Lin made no response. He had thought of that, but was unsure whether he could break with Manna, who was actually his first girlfriend. Never had a woman been so close to his heart. He believed that Manna and he, if not lovers in the physical sense, were becoming kindred spirits. These days he almost couldn't refrain from joining her whenever it was possible.
Ran Su combed his dark hair with his fingers, looking at Lin. A pair of little crinkles appeared under his triangular eyes. He smiled and said, "Come on, Lin. I treat you as a friend. Tell me what you think. "
Lin managed to say, "I shall keep the relationship normal. Manna Wu and I will remain just comrades."
"Promise me then that you and Manna Wu will have no abnormal relationship unless you have divorced your wife and married her." By "abnormal" he meant "sexual."
For half a minute Lin remained silent. Then he raised his head and muttered, "I promise."
"You know, Lin. I have to do this. If you break any rule, I won't be able to protect you. Now that you've promised, I'm going to assure my superiors that there's nothing unusual between you and Manna Wu. Don't break your word, or else you will get me into trouble as well."
"I understand." A coldness was sinking into his heart. How he regretted having agreed to meet Manna three months ago. Already deep in the relationship, how could he extricate himself without hurting her and filling his own heart with despair? He had his family and shouldn't have gone with a young woman this way.
Ran Su gave him a Peony cigarette and said he would return Lin's novel
How Steel Is Tempered
in two weeks. These hectic days made it impossible for him to finish the book. "I don't understand why the Russians always wrote such fat novels," he said. "They must've had a lot of time. I often skip the first chapters, too many descriptions, passage after passage. The pace is too slow." In fact, it was this little man who had notified Lin the previous year that he ought to close his library without delay to avoid having to forfeit his books.
When Lin told Manna about his talk with Ran Su the next evening on the sports ground, she made a long face and dropped her eyes, her elbow resting on a vaulting horse, which stood between them. Nearby were a set of parallel bars, a horizontal bar, and two jumping pits filled with sand.
After a brief silence, she lifted her head and asked testily, "What are your true feelings about me?"
He was puzzled by the question and asked, "What do you mean?"
"Who am I to you? Are we going to be engaged one day?" She looked him straight in the eye.
He took the question with composure. "If I could, I would propose to you. Actually I've thought about that."
Hearing his words, she melted into tears. Her right hand was holding her side as though she were suffering from a stomachache. Disconcerted, he looked around and saw only a few children playing the game "Catch a Spy" in the dusk. A cluster of tall smokestacks fumed lazily in the south. Fortunately none of their comrades was in sight.
He handed her his handkerchief, murmuring, "Don't be so upset, Manna. I love you, but we cannot be together. I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault. Oh, why is the Lord of Heaven so mean to me? I'm already twenty-eight."
Lin sighed and said no more. I'd be a happy man if she were my wife, he thought.
Manna was also summoned to Director Su's office a few days later and was made to promise the same as Lin had.
At the end of December, for the first time Lin was not elected a model officer. Some people complained about his lifestyle. One officer reported that Lin once had not stood at attention like others when the national anthem was broadcast, even though they had been in the bathhouse, all naked in the pool. A section chief remarked that Lin shouldn't keep his hair so long and parted right down the middle. The hairstyle made him look like a petty intellectual, like those in the movies. Why couldn't he have his hair cropped short like others? What made him so special? His college diploma? Then how come the other three college graduates in the hospital didn't bother so much about their hairstyles? How come one of them didn't mind having his head shaved bald?
Without delay Lin asked his roommate Ming Chen to give him a crew cut. Manna was troubled by his new haircut, which made him look nondescript, saying he now seemed like "neither a drake nor a gander." But he said it didn't matter, since it was winter and he wore his fur hat most of the time.
At political studies Lin often felt that people expected to hear more from him about his inmost thoughts, as though he were supposed to make a self-criticism. He was upset and for months remained gloomy.
7
For over a year Manna wanted to see what Shuyu looked like, but Lin wouldn't give her a chance. Whenever she asked him to show her a photograph of his wife, he would say he didn't have one. Manna was sure he did. In secret she had once searched through the drawers in his desk when she was helping clean the windowpanes of the office he shared with another doctor, but she had found no photograph in them. Her roommates often asked her about Lin's wife, and she felt embarrassed that she could tell them nothing. Without fail they would warn her that Lin might be of two minds about their relationship. So she should be more careful.
At the hospital's annual sports meet in the early fall of 1968, Manna won a third prize for table tennis. She was awarded a perfumed soap wrapped in a white towel. To please her more, that afternoon, in Lin's dormitory, he asked her to make a wish.
"My only wish is to see Shuyu's majestic face," she said, rolling her eyes, which lit up with excitement.
Since his roommates were not in, he picked up his dictionary,
Forest
of Words
,
took a photograph out of the vellum cover, and handed it to her. It was a new one, black-and-white and four by three inches.
Looking at it, Manna couldn't help tittering. Both Shuyu and Hua were in the photograph. The baby girl, in checkered overalls, stood on the ground with her knees bent, like a dog rising on its hind legs. Her hands were reaching out for the bench on which her mother sat. Shuyu was closer to the camera than Hua, her face gaunt and her forehead grooved by wavy creases. Her flabby mouth spread sideways as though she were about to cry. A small fishtail of wrinkles gathered at the end of her right eye, which was half closed. More surprising, she was dressed like an old woman: a short gown like a dark iron barrel encased her sloping shoulders and short upper body; her thighs were thin, both shanks wrapped in puttees; on the ground her feet were splayed in black shoes like a pair of mice. A fierce-looking goose was flapping its wings on Shuyu's left. In the background were water vats, the thatched adobe house, and half an elm crown over the roof.
"Heavens, oh her tiny feet!" Manna cried. Lin stood up as she went on, "Isn't she your mother?" She broke into laughter, bending forward.
His eyes flashed behind the lenses of his glasses. He picked up his cap and left the bedroom without a word.
"Hey, Lin, come back. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."
She followed him out, but he didn't turn his head. He was heading toward the back gate of the hospital grounds.
Beyond the wall of the compound stretched an orchard, which had been planted four years before by the local commune members and was now in fruit, the apple-pear trees standing row after row all over the hillside. Hurriedly Lin walked out of the back gate and disappeared in the orchard.
That was the only time Manna saw him in a huff, but he returned to normal the next day. When she again apologized, he told her to forget about it.
The photograph was a great relief to her, because it convinced her that Lin and his wife didn't make a good match, and that sooner or later he would leave Shuyu. At last she had hopes of marrying him one day.
Despite her roommates' plying her with questions, Manna wouldn't reveal anything to them about Shuyu. She still claimed she knew nothing about the country woman. But a month later, unable to contain her excitement, she told her friend Haiyan Niu about the photograph.
They were both on the second shift, which was from 7:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. At night when the patients in the ward were asleep, the two nurses had little to do except distribute some medicine in the wee hours and take a few patients' temperatures, so they would chat. Haiyan was pretty and pert, always smiling with neat teeth and often surrounded by young men. She had grown up in Muji City, though she had been born in Harbin. Her paternal grandfather had been a well-known capitalist, but she hadn't suffered much from her family background, because the old man had donated a huge sum of money to the Communist government for a MIG-15 so as to fight the United States in the Korean War. The donation bankrupted his businesses – an oil mill and a tannery – but his family was classified as Open-Minded Gentry, so that later his descendants miraculously remained untouched during political struggles. And his granddaughter Haiyan had even joined the army. In her there was a kind of wildness, which Manna very much admired, and which was probably a residue of the frontier spirit that still possessed some Northeasterners. Sometimes Haiyan reminded Manna of a sleek leopard.
"If I were you, I'd go to bed with Lin Kong," Haiyan said to her one night, her hands crocheting a woolen shawl.
"What? Girl, you're crazy," said Manna. With a pair of large tweezers she was taking some sterilized syringes and needles out of a stainless steel pot that had boiled for half an hour on the electric stove.
Haiyan was working loop after loop of the cream-colored wool. Without raising her head she said, "No, I'm not crazy. You have to find a way to develop your relationship with him, don't you?"
"Well, I'm afraid that might scare him away."
They both laughed, and Manna sneezed. It had grown humid in the office; tiny dewdrops appeared on the metal lid of the trash bin standing by the desk. Haiyan put down the crochet work on her lap and said, "Listen, elder sister, once you've done it with him, he won't abandon you. If he really loves you, if he's a man with a heart, he'll follow you wherever you go. If he doesn't, he isn't the man you want, is he?"
"You think like a little girl. No love is so romantic."
"Don't give me that. What do you know about love?"
"All right, you know everything."
"Of course I know."
"Tell me, how many men have you known?" Manna winked at her. She always doubted if Haiyan was still a virgin. Rumor had it that Haiyan had gone to bed with Vice-Director Chiu of the hospital. That must have been true; otherwise she would have been discharged long ago. Unlike Manna, she had never gone to a nursing school.
"A thousand," Haiyan said teasingly. "The more the better, don't you think?"
"Yes," Manna said matter-of-factly.
They laughed again. Haiyan flung back her braid, whose end was tied with an orange string. Her toe kept tapping the red floor.
Manna had never thought of sleeping with Lin. The fear of being expelled from the army prevented her from conceiving such an idea; she didn't even have a hometown to return to. Furthermore, she was uncertain whether he would continue to love her if she was discharged and banished to a remote place. Even though he wanted to, love would be impossible under such circumstances, because he might be sent back to his home village and they would have to remain apart. Yet Haiyan's suggestion pointed out a possibility. Manna was almost twenty-nine; why should she remain an old maid forever? Once she and Lin made love, he might go about divorcing his wife. For better or worse, she shouldn't just sit and wait without doing anything, or there would be no end to this ambiguous affair. Recently people in the hospital had begun to treat her like Lin's fiancee; young officers would avoid talking with her for longer than a few minutes. She resented this situation, which she was determined to change.
So she decided to act. The next night, after they had distributed medicine to the patients, she said to Haiyan, "Can I ask you a favor?"
Her earnest tone of voice surprised her friend. "Of course, anything you think I can do for you," Haiyan said.
"Do you know some quiet place in town?"
"What do you mean some quiet place?" Haiyan's large eyes sparkled.
"I mean where you can…"
"Oh I see, a place where you and he can have a good time together?"
Manna nodded, her face coloring.
"Well, so you agree with me at last. Tell me, what made you change your mind so quickly? You are a bad girl, aren't you? You're planning to seduce a good man, a revolutionary officer, aren't you?"
"Come on, spare me all the questions. "
"Comrade Manna Wu, do you understand what you are doing? You've really lost your head, haven't you?" She pointed her forefinger at Manna with her thumb raised, like a pistol.
"Please, just help me!"
Haiyan tittered, then said, "All right, I'll find you a place."
Because hotels and guesthouses in every town demanded an official letter before taking in a guest, it was impossible for an unmarried couple to find lodging in any of them. Manna had to resort to the help of Haiyan, who seemed to have infinite connections. Two of her siblings lived in Muji. That was why she had readily promised to find Manna a place.
On Thursday, at lunch, Haiyan sat down by Manna and nodded to her meaningfully. After others had left the table, she handed her a brass key and a slip of paper with an address on it. She said, "My sister's going to visit her parents-in-law this weekend. You can use her home on Sunday. "
"Thanks," Manna whispered.
Haiyan batted her eyes. "But remember to tell me what it's like, all right?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know." Haiyan batted her eyes again.
"Damn you, as if you didn't know. "
Chuckling, Haiyan patted her on the shoulder and said with a straight face, "Every man is different."