to get some water in a washbasin for her father, he went out to sell the five-flavored donkey meat.

Lin was also glad that he had accepted Bensheng's offer, because he wasn't sure how to put the property up for sale and might need Bensheng's advice and help. He wanted to sell it within a few days and return to Muji as soon as possible. In addition, he was unsure whether his daughter would be willing to leave with him. A good relationship with Bensheng would at least facilitate his job of persuading her. It seemed that Hua was quite attached to her uncle and aunt, who were childless and treated her like their own daughter. In his heart Lin resented the way Hua smiled at her uncle, as though there was something intimate between them, something to which he was denied access.

Another idea lurking at the back of his mind had come to the fore: he wondered if Hua had a boyfriend. The girl was becoming a handsome young woman and must have attracted some pursuers. If she already had a lover, his task of persuading her to go to Muji might get complicated. Perhaps she wouldn't give up her boyfriend for a job in the city. The more he thought about this, the more anxious he grew. He ought to find an opportunity to ask her so that he could know what difficulty he was facing.

At dinner that evening, Bensheng said that Second Donkey was thinking of buying Lin's house for his eldest son, Handong, together with the furniture. The young man planned to marry the next year, although he had no fiancee yet. These days matchmakers had been frequenting Second Donkey's home, because Handong, who worked full-time in Wujia Town, had finally agreed with his parents to look for a wife in the countryside. Lin was delighted that there was a buyer interested in the house, but his face darkened when Bensheng told him that Second Donkey had inspected the property and would pay no more than three thousand yuan. To Lin, the house and the furniture were worth at least four thousand.

"No, I won't sell it at that price," Lin said to Bensheng after dinner.

"Fine. Tomorrow when Second Donkey comes to my store, I'll tell him that. By the way, how much would you ask?"

"Four thousand."

"Keep in mind he can pay cash. He made a killing on cabbages last fall and on potato noodles this spring. His fish pond is a money cow. Few men in our village can come up with three thousand yuan at the moment. "

"That's too low," Lin said firmly.

Though Lin turned Second Donkey down, he couldn't feel at ease because he might not have enough time to wait for a reasonable offer.

The next afternoon he talked with his daughter and found out that she did have a boyfriend. He was unhappy about it, believing she was too young to understand love, but he didn't blame her. While she was helping him pack up Shuyu's clothes, he continued to ask her about the young man. "Does Fengjin live in a nearby village?" he said.

"No, he's in the navy now, in Jiangsu Province."

"How did you get to know him?"

"We used to be classmates." She blushed almost to the ears, kept her eyes low, and went on folding a pair of her mother's pants.

"How serious is it between you and him? I mean, do you know him well enough to love him?"

"Yes," she replied confidently.

He was amazed by her answer, wondering how an eighteen-year-old could truly understand her feelings. Could love be so simple and so easy? Didn't it take time to achieve mutual understanding and trust? Maybe she just had a crush. She couldn't really love him, could she?

"Does he know you're going to have a new job?" he asked her. " Yes, I wrote to him. He wants me to go to the city with you too. "

"So that he can join you in Muji someday?"

"I think so." She nodded.

"Does Uncle Bensheng know you have a boyfriend?"

"Yes, but he's not happy about it."

"Why?"

"He said I should find a college graduate instead, because soldiers are not fashionable anymore."

Lin smiled. Then mixed feelings rose in his mind about her boyfriend. On one hand, he was pleased that Fengjin encouraged Hua to seize the opportunity to go to the city; on the other, the young man was undoubtedly a practical fellow, who knew how to use her to improve his future – because if Hua stayed in the village, he might have to come back to the countryside when he left the army. Lin was afraid her boyfriend might just be using her, but he didn't say a word about his suspicion. For the time being he would be satisfied if he could take her away without a hitch.

Outside the window a goose honked, which reminded him that he should get rid of all the poultry, the goat, and the sow within two or three days.

"Dad, do you think my mother can wear this? It's the only silk thing she has." Hua displayed a red tunic against her chest. "No, it's too large for her. Have you ever seen her wear it?" "No, I haven't."

He remembered that a relative of his had sent the tunic to Shuyu as a wedding present two decades before, but it had never fit her. Neither had she ever tried to alter it, always saying, "This is too fancy for me." That was why the tunic still looked new. Before he set out for the country, Shuyu had told him to give anything she couldn't wear to her brother's wife. He said to Hua, "Pack it in."

Bensheng came home with good news for Lin that evening. Second Donkey accepted the price, though he would pay only two thousand in cash initially and he would hand over the other half by the end of next year, after his son's wedding. Lin was suspicious of this way of being paid, knowing well that once the house was occupied, the new owner could delay giving him the rest of the pay ment forever, and that he might never receive the other two thousand yuan at all. Furthermore, Bensheng was Second Donkey's friend and might eventually get hold of the money without passing it on to him. That would be a good way to avenge his sister. Perhaps the two men had purposely worked out such an arrangement to take advantage of him. No, this wouldn't do. He had to forestall the trouble.

Without further consideration, Lin made up his mind to collect all the cash he could, and not to leave any balance behind.

That night he and Bensheng went to Second Donkey's home and clinched a deal. After a brief haggle, the buyer agreed to pay 3,200 yuan in cash on the spot. Lin hadn't seen Second Donkey for seven or eight years and was surprised that he had not aged much and that only his large eyes were no longer as bright as before. His long teeth were still strong, tea-stained along the gums; his donkeylike face remained smooth and even less swarthy, with just a few wrinkles. How he can take care of himself, Lin thought.

Second Donkey, his feet tucked up underneath him, went on saying, "We're all neighbors. I don't mind spending a bit more." He was drinking beer from a glass, which was so greasy that the liquid resembled peanut oil. Lin wouldn't touch the beer poured for him.

Second Donkey called in his son Handong to help draw up a contract. To Lin's amazement, the slender lad, who had an effeminate face and sensitive eyes, placed on the dining table a sheet of letter paper and a lumpy inkstone, which contained freshly ground ink. He climbed on the brick bed, sat cross-legged, and began to write with a small brush made of weasel's hair, which few people could use nowadays. From time to time he turned smiling eyes toward Lin. His posture, manners, and handwriting all appeared to be scholarly. In every way he didn't look like a son that the thickset, illiterate Second Donkey could father. Later, Lin heard from Ben-sheng, who thought a great deal of Handong, that the lad was a col lege graduate and a teacher in Wujia Middle School. Actually his father had given dinners and gifts to the commune leaders, who then had him elected for college as a worker-peasant-soldier student.

Besides the house and the furniture, the contract also included the shack in the backyard, the pigsty, the grinding stone, the vegetable garden, the eleven elm and jujube trees, the water well, the cauldron, and the latrine. Having read it through, Lin pressed his personal seal on the paper, beneath his name. Second Donkey did the same. Next, the buyer went into the inner room, in which his wife was shelling chestnuts, and came back with three bundles of cash, each consisting of a hundred ten-yuan bills. Then from a small envelope lying on a red chest, he pulled out forty brand-new fivers and put them together with the three thousand yuan on the dining table.

"Count this, please," he said to Lin, who was impressed, never having met a wealthier man.

Lin started counting the money, now and then pulling out a bill with a missing corner. Meanwhile Second Donkey poured another glass of beer for Bensheng, who frowned at Lin's white fingers.

All together Lin found seven damaged ten-yuan bills. "No store will accept these," he said to the buyer.

Second Donkey chuckled and said, "Smart man." He went into the inner room again and returned with seven intact tenners.

The transaction was completed, and Lin left Second Donkey a key to the house. Then he and Bensheng put on their caps, said good-bye to the father and son, and went out into the starless night.

On their way home, Lin gave the seven ten-yuan bills to Ben-sheng, who took the money but didn't look happy. A rooster crowed in the south. "Crazy. It's not midnight yet," Bensheng said. "They should kill or geld that damn cock who just confuses people, only makes noise and never lays an egg."

The next day Lin went to the village office and called his brother, telling him to come with a horse cart tomorrow afternoon to fetch things for his family. He had decided to give all the animals to Ren Kong. He told Hua of his decision, and she promised not to reveal a word to Uncle Bensheng, knowing her father had already given him seventy yuan and meant to leave him all their farm tools and the family plot.

Exhausted from sweeping and earthing up his parents' graves, Lin slept nine hours and got up late the next morning. His shoulders and elbows were still painful. After breakfast, he poured two bottles of sweet-potato liquor into the feed Hua had prepared – chopped radish greens and crumbs of soaked soybean cake. With a pair of chopsticks he mixed the alcohol and the feed, then fed it to the sow and the seven piglets, the poultry, and the goat. All the animals ate hungrily. He planned to leave for Muji the next day and was pleased that so far things had run smoothly according to his plan.

Ren and his two older sons arrived with a tractor in the early afternoon. Without delay they began to work. They put all the chickens, geese, and ducks into a large string bag, tied together the feet of the pigs and the goat with hempen ropes, then threw them into the spacious trailer. The creatures were all sound asleep and made no noise except to grunt vaguely once in a while. The boys were actually young men now, tall like their father with thick muscular arms. Lin was glad to see them, although he had never known them well. Ren had brought along a pair of brown leather sandals for Hua, the most fashionable and expensive kind in the county. The present delighted her so much that she immediately went about helping her cousins load into the trailer jars, vats, the meal bin, a pair of straw rain capes, pots, pans, two boxes of books, and a stack of unused notebooks for her youngest cousin who was still going to middle school.

"Hua, can you boil some water for tea?" her father asked.

"Sure." She went into the house to start the stove.

Meanwhile Lin and Ren sat under a jujube tree, chatting and smoking. Ren was puffing on his pipe, with an Amber cigarette tucked behind his ear, which Lin had given him and which he was saving for his eldest son. Again Lin expressed his admiration for his husky nephews. The eldest one was being trained to be a truck driver. Obviously Ren wouldn't lack wine and meat in the future, since the boy would have a lucrative job.

The trailer was fully loaded. Ren and his sons couldn't stay for tea because they would have to return the tractor to the commune Veterinary Station before five o'clock. After saying good-bye to Lin and Hua, they all jumped onto the vehicle, which rolled away with earsplitting toots.

As the tractor was put-putting down the road, Bensheng came in. His face fell at the sight of the yard, which was almost stripped empty. He asked his niece, "Hua, did you save the wheelbarrow for me?"

"I think it's still in the shed." She went there to see, but returned a minute later, saying, "Damn, they took everything, even the rakes and shovels."

Bensheng went up to Lin. "Elder brother, I thought you'd at least give me the sow."

"I'm leaving you our family plot."

"Forget it! The village is going to take it back."

"I – I told Ren to come with a horse cart so we could leave a lot of stuff for you, but he came with a tractor. We have some clothing for Hua's aunt in the house. Also, don't you want these?" He pointed to the stacks of brushwood and bean stalks, and a pile of manure.

"Damn you, such an ungrateful worm!" Bensheng stamped his feet, storming away. His left leg seemed shorter than his right; this caused him to wobble a little.

Lin and Hua decided to eat at their own home in the evening, not wanting to confront Bensheng. Lin took out some cookies and opened two cans, one of peaches and the other of fried minnow. Together father and daughter sat down to dinner, each drinking a cup of hot water.

As they were eating, Lin asked Hua whether he should give Ben-sheng some extra money, say, a hundred yuan, to make up with him. Hua thought for a moment, then said, "Don't do that. You should save the money for my mother. One hundred yuan is nothing for Uncle Bensheng. Sometimes he can make more than that in a week."

"All right, I won't give him any." Lin took a bite of a walnut cookie. "If he's so rich, I don't understand why he's so angry at me."

"Greedy. He has nothing but money on his mind. He even adds water to soy sauce and vinegar in his store. "

"Really? Does your aunt know that?"

"No, she doesn't. "

They smiled at each other. Lin was pleased with Hua's smile, which showed she had become his ally. He realized that since he had come home, he had been in good spirits and never felt lonely, perhaps because his daughter had grown close to him again. But she would soon belong to another man. If only he could have kept her around forever, or if only she were ten years younger. No, he said to himself, you've been alone all your life and will remain a loner. Don't be so mushy.

The house was quiet, as all the animals were gone. Most of the flies had disappeared as well. Somewhere in the village a horse was neighing.

Dusk was descending after father and daughter had cleared the table and washed the dishes. They had to go to bed early so that they could rise before daybreak to catch the bus. There would be a long, exhausting day tomorrow, since they were to carry three large suitcases containing winter clothes and quilts. After bathing his feet, Lin lit two incense coils to repel mosquitoes, one for his room and the other for Hua's.

Having said good night to his daughter, he returned to his room. Hard as he tried, he couldn't fall asleep. The reed mat under his back was cool, but too hard to be comfortable. Besides, it was only eight o'clock, and the twilight outside wasn't dim yet. Someone was playing a fiddle in the village, the broken music quite jarring. Lin kept his eyes shut and tried not to think of anything. Gradually he grew a little drowsy.

A knock on the door woke him and he turned his head. Hua stepped in with a white toweling coverlet over her shoulders. "Dad, can I sleep in your room? I'm scared. That room is too quiet. With so many things gone, it feels spooky in there."

He remembered she had slept in her aunt's room since Shuyu left. "All right, you use the other end of the bed. Did you put out the incense?"

"Yes." She climbed onto the brick bed, whose breadth was the same as that of the room, and lay down on the other end. Without a word she closed her eyes.

Lin looked at her face carefully. Her nose was straight like his, but thinner; her forehead was full and her skin dark but healthy. When she was exhaling, her lips vibrated a little. He was amazed by her pretty looks, which she probably was unaware of. He was certain she would soon become an attractive young woman in the match plant. Why wouldn't she forget that boy in the navy? She could easily find a man who'd love her more and take better care of her.

As he was thinking, Hua opened her eyes. "Dad, what's Muji like?"

"It's a big city, with two parks, three large department stores, and six or seven movie theaters. "

"My friends told me that there were lots of moons in Muji at night. That isn't true, is it?"

"Of course not. They must have meant neon lights."

"What are neon lights? They look like the moon?"

"Not exactly. They're colorful, blinking all the time."

"That must be scary. Is my mother afraid of walking alone in the city?"

"I don't think so." He regretted having answered in an uncertain tone, but on the other hand, he had never known how Shuyu felt when she was walking alone. "Hua, will you keep your mother company when she goes shopping in the city?"

"I will," she replied with her eyes shut. After a brief lull she said, "Dad?"

"Yes?"

"Were you scared when you left home alone? You were just a teenager then. "

"Not really. "

"Didn't you miss your friends in Wujia after you left?"

"I had few friends."

"Ah, I have so many here." Her voice turned pensive.

While father and daughter were conversing with their eyes closed, the night thickened. The table and chests in the room became obscure. Suddenly somebody yelled from the yard, "Come out, you pale-faced wolf!" It was Bensheng's hoarse voice.

Lin climbed out of bed, put on his pants, and went out. As he opened the door, sour, alcoholic fumes assailed his nose. Bensheng, in large white shorts and stripped to the waist, pointed at Lin's face and said, "Elder bro-brother, I want to settle accounts wi-with you tonight."

"What's this all about?"

"I want you to come h-home with me."

"All right."

Hua came out too, in a pair of pink pajamas. Her uncle waved his hand and croaked, "You're all su-such heartless beasts, so-so ungrateful."

"You've drunk too much, Bensheng," Lin said. "Let me take you – "

"No, my head isn't muddled. Everything is cl-clear in here." He pointed his thumb at his temple, but his legs buckled, shaking.

"Uncle, please go home. "

"You're ungrateful too. You don't e-even want to eat m-my food. Your aunt made lamb dumplings for you, b-but you wouldn't show your face."

"Oh, I didn't know that!" Hua wailed.

"Tell me, how come Handong doesn't de-deserve you? Where can you find a better lad, a real scholar?"

"I've told you I don't want to think about him, Uncle."

"He loves you."

"I told you I don't want a bookworm."

Lin felt bad for Bensheng. "My brother," he said, "we were wrong, all right? Please – "

"Don't brother me! You snatched away my sister. Now you're taking Hua away from me. You bully me be-because I don't have a child. You, you're my born enemy. I want to get even with you." He collapsed to the ground, sobbing like a little boy.

"Uncle, don't be so upset. You can visit us and I'll come back to see you and Aunt. I promise. "

"Don't sweet-talk me. I know you think I'm dirty and greedy, but my heart is pure, like gold." He thumped his chest with his fist.

As Lin bent down to help him up, Bensheng's stout wife appeared from the darkness, wearing a white T-shirt and mauve slacks. "My old devil," she cried at her husband, "you come home with me."

"Leave me alone," he grunted.

"Get up right now!"

"Okay, my little granny." He tried to climb to his feet, but his legs were rubbery, unable to support him.

His wife turned to Lin and said, "I told him not to make any trouble here and let you and Hua leave in peace, but he sneaked out after a pot of horse pee."

"He can't walk anymore. Let me carry him back." Lin squatted down; Hua and her aunt lifted Bensheng by the arms and put him on Lin's back.

Lin carried him piggyback toward Bensheng's house, which was three hundred yards away, while Hua and her aunt followed, casting their long shadows ahead. As Lin plodded along in the damp moonlight, Bensheng breathed out hot air on the nape of his neck, making his skin tingle. Whenever Bensheng let out a feeble moan or a broken curse, Lin was afraid he would open his mouth to bite him. Hua was saying something to her aunt, her voice hardly audible.

Soon Lin began panting as the load on his back grew heavier and heavier.

4

Hua was hired by the Splendor Match Plant a week after her arrival at Muji. For the time being she stayed with her mother in the hospital at night. She liked her new job, which was lighter than any work in the village – just gluing a slip of paper on the top of each matchbox and wrapping every ten boxes into a packet. Besides, she made more money now – twenty-eight yuan a month. In her heart she was grateful to her father, but she never said a word about it.

A month later the plant assigned her a room in one of its dormitory houses; so one Sunday morning her mother moved out of the hospital to live with her in town. Lin bought bowls, pots, and some pieces of furniture for them, and he made sure they had enough coal and firewood. From now on, mother and daughter would be on their own. But their life was not worse than other workers'; Hua's earnings and the alimony Shuyu received could help them make ends meet each month.

After Shuyu and Hua had settled down, Lin began to attend to his own affairs. One day in October, he and Manna went to the Marriage Registration Office downtown. They gave each of the two women clerks a small bag of Mouse toffees. Without delay the older woman, who looked wizened and limped slightly, filled out a certificate for them. It was a piece of scarlet paper, folded and embossed with the golden words: Marriage License.

Then the preparations for the wedding began. They were allocated a one-bedroom apartment, which needed a lot of cleaning. For a week, in the evenings they brushed the cobwebs off the ceilings, scrubbed the floors and doors, painted the rusty bed that Lin had borrowed from the Section of General Affairs, and scoured the cooking range. They cleaned the windowpanes, which were speckled with fly droppings, and sealed the cracks around the window with flour-paste and strips of newspaper. The northern wall of the bedroom had some crevices; when it was windy outside, cold air would surge in, making the wallpaper vibrate with eerie noises. Two masons were sent over by the Logistics Department; they filled the crevices with mortar and then whitewashed all the walls.

In addition to the cleaning and repairing, Lin had to buy a large amount of candies, branded cigarettes, fruit, and wine. At the time these fancy things were in short supply, and he could get them only through the back door. Also, he was trying to buy a black-and-white TV set, which required a coupon he didn't have. So in the evening he bicycled about the city visiting people who might be able to help him, and he often returned late at night. Meanwhile Manna had a cold; she was coughing a lot.

The wedding took place in the conference room on the first Sunday of November. More than half of the hospital's staff and their families gathered there that evening. Most of the leaders and their wives attended the wedding, but Mrs. Su would not come because she abhorred the very idea of divorce. Somehow she couldn't stop calling Manna "Doctor Kong's concubine" whenever the couple came to mind.

Sodas, bottles of wine, platters of apples and frozen pears, and plates of roasted hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, cigarettes, and candies were laid out on twenty-four tables, which had been arranged into six rows. Children turned noisy at the sight of so many goodies; most of them were Young Pioneers, wearing around their necks a triangular scarf that represented a corner of a red flag. Some boys were running about and shouting at their pals while spitting out shells of sunflower seeds or cracking roasted pine nuts with their molars. A few little girls were warming their hands on the radiators below the double-glazed windows, which were partly packed with sawdust in between. The panes were covered with frost, shimmering in the fluorescent lights; on them one could see the patterns of clamshells, seaweed, reefs, waves, capes, islands. It had snowed heavily that morning, and the whirring of the north wind could be heard through the windows.

On the front wall were posted two large words written in black ink on red paper: "Happy Marriage!" Six strings of colorful bunting intersected one another in the air. There were also two lines of balloons wavering almost imperceptibly; one of them was popped, hanging up there like a blue baby sock.

When the room was nearly full, Director Ming Chen went to the front and clapped his hands. "May I have your attention please," he called. People quieted down.

"Comrades and friends," he announced in a booming voice, "today we've gathered here to celebrate the happy union of Comrade Lin Kong and Comrade Manna Wu. I'm very honored to officiate at this wedding. You all know who they are, as you see them every day. So let us make the ceremony simple and short. First, let us meet the bride and the groom."

To loud applause Lin and Manna got up and turned around to face the people. Bareheaded, they both had on brand-new uniforms, with a red paper flower on their chests. Manna wore shiny patent-leather shoes while Lin was in big-toed boots, the standard army issue made of suede and canvas. She seemed nervous, not knowing where to put her hands, and kept smiling to a few nurses from her ward. Then at the request of Ming Chen, together the couple bowed to the audience, some of whom stood up and whooped while others applauded. More people were coming in from the doors at the back. A few women whispered about the bride's complexion, which had turned rather sallow the last few weeks. Someone said, "Look at Doctor Kong's face. He's such a gloomy man that you never see him in high spirits."

Director Chen announced again, "Now, the bride and the groom pay tribute to the Party and Chairman Mao."

The couple turned to face the side wall, on which hung a portrait of the late Chairman and a pair of large banners carrying the emblem of a crossed sickle and hammer.

Ming Chen began chanting: "The first bow…"

The couple bowed to the banners and the portrait, keeping the tips of their middle fingers on the seams of their trousers.

"The second bow…"

They bowed again, lower than the previous time, almost eighty degrees.

"The third bow…"

Done with the homage, the couple turned to face the audience again. For a few seconds the echoes of the director's chanting kept ringing in the room and the corridor. People remained quiet and seemed muted by the sheer volume of Ming Chen's voice. Then the director announced, "Now I declare Lin Kong and Manna Wu are man and wife. Let us congratulate them."

People applauded again; some boys whistled.

When the audience quieted down, the couple were asked to sing a song. Manna was good at singing, but Lin knew few songs, so they sang "Our Troops March Toward the Sun," which was so outdated that some of the young officers had never heard it. Their singing was unpleasant to the ear. The bridegroom's voice was too low and soft, while the bride's was rasping thanks to the cold she had. A few nurses couldn't help smirking; one said, "This gives me a toothache. "

The moment they finished singing, a young officer raised his fist, shouting, "Eat a bobbing apple!"

"Yes, let them eat a bobbing apple together," several voices cried out. What they demanded was an apple strung by a thread in the air, so that the couple couldn't avoid kissing each other while eating it.

Director Chen held up his hands and calmed them down. He said, "We're revolutionary officers and soldiers, and the army isn't your home village, so the bobbing-apple stuff is not appropriate here. Now, enjoy yourselves."

As people were standing up and moving around, Ming Chen clapped his hands for the attention of the children. He cried, "Small friends – boys and girls – you can eat as many goodies as you want, but don't take any home. Understood?"

"Yes sir," a little girl shouted back.

Laughter followed. At once the room was filled with noise again. A baby burst out crying in a back corner. A young officer set off a firecracker; the explosion made a few girls scream; immediately he was prohibited from doing that again. The two doors at the back were opened to let out the smell of gunpowder.

One by one the leaders walked up to the bride and groom to clink glasses and give their congratulations. When Commissar Ran Su approached them, he seemed very moved. Unlike others, he didn't hold a glass of wine. He looked like an old man now – though he was merely fifty-one – with sparse hair and a gray mustache. Furrows spread on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes, whose lower lids hung down a little. He grasped Lin's and Manna's arms and drew them aside, saying in a somber voice, "You two must cherish this opportunity in your lives. Love and take care of each other. Don't forget that yours is a bitter love." He paused and said " bitter love" again, as though to himself.

His words touched the bride. After Ran Su left, she was unable to restrain herself anymore and broke out sobbing. Lin took her glass away. With his arm around her waist he steered her to a corner and tried to calm her down, but she was inconsolable, her mouth trembling and her face bathed in tears. She bit her lip, sniffling, her eyes shining at the happy crowd moving about under a 300-watt bulb.

"Don't be so upset, dear," Lin said.

She was still biting her lip, tears trickling down her chin and falling on the front of her jacket.

"Come, sweetheart," he said again, "this is our wedding. Try to put on a happy face. "

She raised her face, which looked so contorted that for a moment he didn't know what to say. He touched her forehead; it was wet and hot.

He asked, "Is this too much for you?"

She nodded.

"Would you like to go home?"

She nodded again. He turned and saw Nurse Hsu sitting nearby with a few little girls and cracking hazelnuts for them with a pair of pliers. He asked her to take his bride home, since he couldn't extricate himself. Then he found Manna's fur hat and overcoat and brought them out to the corridor. There he helped her on with them, saying he would join her at home soon.

When he returned to the crowd, the room was full of noisy music. The tables were all pushed against the walls, and young nurses and officers were dancing together. After being banned for almost two decades, ballroom dancing had just come back into fashion. The young men and women were wheeling and swaying passionately as though they knew no fatigue. The older officers and doctors stood by, watching the dancers and chatting. Suddenly a nurse slipped and fell on the floor, having stepped on a pear core. Her fall brought on waves of laughter.

Haiyan and her husband Honggan came up to Lin and congratulated him. They were a middle-aged couple now. Honggan wore civilian clothes and glasses, which made him resemble a ranking official; Haiyan was moonfaced and a little stout, wearing a saffron neckerchief. She beckoned to their son. "Come here, Taotao, and meet Uncle Kong."

"No, I don't want to," whined the eight-year-old boy. He skipped away with a wooden carbine in his arms and disappeared among his pals. His parents and Lin all laughed.

"You and Manna should never have a boy," Haiyan said to the bridegroom. "It's much easier to raise a girl. By the way, where is the bride?"

"She didn't feel well and went back home. She has a cold."

Honggan patted Lin on the shoulder and said, "My friend, I'm very happy to be here. Listen, from now on if you need any help, just let me know." His left hand was twirling an empty glass.

Lin looked at his flat face, trying to make sense of his words. He was amazed to see that Honggan had turned into a happy, healthy man and had shed all traces of his peasant stock. His face was quite smooth; only two small pinkish boils on his forehead reminded Lin that the face used to be carbuncular.

"Don't be polite, Lin," Haiyan said. "He has power and pull now. His company owns twelve trucks."

"Oh, thanks," he managed to reply. In his heart he still couldn't embrace them as friends.

"If you need to bring home coal or firewood," Honggan said, " just give me a call. "

"Thanks."

Silence set in. The summer before last Honggan had been demobilized and had become the vice-chairman of a lumberyard in Muji. Like her husband, Haiyan had also made progress in life; after one and a half years of training in Changchun City, she had become an obstetrician. They had moved to downtown Muji so that their son could go to a better school. Though Haiyan and Manna had made up long ago, Manna still wouldn't trust her with any secret. Now Lin hoped the couple would leave him alone.

But Honggan was in a talkative mood. He said in a low voice, "Lin, have you heard anything about Geng Yang?"

Lin was perplexed by the question and shook his head, wondering why he mentioned that name at this wedding. Thank heaven, his bride wasn't around.

"Well, I don't mean to annoy you," Honggan went on, "but I heard he got rich, filthy rich. You know, a bad dog is always lucky."

Lin didn't say a word, his cheeks coloring.

Seeing the bridegroom's flushed face, Haiyan pinched her husband's neck and asked angrily, "Why the hell did you mention that thug here, moron?" She then gripped his ear and tweaked it.

"Ouch! Let go."

"Apologize to Lin," she ordered.

"All right, all right, Lin, I'm sorry."

Lin said with a bland smile, "Let him go, Haiyan. He meant no harm."

"He's stupid, such a killjoy. " She released his ear. "As if he hadn't done enough damage and hadn't hurt Manna at all." She turned to her husband and asked, "Why did you try to spoil this wedding?"

Honggan realized his blunder. "Sorry, Lin, I didn't mean to do anything nasty. There was an article on Geng Yang in Role Models a month ago. I just want to say it's unfair that son of a bitch is doing so well."

"I understand, " Lin said. He didn't read that magazine and had no idea how rich Geng Yang was.

"We should be going," Haiyan said to her husband.

"Yes." Honggan turned to the bridegroom. "Don't forget I'll be happy to help you. Any heavy work."

"I'll remember that." Lin wondered if the couple had drunk too much.

"Bye-bye." Honggan waved, then grasped his wife's arm. Together they merged into the crowd.

Most of the dancers were in sweaters or shirts now. The room seemed to Lin like a large cabin on a ship, foggy and swaying. This feeling made him giddy.

He couldn't dance, so he stayed with the older officers and their wives, receiving congratulations and answering questions. By now, most of the children had left with candies and fruit in their pockets and with all the balloons, so the room became less noisy and the tables were stacked with empty platters, plates, jackets, hats, mittens. Lin was tired and couldn't stop wondering how his bride was doing alone at home. How bored he was by their wedding.

5

Manna turned out to be a passionate lover, and her passion often unnerved Lin. He wasn't as experienced in bed as she had expected. He tired out easily, most of the time before she could calm down. At night when taps was sounded, they would go to bed immediately. They would make love for half an hour, not daring to remain awake longer because they would have to join the morning exercises at daybreak. If it snowed, they would get up early as well to clear roads with their comrades.

Manna seemed frustrated sometimes, but never lost her temper. One Saturday night she joked with Lin, saying good-humoredly, "I wonder how you could have made a baby with Shuyu. In just three minutes?" Her chin was resting on his chest while her eyes were dreamy and half-closed.

"I was young then," he muttered.

"So you had a different pecker?" She chuckled.

"She wasn't like you. "

"In what way?"

"She didn't make me feel like an old man."

"Come on, you are still my young groom." She started kissing his mouth again and swung her leg across his belly.

"Sweetheart, I need more time," he said.

"Okay, take it easy. " She lay still alongside him, but her hand went on caressing his thigh. It took a while to get him ready. They made love for an hour that night, since they wouldn't have to rise early the next morning.

Before the wedding Lin had feared that the rape of a decade ago might continue to trouble Manna, especially in bed; so he had often reminded himself to be gentle with her. But she showed no sign of discomfort. Every day she insisted they make love before going to sleep. Sometimes they even went to bed after lunch. What a woman, he would say to himself.

To satisfy her was not easy, yet he tried his best. Exhausted every night, he wondered if he should use an aphrodisiac – getting some ginseng or angelica roots or seahorses and steeping them in a bottle of wheat liquor. But he decided not to concoct such a drink, believing those things would help burn him out sooner. He hoped Manna could slow down a little, but she was passionate as ever. Are other newlyweds like us? he asked himself.

In bed, at the climax, Manna often moaned, "Oh, let me die. Let's die like this, together." At times she would weep and even bite his nipples or shoulders. In the beginning her words and tears frightened him, and he thought he must have hurt her. But she said he hadn't, claiming she was happy, so happy that she wished they could lie together in bed forever.

Once, however, she confessed to him, "I don't know why I feel so sad. If only we had married twenty years earlier." He gave thought to her words, but was unsure what they meant exactly. Did she imply that if he were younger, he would have been more virile?

Every time after sex he found her slightly different – tired and older, although pink patches would appear on her cheeks and make her a bit more charming. But the flaccid flesh on her stomach and arms, her soft breasts, and the small crinkles on her throat, all indicated that youth had left her. He would wonder how her body could generate so much desire, which seemed ageless and impossible for him to meet. He felt old and begged her not to indulge herself too much, but she didn't seem to care.

In two months he began to have a numb pain in the small of his back, and a soreness was developing in his right sole. He knew that too much sex might have hurt his kidneys, but he wouldn't shun it, feeling obligated to satisfy her in any way she wanted, because she had waited so many years for him. A large dose of vitamin Bi was injected into his foot, around the sore spot, to soothe the nerves. It alleviated the pain to some extent.

His colleagues noticed he had grown thinner. Since the previous summer he had lost fifteen pounds, and his chin jutted out further. When there was no woman around, his comrades would outdo one another poking fun at him. Shiding Mu, the head of the Propaganda Section, said one afternoon in the recreation room, "My goodness, Lin, you've been married for just three months. Look at yourself, you're running out of sap."

Lin sighed, not knowing how to reply. He went on writing the phrase " Warmly Welcome" with a brush on a large sheet of paper. They were making posters for a general's visit to the hospital. Lin was among the few skilled with the writing brush, so he had been assigned to the work.

Shiding Mu nudged him and went on, "Already tired out, eh? This is just the first step of a thousand-mile march." He gave a long laugh, which was so loud that it set the pane on a cabinet door rattling for a few seconds.

"Stop it!" Lin snapped.

But they wouldn't leave him alone. A junior officer chimed in, "Lin, by next summer, you'll be a skeleton if you go on like this. You must slow down."

Another man said to Lin with a wink, "You know, lust is the worm that sucks up your marrow."

Then a clerk in round-rimmed glasses dipped a small broom into a bucket, stirring the hot paste made of wheat flour, and recited loudly these lines from an ancient lyric:

They laughed out loud, then continued to talk about women. No wonder the saying went: "At thirty she is like a wolf; at forty a tiger." An old maid must be a wolf as well as a tiger, so only a young lion should engage her in battle. From the outset Lin should have known he was no match and should have set up a few rules with her. The office echoed with chortles. Their jokes made time pass so fast and the work so delightful.

Though he didn't show his anger, Lin was exasperated at heart. He told himself he had to do something to stop people from talking like this.

At home he looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe, which was the only piece of furniture he had bought for the wedding. Indeed his eyes had sunk deeper and seemed larger. His face was pallid, and more white hair appeared at his temples and crown. The gray strands gave him a sense of finality. At medical school twenty-five years before, he had grown some white hair, which later turned black again. Now there was no hope of reversing the gray.

One day he and Manna jumped into bed after lunch and made love. Afterward, he was so exhausted he fell asleep. Manna didn't wake him when she left for work. He went on sleeping until a nurse came at about three to get the key to the storage room. She said a technician from Harbin had arrived to repair the inhalator Lin had locked away. How embarrassed he was. Without washing his face, he set out with the woman for the medical building. On the way he kept telling her that he didn't feel himself.

That evening he said to his wife, "Sweetheart, we can't continue like this. We're no longer young. People have been talking about us."

"I know it's bad," Manna said, "but I can't help myself. Something's eating me inside, as if I won't live for long and have to seize every hour."

"We should save some energy for work."

"In fact, I don't feel well these days. I had my blood pressure checked this afternoon. It was high."

"How high?"

"One hundred fifty-two over ninety-seven."

"That's awful. We shouldn't have sex so often."

"Maybe we shouldn't." She sighed.

They agreed to protect their health from then on. That night they slept peacefully for the first time.

6

"It's like a cinerary casket," Lin muttered to himself. He referred to a small sandalwood box underneath Manna's clothes in the wardrobe. A bronze padlock always secured its lid. He couldn't help wondering what was inside. Probably money, or her bankbook, or the certificates of merit she had received. Somehow the varnished box had begun to occupy his mind lately.

One evening he asked her in a joking tone, "What are you hiding from me in the box?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The sandalwood box in the wardrobe."

"Oh, nothing's in it. Why are you so curious?" She smiled.

"Can I see what's inside?"

"Uh-uh, unless you promise me something."

"What?"

"Promise you won't laugh at me."

"Of course I won't."

"Promise that from now on you'll tell me all your secrets."

"Sure, I won't hide anything from you."

"Okay, then I'll let you see."

She got up from the bed, went over to the wardrobe, and took out the box. Removing the padlock, she opened the lid, whose underside was pasted over with soda labels. A roll of cream-colored sponge puffed out, atop the other contents. She took the roll out and unfolded it on the bed, displaying about two dozen Chairman Mao buttons, all fastened to the sponge. Most of them were made of aluminum and a few of porcelain. Their convex surfaces glimmered. On one button, the Chairman in an army uniform was wav ing his cap, apparently to the people on parade in Tiananmen Square. On another, he was smoking a cigar, his other hand holding a straw hat, while talking with some peasants in his hometown in Hunan Province.

"Wow, I never thought you loved Chairman Mao so much," Lin said with a smile. "Where did you get so many of these?"

"I collected them."

"Out of your love for Chairman Mao?"

"I don't know. They look gorgeous, don't they?"

He was puzzled by her admiration. He realized that someday these trinkets might become valuable indeed, as reminders of the mad times and the wasted, lost lives in the revolution. They would become relics of history. But for her, they didn't seem to possess any historical value at all. Then it dawned on him that she must have kept these buttons as a kind of treasure. She must have collected them as the only beautiful things she could own, like jewelry.

As he was thinking, a miserable feeling came over him. He didn't know how to articulate his thoughts without hurting her feelings, so he kept silent.

He glanced at the box, in which there were about two dozen letters held together by a blue rubber band. "What are those?" he asked.

"Just some old letters from Mai Dong. " She seemed to keep her head low, avoiding his eyes.

"Can I see them?"

"Why are you so inquisitive today?"

"If it bothers you, I don't have to see them."

"There's no secret in them. If you want, you can read them. But don't do that in front of me."

"All right, I won't."

"I won't lock the box then."

"Sure, I' ll read them and see what a romantic girl you were. "

In his heart he was eager to go through the letters, though he didn't show his eagerness. Never had he seen a love letter except in novels; never had he written one himself. Now he could see a real love letter.

The next afternoon, he came home an hour early and took out the sandalwood box to read the letters. Many of them smelled fusty; they were already yellowish, and some words were too fuzzy to be legible, owing to damp. Mai Dong's writing wasn't extraordinary by any means; some of the letters were mere records of his daily activities – what he had eaten for lunch, what movie he had seen the night before, what friends he had met. But occasionally a phrase or a sentence would glow with the genuine feelings of a young man desperately in love. At one place he wrote, "Manna, whenever I think of you, my heart starts quickening. I couldn't sleep last night, thinking about you. This morning I have a terrible headache and cannot do anything." At another place he declared, "I feel my heart is about to explode. Manna, I cannot live for long if this situation drags on." One letter ended with such an exclamation, "May Heaven facilitate our union!"

Seeing those words, Lin almost laughed. Obviously Mai Dong had been a simple, gushy fellow, hardly able to express himself coherently.

Yet having read all the letters, he felt a doubt rising in his mind. What troubled him was that the desperation Mai Dong had described was entirely alien to him. Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love. Whenever he wrote to Manna, he would address her as "Comrade Manna," or jokingly as "My Old Lady." Maybe I've read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I'm too rational, better educated. I'm a scientist by training – knowledge chills your blood.

At dinner that evening, he said to Manna, "I went through the letters. I can see that Mai Dong was really fond of you."

"No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"He jilted me. I hate him."

"But he loved you once, didn't he?"

"It was just a crush. Most men are liars. Well, except you." She grinned and went on wiping up the remaining pork broth on the plate with a piece of steamed bun.

Her words surprised him. If what she said about Mai Dong was true, then why had she kept his letters in the treasure box? Did she really hate him? He was puzzled.

Manna found herself pregnant in February. After that, she insisted Lin get another bed so they could sleep separately. "I don't want to hurt the baby," she explained, meaning they should stop having sex until the baby was born. He agreed. He borrowed a camp bed from the Section of General Affairs and set it up in a corner of the room.

Her pregnancy came as a surprise to Lin, who had thought that Manna, already forty-four, must be too old to be fertile. Now he was worried, because she had a weak heart. Since they had been married, once in a while she had suffered from arrhythmia, and her blood pressure had been high, though her cardiogram didn't indicate any serious problem. His worry was compounded by the fear that at her age she might not be able to give birth to a baby smoothly. He tried to persuade her to have an abortion, but she wanted the baby adamantly, saying that that was the purpose of their marriage, that she would not be a childless woman, and that this might be her last opportunity. She even told him, "I hope our baby is a boy. I want a little Lin."

"I don't believe in that feudal stuff. What's the difference between a boy and a girl?"

"A girl will have a harder life. "

"Come on, I'm not interested in having another child. "

"I want my own baby."

Unable to dissuade her, he dropped the subject and let her follow her wish.

Her reaction to pregnancy was severe. She vomited a great deal, sometimes even in the small hours. She didn't seem to care about her looks anymore. Her face became bloated, and the skin around her eyes grew dark and flabby as though she had just stopped crying. In addition, she ate a lot; she drank pork-chop soup with shredded kelp in it, saying the baby needed nutrition and tapping her belly, which hadn't bulged yet. What's more, her appetite was capricious. One day she craved sweet potatoes and the next day almond cookies. Then she remembered jellyfish and begged Lin to get some for her. Muji is far from the sea, and even dried jellyfish was a rarity after the Spring Festival. He bicycled about in the evening to look for jellyfish, but couldn't find any. He asked a few nurses, whose families lived in the city, to help, but none of them could do anything. Finally, through a relation of the mess officer, Lin bought two pounds of salted jellyfish at a seafood store.

Manna washed the sand and salt off the jellyfish, sliced them, and seasoned them with vinegar, mashed garlic, and sesame oil. For three days, at every meal she chewed the jellyfish with crunchy relish. She wanted Lin to try a piece, but he couldn't stand the smell.

Then from the fourth day on, she stopped putting the jellyfish on the dining table, as though the dish were unknown to her, despite half a bowl of the leftovers still sitting in the cupboard.

Aunt Cheng, Doctor Ning's mother, stopped by one evening. She told Manna, "You're a lucky woman and can eat whatever you want. In the old days when I gave birth to my first son, I ate only ten eggs. That was all for two months. When I was big with my second child, I was dying to have a roast chicken. Every morning I went to the market to look at the golden chickens at a cooked-meat stand. I had no money even for a wing, just went there to smell some."

The old woman's words reminded Manna of what was good for her, and she began craving roast chicken. So every other day Lin bought her a chicken from a luncheonette nearby, though he was worried about the cost – on his monthly salary he could afford no more than fifteen roast chickens. Fortunately her appetite for chicken lasted less than two weeks. Then she remembered pomegranates, which were impossible to find here in wintertime. How she longed for those pink pearls, sour, pungent, and juicy! One night she even dreamed of a robust tree laden with pomegranates. She told Lin about the dream, saying the auspicious fruit portended that they would have a big boy. Somehow the impossibility of coming by a pomegranate corrected her freak appetite, and she began eating normally again.

Since they'd been married, Lin had read little. His bookcase standing by the door still held his books, but it was also loaded with cups, medicine bottles, eyeglass cases, flashlights, a tumbler doll, and knickknacks. Dust had gathered on the tops of the volumes, but neither he nor his wife bothered to wipe it away. By comparison, Manna was reading a lot, mainly about pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. She checked out all the books the hospital's small library had on the subjects; she was amazed to discover how ignorant she was about parenting. At dinner she would brief her husband on what she had read that day. Most of the time he would listen to her absently; her words entered his head at one ear and left by the other. His lack of interest sometimes annoyed her.

In addition to reading, she was busy preparing clothing and dia pers for the baby. She asked some nurses for their threadbare shirts and pajamas, because diapers should be made of soft, used cloth that wouldn't chafe the baby's skin. In the evening she often went to their neighbors' homes to learn how to make baby quilts and pillows and how to knit socks and booties. She bought three pounds of knitting wool, which cost her over seventy yuan and made Lin wonder why she had become so openhanded, even wasteful – the baby would hardly need so much woolen clothing. But he didn't complain, because she had spent her own money.

Hua sometimes came on Sundays. If Manna was at home, she would stay only for a short while. She told her father that Shuyu was very pleased to hear about Manna's pregnancy, because this meant their family would be larger. Lin was puzzled by Shuyu's response, which seemed to indicate that she thought she was still his wife. He wondered whether it was the alimony he paid that made her feel this way. What a simpleminded woman. At times Hua brought along scallion pancakes, which Shuyu had made for him, but she wouldn't take the food out of her bag if Manna was around. She talked more and smiled more now, telling her father that she liked her job and that the fellow workers treated her well. She looked cheerful, the corners of her mouth going upward a little when she smiled, and a gleam appeared in her eyes. Without Manna's knowledge, Lin bought Hua a Phoenix bicycle and a Shanghai wristwatch. Though Manna knew Hua couldn't afford them by herself, she said nothing. She never greeted the girl wholeheartedly.

Sometimes Lin thought about the twenty years before this marriage. The peaceful time seemed as remote as if it had belonged to another man's life. He couldn't help imagining what this home would have been like if Manna and he had gotten married fifteen years earlier. At that time she had been such a pleasant woman that he had always believed he would be a happy man once he married her. But now she was so different and rather boring. He realized how suffering had changed her.

Once in a while he was bewildered by a strange emotion that would shoot a tingling pain to his temples. It made him wonder whether he cared for this married life, which was so tedious, so chaotic, and so exhausting.

7

Lin told Manna that he would go to his office after dinner. He had been asked to give lessons in basic chemistry to a group of orderlies, who were going to take exams for nursing school. He taught in the evening twice a week.

"Why do you have to go to the office tonight?" Manna asked.

"I can get more work done there," he replied nonchalantly.

"What work?"

"I told you I have to brush up on my chemistry in order to teach the class. "

"Can't you do that at home?"

"I need to concentrate." His voice was marked with resolution.

She said no more, though unhappy about his words. His eagerness to be away from home unsettled her. Recently she often saw a hard light appear in his eyes when he talked with her, as though he were out of patience. To her mind, his irritation might have resulted either from her refusal to abort the baby or from their abstaining from sex. She had asked several older women to see whether she could continue to share her bed with him, but they all assured her that for the baby's sake, the parents ought to remain abstinent during the pregnancy. She believed them, since some books she had read had given the same advice.

After Lin left for his office, she became restless. More doubts came to her mind and set her imagination on the wing. She couldn't help wondering if he still loved her.

It seemed unlikely that their abstinence from sex had estranged him from her. She clearly remembered that when she asked him to set up a bed for himself, he had approved of the idea readily, as if quite pleased. Does this mean he's tired of me? she asked herself. Probably so. Is he looking for another woman? That's impossible. We've stood together through all the bad times. He couldn't change his heart all of a sudden. Still, why is he so eager to stay away from me? Does he want to have a good time with someone else? Is he attracted to other women? Did he really go to his office? Is he there alone?

The more she thought, the more wretched she felt. An intense loneliness overcame her, and the dim home seemed like a deserted sickroom. She felt as if the whole world were conspiring to make a fool of her. No, she said to herself, even if I were a millstone on Lin's back, I wouldn't let him drop me so easily. He's all I have. Without him there would no longer be this home. Besides, he should concentrate on loving and taking care of his pregnant wife, shouldn't he? I must try every means to keep hold of him.

The next evening, after Lin finished dinner and left with an umbrella, she flung her raincoat on and followed him out. She kept about a hundred yards behind him as he was slouching through the rain, which was falling in white threads that were slanting, swaying, and swirling with the wind. A few sparrows were chirping tremulously under the eaves. It was still chilly, though the roadside trees were already softly green with budding leaves. Lin's heavy gait reminded Manna that he was no longer a young man. How could you think of him going to see another woman? she wondered. How absurd you are. You're too jealous and too possessive. Why not let him have some freedom?

He entered the medical building, but she didn't follow in. Instead, she stood beneath a basketball hoop in the front yard. She wouldn't go in until he reached his office on the second floor.

She waited and waited. Ten minutes passed and still the lights in his office remained off. The window was dark like the mouth of a well. Where was he? In the men's room? Impossible, he had relieved himself just before leaving home. He must be doing something secret elsewhere.

As she wiped rainwater from her face with her hand, laughter rang out from the west end of the building. She walked over to see what was going on. There, in the lecture room on the first floor, Lin was talking to seven or eight young orderlies, who were all women of around twenty. They looked engrossed in his talk. The windows were open, but she couldn't hear what he was saying. Every now and then Manna caught a phrase like "a different structure" or "molecular formula." She could tell he was happy, his face expressive and his gestures full of life. He looked taller than usual as his back was straight now. He turned around and began writing something on the blackboard. All the students' eyes were still fixed on him. Suddenly the tip of the chalk sprang away from his fingers and he said, "Whoops!" That brought a silly laugh from one of the women.

Anger and jealousy surged up in Manna's chest. She thought two of the orderlies were quite good-looking and must have been attractive to most men, especially the one nicknamed Snow Goose. That young woman had been transferred to this hospital five months ago on account of an affair with a senior officer at Shenyang Military Headquarters. She had been an actress in an opera troupe there and was sent down to this remote city after the officer's wife had written a dozen letters to his superiors, threatening to publicize the scandal if they didn't punish "the itching bitch." Observing Snow Goose now from a distance of twenty yards, Manna noticed her neck was indeed white and long like a goose's, partly covered by jet-black hair. Her nose quivered and she couldn't stop smiling at the teacher. There must have been something wrong with this woman, who seemed unable to live without seducing a man, like a weasel spirit. Manna had heard that at work one night Snow Goose had wandered about in her white gown without any underclothes on. Some male patients must have smelled something in her and would follow her whenever she was within sight.

The more Manna looked at that woman's bewitching face, the more miserable she became. What angered her most was that pair of apricot eyes, which hadn't left Lin since Manna began observing her. How she hated her, and hated them all! Lin was no good either. He obviously enjoyed flirting with these young women. Shameless, he could be their father. Small wonder he was so eager to leave home the moment he put down his chopsticks. Their home was no more than a guesthouse to him – he just went back to eat and sleep. Damn him! Damn them all!

The rain turned heavy, larger raindrops falling on the greenish tiles and the concrete ground with a thickening, crushing sound. Two women in the lecture room stood up and came to the windows to close them, so Manna swung around, heading home. Her legs felt weak like water.

Manna ran into Commissar Su the next morning on her way to work. Since they had been on friendly terms, she asked him why the hospital couldn't use somebody else to teach the chemistry course. As a pregnant wife she needed her husband to stay home in the evening. For a moment Ran Su was bewildered by her question, saying he had never heard of such a class, not to mention assigning Lin the work. Indeed there were a good number of recent college graduates available; why should they bother Lin with it?

"Don't worry, I'll look into this matter," he said to her as they parted company. His bowlegs seemed more bent than last year.

Commissar Su's answer surprised Manna, and she wondered who had assigned Lin to teach the class. The night before, after returning from the medical building and arguing with herself for two hours, she had decided not to confront Lin, as she remembered the price he had paid for their home. It would be unimaginable that Lin was not serious about their marriage. Otherwise he wouldn't have waited for her so many years and struggled so hard to obtain the divorce. In no way could he be a frivolous man. But now that she had met Ran Su and found out the class was not officially established, Manna changed her mind. She wanted to question Lin so as to get to the bottom of this.

"Lin, I want ask you something," she said after lunch.

"What?"

"Who told you to teach the chemistry class?"

"They asked me to help."

"Who did?"

"Those orderlies who want to take the exams. They went to my office the other day and asked me to give them a crash course."

"So no one assigned you the job?"

"No. They begged me and I agreed to help."

"Then why didn't you talk with me before you agreed?"

"Did I have to?" he asked derisively. Behind the lenses his eyes again glinted with the hard light she dreaded.

"This is our home, not a guesthouse where you can check out as you please."

"I know. " He looked annoyed.

She broke into tears and spoke toward the ceiling. "Heavens, as if he really has no idea what he's been doing. How can I make him understand!"

"What's wrong? They asked me for help, why shouldn't I help them?"

"Let me tell you what's wrong. You have a pregnant wife moping alone and worried sick at home, while you're having a good time with other women."

"That's not fair. I didn't spend time with any woman. "

"Who are those orderlies then? Who's Snow Goose? A gentleman?"

"Come on, you're being unreasonable."

"This is not a matter of reason but of feelings. Let me tell you this: no decent husband would do such a thing to his wife."

"Well, I've never thought of that." He sounded quite innocent.

She went into the bedroom, burying her face in a pillow stuffed with duck down. He sat smoking for a while. Then he wiped clean the dining table and did the dishes. Without a word he left for work.

For a whole afternoon Manna was fidgety, unsure whether Lin would come home for dinner and whether he would continue to go out in the evening. She even blamed herself. Maybe she shouldn't have blown up like that. He must think of her as a jealous shrew now. Had he really changed his heart about her? Probably he had become so tired of her that he had begun running after another woman. No, he couldn't be so heartless. Then what did he really want?

The more she thought, the more agitated she became. Yet deep down, she felt she was not wrong.

She made wontons for dinner, hoping he would come home on time. She boiled a pot of water and waited for him. Lin returned at six sharp as usual. How relieved she was at the sight of him; without delay she dropped the pork wontons into the boiling water.

As the pot was seething, she shredded two sheets of dried laver, cut a tiny bunch of cilantro, and put them into a large tureen. Meanwhile Lin placed spoons, bowls, and cups of soy sauce and vinegar on the dining table, saying she should have waited for him so that he could prepare the stuffing and help her make wonton wrappers.

"I didn't know when you'd be back," she told him, although that was only partially true. She had worried that he might not come home for dinner at all.

When the wontons were cooked, she poured them, together with the water, into the tureen, then dropped in a spoonful of chili oil and stirred the soup counterclockwise for a moment with a stainless steel ladle.

Dinner was ready. Lin carried the tureen to the dining room, which was also their living room.

While eating, Lin said he had seen Ran Su in the afternoon. Actually they had talked for a long time about women. "It was a nice chat," he told her.

"Who did you talk about?"

"Just women in general."

"So he thinks I'm out of my mind?"

"Oh no, he said I was in the wrong and I didn't understand you."

"What did he say exactly?"

"He said a woman couldn't live long without attention and love. "

She tittered, amused that the commissar could talk that way. No wonder he was so patient with his crazy wife. She said, "That's not true. How about nuns?"

"Well, " Lin paused, then went on, "they have the attention of monks, don't they?"

They both laughed.

"Manna," he said, " if I had known you'd feel so strongly about my teaching the class, I'd never have agreed to do it."

Seeing the honest look on his face, Manna smiled and told him never to make such a decision on his own. They should always discuss it first. "A married couple must work like a team," she said.

From that day on, he would stay home in the evening to prepare the lessons. Because the class was already in motion, it was impossi ble to change and he had to go to teach it twice a week. Though Manna was glad about the reconciliation, the two lonely evenings each week still irritated her. Sometimes she felt depressed when he wasn't home, and she couldn't help imagining how to give him a piece of her mind.

8

As her belly bulged out in the summer, Manna grew more grumpy. She resented Lin's absence from home two evenings a week. She knew the class would be over soon, but she couldn't help herself, treating him as though he were having an affair. Her peevish face often reminded Lin of what she had said the day after their wedding, "I wish you were paralyzed in bed, so you'd stay with me all the time."

Is this love? he would wonder. Probably she loves me too much.

One late afternoon in August, Manna returned from the grocery store with four cakes of warm tofu in a yellow plastic pail. Putting it down on the kitchen range, she said to Lin, "Something is wrong with me." Hurriedly she went into the bedroom, and he followed her in.

She looked down at the crotch of her baggy pants and found a wet patch. "Oh, I must've broken my water."

"Really?" He was alarmed. The pregnancy had not reached the ninth month yet.

"Quick, let's go to the medical building," she said.

"Don't panic. It may be too early and could be false labor."

"Let's go. I'm sure it's time."

"Can you walk?"

"Yes. "

Together they set out on their way, he supporting her by the arm. The sun was setting, but the heat was still springing up from the asphalt road, which felt soft under their feet. A few lines of green and white clothes were swaying languidly among the thick aspens behind a dormitory house. A large grasshopper whooshed away from the roadside, flashing the pinkish lining of its wings, then bumped into a cotton quilt hanging on a clothesline and fell to the ground. The leaves of some trees on the roadside were shriveled and darkened with aphids because it hadn't rained for a whole month. Here and there caterpillars' droppings were scattered on the ground. Lin was paying close attention to the road so as to avoid places where Manna might make a false step; at the same time he grew more apprehensive, thinking of the baby that would be premature.

When they arrived at the building, Manna was rushed into a small room on the third floor, in which an examination table, upholstered with sponge rubber and shiny leather, served as a birth bed. Nurse Yu spread a sterile cloth on the table and helped Manna climb onto it. A few minutes later Manna's contractions started and she groaned.

Nurse Yu ran out to send for Haiyan, the only obstetrician in the hospital, who had left for home. At the entrance of the building she bumped into her friend Snow Goose, who agreed to come up and help.

In the room upstairs Manna groaned again, clutching Lin's arm. "You'll be all right, dear," he said.

"Oh, my kidneys! " She was panting and rubbing her back with her free hand.

"It can't be your kidneys, Manna," he said as though examining a regular patient. "The pain must radiate from your pelvis."

"Help me! Don't just talk!"

He was baffled for a moment; then he pressed his palm on the small of her back and began massaging her. Meanwhile she was moaning and sweating. He had no idea what else he should do to alleviate her pain. He tried to recall the contents of a textbook on childbirth he had studied two decades before, but he couldn't remember anything.

Haiyan didn't arrive until an hour later. She looked calm and apologized for being delayed by traffic. After examining Manna briefly, she told Nurse Yu to test the patient's blood pressure and then shave her. Next she ordered Snow Goose, "Flick on the fans and boil some water." Then, turning to Lin, she said, "Her cervix is only three centimeters open. It will take a while." Putting her palm on the patient's forehead, she said, "Everything will be all right, Manna."

Lin drew Haiyan aside and whispered, "Do you think she can survive this? You know her heart isn't very strong."

"So far she's doing fine. Don't worry. The baby is coming and it's too late to think about anything else. But I'll keep that in mind."

She moved back to the table and said, "Manna, I'm going to give you an oxytocin drip, all right?"

"Yes, do it. Let me get through this quickly."

"Can I do something?" Lin asked Haiyan.

"Did you have dinner?"

"No."

"Go eat and come back as soon as you can. This may take a whole night. We'll need you to be around."

"How about you? Did you eat?"

"Yes. "

He was impressed by Haiyan's composure. He left the room while his wife was groaning and rubbing her back with both hands.

In the mess hall Lin bought a spinach soup and two buns stuffed with pork and cabbage, which he began to eat without appetite. He couldn't tell whether he was happy about the baby, whose arrival took him by surprise. He belched, and his mouth was filled with acid gastric juice, which almost made him vomit. He rested his head for a moment on his fist placed on the edge of the tabletop. Fortunately nobody was nearby; around him were stools turned upside down on the tables.

Outside, pigs began oinking from their sties behind the kitchen as the swineherd knocked the side of a trough with an iron scoop. A group of nurses and orderlies came in, gathered around two tables at the other end of the hall, and began stringing green beans.

Lin let out a sigh. His heartburn prevented him from finishing dinner. In the air lingered a stench, coming from the hogwash vat by the long sink. He got up and went across to dump the soup into the vat. After washing his bowls and spoon, he gargled twice, then put the dinner set into his bag made of a striped towel and hung it on the wall, among the bags of his comrades. At the other end of the hall the young women were chatting and humming a movie song. A puppy was whimpering, leashed to a leg of a table.

When Lin came back to the medical building, his wife's groaning had turned into screaming. Haiyan told him that the baby seemed to be coming sooner than she had thought. In fact Manna was in transition. Lin wet a towel and wiped the sweat and tears off her face. Her eyes were flashing and her cheeks crimson.

"I can't stand this anymore! No more!" she cried. The corners of her mouth stretched sideways.

"Manna," he said, " it will be over soon. Haiyan will make sure that – "

"Oh, why did you do this to me?" she shouted.

He was taken aback, but managed to say, "Manna, don't you want the baby?"

"Damn you! You don't know how this hurts. Oh, you've all abused me!"

"Please, don't yell. Others in the building can hear you."

"Don't tell me what to do, damn you!"

"Come on, I didn't mean – "

"I hate you!" she screamed. "I hate you all."

"Please, you'll disturb – "

"Miser! Too late. Oh, help me!"

"Okay, you yell as you like."

"Miser! Miser!"

He was bewildered, wondering why she suddenly called him that. She seemed angry at Haiyan too; that must have been why she said they had all abused her. Then the thought came to him that by "miser" she must have been referring to the two thousand yuan they had talked about paying to Bensheng to get his support a decade before. She must have thought that if they had married ten years earlier it would have been easier for her to give birth to the baby. This realization stunned him, because he hadn't known she had harbored her deep resentment all these years. He turned to the door, telling Snow Goose that he was going to the bathroom.

Once alone in a toilet stall, he tried to sort out his thoughts. Manna must have hoped he would spend two thousand yuan to buy off Bensheng at that time, though she had never made her wish explicit to him. He remembered clearly that she refused to share such a cost. Then why did she call him "miser"? He felt something clutching his lungs, and a pain gnawed him in the chest. Had he had that much money, he would certainly have brought about the divorce sooner. He had told her that he only had six hundred yuan in the bank, and she wouldn't even reveal to him how much she had saved. She must have thought he was a rich man and could easily afford two thousand yuan. After so many years, how come she still didn't believe him? Why on earth had she always kept her secrets from him, never allowing him to see her bankbook?

In his mind a voice replied, Because money's more precious and more effective than love. If you had spent the money, everything would have worked out all right and you could have enjoyed a happy marriage.

No, it wasn't that simple, Lin retorted.

It was simple and clear like a bug on a bald head, the voice went on. Say you had owned ten thousand yuan and spent one-fifth of it on your brother-in-law, counting that as a loss. Then you could have married Manna a decade ago. If so, she would have had no difficulty in giving birth to a baby and wouldn't have harbored a grievance against you. You see, isn't money more powerful than love?

That's not true, Lin countered. We needed no money to help us fall in love, just as we need no money to consummate our marriage.

Really? Then why did you spend eleven hundred yuan for the wedding? Why have you two kept separate bank accounts?

Lin was at a loss for an answer, but he suppressed that cold voice. For a long while he remained in the bathroom, which was the only quiet place where he could be unobserved. Now he was sitting on the windowsill with his back against the wall, absentmindedly watching the backyard. It was already dark; beyond the screen mosquitoes were humming and fireflies were drawing little arcs. From a dormitory house a harmonica was shrieking out "The Internationale" disjointedly. A truck driver was burning oily rags at the corner of the garage, a bucket of water standing by him. Far away on the hill a cluster of gas lamps were flickering in a temporary apiary. Some beekeepers were still busy collecting honey over there despite the nightfall.

Somehow Lin's right eye began smarting, as though a foreign object had entered it. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eye with his fingertip. But the more he rubbed it, the more it hurt. He stood up, went to the sink, and put his head sideways beneath the spout so that the stream could rinse his eye. The cold water, falling over his cheeks and forehead, refreshed him.

No sooner had he turned off the faucet than a piercing scream came from Manna, which reminded him that he must have stayed in the bathroom at least half an hour and that it was time to go back. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, put on his glasses, and hurried out.

As he entered the delivery room again, his wife was wailing, "Oh! I hate you…Too late…So many years…I'm dying, too old for this baby."

"Manna, I'm sorry," he said. "Don't bring up old scores, okay? Concentrate on – "

"All right, no cervix left." Haiyan waved to Nurse Yu and Snow Goose to come closer and help. "Manna, let's push. Take a deep breath. Ready?"

She nodded.

Haiyan counted, "One…two… go. "

She pushed, her face purple and swollen. Lin noticed that Haiyan's face was puffy, as red as a boiled crab.

The second Manna exhaled, she yelled at him again, "Damn you, it's too late. Rice Bag… Chicken Heart!"

"Please don't be so nasty," he begged.

"Ah, I'm dying. Damn your mother!"

Snow Goose turned aside and tittered, but she stopped at Manna's stare. Ashamed, Lin let go of his wife's shoulder and made for the door again. Haiyan grasped his arm and whispered, "Lin, you should stay."

"I – I can't. "

"It's common for a woman in labor to go berserk. She called me names too. But we shouldn't mind. You know, this makes her feel better. You mustn't take her words to heart. She's frightened and needs you to be with her."

He shook his head and went out without another word.

Manna yelled after him, "Go to hell, coward! I don't want to see your face before I die."

Haiyan returned to the birth bed and said, "Come on, let's push again."

"No, I can't," Manna cried. "Cut me open, Haiyan. I beg of you. Please give me… a cesarean."

The corridor was lit dimly, though some people were on night duty in the building. Lin paced up and down in the hall, chainsmoking; his mind was numb, blank, and slightly dazed. Meanwhile his wife's screams and curses were echoing through the floor. Some people went past the delivery room time and again to try to make out what she was shouting. Lin sat down on a long bench, his face buried in his hands. He felt pity for himself. Why do I have to go through this? he thought. I never wanted a baby.

He remembered that half a year ago a peasant woman had lain on this very bench, bleeding and waiting to be treated. Her husband had thrust two large batteries into her vagina, because he had incurred a thousand-yuan fine for having a second baby and she had once more failed to give him a son. The barefoot doctor in the village couldn't get the batteries out, so she was carted to the army hospital. Lin vividly remembered that she was skinny and young, her face half-covered by a sky-blue bandanna and a blood vessel on her temple pulsating like an earthworm. Her round eyes gazed at him emotionlessly as he paused to observe her. He was amazed by her eyes, which were devoid of any trace of resentment, and he saw lice and nits like sesame seeds in her permed hair.

Now he couldn't help thinking, Why do people have to live like animals, eating and reproducing, possessed by the instinct for survival? What point is there in having a dozen sons if your own life is miserable and senseless? Probably people are afraid, afraid of disappearing from this world – traceless and completely forgotten, so they have children to leave reminders of themselves. How selfish parents can be. Then why does it have to be a son? Can't a girl serve equally well as a reminder of her parents? What a crazy, stupid custom, which demands that every couple have a baby boy to carry on the family line.

He remembered the saying "Raise a son for your old years." He reasoned, Even though a boy is believed superior to a girl, his life may not be easy either. He will have to become a provider for his parents when he grows up. Selfish. How often parents have sons so that they can exploit them in the future. They prefer boys to girls mainly because sons will provide more, are worth more as capital.

His thoughts were interrupted by a burst of squalling from the delivery room. The door opened and Nurse Yu beckoned him to come in. He stubbed out the cigarette on his rubber sole, dropped it into a spittoon by the bench, and rose to his feet, shuffling to the door.

"Congratulations," Haiyan said the moment he stepped in. "You have two sons."

"You mean twins?"

"Yes."

The nurses showed him the crying babies, who looked almost identical, each weighing just over five pounds. They were bony, with big heads, thick joints, flat noses, red shrunken skin, and closed eyes. Their faces were puckered like old men's. One of them opened his mouth as though wanting to eat something to assert his existence. The other one had an ear whose auricle was folded inward. They were so different from what Lin had expected that he was overwhelmed with disgust.

"Look," Haiyan said to Lin. "They take after you."

"Like two exact copies of you," Snow Goose chimed in, gently patting the back of the baby she was holding in her arms.

He turned and looked at his wife. She smiled at him faintly with tear-stained eyes and mumbled, "Sorry, I was so scared. I thought I couldn't make it. My heart almost burst."

"You did well." He put the back of his hand on her cheek. Meanwhile, Haiyan began giving Manna stitches to sew up the torn cervix and the incision of the episiotomy. The sight of the bloody cut made Lin's skin crawl, and he turned his head, nauseated.

An hour later two male nurses came. They placed Manna on a stretcher, covered her with blankets, and carried her home. Lin fol lowed them, holding the babies in his arms and shivering with cold. The moon was glistening on the willow and maple crowns; beetles and grasshoppers were chirring madly. The leaves and branches, heavy with dew, bent down slightly, while the grass on both sides of the road looked spiky and thick in the coppery light of the street lamps. A toad was croaking like a broken horn from a distant ditch partly filled with foamy water. Lin felt weak and aged; he was unsure whether he cared for the twins and whether he would be able to love them devotedly. Watching their covered faces, somehow he began to imagine trading places with them, having his life start afresh. If only he himself had been carried by someone like this now; then he would have led his life differently. Perhaps he would never have had a family.

9

Manna was given fifty-six days of maternity leave. During the first week she could hardly move about, so Lin did all the housework and cooked for her. She didn't have enough milk for the twins, though Lin made her eat a large bowl of pigs' feet soup a day to increase lactation. The babies had to be fed every three or four hours; because it took at least a month to secure the daily delivery of fresh milk, for the time being Lin had to get powdered milk for them, which was in short supply. Luckily Haiyan helped him buy eight pounds of milk powder in town, though at a higher price.

In the second week after Manna's delivery, Lin hired a maid from a suburban village, a short, freckle-faced girl with a pair of long braids. Her name was Juli. On weekdays she cooked and helped Manna look after the babies, but she returned home at night and couldn't come on Sundays.

Manna meanwhile was getting weaker and weaker. Sometimes she had heartburn and breathed with difficulty as though suffering from asthma. A murmur was detected in her heart. The cardiogram indicated she had a heart condition, which shocked Lin. He withheld the information from her for a week, then decided to let her know. When he told her the truth, she shed a few tears, not for herself but for their babies.

"It doesn't matter for me," she said. "The earlier I die, the sooner I can free myself from this world."

"What nonsense," he said. "I want you to live!"

She lifted her face, and the desperate look in her eyes disconcerted him. "Lin, I want you to promise me something."

"What? "

"Promise me that you'll love and take care of our babies when I'm gone."

"Don't think of that. You'll – "

"Promise me, please!"

"All right, I promise."

"You'll never abandon them."

"I won't, of course."

"Thank you. You've made me feel better." Unconsciously her right palm was rubbing her sore nipple.

Her words upset him, but he had no idea how to distract her from thinking of death. All he could do was insist she must not exert herself in any way or worry about anything. Let him do the housework and receive any visitor she was reluctant to meet.

After an extended argument between the parents, the twins were finally named River and Lake. Their father didn't like the names very much because they sounded too common, but their mother believed the commonness was a major advantage, arguing that with plain names the boys would be easier to raise. Besides, both the characters "river" and "lake" contain the element of water, which represents natural vitality and is pliable, enduring, and invincible.

Many officers' wives came to see the twins, who looked identical to them. The visitors kept asking Lin and Manna, "Which one is River?" or "Is this Lake?" Indeed it was difficult to tell who was who. Even the maid sometimes had to remember that River had a slightly folded ear.

The visitors brought along eggs, brown sugar, dried dates, and millet, saying these things could enrich Manna's blood. Several women told her that she should eat a lot of eggs, at least six hundred in two months, to strengthen her bones. By tradition it was believed that if the mother was well cared for and well nourished in the weeks after childbirth, most of her illnesses would naturally disappear. So some women advised Manna to take care not to catch cold when she went out and not to be too stingy to spend money on nutritious food. Their words saddened Manna, reminding her of her heart condition, of which few people knew.

The visitors all congratulated the couple on having two sons. "You landed two birds with a single bullet," one would say. And another, "What a lucky man!" In everybody's eyes Lin was extraordinarily fortunate, because since the 1970s a rule had allowed no couple to have more than one child. But Lin now had two sons and also a grown daughter. His old roommate Jin Tian was upset when he heard Lin had two boys, because his wife had borne him only a girl. He suggested that Lin do something to celebrate this great fortune, either throw a party or distribute some candies and cigarettes. But Lin was too exhausted to think about that.

Though she managed to eat six or seven eggs a day, Manna's health kept deteriorating. It was beyond her ability to breast-feed and look after the twins. Juli, the maid, could help only a little, because the babies slept a lot in the daytime and would remain awake at night, playing and crying. To stop them from disturbing the neighbors in the same dormitory house, Lin had to hold them by turns. In the beginning, his holding could calm the babies, but soon they wanted more motion and wouldn't allow their father to sit down, so Lin had to pace back and forth to stop them from crying. In addition, he had to hum tunes incessantly. Though exhausted and heavy-eyed, he dared not discontinue. At times he was so miserable that he felt like crying together with his sons, but he controlled himself.

Soon neither of the twins wanted to be left in bed for a minute; the moment Lin put down the calmed one to pick up the screaming one, the babies would join forces crying loudly. So Manna began to take part in pacing the floor. As a result, neither of the parents could get enough sleep. This was too much, but they had no choice. A few weeks later Juli suggested that they get a swaying crib, the rocking of which might keep the babies quiet. Lin bought a large crib immediately and tied its ends to ropes secured to the window frame and the door lintel. The crib worked miraculously; the parents didn't have to pace the room at night anymore. Instead, Lin would sit on the bed and go on rocking the crib, while the babies made noises continually as though talking to their father.

In the meantime, the boys were growing rapidly, each having gained two inches and six pounds in two months. River was now slightly bigger than his younger brother Lake.

One morning Juli pushed the baby carriage out of the hospital to watch a column of police trucks parading criminals through the streets. Two drug dealers had been sentenced to death and a rapist to life. Each of the criminals carried above his head a wooden placard whose base was tied to his back. A young woman was also among them; she, who had once been a teacher in a kindergarten, had locked a naughty boy in a basement to teach him a lesson, but she had forgotten to release him. The child had starved to death, and she was going to serve fourteen years in prison.

When the twins returned home, their faces became bluish. Manna was unhappy and told Juli never to take them out in the freezing weather again. That afternoon the babies began to have loose bowels.

Their father took them to Doctor Min, a young pediatrician who had just graduated from the Second Military Medical University. The diagnosis was dysentery. Like deflated balloons, the twins seemed to have withered all of a sudden, their heads drooping and their eyes lusterless, both whimpering a little and breathing heavily. Juli was scared, declaring tearfully that she hadn't fed them anything unclean. Neither Manna nor Lin blamed her more, though they were baffled by the cause of the disease. Probably the babies' drinking water hadn't been boiled long enough to kill all the bacteria.

To prevent dehydration, the twins had to be given an intravenous drip of glucose and salt water without delay. The nurses went about working on Lake and River at the same time, but the babies' blood vessels were hardly visible and were so thin that the nurses tried several times unsuccessfully to lodge a needle into them. The twins were screaming hoarsely. To Lin, his sons' arms looked almost transparent, so he was impatient with the nurses who couldn't find their blood vessels. Yet he dared not try to do it himself; neither could he watch for long the needles probing beneath his sons' tender skin. They made his heart twinge and his chest contract. For the first time in his life he was experiencing this kind of paternal suffering, which caused him to tremble a little. He realized that he did love the babies, his nose twitching and tears welling up in his eyes. If only he could substitute for them!

Doctor Min prescribed coptis powder, which is said to be the bitterest thing on earth and which the babies had to take three times a day. No matter how much sugar the parents mixed with the yellow powder, the twins would cry hard when forced to swallow the medicine. The parents and the maid worked as a team, one holding River, another pinching his nose shut and prying open his mouth with a spoon, and the third thrusting the spoonful of coptis powder mixed with sugar into his mouth, then washing it down with warm water. Done with River, they went on to Lake, who had been bawling furiously.

A week later the dysentery still persisted; every day each of the babies would relieve his bowels six or seven times. Juli had to take them to the medical building for the drips every afternoon. Their parents were desperate.

Hua came on Sunday morning. At the sight of her stricken half brothers she couldn't stop her tears. She reminded her father that purslane might help, since in their home village people always used this herb to treat loose bowels. Lin remembered that several years ago when he visited a clinic in the countryside, he had seen barefoot doctors cook purslane stew in a cauldron. The villagers who suffered from diarrhea or dysentery would go to the front yard of the clinic and eat a bowl of the stew. At most it took three bowls to cure the illness. But now it was wintertime; where on earth could he find purslane?

Nevertheless, he bicycled downtown right away, believing some medicinal herb stores might have dried purslane. He went to every one of them in Muji, but was told that this was an item that no herb store would carry.

"Why not?" he asked.

"It's a tradition, I don't know why not. Perhaps because it's just a vegetable," a beardless old clerk told him.

The babies were getting weaker and weaker. Apparently the cop-tis powder didn't work. As a last resort, Doctor Min decided to give them enemas, to wash their bowels with coptis solution directly. This treatment turned out to be very effective. Within three days, new tests showed that the bacteria had disappeared from the babies' intestines. Yet the symptom did not diminish; the twins continued to have loose bowels. In addition, they wouldn't pass water: their urine was excreted through their anuses.

Doctor Min was totally bewildered by this case. After two days' thinking she decided that though the dysentery had been cured, the twins still suffered from a nervous disorder that was impossible for her to treat. She said to the nurses, "I'm afraid we have to let nature take its own course."

Lin and Manna were at their wits' end, since nobody knew what to do about the babies' nervous disorder. A cook suggested they give the twins some mashed garlic. They told him that the babies were too young for that. Besides, garlic mainly works as an antibiotic, and the bacteria in the babies' intestines had been eliminated.

Then Hua came one evening and told her father, "Mother said you should feed them some mashed taro mixed with white sugar and egg yolk."

"How come she's so sure it will work?" Lin asked. Manna moved closer, listening intently.

"Mother said it helped me once," Hua answered. " When I was five and had dysentery, Mother made me drink a lot of herb decoction, but it didn't cure the disease. Our neighbors thought I was dying and couldn't be saved. Uncle Bensheng ran to Wujia Town and got the recipe from an old doctor."

"How do you cook the egg yolk?" Manna broke in.

"Just hard-boil the eggs."

Though still doubtful, without delay Lin bought five pounds of taros from a vegetable shop and prepared the folk remedy. The twins enjoyed eating the mashed taro, opening their mouths like baby swallows receiving food from the mother bird. To everyone's amazement, that very night the babies stopped defecating. Within two days they began to urinate normally. Many doctors and nurses harbored misgivings about folk remedies, but this time everybody was impressed.

At long last the twins were cured, and Lin was possessed by a new, mysterious emotion, which occasionally brought tears to his eyes. He felt the babies had almost become a part of himself. The week before, he had read in Heilongjiang Daily that a retired clerk had donated a kidney to his son. These days Lin kept asking himself whether he could do the same for his children.

10

Along with their dysentery, the babies' nightly wakefulness was also cured. Now they would go to sleep early in the evening and remain peaceful until daybreak. Even when they were given the bottle at midnight and when their father changed their diapers, they would make no noise. Their normal sleep made it possible for their parents to spend some time together in the evening. After the babies fell asleep, Lin and Manna often lounged on the sofa, chatting or watching news or a movie on TV. At last they could enjoy a little peace.

One evening in late November there was a featured report on TV entitled "To Get Rich Is Glorious," which showed how some people in the South had responded to the Party's call and grown affluent. A young man had bought dried mushrooms and ginseng roots from Manchuria and sold them in Fujian Province at higher prices, and within five years he owned seven stores in different cities. An engineer had quit his regular job and made a fortune by running two chicken farms, which employed 130 hands. A middle-aged woman had opened a clothing shop just three years ago, but now she had become a local magnate and had hired sixty workers to make fashionable garments in her shop. At the last Spring Festival she donated ten thousand yuan to an elementary school, so she was admitted into the Communist Party and elected a model citizen. Every one of these entrepreneurs became a legendary figure. A few years ago their ways of making money had been illegal, but now the nouveaux riches were held up as examples for the masses to follow.

Manna was grating turnips over a terra-cotta basin, while Lin, never interested in making money, was reading a back issue of Popular Medicine, fascinated by an article about a folk way of getting rid of kidney stones. As he was wondering why sesame oil and walnuts were prescribed in the recipe, the woman reporter announced on TV, "Now we have another rich man, from Feidong County, Anhui Province. Comrade Geng Yang."

At the mention of that name, Manna let out a moan and dropped the steel grater into the basin. Lin turned his head and asked, "What's wrong?"

She didn't respond, her eyes riveted on the TV screen. He turned and saw Geng Yang's face growing larger and closer. It was almost the same as eleven years before, sallow and long, only less stern and marked with a few wrinkles. Geng Yang had some gray hair now, but he was bulkier and darker, a picture of health.

The young reporter asked him, "Are you the richest man in Fei-dong County?"

He beamed, licking his upper lip. "Well, I never thought I could get rich. I owe it entirely to our Party's great policy." Behind him a crane was hoisting a load of bricks onto a building under construction. Three clusters of white sparks were radiating from welding torches in the air. Somewhere a steam hammer was clanking rhythmically.

"How much did you make last year?" The woman raised the microphone close to his mouth.

"Twenty thousand yuan."

"Wow, that's about twenty times the amount you pay a worker. How come you made so much?"

His eyes flickered as though fireflies were flitting in his pupils. Manna recognized the same lustful look in those eyes. "Well," he said, "this construction company used to lose money all the time. Three years ago they set up a new policy: Whoever managed this company would get ten percent of its profit; but if the company lost money again, the manager would have to pay three percent of the loss out of his own pocket. Nobody would take the risk of steering such a sinking boat. I was the daredevil that stepped in to try." He tipped his head back and gave a hearty laugh.

"How did you make this company profitable within a year?"

"By strengthening discipline and order, by rewarding and punishing the workers fairly and strictly. Everyone here must do his job efficiently, or else we'll dock a certain amount from his wages. Now the company is organized like an army unit – a battalion, I should say. Each team must carry out its task on time, and I hold its leaders responsible for any delay and sloppy work."

"How about this year? How much profit do you expect to get personally?"

"Probably twenty-three thousand."

"So you're having another banner year?"

"Yes. "

"Thank you, Manager Geng."

As the camera panned away from Geng Yang to a roaring bulldozer on the construction site, Manna burst out sobbing, wiping her cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt. Meanwhile Lin was flabbergasted at Geng Yang's appearance on TV. How could that devil be doing so well? So full of vitality? Enjoying so much fortune and publicity? No wonder Honggan had called him a lucky dog at their wedding last winter.

Lin got to his feet and went over to Manna as she was screaming, " It's unfair, unfair!"

"Shh, don't wake up the babies." He sat down beside her, removed the half-grated turnip from her hand and put it into the basin. He held her hand, lifted it up, and pressed it against his cheek. Her fingers were still wet and flecked with bits of turnip, giving off a pungent smell.

"How come an evil man like him can get rich and famous so easily?" she asked. "The Lord of Heaven has no eyes!"

Lin sighed, shaking his head. "Life's always like this, ridiculous – a monster thrives for a thousand years, while the good suffer and die before their time."

"How I'm scared of him!" she moaned in tears.

He turned and embraced her, whispering, "Don't be scared. He's not here. I won't let him hurt you."

Gently he twisted the tip of her ear to calm her down, as though she were a little girl who had just come in from a pitch-black night. He went on murmuring, "Don't be scared." She put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.

His words and the warmth of his body invoked in her the old overpowering pain that had arisen from the absence of consolation during the first days after the rape eleven years before, so now she simply couldn't stop crying, holding him tight and whimpering incoherently. Something in her chest snapped as tears flowed out of her eyes. It was so good to have a trustworthy friend in whose arms she could cry without feeling embarrassed, without being afraid of the kind of ridicule unleashed by the hostile world, without worrying about becoming the target of endless gossip and mockery, and without having to say, "Forgive me." For the first time she was weeping with abandon, like a child. Her tears soaked the front of his woolen vest. Her thick hair kept touching his chin. He grew tearful too and stroked the nape of her neck.

From that night on, they slept in the same bed again. Many days in a row Manna had nightmares, which were bizarre and indecipherable. In one of them, she was on her way to a nunnery atop a mountain, carrying the twins on her back. It was a sunny day, the breeze sweet-scented, full of scattered blossoms. As she approached a reservoir, which she had to cross to reach the mountain, an old man in a conical bamboo hat was coming along the rocky dam from the opposite direction. From the distance she couldn't see his face clearly, but his gait was so tottery that he didn't look dangerous. The babies on her back were sleeping, exhausted by the heat, saliva dribbling from the corners of their opened mouths.

As the man was coming closer, suddenly a gust of wind blew his hat off, revealing his face. It was Geng Yang! Manna was too shocked to shout or escape. He rushed over, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, snatched the twins off her back, and ran away along the dam. She shouted while chasing him, "Give them back to me! Geng Yang, you can do anything to me if you give my babies back! I promise I'll come to you if you let them go." The babies were screaming and kicking their legs.

Without turning his head, Geng Yang swerved and ran down the dam toward a sandy bar, his boots throwing up a thin mist of dust. She was gasping for breath, but went on pursuing him. Then she saw him put the twins each into a giant wooden shoe, which he pushed into the water. A wind came and blew the shoes away toward the center of the vast reservoir. He burst out laughing. "Now you lost your sons. See if you dare to report me again!"

She collapsed on the ground, shouting, "I've never reported you. Please, please, I beg of you, have a heart, bring them back for me!"

"No, they're on their way to see the Dragon Emperor in the Water Palace, ha-ha-ha. "

"Lin! Come and help me!" she called out.

"That chicken can't do a thing," Geng Yang said.

"Lin – come and save our children!" she yelled again. Still Lin was nowhere to be seen.

At this moment Mai Dong, her first love, came out of the osier bushes on the bank and began capering about on the beach. He waved his hands and then clapped them above his head, chanting to her merrily, "You can't have them back! You can't have them back!" He was still in his mid-twenties, wearing the army uniform and a crew cut.

She became murderous and picked up a few large cobblestones and threw them at Geng Yang and Mai Dong with all her might.

"Ouch!" Lin yelled as Manna's fist landed on his forehead. He pulled the lamp cord, and the blinding light woke her up. She kept rubbing her eyes.

"Why hit me like that? Oh, my eyes – " Lin stopped, seeing his wife in tears, her face horror-stricken.

"Sorry, sorry, I was having a terrible dream," she said and turned aside. "I dreamed that we lost our children and couldn't get them back." She began sobbing while her arm covered the sleeping babies.

Lin sighed. "Don't think too much, darling."

"I won't," she said. "You go back to sleep now."

He turned off the light and soon resumed snoring softly. Meanwhile Manna's eyes were wide open, watching the clouds being torn to strips by the bare branches waving outside the window. She was wondering why Lin hadn't appeared in her dream, whereas Mai Dong had turned up and ridiculed her so maliciously. What does this mean? she asked herself. Why didn't Lin come to our rescue? Where was he? Is he really too timid to fight to protect us? Why was Mai Dong as mean as that bastard Geng Yang?

Question after question rose to her mind, but she couldn't answer any of them. Her thoughts were in disorder.

Outside, the moon was pale, wavering beyond the dark treetops. The wind was howling and reminded her of the wolves she had often heard at night when she was a child in the orphanage.

11

Manna's heart grew weaker, her pulse more irregular and sometimes thready. Severe pains occurred in her chest and left arm, and at nightfall she would feel dizzy and short of breath. Her heart murmur often turned into a gallop rhythm. The results of a new examination shocked Doctor Yao, an expert in cardiopathy. One afternoon, holding Manna's X-ray against a desk lamp in his office, Doctor Yao told Lin, "Medication may not help her anymore. I'm afraid she doesn't have many years left. Heaven knows why her condition has deteriorated so rapidly."

Hearing the prognosis, Lin almost broke into tears. He said in a choked voice, "Why – why did I let this happen? I'm a doctor, why didn't I detect the real condition of her heart?" He covered his face with both hands.

"Lin, don't blame yourself. We all knew she had a heart problem, but we didn't expect infarction would develop so soon. Some of her coronary vessels must have been blocked long ago."

"Oh, I should have known this. I told her not to eat too many eggs, but she wouldn't listen." Lin struck his knee with his fist.

Doctor Yao sighed. "I wish we had diagnosed it."

"So there's no cure?"

"I've heard some experts in Europe can dilate the coronary arteries, but the technology is not available in our country."

"What should I do?"

"Lin, I'm sorry. " Doctor Yao held Lin's upper arm and shook it gently, meaning he had no idea either. "But you must not be too emotional. Cheer up a little – she depends on you." He paused for a moment while Lin rubbed his stomach with the palm of his hand as though assuaging a pain. Doctor Yao went on, "Don't let her do any physical work, don't make her lose her temper, just make life easy for her."

Lin lowered his head and muttered, "I'll try my best."

"If I were you, I wouldn't tell her about her heart condition, just keep her happy."

"I won't let her know, of course."

Despite Lin's effort to guard the secret, word of Manna's illness soon began circulating in the hospital. The rumor went wild and even claimed that she would definitely die within a year. In a few weeks Manna heard about the true condition of her heart, but she took it with surprising serenity, saying to Lin that she knew her life would be over soon. Her words distressed him.

As she got weaker, her temper became worse. She often yelled at Juli and Lin; sometimes she cried for no apparent reason, like a self-willed child.

Lin tried to do as much housework as he could. He washed diapers on weekends when Juli didn't come to work. In midwinter the tap water was ice cold. His hands ached and itched while he scrubbed at the faucet in front of the house. He had never expected that washing laundry would be a part of his married life. Throughout those years before the marriage, he had washed only his socks and underwear since Manna did his laundry for him. Now, a pile of diapers would be waiting for him every weekend. He dared not complain or think too much, for things could be worse. In spite of all the difficulties, they could afford to hire a maid and he didn't have to wash laundry on weekdays.

On Saturday evenings he would carry out to the faucet a load of baby clothes and diapers and a kettle of hot water, which he would pour over two or three fistfuls of soap powder, and then he would soak the laundry in the suds for a moment. Under the mercury street lamp, the water would glisten in the large basin. Through the loudspeaker atop the roof of the medical building, a soft female voice often sang "A Large River Long and Wide" and "The Five-Starred Red Flag Flies High." Lin would set the washboard against the rim of the sink and start scrubbing the laundry piece by piece with a squishing sound. Soon the detergent water lost its suds and turned cold, and he had to blow on his fingers again and again in order to continue. The toughest part was to rinse the soaped, scrubbed laundry, because there was no hot water available after the initial soak and the tap water was so cold it seemed to bite his fingers with teeth. Yet he kept washing quietly and always avoided greeting those who came to fetch water.

People noticed that Lin's face had grown bony, his cheeks more prominent now. His trousers became baggy on him. Commissar Su's wife would tell her neighbors, "Lin Kong has lost his hips. It's heaven's retribution, serves him right. See who dares to abandon his wife again." Whenever she saw Lin, she would glower at him, spit to the ground, and stamp her feet. He ignored her as though he hadn't heard or seen her. But unlike the crazy woman, his colleagues had stopped joking about him; instead they would shake their heads behind his back.

He was grateful that Hua often came on weekends. She sometimes helped him with the laundry and looked after the babies. She liked feeding them with only one nursing bottle, which made them compete to suck it and crow with pleasure. They would laugh and put out their fat little hands whenever she teased them, calling them "my little precious" while pressing her chin against their chests. She had made them each a bunny hat with frills. By now Manna had become friendly to Hua and had even bought her a pink cardigan. She once told Lin that if only she could have had a daughter like Hua.

After a long sick leave, Manna returned to the Medical Ward. She could work only half a day, but she was paid a full salary. She spent afternoons at home.

One Sunday morning in January, Lin was cooking rice for lunch. While the pot was boiling, he set out for the mess hall to buy a dish. The previous evening, he had seen a notice on the small blackboard at the entrance to the kitchen, saying there would be beef and fried potato for lunch, seventy fen a helping. On his way there he ran into Commissar Su. They talked for a while about initiating a crash program for training paramedics from the local counties the next spring. The prefecture's Department of Public Health had just asked the army hospital for help and was willing to finance the program. This meant the hospital's staff would receive a larger bonus at the end of next year.

Because of the talk, Lin forgot the rice boiling at home. When he got back with a bowl of potato and beef, the kitchen was white with smoke. He rushed to the cooking range, put the bowl down, and removed the pot. The second he opened the lid a wave of steam clouded his glasses and made him unable to see anything. After wiping the lenses with the end of his jacket and putting the glasses back on, he saw that the rice was already burned through. He picked up an iron scoop and was about to put a little water into the pot when Manna came into the kitchen, coughing and buttoning her jacket. "Put a scallion into the pot, quick!" she shouted.

Lin planted a scallion stalk into the rice to get rid of the burned smell, but it was too late, a good part of the rice was already brown. He pushed the transom open to let the smoke out.

Suddenly Manna yelled at him, "Why did you leave while the rice pot was boiling? You can't even cook such a simple thing, idiot."

"I – I went to buy a dish. You were home, why couldn't you keep an eye on it?"

"You didn't tell me, did you? Besides, I'm too sick to cook. Don't you know that?" With her fingertips holding the cuff of her sleeve, she swept the pot and the bowl off the cooking range; they crashed to the cement floor; beef and potato cubes and smoking rice were scattered about. The aluminum lid of the pot rolled away and hit the threshold, where it came to rest, leaning upright against two bricks piled together as a doorstop.

"Even pigs won't touch this," she added.

From inside the bedroom Lake broke out crying, then screamed at the top of his lungs. A few seconds later River started bawling too. Manna hurried back in to calm them. Without tending to the stove or cleaning up, Lin turned and stormed out. His green mittens, connected by a string, flapped wildly beside his flanks as he strode away. "I hate her! I hate her!" he said to himself.

He went to the hill behind the hospital grounds. It was a cold day. The orchard on the slope was deserted, the apple-pear trees thick and bulky, their frosty branches sprawling and looking feathery. For a while he couldn't think of anything, his skull numb and his temples tight. He climbed toward the hilltop, which was covered by snow except for two clusters of brownish rocks. Beyond the hill, on the riverbank, there was a village that had a deer farm and a boat house, which Lin for some reason wanted to watch from the crown of the hill. The scent of winter was clean and intense. It was windless, and the sun was glinting on the boulders here and there and on the tree trunks crusted with ice. In the distance a flock of rooks were circling and cawing hungrily.

As Lin calmed down, a voice rose in his head and said, Do you really hate her?

He made no reply.

The voice continued, You asked for this mess. Why did you marry her?

I love her, he answered.

You married her for love? You really loved her?

He thought a while, then managed to answer, I think so. We waited eighteen years for each other, didn't we? Doesn't such a long time prove we love each other?

No, time may prove nothing. Actually you never loved her. You just had a crush on her, which you didn't get a chance to outgrow or to develop into love.

What? A crush! He was taken aback and paused in his tracks. His sinuses became congested.

Yes, you mistook your crush for love. You didn't know what love was like. In fact you waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting. You could have waited that long for another woman too, couldn't you?

I waited for Manna only. There wasn't another woman involved.

All right, there were only the two of you. Let's assume you and she loved each other. Were you sure that you both would enjoy living together as husband and wife?

We really loved each other, didn't we? Lin's temples were throbbing, and he took off his hat so that the cold air could cool his head.

Really? the voice resumed. What do you know about love? Did you know her well enough before you married her? Were you sure she was the woman you'd spend the rest of your life with? Be honest now, among all the women you've known, who are you most fond of? Isn't there someone else who is more suitable for you than Manna?

I can't tell. Besides her there's only Shuyu in my life. How could I compare Manna with someone else? I don't know much about women, although I wish I did.

Suddenly he felt his head expanding with a shooting pain. He was giddy with the intuition that this marriage might not be what he had wanted. He sat down on a rock to catch his breath and think more.

The voice went on, Yes, you waited so many years, but for what?

He found his mind blank and couldn't answer. The question frightened him, because it implied that all those years he had waited for something wrong.

Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.

Lin was stunned. For a moment he was at a loss for words. Then he began cursing himself. Fool, eighteen years you waited without knowing for what! Eighteen years, the prime of your life, gone, wasted, and they led you to this damn marriage. You're a model fool!

What's to be done now? the voice asked.

He heaved a deep sigh, not knowing what to do or whether he should try to do something. Tears were sliding down his cheeks and reached the corners of his mouth; time and again he raised his hand to wipe them off. His ears were freezing, so he put the fur hat back on and turned down its earflaps.

Then the image of Manna in her late twenties emerged in his mind. She had a vivacious face smiling radiantly; on her palm perched a tiny green frog, its mouth quivering. A few sky-blue drag-onflies were flying around her, their wings issuing a whirring sound. As Lin stretched out his hand to touch the frog's back, it jumped and plopped into the limpid stream flowing along the edge of an eggplant field. She turned and looked at him, her eyes dim with affection and kindness, as though full of secrets that she was eager to share with him. The end of her loose hair was thrown up a little by the warm breeze, revealing the silky nape of her neck. How different she was now from then! He realized that the long waiting must have changed her profoundly – from a pleasant young woman into a hopeless spitfire. No matter how he felt about her now, he was certain she had always loved him. Perhaps it was the unrequited love that had dragged her down. Or perhaps it was the suffering and despondency she had experienced in the long waiting that had dissolved her gentle nature, worn away her hopes, ruined her health, poisoned her heart, and doomed her.

The voice interrupted his thoughts. Yes, she has loved you. But isn't it this marriage that has been debilitating her?

He tried to answer, She wanted a family and children, didn't she? She must have been starved for human warmth and affection, any bit of which she might have taken as love. Yes, she's been blind to the true situation, always believing I loved her. She doesn't know what a true lover is like.

His heart began aching. It dawned on him that he had never loved a woman wholeheartedly and that he had always been the loved one. This must have been the reason why he knew so little about love and women. In other words, emotionally he hadn't grown up. His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had had an opportunity to blossom. If only he had fallen in love soulfully just once in his life, even though it might have broken his heart, paralyzed his mind, made him live in a daze, bathed his face in tears, and drowned him in despair!

What are you going to do? the voice kept on.

He could not think of an answer. Being a husband and a father, he felt he ought to carry out the responsibilities imposed on him by his marriage. What else could he do to alleviate his sense of guilt and convince himself that he was a decent man? What else could he do other than to endure?

He sighed. If only he had had enough passion and energy left in him so that he could learn how to love devotedly and start his life afresh. If only Manna were healthy and not dying. He was too old to take any action now. His heart was weary. He only hoped that before his wife died their sons would be old enough for kindergarten.

Down below, along the brick wall behind the hospital, a man and a woman were strolling eastward despite the cold weather. Both of them wore uniforms; the man was a head taller than the woman, who looked rather small and delicate. Every once in a while she would run a few steps to catch up with him. They looked familiar to Lin. Lin strained his eyes to make out who they were, but his sight failed him. It occurred to him that the rule that prohibited two people of opposite sex from walking together outside the wall had been almost abandoned in the past year. Few leaders would now bother to criticize young men and women who walked in pairs outside the compound. He had heard that some nurses had even gone into the woods with their patients. Yet somehow to him and Manna, there still seemed to be a wall around them. They had never walked together outside the hospital since they were married, and Manna still could not ride a bicycle.

A moment later Lin stood up and whisked the snow off his lap with the mittens. Instead of going up to the summit, he turned back at the middle of the slope, coming down slowly, weak at the knees. A few goats were bleating from the birch woods on the left; a line of cow dung dotted the white road, still sending up curls of steam. Up on the slope a cart was climbing toward the hilltop, its iron-rimmed wheels rattling away on pebbles and ice. Down there, at the foot of the hill, a tiny whirlwind was hurling dried leaves along the bank of the frozen brook, swirling away toward the vast field studded with corn stubble.

He reached home twenty minutes later. On opening the door, he was suddenly nauseated by the smell of rice vinegar, which had been blown into the air to deactivate the flu virus and which, before now, had always been pleasant to his nose. Manna came and told him in a soft voice that lunch was in the bamboo steamer on the cooking range. She had made noodles and fried some soy paste. But he didn't go to the kitchen. Instead, he went into the bedroom, flopped down on the camp bed, and pulled a blanket over his face. The bedsprings under him creaked as he turned now and then.

Manna began sobbing. For a while he didn't want to comfort her, for fear that he might join her in weeping if he tried. But a moment later he pulled himself together, got out of bed, and went up to her. Sitting down beside her, he put his arm around her shoulders and said, "Come, stop now, dear. You've cried enough. It's bad for your health." For the first time he felt she was as fragile as though her bones might fall apart at any moment. His heart was again filled with sadness and compassion. He kissed her cheek.

She raised her eyes and said with shame, "I was nasty. Can you forgive me?"

"Forget about it, darling. I should have been more careful. "

"Say you forgive me."

"It wasn't your fault."

"Just say it!"

"I forgive you."

"Please eat lunch."

"I ' m not hungry. "

"Please eat."

"All right, if you say so." He tried to smile, but the effort distorted his face, which he turned aside to avoid being noticed. He got up and went to the kitchen.

12

Why don't you escape?" That question came to Lin's mind now and then.

He couldn't help forming imaginary plans – withdrawing all the 900 yuan from his savings account, sneaking away at night to the train station, using an alias from now on, restarting his life in a remote town where no one knew him. Ideally he'd like to work as a librarian. But in the depths of his heart he knew he would have been weighed down with remorse if he had abandoned his family to seek his own happiness. Wherever he had gone, the hound of his conscience would have hunted him down.

When the Spring Festival was at hand, Manna said to him, "Why don't you take something to Shuyu before the holiday? Just to see how she's doing."

"Why do you want me to do that?" He was surprised.

"She must be lonely, no family around except Hua. Besides, don't you miss them?"

"All right, I'll go see them."

At first he thought perhaps Manna had suggested the visit because her illness had softened her feelings, or because she knew that the twins might depend on Hua and Shuyu's help in the future. Then he wondered, Isn't Manna a lonely woman herself? Did she imply that she didn't feel as lonely as Shuyu because she had a family intact? Can my role as a husband make such a difference? Do most married women feel the same way?

To some extent, he was eager to see how Shuyu was getting on, though he had heard from Hua that she was well. Her sciatica was greatly alleviated by hot baths she often took in the match plant. But his daughter had also told him that sometimes her mother missed their home village. Shuyu would say, "I'm like an old tree that can't be moved to another place." She made Hua promise that next April the two of them would go back to Goose Village to sweep the graves of Lin's parents. Despite complaining, she enjoyed her life in the city.

Two days before the Spring Festival, Lin put into a duffel bag four frozen mackerel and a bundle of garlic stems, both of which had been allocated to their family by the hospital for the holiday, and he was ready to set off for the Splendor Match Plant. As he was leaving, Manna got up from the bed and gazed at him. He had on his fur hat, with its earflaps tied around his chin, and his hands in leather gloves were holding the handlebars of their Peacock bicycle, which was an economical brand, the only one that didn't require a coupon at the time. Manna's eyes were glowing and wide open as though unable to close. She bent down and kissed the elder baby River, who was sleeping with his brother Lake in the suspended crib.

"Be careful, " she said to Lin.

"I will."

"Come back early. I'll wait for you."

"Sure, I'll be home for dinner."

It was half past four in the afternoon and traffic was surging in the city. The sky was overcast with gray clouds and smog. One after another lights flickered on in the two- and three-story buildings on Spring Street, along which Lin bicycled. He was going to the city's west end. The tops of the houses, covered with red pantiles and ice, turned murky in the dusk, and the road was slippery with the snow pressed hard by carts and automobiles. He told himself not to pedal fast. A week ago a girl had been killed by a truck while bicycling on this very street.

When he arrived at the plant, it was already dark; all the houses had their lights on. Without difficulty he found Unit 12, which had been assigned to Hua recently and was in the middle of a dormitory house. Hearing his daughter singing from inside, he didn't knock on the door. He couldn't make out what she was singing, perhaps a dance song.

It had begun to snow lightly. From a tall smokestack in the south, a loudspeaker was announcing the evening news after the music of "The East Is Red, the Sun Is Rising." Outside the plant a few firecrackers exploded on the balconies of some residential buildings.

Uncertain whether he should go in, he remained at the window, whose panes had almost frosted over. He bent forward and looked in with one eye through an uncovered spot. Inside, Shuyu, in a white apron and a green cotton-padded jacket, looked healthy and happy. Mother and daughter were making pies together. A round bamboo grid on a kneading bowl held three rows of pies. Hua was rolling out the dough with a wooden pin, while her mother was using a spoon to stuff the pies with sugared red-bean paste. Shuyu looked younger now, somewhat urbanized; she reminded Lin of a professional cook. For some reason he was overwhelmed by the peaceful scene, and his throat tightened. He straightened up, looked around, and saw a few white cloth sacks, which must have been filled with frozen dumplings and pies, hanging outside some windows of another dormitory house. He remembered that back in their home village each family would make thousands of pies and dumplings at the end of the year and have them frozen in the storehouse, so that they wouldn't have to spend a lot of time preparing meals during the holiday season. Winter was the time to relax and enjoy themselves, and many men would gamble and get drunk every day.

Should he go in? He remembered that a few months ago a retired official had died of a stroke while getting together with his former family. The old man had left his home village with the Communist army in the fall of 1943 and later divorced his wife when he became a middle-ranking official in Harbin. Forty years later, when he retired and went back to visit his home village, he found his former wife still waiting for him and their four children already raising their own families. Overwhelmed by the family gathering, which consisted of sixteen members of three generations, the old man had a stroke at the dinner table and died two days later.

Now, standing outside the apartment, Lin was afraid he might not be able to control his emotions if he went in. So he left the duffel bag on the briquets piled beside the door. But before he could move away, the bag fell to the ground, together with a thick bunch of frozen scallions that had hung above the coal.

"Who is it?" Hua cried from inside.

The door opened. "Dad! Come in." She turned around and shouted, "Mom, my dad is here."

Shuyu came out, rubbing her floury hands. "Don't stand in the snow. Come on in," she said with a broad smile, as though he had returned from a long trip.

Lin locked the bicycle and went in. The room was so warm he took off his hat and glasses, which misted up instantly. He kept wiping the lenses with his thumb and forefinger.

Both Shuyu and Hua urged him to get on the brick bed, which was shiny and well heated, so he unlaced his boots and climbed on it. He crossed his legs, covered them with a small quilt, then removed his jacket. In no time Shuyu placed a large mug of black tea on the low table before him. She said, "Drink this to warm yourself up. It's so cold outside."

Sitting on the brick bed made him feel cozy. How he would like to lie down and warm his back for a while. He was tired, and the feeling of being at home moved him as he sipped the tea and listened to his wife and daughter talking in the kitchen and cooking dinner.

His heart was full, and he was breathing heavily. He looked around and saw four Spring Festival pictures on the walls, similar to those in their village home and each having at least one fat baby and a pair of giant peaches in it. The thought came to him that Shuyu and Hua could live quite well without him. This realization saddened him and made him feel like a good-for-nothing. "I'm a superfluous man," he muttered. That was a phrase he had read in a Russian novel long ago. The author's name escaped him.

He tried to recall the holidays in recent years and found himself at a loss – not a single one of them was distinguishable from the rest. He couldn't say that he had ever had a happy Spring Festival since he left Goose Village. His mind shifted from holidays to love, which perplexed him more because he had never spent a day with a woman he loved wholeheartedly – no, there had not been such a woman in his life and that emotion had been alien to him. Yet one thing he was certain about now: between love and peace of mind he would choose the latter. He would prefer a peaceful home. What was better than a place where you could sit down comfortably, read a book, and have a good meal and an unbroken sleep? Deep in his heart he knew this was merely wishful thinking, because soon he would have to return to Manna and their babies in the other home. He closed his eyes. What a mess he had made of his life and the lives of others!

Dinner was ready. Hua put on the table a cabbage salad mixed with cellophane noodles, a plate of stewed chicken, a small basket of fried pies made of glutinous-rice flour, and a casserole of sauerkraut and pork and tiny shrimps. Shuyu opened a bottle of wheat liquor and poured a full cup for Lin, telling him, "Bensheng asked Second Donkey to bring this bottle for you when he came to town."

"When did Second Donkey come?"

"Last week. He was here with his son Handong to buy a used truck. He's so rich now he wants to start a hauling business."

"How's Bensheng doing?"

"He's fine. Second Donkey says he envies you a lot."

"Your brother envies me?"

"Yes. Bensheng said, 'How come all good things happen to Lin? Why am I never that lucky? He has the best education, a high rank, and three kids.' "

"Why did he say that? Didn't he make a lot of money from his grocery store?"

"Don't know. Second Donkey said Bensheng burst into tears when he heard you got two sons. Never so jealous."

Lin raised his head, facing the sloped ceiling. He thought, How we're each sequestered in our own suffering! He turned to his daughter. "Get two more cups, Hua."

"We have only one cup, Dad." But she went out into the kitchen anyway.

"We have more good news," Shuyu said.

"What?"

"Hua's boyfriend, Fengjin, is going to leave the navy soon. He'll come here and join her. He wants to be engaged. Lin, in a few years we'll become grandparents, and our family is going to get bigger."

"Mom, don't talk about that please," Hua cut in, having returned with two small bowls.

Shuyu's words made Lin want to smile and weep at the same time. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then he poured some liquor into the bowls and said, "We should all drink for this family reunion. "

"Happy holiday! " Hua said to him.

They clinked the cup and bowls and drank. Shuyu said to him, "Try a pie and see how good we made it." With her chopsticks she put one of the two chicken legs in his bowl.

As he was eating, he remembered that this was the first time he had celebrated the Spring Festival with Shuyu and Hua, if he could call this a celebration. The holiday was still two days away. Every winter he had stayed at the hospital, and he had always returned home in summer. This memory upset him. Somehow he wished Shuyu and Hua had hated him and barred him from this home. That might have made him feel better, at least less attached to them. It was harder to bear their kindness.

He drank one cup after another, as though wanting to numb his mind and make himself forgetful.

"Dad, don't drink too much. You'll get drunk," his daughter said.

Shuyu glared at Hua, as if saying, Shut up, girl!

"I'll be all r-right," he said, raising his cup again.

Soon he was unable to control his emotions. He felt pathetic, eager to say something that could make them understand him, but his tongue seemed no longer his own.

He grabbed Shuyu's hand and said tearfully, "Sweetheart, I didn't mean to hurt you. Can, can you forgive me?"

"All right."

"I'm a bad, bad man, sweetheart."

"No, you're a good man."

"Oh, I don't want to be a good man. I just want to be a normal man. "

"All right, you're not a good man then." Shuyu couldn't stop her tears by now, because this was the first time he had ever said an endearment to her.

"Don't, don't cry, dear," he went on. Somehow his vision blurred, and he saw Manna weeping before him, together with his sons. He rubbed his eyes and they vanished.

"I'm so happy, Lin, at last you came home," Shuyu said and glanced at their daughter, whose eyes were traveling between her parents' faces. Shuyu believed that now he was showing his true feeling about her, because a man would speak his heart when drunk.

"Oh, I was so stupid." He turned to his daughter. "You know, Hua, Manna will die soon. She's a goner. Ah, she isn't a bad woman, but her heart can't last long."

"Daddy, stop please!"

"All right, all right, I'll shut up." But he embraced Shuyu with one arm, touching her face with his free hand, and asked, "Is that you, Shuyu?"

"Yes, it's me, your wife Shuyu."

"Sweetheart, will you wait for me? I'll come back to you soon. We are still, still one family, aren't we? Don't leave me. Manna's going to die in a year or two. Oh what – what should I do about the twins?"

"Please, don't talk like this. Don't worry your head about that."

"Will you help me?"

"All right, we'll help you, I promise. Don't be so upset." She turned to Hua and ordered, "Get a bowl of vinegar, quick. Your dad is real drunk."

He went on, "My dear, I'm so sad. My heart is so full, about to burst. I can't stand this damn life anymore!"

They made him drain a bowl of diluted vinegar. He fell on the warmer end of the brick bed, and an instant later began snoring tremulously. Having covered him with a thin cotton quilt, Shuyu told Hua, "Go call the hospital and let that woman know your dad is too drunk to go back tonight."

Wrapping a scarf around her head, Hua rushed out into the rustling snow. She ran toward the guard office, which had a telephone.

After breakfast with Shuyu and Hua, Lin returned to the hospital, his footsteps still infirm because of the hangover. Manna was relieved to see him back, saying, "You should've taken care not to drink too much. You're no longer a young man."

"I'm sorry. " He put on the table the duffel bag, stuffed with hazelnuts and chestnuts.

"I only slept two hours last night. How I worried!" she said.

"I didn't mean to stay there. I left the fish and the garlic stems at their door, but Hua saw me before I could leave."

"How are they?"

"They're doing well, better than in the village."

"That's good to know."

Since the babies were sleeping, Lin and Manna began to prepare for the holiday. She stewed pork feet and a hen to make aspic, while he took their kettle out to do some scouring and descaling at the faucet. As the aluminum pot was boiling, Manna put roasted peanuts and sundry candies into two cookie boxes for the people who would come to pay them a holiday visit the next morning.

Hua came early in the afternoon. She looked so happy that even her eyes seemed to be smiling. While Lin and Manna were cleaning the home, Hua looked after the twins, humming a folk song to them and telling them the story of a big gray wolf and two little lambs, as though they could understand her. The room was filled with the babies' prattle and laughter. Hua cut a rooster and a prancing cat out of red paper, showed them to the babies, then pasted them on two windowpanes. Manna was pleased with the paper-cuts, which made their home more festive, especially to the eyes looking from the street.

With a broom tied to a bamboo pole, Lin was sweeping the cob webs off the ceiling. As he was passing by, his daughter patted his knee. Seeing Manna shaking a flour sack outside the front door, Hua said, "Dad, my mom is very happy at home. She said she'd wait for you."

Suddenly he remembered what he had babbled at dinner the night before. Embarrassed, he asked, "I made a fool of myself last night, didn't I?"

"No, no. We were so glad you came home. You should see Mom – she's a different person today. She said she'd come and see them in the spring." She referred to the twins, her forefinger pointing at the crib.

A miserable feeling arose in Lin. He pondered for a moment, then said, "Hua, your mother's getting old. Will you take good care of her?"

"Yes, I will, Dad." She smiled.

"Tell her not to wait for me. I'm a useless man, not worth waiting for."

"Don't be so hard on yourself, Dad. We'll always wait for you."

He felt a clutching in his chest and turned away to sweep the kitchen ceiling, trying hard to hold back his tears. He was upset and touched at the same time. Outside, Manna was cheerfully wishing "Happy Spring Festival" to someone passing by. She sounded so pleasant that Lin noticed her voice was still resonant with life.