Serve the People! (8 page)

`I said shout!' the Captain bellowed, glaring at Wu Dawang.

`They're all asleep.' He glanced back, a frustrated zeal flickering across his face.

If I tell you to shout, that's an order. There's an extra commendation in it for you if you manage to wake them up.' Then, as if drilling a new recruit, he retreated half a pace, tilted his head back and shouted, `One-two-three

And, just as if he were an eager new recruit, Wu Dawang roared out, with the relentlessly forceful rhythm of the drill ground: To Serve the Division Commander and His Family is to Serve the People!' He looked at the Captain, who beamed with pleasure.

'That'll do. Off you go now.'

Wu Dawang watched the Captain disappear into the barracks, before at last carrying on his way. Behind him, the soldiers he had startled awake were peering out through windows and doorways. Their looking done, they soon returned to their beds, as if all were right as could be with the world.

MOST OF THE SENIOR OFFICERS were already up and awake, each exercising in their private courtyards and waiting for reveille to sound and summon them to supervise the morning's drills. Entering the main compound, Wu Dawang exchanged nods and greetings with the sentry. After saluting the Deputy Division Commander, he took a key out of his pocket and opened the small iron gate that would let him into Number One. Latching it behind him, he turned back toward the house, intending to go around to the kitchen and start preparing Liu Lian's favourite breakfast of lotus seed rice soup.

Imagine his surprise, however, when he discovered that Liu Lian-whom he had never seen out of bed before end-of-drill had sounded-had chosen to rise today before reveille and had seated herself in the yard in front of the house, wearing the army uniform that had spent the past five years folded up in a cupboard. Wu Dawang had never once seen her in it. The stiff scarlet insignia on her collar threw her pallor into even greater relief. She looked as if she'd slept as badly as her orderly. On both men and women, army uniforms came up baggy, ill-fitting, and somehow had a levelling effect: they made the young look older and the old younger; the attractive plainer and the plain more attractive. There she sat in front of the house, her bleary-eyed face sagging with fatigue, as if she had) ust completed Mao's Long March of 10,000 miles, fighting the Nationalist enemy all the way.

Disconcerted both by her presence in the yard and by her mode of dress, Wu Dawang fixed a smile across his face. `How come you're up so early, Aunt?'

His arrival had clearly taken her just as much by surprise. She glanced at him a couple of times before answering his question, in a tone somewhere between chilly and freezing, with another question. Didn't your Political Instructor speak to you?'

He lowered his eyes. `Yes, he did, but I want you to give me another chance. If I fail to give satisfaction again today, I'll take myself straight back to barracks.'

He looked up at her stony face. That one night seemed to have spun a web of fine wrinkles out from the corners of her eyes. She was beginning to look her thirty-two years. A woman in her early thirties, of course, was still young enough to be his sister, to set hearts racing, to possess a ripe allure. But Liu Lian didn't normally look her age; it must have been the uniform playing tricks on her. Or her lack of sleep: perhaps she'd been sitting there all night, staring expressionlessly out across the courtyard. More than anything, he wanted to tell her she looked tired, that she should go back to her room and rest, but his courage failed him. Now that he had rejected yesterday's overture, an absolute darkness reigned between them. He gazed timidly at her, head slightly bowed as if awaiting judgement, which, after subjecting him to a long, steady stare, she eventually pronounced.

'Don't bother with my soup this morning,' she instructed dully, getting up from her chair. 'Just boil me a couple of eggs, then go back to barracks.' Without waiting a second longer for him to ask her anything else, she returned upstairs, alone. Her footsteps, the slam of the door behind her, pounded on his eardrums.

Things were turning out worse than Wu Dawang had expected. The reveille blared over the tannoy, plunging the barracks into fresh fits of overenthusiasm. Wu Dawang reminded himself that he'd been in the army five long years, that he had impeccable experience of Serving the People, that he was a paragon of political correctness, the pride of his company, a model Party member. He now recast his already deep understanding of `Serve the People' into a weapon for overcoming his present difficulties and the destiny they pointed to. After Liu Lian's footsteps had died away, he moved swiftly to the kitchen. There he set a pot of water to boil, broke two eggs into a bowl, whisked them together, added two spoonfuls of white sugar, then trickled the simmering water into the sweetened viscous mixture, beating and turning it with chopsticks as he did so. In much less than a minute, he had ready a piping hot bowl of golden egg-drop soup. While waiting for it to cool a little, fresh inspiration came to him. Taking up a pen and paper, he leaned over the kitchen table and quickly composed a searching statement of self-criticism, acknowledging the serious errors in his understanding of `Serve the People'. He then carried both soup and self-criticism upstairs.

Standing at the door to her room, he knocked lightly a couple of times. `Sister,' he mustered the courage to call out, `your egg soup's ready, I've brought it up to you.'

A listless response drawled out from inside: `Leave it on the dining table and go back to barracks. Ask your superiors to send the new orderly over as soon as they can.'

While not quite what he'd hoped, this reply nevertheless was largely in keeping with the tone of their most recent exchanges.

Only briefly put off, he tried again. `I understand if you want me out of the house, but your soup's getting cold. Will you let me bring it in to you one last time?' Taking liberal advantage of her silence, he pushed open the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, having changed out of her uniform and into a pink polyester blouse with a neat collar and pale blue, straight-legged trousers of the style fashionable at the time. Suddenly, she looked exuberantly youthful again, though the sour, aggrieved expression her face had worn outside seemed to have taken deeper hold of her features.

Setting the egg soup down on the table, he glanced nervously at her. `It's getting cold,' he repeated, 'better eat it quick.' He held his confessional out to her: `I wrote a self-criticism. I'll write another ifyou don't think this one goes far enough.'

She glared at him, ignoring the scrap of paper in his hand. `So you realize you made a mistake?'

`I know. Let me put it right.'

`It's too late now. I want you to go back to your company. I've told your Political Instructor to have you discharged at the end of the year, so you can go home to look after your wife.'

Although this communique was delivered at normal, conversational volume, its meaning exploded in Wu Dawang's head, inducing a numbing dizziness. He'd thought his voluntary self-criticism would melt away all the tension between them beautifully, just as the sun rising in the east thaws a river's dawn veneer of ice. But there she sat, impervious to his efforts at reconciliation. The scene at dusk the day before began to come back to him. He remembered how she'd lain on the bed, naked, waiting for him to take off his clothes and join her there. This was no sudden rush of blood to the head, no act of blind desperation brought on by the Division Commander's absence; it was a brave and long premeditated step into uncharted territory. His cowardice had first wounded her to the core, then planted a deep seed of contempt for him.

Now--now Wu Dawang began to rue what, only yesterday, had struck him as a response of perfect rectitude. It wasn't his forfeiting of the opportunity to sleep with Liu Lian that he was regretting, but rather the cataclysmic consequences that this rejection now seemed to threaten. It is practically impossible to evoke here the genuine terror Wu Dawang felt at the prospect of his glorious future plunging back into darkness--as if at the flick of a switch. He looked up at Liu Lian, his self-criticism trembling at the end of his outstretched arm. The end-of-drill bell briefly drowned the room in sound, then died away. The bleak quiet returned, pressing suffocatingly down on him, as if a tower, or a stretch of the Great Wall or a mountain range were weighing upon his skull.

As tears started in his eyes, he fell to his knees before Liu Lian, who seemed as surprised by his sudden obeisance as he was himself. He knew that he needed to say something else, but couldn't think what it should be. Until, finally, his agitation forced a sobbed entreaty out of him.

`Give me another chance,' he begged. If I don't Serve the People this time round, I'll go straight out and throw myself under a bus, or in front of target practice. Either way, you'll never hear from me again.

Perhaps it was the subtle hint in this outburst that at last moved Liu Lian. Or perhaps it was the sight of him kneeling before her that thawed her icy heart. Although she didn't tell him to get up, she shifted her position slightly on the bed. `And how, exactly, do you propose to Serve the People?' she asked.

`However you want me to.'

`Run naked three times around the drill ground.'

He looked up at her, unsure whether she was playing with him, or seriously testing the sincerity of his pledge. Putting his self-criticism down on the floor in front of him, he placed his hand on his breast. There he knelt, as if in combat readiness, as if--like an arrow drawn across a bow string-waiting for the word to begin his naked sprint.

As things stood, matters had now swung from the deadly serious to the unimaginably ridiculous-to a level of absurdity beyond Wu Dawang's own comprehension, but still artistically consistent with the fantastical parameters of our story. Neither character, in fact, had grasped the full ludicrousness of the scene they were acting out, or of their roles within it. Perhaps, in very particular circumstances, emotional truth can shine only through the curtain of farce, while earnest restraint will always fail to ring true. Maybe absurdity is the state that all affairs of the heart are, finally, destined for: the ultimate and only test of worth.

His hand travelled up to his collar.

`Serve the People,' she said. `Take it off.'

Off came his jacket, the buttons popping one by one, revealing an undershirt emblazoned with the message 'Serve the People'.

'Serve the People,' she said. `Take it off.'

Off came the shirt.

`On you go. Serve the People.'

After a moment's hesitation, he tugged off his trousers, unveiling his athletically muscular form, just as she had exposed herself to him the evening before. Their gazes locked, crackling with antagonistic passion. A lustful light flickered in their eyes-a tongue of flame about to lick a pile of dry tinder alight. And as their desire smouldered through the thinning air of the room, Liu Lian found the exact, the only words that the moment required. `Serve the People-go on, serve them, serve them, serve them . . .

OUR STORY HAS SO FAR followed a course that most readers will have anticipated. And once the curtain was properly lifted on this affair, the performance took on its own, largely foreseeable momentum, even while its finale remained uncertain. As he acted out the part allotted to him, however, Wu Dawang's thoughts would often stray involuntarily back to his passionless past, initially thwarting him in his impulse to wallow, uninhibited, in the mire of sexual bliss.

It remained a matter of some mystery to him how, precisely, his married life had become so claustrophobically joyless. Like a melon plant that produced only shrivelled seeds, his advances towards Ezi never achieved their desired logical result real intimacy and warmth.

Until they found themselves alone together, their wedding night had progressed conventionally enough. The ceremony had been conducted and the party broken up, after a respectable interval, by the village team leader. Once the children appointed to haze the nuptial chamber had been chased away into the evening dark and the room had at last fallen quiet, his hands had fumbled for his wife's body, the excitement of the celebration still upon them.