Serve the People! (14 page)

'But what'll happen to you if he does?'

'At worst, he'll have me sent to prison. As long as they don't shoot me, I can marryyou when I get out.'

'Marry? How?'

If he finds out, surely the Commander won't want you anymore. Then we can get married.'

She chose not to respond to the scenario he'd sketched out-or to the question of whether the Division Commander would still want her after he'd found out about their affair. Instead she raised instead another, equally fundamental issue.

'Would you be willing to divorce your wife?'

'Yes. So long as you moved her and my son to the city and fixed her up with a steady job and my son with a school.'

She sat up. 'And if I couldn't?'

He sat up, too. 'I promised before I married her, I swore an oath. You'd have to.'

'But what if-what if I couldn't?'

'Of course you can. No question. As long as she gets her life in the city, I'll have done my duty by her. I'll divorce whenever you want and marry as soon as you'll have me. Even if the Commander throws you out, you ask me to get a divorce and then decide I'm not good enough for you-and I know I'm not good enough for you-I'll still stand by you. I won't marry anyone else, or have anything to do with my ex-wife. Any time you need me, all you need to do is write or phone and I'll come straight to you.'

Having said his piece, he looked across at her expectantly, like a child handing his homework in to his teacher.

From a few inches away, she stared hard back at him, trying to gauge his sincerity by the light of the moon. Unable to detect a flicker of flippancy in him, she kissed him passionately, then removed her clothes and hung them on a nearby plant. Turning back to him, she spoke of a sterner, more inescapable reality.

The Division Commander's coming back earlier than expected-today in fact, so these are our last few hours together. For weeks now, you've done everything for me. It'll be light soon, so let me serve you for the time we've got left-anything you want, anything to make you happy. I want you to remember me for the rest of your life.'

Beneath the steadiness of her voice, Wu Dawang could sense her sadness. The moon had glided east of the barracks, and a distinct chill had descended over the garden, turning Liu Lian's skin bluish-white and covering her shoulders and arms with goose bumps. But it was the news of the Division Commander's imminent return, not the fall in temperature that made Wu Dawang shiver.

She stretched out beside him again.

He looked at her with the same detachment that one might consider a portrait, until the composition before him began to swim out of focus, its lines blurring. As she lay there waiting for him, Liu Lian's breathing quickened slightly-with impatience. But he stayed where he was, holding her hand, as if he was afraid of losing her. Suddenly, without knowing why, tears welled up in his eyes. In all the time they'd been together, she'd always been the first of the two of them to cry. From the very start he had, of course, known how the thing would end-with the Commander's return. None the less, the news that this ending was scheduled for the day ahead still struck him as hurtfully sudden.

'Has the Commander rung?'

Didn't you hear the phone just now?'

He hadn't. The telephone had in fact rung several times over the past eight weeks, and not once had he wondered what Liu Lian had said to her husband, what lies she'd stalled him with. Thanks to his slavish devotion to duty-Don't Ask What You Shouldn't Ask, Don't Listen To What You Shouldn't Listen To, Don't Say What You Shouldn't Say- he'd been able to block this question out entirely, saving himself from any number of extra anxieties. Now, however, that their return to reality was only hours away, he had no choice but to face up to his present situation.

'I want to go home, Liu Lian.'

'When?'

'Before the Division Commander gets back.'

She sat up and put her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder. `Are you afraid? You've no need to be, while I'm here. I'll make sure everything's settled. It'll be as if nothing had ever happened.' But as soon as she'd offered these words of comfort, she immediately seemed to change her mind. `Then again, maybe it would be best ifyou did go away for a bit, to spend some time withyour family. I'll fixyou up with some leave. Stay at home until your company recalls you.'

A slow trail of footsteps rang out along the road: first approaching, then retreating into the distance, and eventually fading into silence. They both followed the sound with their eyes, recognizing the tread of the relief patrol. When all was quiet once more, their thoughts returned to their predicament.

How will I live without you, Liu Lian?'

`How will Ilive without you?' Both, by this point, were sunk deep in the sorrow of parting, helpless to understand or resist their tragic destinies. Leaning one against the other, they sank back onto the mat, as if lying down before the implacable advance of fate.

Wu DAWANG RETURNED TO HIS home in western Henan, on leave.

A month and a half of furlough dragged like years in prison. He had no idea what had happened to Liu Lian after the Division Commander's return, or what discussions had taken place between his Captain and Political Instructor, or between his comrades-in-arms, when they got back from camp and field training to find him missing. His escape had gone entirely according to Liu Lian's meticulous plan. At ten o'clock on the morning of his departure, he arrived at the railway station where an official who specialized in arranging long-distance berths for highranking officers was waiting for him. After thrusting a ticket for a standard berth-a scarce commodity in those days-into his hand, the official showed him his special military travel permit. He then put the permit into an envelope and handed it to Wu Dawang, instructing him to keep it safely on his person at all times-even when visiting the toilet.

His mission complete, the tall, thin officer returned to his office, leaving Wu Dawang standing alone in the large waiting room. And it was from this point on, in fact, that he was engulfed by a sense of solitude that descended on him as abruptly as, two months earlier, love had.

For the sake of appearances, Liu Lian didn't go with him to the station. In fact, she didn't even make it as far as the gate to Compound Number One, where the) eep that Management had sent was waiting for him. As they were about to say good-bye, the jeep sounded its horn. `Take this,' she said, stuffing twenty crisp ten-yzuzzz notes into his hand, `and buy your wife some decent clothes, and your son some toys and treats.' He shook his head but she insisted, slipping the money into the leather briefcase she'd found for his travel documents.

The jeep honked its horn another couple of times.

As the tears rolled down his cheeks, she offered him a slight, gloomy smile. `Liu Lian,' he said, taking her hand, `will I ever see you again?'

After allowing him to clasp it for a minute, she withdrew her hand again. `Off you go, the driver's waiting.' He had no choice but to turn and leave.

Though he'd hoped she would see him all the way to the jeep, he told her not to, and nor did she. As he drove away from the compound, however, he saw her emerge from the house. She stopped under the vine trellis and waved at the vehicle as it sped off, a brave, sad smile on her face.

He didn't know that the image of this last smile would dominate his memories of her for the rest of his life. And, during the painfully slow, lonely six weeks' leave that he endured in the Balou Mountains, that same smile was his main source of consolation.

Nor did he know that, during those same six weeks, the illustrious Division he had served in for the last five years was preparing -under pressure from invisible forces within to vanish from the state military system. He didn't understand, either, how devastating the demobilization would be for so many people, or how many destinies his affair with Liu Lian was--directly or indirectly- to change. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that their liaison alone had destroyed an entire Division, without it fate would have dealt a very different hand to his comrades-in-arms. Little did Wu Dawang know--as he fretted away his leave--that his Division Commanders were conducting an elaborately premeditated, officially authorized operation to obliterate from view the Sergeant of the Catering Squad and his personal history.

Amnesia would become the Division's new watchword.

While the Division as it set about its disappearing act--concentrated on forgetting him, Wu Dawang thought obsessively about the barracks, just as the life of a dying man flashes before his eyes, and grew easily impatient with the tedious pace of village life. And every night, once dusk had fallen, he found himself unable to resume normal marital relations with his wife.

Zhao Ezi was still his wife. Admittedly, she'd only ever demonstrated a kind of dull ineptitude in matters conjugal-an ability to speak out on inappropriate subjects at inappropriate moments that had utterly alienated the two of them from each other. Her emotional idiocy had from the outset blighted their attempts at intimacy. But nevertheless, ever since he had promised her a home in the city, she had resolved to engage diligently in nocturnal manoeuvres with him. Though she continued to be embarrassed by sex and would never make any unsolicited declaration of love, or ask him to give her physical pleasure, she would for the most part passively fall in with his own urges and allow him free run of her whenever the mood took him. Since becoming a Sergeant and a Party member especially, he had only to tell her about his latest commendation, about the step closer toward officialdom it had brought him, and she would smile dutifully and let him proceed as he pleased, turning herself into a reward for successes so far achieved, a motivation to carry him through the struggles that remained.

In the few years that they had been married, she and Wu Dawang had spent no more than two or three months actually living together-not much more than he'd spent with Liu Lian. But, in every other way, these two periods of time were as different as Heaven and earth. While his wife viewed sex as a prize for good behaviour, as the regrettable but necessary release of a primal instinct, Liu Lian saw it as an equal, creative exchange of pleasure.

Now, however, the happiness he had shared with Liu Lian lay entirely in the past. It existed only as a memory.

Probably because he was so busy remembering, for weeks following his return from the army, Wu Dawang did not make the slightest move in the direction of his wife. She was still the same simple, unaffected woman she had always been. Though she was nothing to look at compared to Liu Lian, though she lacked her sophistication, she did have certain qualities her rival lacked-youth being one. And as for the idea of sending him off to work in the kitchen-in her eyes, for him to cook her a meal would be an unthinkable humiliation. And she would never have let him wash dishes or clothes. If the neighbours saw him doing anything of that kind, they would think her positively debauched.

But working the land was his responsibility alone, and in this-taking in the corn, binding up the sheaves, ploughing, sowing the wheat, hauling dung, spreading fertilizer and so on-he was never less than diligent. But while farming kept him busy during the days, the nights offered no distraction.

The village of Wujiagou was made up of some twenty holdings dotted across a flank of the Balou Mountains, its hundred-odd inhabitants living off a combination of collective and private farming. On the wasted edges of a collectively owned field, for example, a villager might plant a few beans or sesame for his own family, or he might requisition a sandy bend of a river in which to sow cabbages and radishes. This was done not in the expectation that they would all grow to maturity and yield a full harvest, merely in the hope that whatever survived would help the family to scrape together their three daily meals. Every day Wu Dawang worked away in the fields, recounting to his fellow villagers what he had seen of the outside world. Every evening he would stay up long after his wife and son had gone to bed. Sitting in the courtyard by the house, or out on a nearby hillside, he would stare silently off in the direction in which his barracks lay, as if he were drunk, or deranged.

Perhaps a month after his return, in the middle of one of these nights, his wife nudged him with her elbow as he lay sleeping in bed. `What's wrong?' she asked.

He pretended not to understand. 'What do you mean?'

`Is it because you haven't won any new commendations for the past six months? Is that why you won't touch me? You can have me if you want, as long as you keep working hard when you get back.'

This offer of sex on credit was the first encouragement she had given him, the first time she had intimated any form of physical desire. But he saw immediately that, as before, she continued to bind sex inextricably together with promotion - that she saw his desire for intimacy as a means for bettering her material situation, no different in essence from the hoe or pickax he used to turn the earth. As all this came back to him, his affection for her-such as it had been-withered into insignificance.