Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

  He fiercely pounded the table and said, “Then call your family representative Madame Li up here and tell her to run over and report to your auntie.”

  “One of these days I’ll report it myself. I don’t think there’s another man in all the world as unfeeling as you. Since they annoy you, it should be enough that they don’t come over here. But you won’t even let me go see them. You really want me to sever ties with all my close relatives? With that loner temperament of yours, you should never have married me. What a pity that women can’t pop up out of the mud or drop down from the sky, because no one but a person like that with neither father nor mother could ever suit your temperament so well. Huh, I can see it all now. We Suns have no power or influence, so we incur your dislike. If you ran into Su Wen-wan’s or T’ang Hsiao-fu’s father, I can’t believe you wouldn’t crawl over on your hands and knees to pay respects.”

  Hung-chien shook with rage, “If you say any more nonsense, I’ll hit you.”

  Seeing his livid face and reddened ears, Jou-chia realized her remarks had gone too far and kept silent.

  After a moment’s pause, Hung-chien said, “You’ve gotten me to the point where I don’t even dare go to my own family! Seeing your aunt every day in your office isn’t enough? Since your aunt is so wonderful, you might as well just go over there and stay.”

  Jou-chia muttered, “She’s nicer to me than you are. And the people in my family are nicer than the ones in yours.”

  Hung-chien replied with a hiss.

  “You can hiss all you like,” said Jou-chia. “My family is nicer than yours, and I happen to want to go home often. You can’t stop me.”

  Without any recourse against his wife’s obstinacy, he glared at her for a long time, then flung open the door to go out and ran smack into Mama Li. The push nearly sent her reeling down the stairs. “Have you overheard enough?” he asked. “Go gossip. I’m not afraid of you.”

  When he returned from the newspaper office, Jou-chia was already in bed, and neither of them spoke. The next day was the same. On the third day Hung-chien could stand it no longer, and during breakfast he knocked his bowl and chopsticks noisily around on the table. Jou-chia ignored him as before. Acknowledging defeat, Hung-chien broke the silence first: “Are you dead?”

  “You speaking to me?” asked Jou-chia. “No, I’m not dead yet. I wouldn’t give you the peace and quiet! I was watching you pound the chopsticks and slam your bowl around in such a display of skill!”

  Hung-chien sighed, “Sometimes I really wish I could sock you one.”

  Jou-chia threw him a glance and said, “I can see it’s only a matter of time before you let go and hit me.”

  In this way the two more or less made up. But often when making up after a major quarrel people will still go back and pick out little points to argue over. The man will say, “I wouldn’t have gotten mad if you hadn’t said such and such,” and the woman will say, “Then why did you have to bring it up first?” If they can’t clear it up, there’ll be another tiff.

  After Hung-chien had begun working at the newspaper office, he met an old acquaintance, Mrs. Shen, with whom he had had tea at Su Wen-wan’s. She was still editing the Family and Women section for which Chao Hsin-mei had then recommended her to the agency. Now she was editing the Culture and Arts section as well. She was as plump as ever and smelled just the same. Only her style of dress was not as Gallic as when she had first returned from abroad, and the French in her speech had dropped off. She had met too many people in the past year and had long since forgotten Hung-chien. After he introduced himself, she said feelingly in a sweet girlish voice, “Oh, yes! Now I remember! How time does fly! You look just the same, which is why I thought your face was so familiar. As for me, I’ve aged so much in this last year! Mr. Fang, you just don’t know what I’ve been through!”

  Hung-chien dutifully assured her that she hadn’t aged. She then asked him if he’d seen Mrs. Ts’ao lately, and he told her he had seen her in Hong Kong.

  “My goodness!” she said, slapping her forehead. “See how stupid I am! I got a letter from Wen-wan last week. She wrote that she’d seen you and had a good talk. She also asked me to do something for her, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time. There’re just so many little things I have to do every day!”

  Hung-chien chuckled to himself over her lies and asked her the whereabouts of Mr. Shen. She raised her eyebrows, rounded her eyes, and put a finger to her lips in a thoroughly French expression; then taking a look around to see that no one was paying attention, she came up close and whispered, “He’s gone into hiding. He’s too well known. The Japanese and the puppet government in Nanking7 are all trying to get him to come out and work for them. Don’t tell anyone!”

  Hung-chien held his breath, nearly suffocating in the process, and hurriedly took a few steps backward, repeatedly assuring her he wouldn’t. He mentioned it to Jou-chia when he got home, marveling at what a small world it was. Of all things, after running into Su Wen-wan, now he had seen Mrs. Shen too.

  Jou-chia said coldly, “Yes, the world is small. Just wait. You’ll run into someone else too.”

  Not understanding, Hung-chien asked whom she meant.

  Jou-chia said with a smile, “Need I say it? You know whom I mean. Hey, don’t blush.”

  He then realized she was referring to T’ang Hsiao-fu and said with a sneer, “What rubbish! It never even crossed my mind in a dream. So what if I did meet her?”

  “Ask yourself.”

  He sighed, “You, you little fool, are the only one who can’t get her out of your mind! I’ve long since forgotten her. She’s probably married, become a mother, and doesn’t even remember me any more. Now when I think how serious I used to be about love before I got married, it really seems naïve. The fact is, no matter whom you marry, after you’re married, you’ll find it’s not the same person but someone else. If people knew that before marriage they could skip all that stuff about courtship, romance, and so on. When two people get to know each other and fall in love, they both conceal their true faces so that the whole time up until they get married they still don’t know each other. It’s the old-fashioned marriages that are more straightforward. Neither party gets to know the other before marriage.”

  Jou-chia said, “Are you through declaiming? I just have two things to say: First, you have absolutely no heart. To this very day I still take love seriously. Second, you really are your father’s son, getting more and more obstinate.”

  He said, “What do you mean ‘have absolutely no heart’? Don’t I treat you pretty well? Besides, I was only speaking in general. You’re so small-minded that you have to apply everything to yourself. You could say you hadn’t discovered my real self before you got married either, and now you know me in my true colors.”

  “Of all the drivel you’ve been spouting,” said Jou-chia, “that’s the one thing worth hearing.”

  “You’re very young,” said Hung-chien. “When you get to be my age, you’ll understand all that.”

  “Don’t go flaunting your age,” said Jou-chia. “You’re just over thirty! Flaunt your age and you must not have much longer to live. I’m not even thirty yet, and you’ve infuriated me to death already.”

  He laughed. “Jou-chia, you’re so civilized in everything else, but that remark is backward. That’s like an old-fashioned woman who threatens her husband with suicide. Instead of using a knife, a rope, or arsenic, you use an abstraction like fury. What’s that—spiritual civilization?”

  Jou-chia said, “Phooey! If I want to die, I’ll die. Whom would I want to threaten or frighten? But don’t get so happy. I won’t forgive you.”

  “There you go, taking it seriously again,” said Hung-chien. “If we keep up, we’ll end up quarreling. Go to sleep. You have to get up early tomorrow to go to work. Close your eyes, such lovely eyes. If you don’t get enough sleep, they’ll be swollen tomorrow, and your aunt will come over and question me about it.” As he spoke, he patted her a few times a
s though patting a child to sleep.

  When his wife had fallen asleep, he began reflecting on how cold and indifferent he felt now at the thought of possibly meeting Tang Hsiao-fu again. If he really did meet her, it would be just the same. That was because the self, which had loved her a year ago, had long since died. The selves which had loved her, which had been afraid of Su Wen-wan, and which had been seduced by Miss Pao, had all died one after another. He had buried some of his dead selves in his memory, erected a monument to them, and occasionally paid them homage, such as by a moment of feeling for T’ang Hsiao-fu. Others seemed to have died by the wayside and been left there to rot and decompose or be devoured by birds and beasts—but never to be completely obliterated, such as the self which had bought the diploma from the Irishman.

  More than two months after Hung-chien had begun working at the newspaper office, he saw a notice in the newspaper one morning placed by Mrs. Shen under her usual pen name. The general purport of it was that she had always devoted herself to journalism and placed herself above politics. All the tales being circulated about her abroad were but wild and unfounded rumor, and so on and so forth. Filled with apprehension, he asked around at the newspaper office and then learned that her husband had taken a post with the puppet government, and she too had gone to Nanking. He remembered the warning Hsin-mei had given him in Hong Kong and wrote to tell Hsin-mei about the incident, asking if he had gotten married and why he hadn’t written for so long.

  When Hung-chien discussed the matter with his wife on his return home, she too was distressed by it, but said, “It’s just as well Mrs. Shen’s gone. The section she edited wasn’t very exciting. The things she herself wrote were always the same old stuff, shifted around from one day to the next. At least it saved trouble. Newspaper readers throw them out when they’re through anyway. They wouldn’t pull out an old paper to compare. I guess she didn’t want to publish a collection, because the several dozen articles only amounted to one. It would really have been a big joke. At that rate I could edit Family and Women myself. You can take her place and edit Culture and Arts.”

  Hung-chien said, “I’m not so sure of myself as you, dear wife. You don’t know how hard it is to solicit manuscripts. Let me just confess something to you: That column ‘What Every Housewife Should Know’ in the Family and Women section, stuff like ‘Sesame oil sprinkled on soy sauce will keep it from becoming moldy, etc.’ was written by me.”

  Jou-chia doubled up with laughter and said, “That kills me! What do you know about sesame oil added to soy sauce! Did you get that from Mama Li? I’d never noticed it.”

  Hung-chien said, “Which is why you can’t run the house properly. Mama Li should take me as her teacher! Mrs. Shen didn’t have any manuscripts, so she came complaining to me, saying that my Information Office ought to furnish some material. I was afraid of getting a whiff of her, so to get rid of her faster I agreed. I found an old copy of the Housewife’s Handbook and copied out six or seven lines every week, then gave them to her before she came. You don’t have her body odor. If you wanted manuscripts, I’d be the first one to ignore you.”

  Jou-chia frowned and said, “Your remarks are nasty; they make me sick. If she heard what you said, she’d certainly have you arrested and taken to 76 West Hu Street for a beating.”8

  His wife’s jest immediately made him turn serious as he said, “I don’t think we can stay here any longer. Now you understand why I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

  One Saturday three weeks later, Hung-chien returned home very early. Jou-chia said, “There was an air mail express letter from Chao Hsin-mei. I thought it was something important, so I opened it and read it. Sorry.”

  Changing into his slippers, Hung-chien said, “Oh, a letter from him! Let me have it. What did he say?”

  “What’s the big hurry? Nothing important. He wrote an express letter and requested a receipt. I had to take forever to find your chop [his seal to stamp the receipt], the mailman downstairs yelling for me to hurry up, getting me all flustered! Next time don’t leave your chop just anywhere. Keep it in one place so it can be found easily. Is this the first time he’s written you since we returned to Shanghai? I don’t think there’s any need to send an express letter but to write more often.”

  Hung-chien knew she was somewhat hostile toward Hsin-mei, and so he ignored what she said. The letter was very simple: It said that he had received all his letters, and that he knew all about Mrs. Shen’s affair, that Shanghai was going steadily downhill, that Hung-chien had best come to Chungking as soon as possible, and that Hung-chien might work in the same organization. Moreover, Hung-chien could go to the Shanghai office of the company that transported their luggage last time and see Manager Hsüeh to discuss the details of the itinerary and find traveling companions. The letter ended with the line: “My wife has asked me to send regards to yours.”

  Like a man groping about in the dark who suddenly sees the light, Hung-chien was inwardly pleased, but didn’t show his pleasure on his face. He merely said, “That devil! He never said a word about getting married or even sent a wedding picture. I’d really like you to see this Mrs. Chao.”

  “I can imagine what she’s like without seeing her. I’ve had the honor of meeting all the women Hsin-mei has fallen for, like Mrs. Wang and Miss Su. She’s probably the same type.”

  “That’s not so, which is why I hope he’ll send a picture for you to see.”

  “We gave him our wedding pictures. I don’t mean to sow discord, but it seems to me this great friend of yours doesn’t hold you very dear. You’ve written him four or five letters, haven’t you? Now finally he half-heartedly sends you a letter like this, not even letting you know he got married. He’s rich and has lots of friends. If I were you and hadn’t gotten a single reply from him, I wouldn’t ever have written him a second time.”

  She had touched on a sore point, and he said evasively, “You always have to exaggerate. I’ve never written him more than three letters. He didn’t let me know that he’d gotten married, because he was afraid I’d send a gift. He understands that I’m poor and realizes that since we received a generous wedding gift from him, we’d want to give him something in return.”

  Jou-chia laughed drily and said, “Oh, so that’s it! Only you understand what he means. So you’re good friends after all, with mutual understanding! Still, a wedding isn’t like a funeral. You can always send something later. He should simply have left out the words ‘my wife’ in the letter. There’s still time if you want to send him something.”

  Having been bested in the argument, Hung-chien could only say grouchily, “Then you take care of it for me.”

  “I’ve no time,” said Jou-chia, brushing her hair.

  “You were still human when you went out this morning,” said Hung-chien. “How did you manage to turn into a porcupine?”

  “I’m a porcupine. Don’t talk to the porcupine.”

  After a moment of silence, the porcupine herself spoke, “Hsin-mei urged you to go to Chungking in his letter. How are you going to answer him?”

  “I’d like to go all right,” said Hung-chien hesitantly, “but I’ll have to give it some careful thought.”

  “What about me?” she said, her face expressionless. It was like a window with the Venetian blinds drawn. Hung-chien knew this was the lull before the storm.

  “It’s because of you that I’m so hesitant. As for Shanghai, I really don’t want to stay here any longer, and there’s no future for me at the newspaper office. Half of the support for this family comes from you. . . .” He thought this remark would ease the atmosphere. “Since Hsin-mei has been nice enough to make the offer, I’d like very much to go try my luck in the interior again, but the matter isn’t decided. There’d be a lot of trouble involved in settling a family in a new place. You remember, of course, the job we had finding a place when we came back to Shanghai this time. Hsin-mei’s a married man. It won’t be like it was before. My plan is for me to go to Chungk
ing first by myself, and once I’ve settled things to come and get you. What do you think? Of course, it’ll require deliberation. I haven’t decided yet. It wouldn’t hurt if you tell me what you think.”

  During all this, he was waiting for her to interrupt him at any moment; he hadn’t expected her to keep silent and let him speak his piece. Her silence made him feel more apprehensive as he kept talking.

  “I’ve listened to all your fancy talk. Let’s just come right out with it. After four months of marriage, you’re tired of your ugly, mean old wife—whom you never loved in the first place—and now that you have a chance to go far away, why not get a change of air? Your good friend is your savior. He’s the one who pushed you to get married—it galls me to think about it—and now he’s the one who helps you regain your freedom. Go on then! He’s making you a high official, and he just may even find you an official’s wife! I’m not worthy.”

  Hung-chien clucked and said, “Where’d you get such nonsense! You really are hypersensitive.”

  “I’m not the least bit hypersensitive. You go right ahead. I certainly won’t stand in your way. If you think for a minute I’ll let your friend say that after using ‘every trick and scheme’ to get you, now I won’t let you out of my sight, or that I’ll let you say your family burdens got in the way of your future, humph, I won’t! I eat out of my own pocket, and I’ve never asked you to support me. I’m not your burden. Once you leave, whether you come back or not is entirely up to you.”

  He sighed, “Well, then—” Jou-chia was expecting him to say “I won’t go,” and was not prepared when he said, “I’ll take you along. That’ll settle it.”

  “I have a perfectly good job here. Why should I give it up for no reason and go with you? Once we get there, if neither of us finds a job, can we ask Hsin-mei to support us? If you get a job and I don’t, heaven knows how much you’ll bully me then! Hsin-mei’s letter said nothing about finding a high position for me. What am I supposed to do there? Be a socialite? I’m too ugly, I’ve no qualifications—except to serve the official’s wife as a maid.”