Serve the People! (4 page)

In the interests of laying out all the relevant facts, it should probably be made clear that not only was this the first time in his life that the country-born Wu Dawang had seen a woman in a silk nightgown, but also that an enticingly feminine scent of Osmanthus flower was wafting sedately out from under its hem, engulfing every corner of the room, billowing up around him, constricting his breathing. Its oppressive closeness was drawing the sweat from his palms. It left his fingers powerless stumps, hanging uselessly by his sides, trembling as the sweat coursed down them. A single glance at her brought the rainbow flashing painfully back, scorching his eyeballs. But just as he determined to wrest his eyes away, it became apparent once more that the breeze's only logical exit point was the neck of her nightgown.

And there-just one unguarded glance laterentirely at ease within the air-filled nightdress, were her breasts, as flawlessly, geometrically round as if they had been traced with a compass, rising up large and white as the mazztoiz the fluffily perfect bread rolls so dearly beloved of the Division Commander-that he steamed for his superior and his wife. The moment Wu Dawang's mind wandered from the generous display of Liu Lian's bosoms to the steamed rolls he so deftly prepared, his hands registered an impulse to reach out and knead them.

But he was, when all was said and done, a man of education, a man who'd been to middle school, a man in whom the army had planted ideals, a yearning for the higher things in life. He was a man who enjoyed the esteemed regard and confidence of the Division Commander and of the army as a whole, a man who had pledged to fight for Communism until his dying breath. And he knew as well as his own name that he wasn't a son, or nephew, or brother, or cousin in this house -S he was just a General Orderly. He knew what he should do and say-and what he shouldn't.

The forces of reason hammered down on his overheated brain like hailstones, dousing his raging fires with freezing meltwater. The Commander's wife, he reminded himself, was perfectly entitled to wear whatever she wanted-whatever it happened to reveal in her own marital bedroom. (Barely a month after their wedding, he recalled, his own wife had taken to strolling around their bedroom naked from the waist up, without a trace of self-consciousness.) Women always remained guilelessly pure of heart in the presence of men, he reflected; it was men with their diseased thoughts who were the problem.

And so it came about that, just as Wu Dawang's soul teetered perilously over a precipice of capitalist loucheness, the glorious forces of revolutionary reason rushed to its rescue. His gaze slid peacefully over and away from Liu Lian, as an eagle's eyes would skim a still body of water, and came to rest on the volume of The Selected Works of Mao Zedonzg that she had been leafing through. `Aunt,' he asked again, `will that be all?'

Displeasure flickering across her face once again, Liu Lian tossed aside the book on which he had fixed his glance. `Xiao Wu,' she asked icily, `what must you always remember when working in the Commander's house?'

`Don't say what I shouldn't say,' he responded, and don't do what I shouldn't do.'

`And?'

`To serve you and the Division Commander is to Serve the People.'

`Well said-well said.' Relaxing her expression of affront, she pulled her thoroughly aired nightgown back over her thighs. `Do you know how much older I am than you?' she asked in more kindly, sisterly tones.

No.

'Only fouryears. Still think I'm old enough to be your aunt?' Without waiting for a response, she took a cloth from her bedside and passed it to him. `Dry yourself off, I'm not going to eat you. Seeing as you can't get it out of your head that I'm your Commander's wife, you'd better answer all my questions--just like you'd answer him.'

He wiped his face with the cloth.

`Are you married?'

`Yes.'

`How long?'

`Three years.'

`Children?'

`We had one the year before last. When I took home leave three months ago, you gave me baby clothes to take back as a present. Don't you remember, Aunt?'

She paused, as if something had suddenly stuck in her throat. After a brief silence, she resumed. `Stop calling me that: I'm your sister, remember.'

He looked up at her once more.

`What do you want, more than anything else in the world?' she asked.

`To realize Communism--to struggle for Communism until my dying breath.'

She flashed a curious, cold smile--like a thin veneer of embers smouldering over ice. She repeated her question, a harder set to her features: 'I'm your sister, remember, you have to tell me the truth.'

He mumbled ayes.

'So what is it you really want?'

'To become a Party official. To have my family transferred to join me in the city.'

'Do you love your wife?'

`I don't know about love, but when you marry someone you have to look out for them, for the rest of your life.'

'Sounds like love to me.'

A silence fell over the room, as heavy as an armyissue tent. The electric fan was still whirring. Whether it was the heat or his nerves, the sweat kept pouring off Wu Dawang-stinging like seawater when it dripped into his eyes. He knew she was staring at him but for safety's sake he focused only on the eau de nil of her bedclothes and the silk mosquito net suspended above. Time limped by as slowly as a decrepit ox pulling a broken cart, until he could stand it no longer. 'Aunt,' he faltered again, 'was there anything else you wanted to know?'

She threw him a cool glance. `No, nothing else.'

'So, can I go back downstairs then?'

'Yes, all right.'

But just before he reached the safe haven of the doorway, she called him back for one last mystifying question. 'Tell me the truth: do you wash, every night, before bed?'

'Yes,' he replied, baffled. 'When I was a new recruit, the Political Instructor didn't let you get into bed if you hadn't washed.'

'So you wash every day?'

`Every day.'

'You can go now,' she dismissed him. 'But remember: whenever that sign isn't on the table, I wantyou upstairs.'

He fled quickly down the stairs. As soon as he reached safety, he turned on the kitchen tap and doused his sweat-soaked face in cold water.

BACK IN THE NARRATIVE PRESENT, then, the Serve the People! sign had once more left the dining table, finding its way this time onto the kitchen work top. Before sundown, Wu Dawang had been around the back of the house, watering the pak choi, radishes and chives. As most of his work centred around the kitchen, it was only while he was in the garden that the sign could quietly have slipped out of the dining room to set up ambush in his operational headquarters.

Just as it had done three days ago, the midsummer sunset burned the plains of eastern Henan with a furnacelike intensity. Despite the immoderate warmth of the evening, soldiers were massed in every available space in the barracks-the drill ground, by the sides of roads and thoroughfares, in the yards that fronted company quarters-to practise postprandial drills designed to Oppose Imperialism and the Capitalist Road, and engage in all manner of educational activities aimed at Newly Reconstructing the Superstructure, and Consolidating the Great Wall of Socialism. On the firm ground of the central plains, a glorious revolutionary display was blooming beneath the sultry summer sky.

To the north, the half-dozen residences that housed the division's senior officers lined up in two rows of three, separated from the rest of the barracks by a red-brick enclosure and watched over by sentries and guards--a small-scale homage to Zhong- nanhai, the high-walled Politburo compound in Beijing. Each of these six small buildings was further divided from its neighbours by a reinforced steel fence additionally fortified by thick green vines. Each was inhabited by one of the six Supreme and Deputy Commanding Officers, each with his own Personal Orderly. Every day the senior officers would assemble in conference rooms to talk over matters of national import; every evening they would return to their respective residences and refuse to have anything to do with each other. Wu Dawang didn't know why they maintained such splendid outof-hours isolation. Perhaps they were afraid that fraternizing in private might foster corruption. Perhaps some mysterious explanation lurked deep within the officers' compound or within the larger enclosure of the barracks itself. As none of this was his business, he paid it little thought. All he knew was that to serve the senior officers was to Serve the People.

When he pushed open the kitchen door on his way back in from the vegetable garden, he was holding a bunch of pak choi that he had intended to stir-fry the following morning for Liu Lian. (She was in the habit of eating green vegetables between meals because, she had told him, they were full of vitamins; after meals, she would crack a few pine kernels for the beneficial oils she said they contained.) But the sight of the Serve the People! sign on the work top seemed to have immobilized him-down to his very fingertips, through which the pak choi now slipped, stem by stem, onto the floor by his feet.

Something, he now knew, was about to happen; a course as inevitable as the burning down of a lit fuse had been set. A passionate entanglement lay in wait for him, like a land mine. But knowing it was there was of no help to him in the face of danger; he was uncomfortably aware not only of the landmine itself, but also of the fact that, sooner rather than later, he would have to tread right on it.

He gazed back out through the kitchen door at the garden where a few late sparrows were still skitting back and forth, their merry chirping casting his thoughts into disarray. He couldn't think how to avoid the land mine; all he knew was that it lay in the road before him. And the worst of the whole business was that, even though he knew full well that stepping on it would destroy him, his reputation and prospects, even as he told himself this, a kind of reprehensible, lustful recklessness was willing him onwards -the kind of foolhardy courage that drives a man on toward a tiger-infested mountain, knowing he is likely to be torn to pieces. This intrepid carelessness sowed in him a fearful longing-the nervous, greedy yearning of thieves before a robbery.

As he stood in the centre of the kitchen, staring at the sign, transfixed by anxious anticipation, he thought of the cheerless sexual experiences that he and his wife had shared, after overcoming their ignorance and self-consciousness, in the course of a marriage that time and circumstance had withered into an emotional wasteland.

And yet it was this verylandscape-of his blighted marriage-which would set into even greater, more glorious relief the all-consuming passion that was shortly to engulf him, which would serve as the tinny overture to the grand opera into which his affair with Liu Lian would swell.

As the minutes slipped quietly by, the blood-red sun faded to a dull crimson smear and the exuberant sparrows left the garden. A locust was concluding a hazardous trek into the kitchen, reaching Wu Duwang's feet with a final hop. Wrenching his gaze away from the sign, he saw that the insect had clambered, exhausted, onto one of the leaves he'd dropped. As he prepared to gather up the vegetables and flick the locust away, he suddenly became aware that Liu Lian was standing in the doorway to the dining room, as still as a waxwork, a paper fan in her hand, that same loose nightgown draped over her. He immediately acknowledged her presence: `Aunt Liu.'

She ignored his greeting, her face blanched by an angry pallor.

'I've only just got in from the garden,' he went on. I was about to come and see you.'

'You got in ages ago,' she replied. 'You've been standing here at least ten minutes.' Furious, she picked up the sign and banged it hard against the work top. She then spun around and strode back across the dining room, into the sitting room and up the stairs, her soft plastic slippers, fashionable at the time amongst the wives and daughters of well-to-do city families, slapping percussively over the floor. Her anger echoed out from the strident clack of her footsteps. A shiver, then an electric current of panic ran through his entire body. Without another word, he picked up the vegetables from the floor, put them in the sink, hastily washed the mud off his hands and followed her upstairs. He stationed himself in the doorway to her bedroom, head bowed like a scolded child, or a new recruit come to confess a transgression to his commanding officer.

'Sister,' he called out softly.

The instant he'd uttered the word, he marvelled at how easily it had come out; as if without noticing he had said something that would change the course of world events. As Liu Lian sat with her back to the door, in front of the old-fashioned dressing table mirror, it was a change in her countenance a faint, trembling resurgence of colour-that fully alerted Wu Dawang to what he'd) ust done. Her face had a slightly dazed look, as if she'd just woken from a dream, while the two curves of her shoulders registered a delicate tremor, like two large apples hanging in the gentlest of breezes. Watching her turn gently around on her stool, he finally became unmistakably aware that those two momentous syllables had slipped out from between his lips.This one word had toppled the Great Wall of hostility that had divided them; it seemed to have set her alight, like a single spark from one edge of a prairie lighting a pile of dry tinder heaped at its other. Wu Dawang contemplated the effect of his utterance, not yet conscious that, like a key inserted into an old iron lock, it had with a single smooth action unlocked the door to love, permitting it to swing gloriously open like the great gate in a besieged fortress.