Serve the People! (11 page)

His body tensed with the nervous excitement of mobilization. `What's going on?' he asked the sentry.

`Camp and field training,' came the reply. `Haven't you heard?'

Without pausing to answer, he cycled quickly over to his barracks, where he discovered that his whole company-bar a skeleton staff left behind to look after the pigs and the vegetable garden -had left the evening before. He was told that his company had been sent off as an advance party, but the Captain and Political Instructor had issued him with a permit to stay. Retrieving it from the office, Wu Dawang saw it contained only one sentence: `Your task is to remember at all times that to serve the Division Commander's family is to Serve the People.' The instruction hit him like cold water in the face, filling him with a sense of unhappy abandonment.

Midsummer was now past. Though the dry heat persisted, its roasting intensity had gone, tempered by an edge of coolness that signalled autumn was not far off. After folding up the permit, Wu Dawang rode resentfully on to market, filled his baskets with chicken, fish, peanut oil, sesame oil, MSG and ground pepper for the house, then went on to the post office to send thirty yuarz back home.

In the normal run of things, he was in the habit of posting seven or eight yuazz back home at the end of each month, to help with the housekeeping. And yet here he was, sending money long before the end of the month, and much more than usual. This was one of the few blots-blacker even than his adulterous liaison with his supreme superior's wife-on Wu Dawang's otherwise unsullied army record. The year he joined the army, at a little over twenty-two years old, he'd received six yuaa as a monthly allowance, the second year seven, the third eight and so on, enjoying an increase of one yuazz each year. Five years on, he still received only ten yuazz, every cent of which - beyond the one or two yuaiz he spent each month on toothpaste and soap-he sent back home. How he'd managed to save up the staggering sum of thirty yuan was therefore information he was anxious to keep classified.

He'd scrimped the money together from odds and ends of petty cash - only cents, not whole yiiaii - left over from the food shopping he did for the Division Commander's household. Although he knew this was no hanging offence, Wu Dawang was aware that embezzlement-however minor-was still embezzlement. As a result, whenever he bought anything he would up the price by one or two cents on the official record. His accounts were thus never anything less than perfectly square, for which both the Commander and Liu Lian had commended him. This thirty _yuan now in transit to his wife was the culmination of months of careful planning and scheming. It went some way toward relieving his troubled marital conscience, enabling him to pursue his recklessly passionate affair with Liu Lian with a lighter heart.

As he left the post office, the sun shining bright in a cloudless sky, a file of troops was marching along the main street, waving flags and banners and shouting abusive slogans at some new enemy of the state. After a month of the cloistered, underground existence he'd been leading with Liu Lian, the raw, revolutionary zeal of everyday life now struck him as unfamiliar, even alarming. He stood at the side of the street, watching, as if trying to work out whether the demonstration was in any way an attack on his degenerate entanglement with the Division Commander's wife. When, at last, the marchers had passed noisily on, he set off again on his bike.

By the time he arrived back, the Division was long gone. Only the lonely footsteps of the relief patrol echoed up and down the road that cut through the deserted barracks. Although the sparrows and cicadas were no louder or more numerous than before, their voices now seemed to reverberate deafeningly across the drill ground. Marching up and down, the patrols left behind now struck him as oddly unconvincing, as if they were playacting, the guns on their shoulders no more intimidating than flags or placards. As Wu Dawang approached the Division Commander's gate, a careless sparrow happened to shit on his cap, an event duly reported to him by the compound sentry from his duty platform. Wu Dawang paused, still holding on to his bicycle. `Do you know who I am?' he asked irritably. `I'm the company's Model Soldier. How dare you speak to me like that?'

I know who you are, Sergeant Wu,' the sentry replied. But there really is shit on your cap.'

As soon as he'd taken off his cap to see for himself, Wu Dawang smiled and wiped it off. `I'm the Division Commander's Orderly. Just let me know if there's anything you need help with.' Saying these few simple words made Wu Dawang's heart fairly sing with happiness, because the sentry thanked him for them as profusely as he would have the Division Commander himself.

In fact, since the start of his affair with Liu Lian, a subtle, psychological change had been taking place in Wu Dawang: sometimes he would catch himself imagining he was indeed Liu Lian's husband, the master of the household he served. Many times he had felt a secret, boastful urge to divulge to others some of the details of his relationship with Liu Lian. Only his revolutionary self-discipline--together with the fact that no one would have believed him, and the impossibility of guaranteeing his confidant's discretion -had so far sealed his lips.

As Wu Dawang wheeled his bike around to the back door, some of this new complacency must have shown on his face and in his manner, unwittingly triggering a startling new turn to their affair. Throwing his purchases into the kitchen, he glimpsed Liu Lian coming in the front door, carrying a few everyday toiletries toothpaste, soap, powder, face-cream, and so on. When she reached the doorway to the dining room, she glanced over at the Serve the People ! sign on the dining table. But,) ust as she opened her mouth to speak, Wu Dawang tugged off his sweaty uniform and held it out to her. `Go and give that a wash.'

She stared at him. `What did you) ust say?'

`I'm boiling hot,' he said. `Wash my clothes.'

His tone was precisely the one he would have used with his wife, expecting her to wash and cook for him when he came in from the fields. He was not, however, speaking to his wife. Displeasure flashed across Liu Lian's face. Ignoring the uniform, she pointed silently at the Serve the People! sign, a faint jeer about her mouth. She then turned toward the shower room, her toiletries still cradled in her arms.

From the kitchen, Wu Dawang had an uninterrupted view of the sign. Though its text and images had been tarnished by cooking smoke, its message still chimed across at Wu Dawang like an alarm bell, reminding him of the role he'd been assigned to play in Compound Number One, of the inferior status that a peasant soldier could shake off only in his fantasies.

He slowly retracted his hand and uniform. Squatting down onto his heels like a deflated leather ball, he let his clothes fall to the ground. He gazed out of the back door, into the vegetable garden. At one side stood a small copse of poplars, their trunks cracked open into fissured knots that stared back at him. The colour drained from his face, he turned back to the Serve the People! sign, then sprang up and ran to the shower room. No Liu Lian. He pounded up the stairs to the bathroom where he discovered her dabbing her face with some of the powder she'd just bought. Charging in, he gathered her up in his arms and began staggering off with her toward the bedroom. In the confusion of this hasty manoeuvre, and as she was struggling to free herself, she knocked a framed scarlet and yellow quotation by the Chairman off the wall. A second later, he accidentally trod on it, shattering the glass and embellishing the Great Truth beneath ('Without a People's Army, the People Have Nothing') with a large, dusty footprint.

A stunned silence fell.

He put her down. They looked at the smashed quotation, then at each other.

`What the hell have you done?' she demanded.

You were the one who knocked it off the wall.'

She looked down at his footprint. `One call to Security and you're a dead man.'

`Is that what you're going to do?'

She glanced at his stricken face. `I might. And I might not.'

His voice became more cajoling. `You were the one who made me come upstairs. If you hadn't, it wouldn't have fallen off the wall, would it?'

Liu Lian looked at him like a mother would at a son who'd just slapped her. As she stared hard at him, her expression of startled uncertainty changed into shocked indignation. `What did you just say?'

`I said, it was you who made me come upstairs.'

When?'

`Just now, in the kitchen, when you pointed at the Serve the People! sign.'

She laughed drily. She had meant to remind him of the sign's literal meaning, of his real status in the house, but he had chosen to understand only the private sexual code they had devised for it; to serve her according to less conventional Communist principles. She had no idea what had passed through Wu Dawang's head as he'd squatted, staring out at the garden, that a long-hidden resentment at the rigid hierarchy all around him was about to burst forth. As she contemplated his simple, honest face, compassion welled up inside her. She felt she'd treated him unfairly. She placed his hand on her breast, as if to comfort him, and traced her own soft, slender finger across the back of it. This familiar, affectionate gesture offered Wu Dawang first sexual encouragement, then opened the floodgates to his suppressed, unarticulated feelings of discontent. With reckless abandon, he scooped her up in his arms, carried her over to the bed further trampling the Chairman's quotation underfoot threw her down on it and began roughly undressing her.

She lay on her back, both legs in the air, submitting to this unceremonious treatment. As he entered her, he was overcome by a new kind of happiness a triumphant sense of taking revenge for some past wrong, of getting the better of an oppressor. The strange thing, though, was that, far from outraging her, this almost animal outburst of his seemed to be giving her just as much pleasure. Her startlingly loud, raw, uninhibited sobs urged him on until, finally victorious in his complete possession of her, he collapsed to the ground at the foot of the bed, naked and dripping with sweat. The fragments of glass and damaged quotation lay around him like rubbish.

She lay quietly on the bed, also naked except for a pillow pulled over her thighs. Both stared, unmov ing, up at the ceiling, sunk in postcoital anticlimax.

The midday sun poured in through the window, illuminating golden stars of airborne dust. While the songs of sparrows and turtledoves clattered around them, the cicadas sounded hoarse, exhausted, their voices dying away almost as soon as they'd made themselves heard. They lay there in silence, letting the time pass between them, a sense of extraordinary fatigue hanging in the air.

`What time is it?' she eventually asked, still without moving, as if the ceiling might supply the answer.

`I don't know,' he replied, also to the ceiling. `Are you hungry?' he asked.

No. Wu Dawang, we've become animals.'

`I don't care.'

Where did all that come from?'

`All what?'

`All that just now.'

`I feel like I'm full of hatred, inside. Somehow,) ust then, it all came out.'

`Who do you hate?'

`I don't know.'

Is it me?'

`No, I don't think so.'

`I feel like that, too.'

Who do you hate?'

`I'm not sure either.'

She sat up and put her clothes on, then lay back down on the bed. `There's no one around,' she said. `I wish we could spend the rest of our lives locked in here together.'

When's the Commander back?'

`Don't worry yourself about that. But the minute he is, I'll get him to fix your promotion.'

At the very least, let's lock ourselves in here for a full three days and three nights before he comes back. Then, when he does, I'll go back to my company. Whatever happens, I can't stay here.'

Why not?'

`D'you think I could face him after everything that's happened between us?'

A silence spun out between them, as he waited to hear what she thought would happen between the two of them when the Division Commander came home. Instead, she eventually asked him: `What did you buy in town?'

He told her about the food he'd bought.

`How long will that last us?' she wanted to know next.

Over a month.'

She sat up and combed a hand through her tangled hair. Standing up, she glanced down at his naked body. Then she wandered, smiling, downstairs.

When he heard her go outside, he picked himself up from the floor and went across to the window. He saw her walk over to the entrance to the com pound with an iron lock in her hands, check to left and right that no soldiers were approaching along the road, and pull the two iron gates shut. Putting her hands through the gates, she padlocked them together on the outside to give the illusion that no one was at home. Returning to the house, she locked both front and back doors.

The stage was now set for the culminating seventytwo hours of their affair. He dressed while he waited for her. By the time she reappeared, however, she'd already taken off all her clothes again. They stood facing each other across the bedroom doorway.

`I've locked everything up,' she said.

We haven't much rice,' he replied.

`I've checked. There's still half a bag in the cupboard.'

'That should be enough.'

'Why have you put your clothes back on?'

He undressed again, folding his uniform carefully away in her wardrobe as if he planned never to put it back on.