Under the Hawthorn Tree (32 page)

‘I understand, you're doing this for us.'

Her mother must have stood up and signalled for her guest to leave as Jingqiu saw Old Third stand and implore, ‘Just let me get some water to wash Jingqiu's feet. Her soles are infected and covered in sores, and she has bits of dirt inside them. She can't see them herself, so I can help her pick them out, and put the cream on. Then I'll leave at once. I'm begging you, please.'

‘You shouldn't go walking around out here, I'll get the water.'

When Jingqiu's sister heard this she jumped up and said, ‘I'll go, I'll go,' returning promptly and placing the bowl by her sister's bed. Jingqiu felt like those mothers who are not allowed to go out for a month after giving birth, but who lie in bed all day being served. She wanted to get up, but the three of them wouldn't let her.

Old Third removed the bandages from her feet and her mother examined them carefully. With tears in her eyes, she said to him, ‘Please do help her, Si and I will go outside to get some fresh air.'

Jingqiu wouldn't let him wash her feet in case he got his bandage wet. She washed them herself and he helped her dry them. He then switched on a nearby lamp and pulled the bulb closer. He asked Jingqiu for a needle and started picking out the bits of coal dust from her sores. ‘Does it hurt? If I go too deep just tell me.'

Jingqiu shook her head. She thought of the scene that had just passed earlier with her mother and began to laugh at him. ‘You were just like Fu Zhigao, the traitor from Red Crag. Grovelling and fawning.'

He laughed too. ‘I was scared to death.'

‘Were you worried my mother would send you to the police?'

‘I wasn't worried about that, I was worried that she wouldn't let me wait for you, that she would shout at you. Thank god we weren't born in Fu Zhigao's day, else I'd definitely have been a traitor,' he joked. ‘If the Nationalists took you hostage to threaten me then I would tell them everything, no doubt about it.'

‘Do you hate my mother?'

‘Why would I hate your mother?' he asked, surprised. ‘We have the same interests at heart, she said so herself. Don't you think she likes me? She agreed that I could come back in thirteen months, she even said our love was “long-lasting”.'

‘You're certainly full of revolutionary optimism.'

‘It's like Chairman Mao said, “When our comrades are in trouble we must look to success, to the light, we must be even braver.” ‘Deep in concentration, he picked out the bits of soot while she gazed at him.

Her heart sank; another thirteen months before I get to see him again, how will I get through it? ‘Will you really wait thirteen months before you come see me again?'

He nodded. ‘I've promised your mother, and if I don't keep my word she will never believe me again.' He looked at her staring at him, utterly miserable. ‘You want me to come and see you? You don't want to wait that long?' She nodded. ‘Then I won't wait, I'll come in secret, is that okay? So, I'm a traitor after all, I made a promise to your mother and all it took was one word from you.'

‘Traitor or not, as long as you don't get caught,' she smiled.

Once he had cleaned out all her sores he rubbed the cream into her feet, emptied the basin of water outside and returned to sit beside her on the bed. ‘Give me a picture, so when I'm missing you I can look at it.'

She thought she looked ugly in all the photos she had of herself, and she rarely had her picture taken anyway, so it took her some time to find one, and even then it was one of her at six years of age. The girl in the picture had bobbed hair and a straight fringe across her forehead, and was wearing a light green dress. The photo was in black and white but her father had coloured it himself, not very neatly in some places, especially in the green of her dress. She gave him the photo, promising to send him a new one.

He had previously sent her two passport-sized photos in between the pages of books and letters. He took another from his bag, taken outside. He was wearing a white shirt and a pale pair of trousers, in his hand he was carrying what looked like a roll of paper, and he was standing beneath a tree. She recognised it to be the hawthorn tree. He looked very young in the photo, distinguished even, with a slight smile spreading across his face. She really liked the photo, and now that her mother knew about their relationship she wasn't scared about having it in the house.

‘Do you like it? I went especially to the tree to take it. Once you've got your job, and it's permanent, I'll take you to that tree and we can have our photo taken there. I've got a camera and I can develop my own pictures. I'll take lots of pictures of you in all sorts of poses, from all angles, I'll develop lots, big ones even, and put them all over my walls.'

He took out some money from his pocket and put it on the table by her bed. ‘I'm leaving this money for you. If you don't want me to cut my hand again you'll take it. You mustn't work for that hunchback Wan again. If the cardboard factory has work then that's fine, but if you don't listen to me and go back to work for that man, or do any kind of dangerous work, I'll be angry. I won't leave you, but I will cut myself again. Do you believe me?'

She nodded. ‘I won't ever go back to work for that man.'

‘Good. The problem is only temporary. That is why I'm leaving this money here, there is no way your mother will be angry with you.'

He knelt by the side of the bed and took her in his arms. They remained wrapped in each other's arms until he stood up decisively and said, ‘I'm going. You stay there, don't get up, you've only just put the cream on your feet and you don't want them to get dirty.'

She sat on the bed, listening to him leave, unlock his bike, and ride it away, until everything was once again plunged into silence.

A short while after Old Third left her mother and sister returned. Jingqiu looked at the clock; it was nearly eleven.

‘Did Sun say where he was staying tonight?' her mother asked, a hint of worry in her voice.

‘Whenever he doesn't have somewhere to stay he spends the night in a pavilion by the river, but by now the crossing will have closed. Maybe he'll sit on the bank . . .' The words caught in her throat, and she faltered.

Her mother sat on the bed. ‘I know you don't want to let go of him, and he doesn't look like a bad boy, but what are the options? You're still so young, and even the girls and boys over twenty in relationships invite criticism. You've started so early – your job isn't yet sorted out – and I'm telling you you can't see him, for now. It will be a test of his intentions. If he's sincere he won't run away just because he can't see you for a year, but if he can't pass the test . . .'

‘Mother, you don't need to explain, I know you only want the best for me. You go to bed, we've got work tomorrow.'

‘Are you working tomorrow? Your feet are so badly injured and you didn't say a word to me about it.'

‘It would only have made you worry, what would have been the point? It's fine, he told me not to go tomorrow and I agreed.'

‘If you're not working tomorrow then you won't need your rubber boots,' her sister said.

‘What rubber boots?' her mother asked.

‘That Sun boy bought them for her,' Jingqiu's sister piped up. ‘He came one morning with them and he cried when he saw how bad her feet were.'

‘He's just like your father,' Jingqiu's mother sighed. ‘He also cried easily. When men cry it's either because they are especially empathetic or because they are weak. Sun seems like an empathetic boy. What about his family?'

‘I'm not quite sure,' Jingqiu replied. ‘I know he's got a younger brother and a father. His mother killed herself . . .'

‘I've heard that that sort of thing runs in families. The children of depressed people are easily depressed themselves. What is Sun like? He seemed a bit particular when he was calculating how long it'd be before he got to see you.'

Jingqiu thought back to when he was making those calculations; it was cute. Her mother asked her some more questions about Old Third, how old he was, whether he smoked or drank, fought and swore, where he went to school, what his hobbies were, where he was from, that sort of thing. ‘Why didn't you ask him yourself when he was here?' Jingqiu asked in turn.

‘He would have thought I was checking him out as a prospective son-in-law, I couldn't give him that impression lightly. My goal in speaking with him was to tell him not to come to visit you.' Jingqiu recalled the proud way Old Third had said that her mother had already agreed to their relationship, and she felt touched with sadness on his behalf. ‘What does his father do?'

‘He's a district level commanding officer.'

Her mother fell silent before saying, ‘I thought he seemed different from most boys. Someone from that kind of background can't easily understand people like us. Who did the People's Liberation Army liberate? Workers and farmers oppressed by landlords and capitalists. His father and your father belong to two irreconcilable classes. His family obviously doesn't know about you . . .'

Jingqiu hadn't thought about that before, but now that her mother mentioned it, it was a serious question. She hoped with all her heart that it wasn't true. ‘But his mother was the daughter of a capitalist, and his father didn't abandon her.'

‘You're right, the Communist Party takes a very different attitude to capitalists than it does to landlords. In those days capitalists represented the rising, progressive, productive forces, whereas landlords represented a declining force. The first thing the Communist revolution wanted to do was get rid of the landlord class. Don't get your hopes up. His family is a barrier you can't easily overcome and he might lose interest sooner rather than later.'

Jingqiu said, ‘He said he would wait a lifetime . . .'

‘Who can't say that? Who hasn't said it? To open your mouth and say “a lifetime” is naive. Who can predict the way things will go at such a young age?' Her mother saw a look of rebellion in Jingqiu's eyes. ‘You're still young, you haven't got much experience of people so you believe him as soon as he says it. Wait until you've grown up, then you'll discover every man will say that when he is chasing you, they all say they can wait a lifetime. But if you ignore him for a year, you see if he'll wait. He'll have gone already.'

If mother knows men won't wait a year, thought Jingqiu, why did she tell Old Third to wait? She's using it as an excuse to test him. She was desperate to tell Old Third what her mother had said, but she also thought that if she told him he wouldn't really be tested at all.

Do all men exaggerate and not keep their word? I probably should test Old Third to see how long he will wait for me. The problem is, say he waits for a year, that doesn't prove he could wait two. If he waits two years that doesn't prove he could wait a whole lifetime.

She didn't even really know what ‘making him wait' meant. If she made him ‘wait' for her did that mean he had to ‘love' her? By asking ‘could you wait a lifetime for me?' wasn't she really asking ‘could you love me for a lifetime?' She wasn't used to using that word, ‘love'. But these two words, ‘wait' and ‘love' still seemed to mean slightly different things.

Lost in her own thoughts, she had no idea if her mother had spoken or not, she only heard her sister say, ‘I'm asking you, what happened to his hand? When he came this morning it was fine.'

‘He told me to go to the hospital but I wouldn't, so he cut himself. He bled lots.'

‘He seemed so sensible,' her mother said, her brow furrowed. ‘How could he do such a crazy thing? That shows he's immature. Erratic people are dangerous and easily take to extremes. If they like you, they can like you too much, if they hate you, they hate you too much, it's like that whatever they do. It's better to keep a distance from people like that.'

Jingqiu had thought that her mother would be moved by this, but she called it dangerous. Her mother had once told her that when her father was young he had a tendency towards extreme behaviour, and that when her mother either paid him too little attention or didn't believe him he would start tugging furiously at his hair, pulling it out in large clumps. She knew that their courtship had been complicated. Her father's parents had originally arranged a marriage for him back in his village, and in fact not just one; as he had been set to inherit from two branches of the family, from his grandfather's real son (his father), and also from his grandfather's younger brother, who had no son, each branch of the family had arranged a wife for him. In order to escape these marriages he ran away to study, but as his grandfather was dying he was forced to marry both of the women chosen for him.

Later, Father had met Mother, and he went through all kinds of hardships in order to leave his two wives and remarry. Mother waited a long time to marry, until she was almost thirty. Father and Mother worked in different cities after they were married, so father only came to visit once every couple of weeks, but they wrote to each other frequently. During the Cultural Revolution, when Mother was being criticised at No. 8 Middle School, these letters were used as evidence that Jingqiu's parents were living a capitalist lifestyle.

It was her granny who had talked to outsiders about the letters. She lived with Jingqiu's mother, Jingqiu and her brother and sister, while her father lived on his own. Granny was old-fashioned and thought her mother had bewitched her father in order to make him leave his first two wives. According to Granny, only the first wife was truly legal, and it simply wasn't proper to divorce and remarry. She couldn't stand seeing them being affectionate towards each other, so she used to say that they were extravagant, wasting their money on trains and stamps.