The Red Chamber (53 page)

“That’s what people say, but it doesn’t make sense.” He shakes his head vigorously. It is the old Baoyu, animated and opinionated, that she has not seen for so long. “Think about it. Since when does a ‘newborn baby’ want to help mankind? That’s absurd.

“So what does a newborn baby really want?” He leans forward, ticking his points off on his long fingers. “It cries when it’s hungry or sick or when its diaper is wet. That’s all.”

“What’s your point?” she says, a little tartly.

“That’s what Mencius means.” He shuts the book, patting its cover. “A baby
has
no desires—no ambition, or love, or greed. It is only when we get older that we learn to desire those things—”

She has no idea what he is getting at, but his remarks strike a sudden fear into her heart. “How can you put your own ideas into Mencius’s mouth like that? For a thousand years, other people, far more learned than you, have devoted their entire lives to studying Mencius and figuring out what he means, and here you come along—”

She breaks off, surprised by her own vehemence. It takes her a moment
to master herself sufficiently to speak with any semblance of calm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that—”

“No, you’re right. I was just following my own train of thought …”

The mutual dissatisfaction hangs palpable between them. Baoyu moves away from the desk and begins to pour hot water into the basin.

She wants desperately to bridge the distance between them. “Baoyu, you’re studying too hard—”

“Studying too hard?” He smiles ironically. “Since when is it possible for you to think I am studying too hard?”

She hurries on, ignoring his jibe. “It’s making us both tense, short-tempered. Why don’t we do something to relax?”

“Like what?”

She answers at random. “Oh, I don’t know. We could go for a walk … Why don’t we go for a walk in the Garden tomorrow if the weather is fine? It’s overgrown, of course, but the fresh air will do you good—”

“No!” he says, so forcefully that she jumps. After a moment he adds in a calmer voice, “I don’t want to go to the Garden.”

She stares at him, but his face is expressionless. She is even more terrified than before. He begins to ladle cold water from the basin. She goes over to him and takes the ladle from his hand. Instead of ladling the water for him, she does something she has never done before. She stands close to him and tugs his hands so they are touching her body through her clothes. She lets the ladle clatter to the floor. She presses his hands flat against her body, and guides them so they travel over her belly, her hips and buttocks, her breasts. He does not resist her, his hands obedient to the pressure of hers. It is the first time that they have touched each other in the light. She seeks his eyes with her own, wanting to see the desire in them, but he keeps them fixed downwards. She takes him by the chin to tilt his face up, but still his eyes slide away from hers, so she kisses him on the lips instead, boldly, lingeringly. At first his body is rigid, but as she continues to kiss and caress him, she feels him relax. Then she leads him to the bed and for the first time they make love in the glare of the lamps.

4

The night before the Exams, Jia Zheng calls Baoyu and Huan to his study. He remembers how distraught he had been before he took the Exams so many years ago, and how he had longed for a few words of encouragement and comfort. Instead, his father had threatened to beat him if he did not pass. He had not been able to fall asleep the whole night before, and had set out in the morning slightly nauseated from exhaustion. Although he feels awkward in the role of mentor, especially after his experience with Jia Yucun, he decides he must say a few words to his sons before such a momentous occasion.

Huan comes first. The boy fidgets so much that it sets Jia Zheng’s teeth on edge. He encourages Huan to keep calm and pace himself during the Exams. Having read Huan’s practice essays, Jia Zheng feels that his diction is too crude and his transitions too clumsy for him to pass. Unlike Baoyu, Huan is not talented enough to master the materials for the Exams without a teacher or a tutor. After Baoyu passes and starts to make an official salary, they will be able to afford a tutor for Huan. However, since Huan has worked hard and is eager to take the Exams, Jia Zheng does not consider it right to discourage him.

After Huan has excused himself to do some last-minute cramming, Baoyu comes. “Sweeper said you wanted to see me, Father?” he says, standing just inside the door.

Jia Zheng rises from his seat. “Yes.” He smiles. “Have Baochai and the girls gotten all your luggage ready?”

“I think so.”

“With all the fuss they’re making, you’d think you were going for three months, not three days!”

Baoyu forces a smile. He looks pale and wan, and Jia Zheng worries whether he will have the stamina to concentrate for the whole Exams. It is probably just nerves. He puts his arm around Baoyu’s shoulders. “Worried?”

Baoyu shrugs, almost impatiently, his eyes on the ground.

Jia Zheng guesses he is too proud to admit that he is anxious. “You
don’t need to worry. You’ve studied hard for so many months. Just do your best.” Feeling how rigid Baoyu’s body is, he wonders whether he has put too much pressure on the boy. “Remember how I told you last spring, when you were sick, that everything depended on you?”

Baoyu looks up into Jia Zheng’s face, his eyes strangely intent. “Of course.”

“Well, things have started looking better since then, haven’t they? I’ve been reinstated, and we’re back at Rongguo. Now that you’re married to Baochai, Pan has been even more generous. I want you to know”—he looks into his son’s eyes—“you don’t need to worry if you don’t pass the first time.”

Baoyu’s eyes drop. “You don’t really mean that, Father. You’ve always drummed it into my head that everything depended on my passing.”

“I do mean it. I just wanted you to study hard and do your best. And now that you’ve done that, it doesn’t matter so much if you fail. In fact—” He finds himself confessing what he has kept from his son for so many years, for fear that Baoyu would think less of him. “I failed the first time. And the second time, as well.” He still feels the sting of his failure more than thirty years later, and to his amazement, tears film his eyes. He laughs sheepishly to hide them.

“Did you, Father?” Baoyu raises his eyes. Instead of the contempt Jia Zheng had half feared he would see there, Baoyu’s eyes are filled with sympathy and understanding. “You never told me that.”

Jia Zheng can still remember the way he had felt when the list of successful candidates was posted and his own name was not on it. He didn’t want to leave his bedroom, so afraid was he of reading contempt for his failure in everyone’s eyes. He had been filled with jealousy for Min, because she was so much quicker to learn than he. He had hated his schoolmaster, and his mother and father. He had been so taken up by his own despair that for once his father’s scoldings and threats had no power to move or frighten him. He had felt that his whole life was over.

And yet he had picked himself up off the ground and had begun to study again. He had failed another time, it was true, but that time, one of the Examiners, a friend of his father’s, had leaked the information that he had just missed the cutoff. The third time, he had passed respectably. After that he had advanced quickly, earning the respect of his colleagues and superiors, his previous failures apparently forgotten.

In a strange way, the same experience had been repeated in his arrest and imprisonment. When he had been arrested, he had thought he
would never be able to hold his head up again. He had barely been able to look his prison guards in the eye for fear of what they must think of him. Again, he had been patient, and he had not only been pardoned and released, but had also returned to his former position, where his colleagues treated him with the same, if not more, respect than before. This is the wisdom that he wants to impart to Baoyu, what he has learned from the sum of his fifty-odd years, but he does not quite know how to express it.

He squeezes Baoyu’s shoulders. “Everything is not won or lost in a single day. Even if you fail this year, you will pass eventually, and then you’ll be surprised at how different things will look. You won’t have to study all the time. You will like being an official. Some of the work is tedious, of course, but you’ll also get to make decisions, even if it is over small things. And, maybe, one day, you’ll have a family of your own—”

Baoyu wrenches himself violently from under Jia Zheng’s arm. “I’m not interested in anything like that.”

Jia Zheng had hoped time was helping Baoyu forget Daiyu. He has noticed how solicitously Baochai always treats Baoyu, and how the two of them never seem to argue, as Xifeng and Lian had, even in their newlywed days. He has allowed himself to believe that the new couple was growing together, but now he sees from the suppressed misery on Baoyu’s face that he has deceived himself.

Baoyu seems to control himself with an effort. He says, after a moment, “Are you satisfied with me, Father? Have I done all you wanted?”

At this reminder that Baoyu had acted against his own wishes for the good of the family, Jia Zheng feels a pang of remorse. “Yes, of course,” he says, taking Baoyu’s hands. “You’ve done more than enough. I know that it has been hard for you—”

Baoyu pulls away, apparently uninterested in Jia Zheng’s attempt to comfort him. “Then there is something I want to say to you.”

“What is it?”

Baoyu draws himself up and speaks almost ceremoniously. “I would like to thank you.”

“For what?” Jia Zheng says, taken aback.

“I would like to thank you for all the care that you have given me over the years, all your teaching, and patience, and concern.”

This stilted little speech, after the heightened emotions of the earlier conversation, almost makes Jia Zheng laugh. “You don’t need to thank me.”

“But I do,” says Baoyu. “If it hadn’t been for you, who knows what would have become of me? As it is, I’ve learned little enough—”

“Hush!” Jia Zheng says, half embarrassed, half amused. “You’d better be quiet, or you’ll end up making a fool of yourself!”

Baoyu stops, pulled up short, and looks discomfited. “At least let me take leave of you properly.”

“Take leave of me! What next? You’ll be gone for only three days—”

Before Jia Zheng can stop him, Baoyu kneels on the floor. He touches his head to Jia Zheng’s feet. Jia Zheng tries to raise him up, but again and again he presses his forehead and hands to his father’s shoes. For the second time that morning, Jia Zheng feels the tears sting in his eyes. This time, however, he is unable to control himself, and his tears spill over as he raises Baoyu from the floor.

5

Xifeng forces her heavy eyes open and squints at the clock. She had let herself lie down after lunch, intending to rest for ten or fifteen minutes, and here it is after four o’clock. She jerks herself upright and swings her legs off the
kang
. The sudden change of position makes her vision go black. She bends over, clutching her mouth, overcome by a sudden need to vomit. Shutting her eyes, she puts her head down, and breathes slowly and deeply to stave off the bout of nausea.

When the nausea recedes, she stands up, supporting herself against the table. Baoyu and Huan are coming home from the Exams this afternoon. The others will wonder if she is not there to greet them. The nausea rises again, but she thrusts herself from the table and stumbles towards the wardrobe. She vomits on the floor near the corner. Leaning against the door of the wardrobe, she glances down at what has come up from her stomach. There isn’t much of it. She hardly eats a thing these days.

She drags herself to fetch the bucket of water. She sloshes its contents onto the vomit, and manages to sweep the mess out of the door. Then she goes to the wardrobe and lowers her pants. The cotton rag she has pinned to her underwear is soaked through with blood. After months and months of not having her period, she has started to bleed again, heavily. How long has it been? A week? Ten days? If it does not stop in a day or two, she will ask Baochai to send for the doctor again. When Baochai sent for him three weeks ago, he had said that all he could do was modify her prescription. She has taken the new prescription twice a day, but it seems no more effective than the old one.

She replaces the soiled rag with a clean one. When she pulls her trousers up, she has to stretch the waistband to its utmost, to ease it over her swollen belly. Her whole body is getting skinny, like a monkey’s. Only her belly keeps growing, bigger and bigger, and is flabby to boot. She would have thought she was pregnant, except, of course, for the fact that she hasn’t been touched by a man in over two years. She smooths her gown over her hips to hide her bulging belly.

On her way to the door, she catches a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror. Her hair is uncombed, and her makeup has been rubbed off by sleep. Without the covering of powder, her complexion is chalky. Her cheekbones and teeth, with their receding gums, seem unnaturally prominent. She drags a comb through her hair and smears two streaks of rouge onto her cheeks.

When she is crossing Lady Jia’s courtyard, she notices that there are no sounds of conversation or laughter coming from the front room. Baoyu and Huan must not be home yet. Relieved, she pushes through the door curtain, crying, “Where are our successful Examination candidates?” trying to distract from her lateness with a show of gaiety.

She expects laughter, retorts. Instead, everyone in the room, Lady Jia, Baochai and Mrs. Xue, and the Two Springs, turns towards her with tense expressions, and then turn away in silent disappointment when they see it is only her.

“What’s the matter?” she cries.

It is Tanchun who answers. “They really should be home by now.” Her eyes shift uneasily to the clock on the wall. “The Examination papers should have been collected at noon, and then”—she counts on her fingers—“an hour to get their things together, an hour to get out of the Examination Hall, an hour to get home. That’s assuming everything took much longer than it should have.”