The Bathing Women

by Tie Ning

  He said, “Why talk this way? Where do you want me to find her? How did you get so fussy?”

  She despised the word “fussy,” especially the way Fang Jing labelled her with it. She reacted strongly—with panic—to their mutual criticism. To cover the panic, she tried to show her toughness to Fang Jing. She hated the toughness on her side but felt she had to keep going. She said, “Save your ‘fussy’ for someone else. I’m not the housewife in your family.”

  Right then, he stopped talking. She had no choice but to ask him again and again, “What’s wrong? Why don’t you say something? Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

  He suddenly gazed at her as coldly as if she were a stranger. “I’m thinking of my daughter. I’m thinking that I’ve paid too little attention to her since meeting you. I’m thinking that maybe it’s time for me to go and see my daughter. I’m not a good father.”

  It had the sound of self-criticism, but every word struck Tiao’s head and heart because what Fang Jing said about missing his daughter was merely a way to show Tiao her diminished importance and to express his regret about their relationship. She wanted to save their relationship, but, inexperienced as she was, she didn’t know how. Actually, it was a relationship that was headed nowhere, and Fang Jing had just signalled his withdrawal by accusing Tiao of being bitter and fussy. He was tired. She was also tired. He was tired and wanted to withdraw into his unfree sort of loneliness; she was tired but was still frantically willing to dive into the trap.

  He was determined to distance himself from her. He had seen the way she’d matured; no longer the clay that he could mould any way he wanted, she didn’t appreciate his truthfulness and argued with him. She was no longer a kitten or puppy that could only nip, and even when it was very angry, the tiny pain it could cause would only remind you to pet it. She was no longer a kitten or a puppy, but a full-grown animal with fur and claws, everything necessary to cause a big stir. Animals of that size wouldn’t be easily controlled and might even turn on you.

  He backed away.

  Avoiding her, he didn’t take her phone calls or answer her letters. Because of this, Tiao wasted away day after day. She didn’t dare to look at the photographs of herself at the time, where what was left of her seemed to be two large sunken eyes. She suffered from insomnia, lack of appetite, and her hair withered and dried. She went to work reluctantly, and handled her duties at the Publishing House, but the plan for publishing a series of celebrities’ childhoods had disappeared long ago—without her connection with Fang Jing, how could she have any chance of doing it? When she was with Fang Jing, she turned love into her main concern and her profession into a sideline, and now he’d broken up with her as soon as the thought crossed his mind. She had to come up with a topic to work on while waiting for his reply. She considered doing a series called We Reap What We Sow. When the title occurred to her, she was pleased. But then she immediately associated it with her relationship with Fang Jing, which was certainly a we-reap-what-we-sow relationship. And she felt the name was deadly boring. She rejected it but had no other ideas. As she sat in her office, her brain often went blank for long periods.

  Ashamed of herself, she stayed away from Fei. After a while, Fei came to the Publishing House to see her. Nothing escaped Fei; Tiao’s haggard, weakened look told her everything had turned out as she’d predicted; only she hadn’t expected it to happen so fast.

  She sat across from Tiao, who pulled open a drawer and lowered her head, searching through it. Finally, she took out a bag of dried fish and tossed it to across the desk to Fei. She smiled at Fei, but the tears streamed down her face. They had already been welling up when she lowered her head to rummage around in the drawer. She’d kept her head down for a long time in order to control her tears, which Fei clearly saw dropping into the drawer. Many years before, in the alley in Fuan after the movie, when Fei told Tiao, “I don’t have a mother,” Fei had smiled this way, tears streaming. It was awkward to face dear friends, wanting to let emotions out and also wanting to keep them in. Fei had to move away. She stood up, walked to the window, and looked out for a while. Then she plopped her bottom down on the sill. Back against the window, she faced Tiao, her legs dangling, took out a cigarette, and lit it.

  For a moment Tiao felt she was about to scream. Astonishment held back her tears. The office was on the fifteenth floor. Even though the window was closed and the sill was wide, the way Fei sat touched off an intense feeling of disquiet. Tiao couldn’t tell what was off-kilter: The scene outside was stable, the window frame was upright, then was it Fei? Tiao couldn’t say, but she was in the grip of nightmarish anxiety, unreal and real at the same time, just like the dream she kept having. In her recurrent dream, she had a full bladder and had to go to the bathroom. When she finally found one, and opened her legs to squat down, the pit suddenly collapsed and she was stained with shit all over … She suppressed her scream and waved to Fei to come down.

  Fei didn’t. She sat on the window ledge and asked Tiao, “What are you planning to do?”

  “I love him. I don’t know how I’m going to live without him.”

  Fei said, “Do you still think that way?”

  “Yes, I still do. Go ahead and yell at me.”

  “You’ll die if you continue like this.”

  “It’s better to die than live this way.”

  Fei said, “You must be crazy.”

  Tiao said, “Yes, I’m crazy. Let me go crazy once. What else can I do?”

  Fei turned around and pushed the window open with a scraping sound. Wind blew in and lifted some paper on the desk. When Fei turned around, the tears welling in her own eyes were flung out. She didn’t want to cry in front of Tiao, even though Tiao’s emaciation moved her deeply. She jumped down from the windowsill at Tiao’s repeated pleas and said, “I don’t understand why you’re so afraid of me sitting on the windowsill. Do you think a grown person like me would fall out?”

  “You won’t fall. You’ll never fall, but—I’m still afraid.”

  “Tiao, tell me what I can do for you. Tell me.”

  Tiao shook her head.

  “I know what you want me to do. You want me to go to Beijing to talk to Fang Jing.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Let’s not waste time. Give me his phone number and address. I’ll go see him for you.”

  “No, no, please don’t.”

  “Why, what’s the problem?” Fei asked.

  “It’s not that, there’s … I think you shouldn’t act rudely,” Tiao told her.

  “That’s the kind of thing only someone like you would think of,” Fei said. “Even now you’re still protecting him!”

  Tiao began asking how Fei was going to meet him, and it was clear Fei’s fierce sisterhood buoyed up the dispirited Tiao.

  3

  Feeling the unfairness of what had happened to Tiao, Fei set out for Beijing, intent on standing up for Tiao with Fang Jing. However, on her way to Beijing she thought constantly about her uncle, Dr. Tang. The two were completely unrelated: Dr. Tang and Fang Jing didn’t know each other, and would never have a chance to meet.

  In the spring of 1976, two years after Fei started at the factory, Dr. Tang became acquainted with a nurse in the surgical clinic. He’d hurt his hand in a bike accident and had gone there to have it dressed. The nurse cleaned his wound, put on some ointment, and then bandaged it efficiently and carefully. They were colleagues. Although one worked in internal medicine and the other in surgery, they greeted each other with a nod every time they passed. Around the hospital, there was talk about the nurse. Her husband worked in another city and couldn’t get transferred to Fuan, so she’d had affairs with some men in the hospital. She wasn’t too choosy about the men, nor did she mind much what other people thought. At a time when “lifestyle problems” were second in seriousness only to political ones, she wasn’t shy about her “lifestyle problem.” In her department, she was the butt of the jokes of the middle-aged men and women. When the
y teased her with double entendres, her thick-skinned, blunt comebacks would startle them. She often said, “What can I do if a man wants me? Can I forbid him to want me? I can’t stop him, so I have to let him come to call.” In this way, she turned the unmentionable into the stuff of everyday life, like shopping, cooking, and eating. Likewise, her whole being radiated earthiness. Whether they were electricians in the hospital or cooks from the canteen, it was all the same to her. She never looked down on the cooks, so she always got served heaped portions of food—and who doesn’t live to earn a mouthful of food in this world? The servings on her lunch tray, supposedly for one person, were enough to feed her and her two children. Her carefree lovemaking also seemed to make her complexion glow with health. She loved to laugh, often giggling while she lay on men’s bodies, and had never felt that she was less than they were or that she was being taken advantage of; she always believed it was the other way around. This was not the rationalizing Ah Q spirit helping her to deceive herself; it was simply because she was ordinary, practical, simple, and emotionally detached that made her a spiritual victor. She was the vampire, and Dr. Tang’s wounded hand gave her a chance to suck his blood.

  Dr. Tang would sit, while she stood to change the bandages, and she would take longer and longer each time. Changing bandages gave him a reason to sit in front of her, and her a reason to stand in front of him. Whether by accident or on purpose, her knee brushed his. He didn’t react or try to avoid it. She got closer, and her knee pressed against his knee. Next, she used both of her knees to sandwich his, tightly. There were others in the room; not far from them, the unit director was checking a man whose face was twisted into a grimace by the corns on his feet. The nurse’s brazen seduction made Dr. Tang nervous, even though her knees were somewhat hidden by her white smock. But the public seduction also gave him a special thrill; his knee was wedged, his wound, which was not too serious, was being bandaged in routine fashion. He quickly glanced over at the clinic’s beds, but no one was paying attention. It was a moment of extreme boredom, and people often need to do something to relieve their boredom. By the time she let go of him, he was thinking, what the heck, why not have a relationship with her? They lived in the same hospital compound, only two or three dormitories away, so there wouldn’t even be any travel involved.

  Both appeared willing, and hit it off very well, with no expectations between them, just sex and stolen pleasures. Dr. Tang and the nurse mostly did their business during the day, when her kids had gone to school and the residential area was quiet, often disappearing from their offices suddenly for a while, half an hour or forty minutes. The hospital was chaotic all day long, and who would notice? Maybe they’d gone to the bathroom, or maybe they went off to meet the acquaintances whom every doctor and nurse would have. Usually Dr. Tang went to the nurse’s apartment. They’d enter, close the curtains, and then rush to their purpose without any extra words. The nurse had many tricks, and she allowed Dr. Tang to experience many vulgar pleasures—and vulgar pleasures are still pleasures, after all. He often thought about what she said the first time he came home with her: “Now I only leave the door open for you.” Expressions like this were strange to Dr. Tang, but they conveyed a feeling intimate beyond words, which seemed to suit a country woman like her well. The door that would be reserved for him alone also called up a concrete image for Dr. Tang. It was a door that a house in the northern countryside would have, like those he had seen when he served his short internship in the countryside after graduation: double doors made of locust and poplar wood and studded with rusty iron rings. This reminded him of those filthy words those women would howl at each other: “Come out, you slut with a kept han. You shameless stinky dog cunt …” He played with the word “han,” always feeling the word “han” was a more masculine-sounding word for man than other words. When he pronounced the word “han” he had an expansive feeling, vast and carefree. “Han”—man—plain and vigorous as crops. Sturdy and responsible. Was he a “han”? In what way did he seem that sort of man?

  He and his nurse thought they had managed to keep things secret and that no one knew of their affair, but they failed to escape the eyes of the security department after all, though they didn’t have a clue that the security department was on their trail. As they skillfully slipped out and went home to do their business, two security men were planning a raid on them. The security department was very well aware of the nurse and had caught her in flagrante more than once. It was exciting to expose adultery: the plotting beforehand, the stakeout—and then the actual scene of exposure—all gave people a joyful feeling. It serves as the cruelest and most thorough punishment of the adulterer and adulteress; it’s the most open and aboveboard channel for all the participants to gratify their sexual desire. Exposing adultery contributed to the cultural life of a boring era by providing entertainment. However, to bring about the exposure requires a fresh story, and only new characters and a new story could get people interested. The nurse had lost the interest of the security men; she was no longer a new person in adultery who could offer a new story. She was beyond being even “an old bottle filled with new wine,” just those shameless things with the electricians and cooks happening over and over. Someone has to be completely shameless to make people lose interest entirely.

  Dr. Tang was a different matter altogether, and the one that the security department valued. His dubious family background, his position as a doctor, along with that quiet, standoffish manner, were all an irritant to people. If the goal was to humiliate someone in public, he would be the right person; it would be more fun to watch the humiliation of his sort—much more interesting to watch him than a piece of damaged goods of whom so many people were already aware, wouldn’t it?

  One afternoon, someone from the security department came to the residential area, opened the nurse’s door with a duplicate key, entered the apartment, and hid underneath the bed. Another man outside locked the door and lay in wait nearby.

  They patiently waited for the nurse and Dr. Tang. When the man and the woman were enjoying themselves fully, the man hidden under the bed took all of Dr. Tang’s clothes, including his shoes and socks, and dragged them underneath the bed. At the same time, suddenly there was knocking on the door, or, rather, pounding. The people pounding on the door were not waiting for the people inside to open the door; they’d intended to break down the door and enter the house from the moment they started pounding on it. They believed they had the right to break into other people’s houses.

  They broke in.

  Naked, Dr. Tang jumped out of the bed and automatically looked for his clothes—he had at least to cover himself first, but he found nothing. The man under the bed hadn’t even left him underwear. Dr. Tang was really scared, but no matter what, he wasn’t going to let himself be taken by them. When the security men broke into the room, Dr. Tang leaped to the windowsill, and, without a stitch on, jumped out of the room and down into the courtyard. Maybe he wanted to run back home to find clothes to cover himself, or maybe he was just desperate to escape from those men closing in on him. It would have been a lopsided encounter, a group of men in clothes surrounding a naked man. Intent on fleeing from people, he completely forgot there would be even more people outside. Those who rushed there after word spread got a chance to see this once-in-a-blue-moon scene, so satisfying to their souls: a lively nude man who’d leaped out of the nurse’s apartment in broad daylight.

  He was trapped in the crowd, like a cornered animal. The way back home was blocked, and he couldn’t remain here on public display. He could only run, but where to? He first ran in circles in the residential compound and then out of the compound and across the hospital. He passed the laundry room, the canteen, the humming boiler room, and then went up the black craggy coal pile. More and more people gathered behind him, even residential patients with crutches and head bandages staggered along, with the security men at the very front.

  He stood at the top of the coal pile and looked at the surging crow
d. He stooped over, his skinny bleeding feet clinging tightly to the coal pile. His male organ, startled at first and then bobbing along all the way, lay shrunken at his groin like a crumpled, soiled dishrag. The crowd was approaching closer and closer. Where else could he go? Then he caught sight of the tall chimney—maybe the coal beneath him linked him to it. Without thinking, he clambered off the coal pile and ran to the chimney. He reached the chimney, glanced down at his feet, which were stained with coal dust and blood, and then started to climb. By the time he was halfway up, he had slowly composed himself. Far away from the crowd now, he clung to the sky-scraping, warm chimney and looked down at the cluster of people on the ground, who had become very small, and were getting smaller and smaller. No one would come from the crowd to try to catch him; none of them had the right kind of psychological preparation, a preparation for dealing with someone saying farewell to life, embracing death.

  He continued to climb. When he reached the top he felt a total serenity. The sun was setting, and the light was very soft. His view had never been so broad and he had never breathed so easily as now. He scanned the city and the hospital where he had worked and lived, and then his eye paused at the window of the ob-gyn operating room, a window he’d once covered with a blanket. He had performed an operation on Fei that neither could forget. Pressing against the rough chimney with his naked body, he quickly reflected on his life, which hadn’t been very long. The only regrets he had were towards Fei; in many respects he still had debts he owed this poor child. Maybe he should tell her what she had always wanted to know, who her father was.