I Did Not Kill My Husband

by Liu Zhenyun

  “Don’t just stand there,” the elderly man shouted, “get back up there and drive to the nearest hospital.”

  That snapped the driver out of his daze. He rushed to his seat, started the engine, and drove off down highway, then turned and roared down a paved village road as fast as the bus would go for fifteen kilometers, to a spot called Bullhead Town, where Hebei province bordered Beijing. He drove around until he spotted a hospital in the western part of town.

  After lying unconscious in the Bullhead Hospital for four days, Xuelian awoke to find a needle in her arm and an IV bottle hanging from a rack by her bed. Never in all the years she had been protesting had she fallen ill, despite all the lumps she had taken, not even a bad headache. The hard slogs had actually made her stronger. Until now, when all the illnesses-in-waiting erupted full-blown. The doctor told her that her bad cold had led to malaria-like symptoms; to that was added gastritis and enteritis. Somewhere along the line she had eaten something that wasn’t clean, and was told that during the time she was bedridden she had suffered from dysentery. Finally, the asthma she had spoken of on the bus appeared to have become a reality. All these maladies were a form of inflammation, which was why her fever hadn’t broken over the four days. Her white blood cell count was nightmarishly high.

  For four days she was hooked up to the IV drip; during that time she had pretty much exhausted the center’s meager supply of anti-inflammatories. She thanked the doctor for treating her, but was already experiencing extreme anxiety, not over the state of her health, but, as she spotted the calendar at the foot of her bed, the fact that she had lost four whole days, days that carried the National People’s Congress toward closing, which was now only four days away. If she didn’t find a way to get to Beijing soon she would miss the opportunity to stage her protest while the Congress was in session, making it ineffective. A tiger would become a cat, a protest would be little more than a petition, and none of those people back in the county or the city would have anything to fear.

  As soon as the doctor left, Xuelian tried to get out of bed for the first time in days, but the minute her feet touched the floor she realized how weak she was. The room spun, her legs felt like rubber, and walking was out of the question. How then was she going to leave the hospital and get on the road to Beijing? She crouched down, breathless. She had to get back in bed.

  Two more days passed, and the curtain was coming down on the Congress. Xuelian would not allow herself to stay in bed any longer. She made up her mind to leave, even if she had to crawl all the way to Beijing. She asked one of her ward-mates to call for the doctor, a slight, middle-aged man with buckteeth; Xuelian had formed a good opinion of him during her hospitalization, but when he heard that she wanted to leave, his anxiety exceeded hers.

  “Are you tired of living? You can’t leave, not in your condition.”

  She couldn’t tell him the real reason she had to leave and had to come up with something else.

  “I don’t have any money,” she said.

  The doctor froze for a moment, then spun around and walked out. He returned a moment later with the hospital’s manager, a middle-aged, heavyset woman with a perm.

  “How much money do you have?” she asked.

  Xuelian reached behind her for her bag, opened it, and took out her purse. All the bills and change added up to five hundred sixteen yuan.

  “What were you thinking?” the manager said angrily. “You’ve been here for six days, hooked up to a drip, and you’ve just about exhausted our pharmacy. Your treatment and hospital stay add up to more than five thousand.”

  “I guess I’ll have to leave,” Xuelian said.

  “Certainly not, if that’s all the money you have.”

  “If I stay here I’ll just owe you more, won’t I?”

  “Get a relative to bring money,” the woman said, seeing Xuelian’s point.

  “My home is three thousand li from here. My family is poor. My relatives would happily come if there was money in it for them, but not if they were asked to bring money to me.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  Xuelian thought for a moment.

  “Beijing is only two hundred li from here. I have a relative who sells sesame oil at a farmer’s market in Donggaodi district. You can send someone with me to Beijing to get money from him.”

  13

  The next morning Li Xuelian rode into Beijing in the back of an ambulance. Belonging to the Bullhead Township Hospital, the vehicle had seen better days, wheezing like an asthmatic old man and complaining with hacks every so often. Normally reserved for the transportation of the sick and dying, this time it was delivering its patient not to a doctor or a new hospital, but to the farmer’s market in Donggaodi district for money to pay her hospital bill. If that had been the sole reason for going to the city, the ambulance would not have been required, since a trip was planned for the next day to purchase medical supplies. But Li Xuelian’s outstanding hospital bill moved everything up a day, thus saving the hospital one trip. For her, this was a departure from her earlier rides into Beijing. The ambulance negotiated several kilometers of country roads before reaching a highway that took them to the Hebei-Beijing checkpoint, where police checked incoming traffic, something she had experienced twice before on buses. This time, however, instead of directing her conveyance to the side of the road for inspection, the police waved them through, despite the vehicle’s unhealthy appearance. It was a trouble-free entrance.

  Xuelian’s planned protest at the Great Hall of the People would have to be delayed by a stop in Donggaodi district. A thirty-something young man, whom the driver called Anjing, or “silence,” accompanied her on the journey. He was anything but silent, however, complaining the whole way about the hospital and Xuelian.

  “I was supposed to make this trip tomorrow,” he said. “I had other plans for today. I keep telling them to get payment for treatment up front. But they won’t listen, and now look at the trouble that’s caused. Humanitarianism is all well and good, but there are always people who will take advantage of you.”

  Xuelian felt like explaining that it wasn’t her idea to be admitted to the hospital, that someone had brought her there unconscious. Nor had she asked to spend all the time in the hospital, where she’d been given an array of medicines and lain there for four days without regaining consciousness. She wanted him to know that she was not a deadbeat and that it had been her idea to go to the farmer’s market expressly to get the money she owed. But she was too weak to get into a long discussion, and since this was likely the only time in her life she’d see him, why waste time trying to win him over? That might work on some people, but not on the likes of a person who would not be understanding, no matter what she said. She opened her mouth, but quickly shut it and stared silently out the window.

  An hour after they entered the city they arrived at the Donggaodi farmer’s market, where her cousin, Yue Xiaoyi, who had come to Beijing seven years earlier, sold sesame oil. He was twelve years younger than Xuelian and had stayed with her family as a three-year-old when his mother was stricken with hepatitis and his father, who had to take care of her, was afraid that the disease might spread to his son. He stayed with Xuelian’s family for three years. Slow in starting to talk, he could not form a complete sentence even at the age of three, and was taken advantage of by Xuelian’s eight-year-old brother, who rode him like a horse. Feeling sorry for the boy, Xuelian often carried him piggyback into the fields when she went to cut grass, and caught grasshoppers for him. He never forgot her kindness, and after he moved to Beijing, whenever he came home to visit, he made a point of stopping to see her. On several of her protest trips to Beijing, she’d stayed in his shop, with never a word of complaint from him over the expense. Beyond that, when she explained one night why she’d come to Beijing, even though he had no idea how it had grown into such a major event, he was solidly on her side. He was a good man, this cousin, and now that she was in a jam, he was the one she came to. She recalle
d that he was on the northeast corner of the market, between a shop that sold donkey intestines and one that slaughtered and sold chickens. Now that she was back, she walked haltingly with the hospital traveling companion to the northeast corner. The intestines and chicken shops were still there, but Xiaoyi’s sesame oil space was now occupied by a man who sold roasted seeds and nuts.

  “What happened to Yue Xiaoyi, the sesame oil seller?” she asked.

  “Don’t know who that is,” the fellow said. “This spot was unoccupied when I set up shop.”

  “Good brother,” Xuelian said to the proprietor of the intestines shop, “what happened to Yue Xiaoyi, who used to sell sesame oil here?”

  “He left three months ago.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No.”

  She next asked the owner of the chicken shop, who was slaughtering a chicken as she walked up, if he knew. He shook his head impatiently, without so much as a glance at her. Xuelian panicked. So did Anjing, her traveling companion. But there was a difference. She panicked over not finding her cousin. He panicked over being taken for a ride. He grabbed her.

  “What kind of scam are you pulling? I’m not going to waste my time following you from one end to the other. I’ve got better things to do.”

  Xuelian’s hands shook.

  “He was here the last time I came. How was I to know he moved?”

  “Stop wasting your breath and give me the money. If you don’t I’m taking you back to Bullhead.”

  Xuelian began to cry, not because Yue Xiaoyi wasn’t where she thought he’d be or that she couldn’t pay what she owed. She was crying over the possibility that she’d be taken the two hundred li back to Bullhead if she couldn’t pay, which would spell the end of her chance to protest at the Great Hall of the People. The Congress was due to close in a day and a half. The market was packed with people, some of whom gravitated toward them to see what was going on with the young man holding an older woman’s arm and screaming at her. Their first impulse was to talk peace, but when they heard that the argument was over money, no one stepped forward. They just stood and watched. Until, that is, a fat man in a rubber apron with half a butchered pig over his shoulder and a butcher knife in one hand walked up, saw a crowd of gawkers, and laid down his load to see what it was. When he learned that the woman had asked after the fellow who had once sold sesame oil here, he took Xuelian by the arm and led her over to the intestines shop.

  “Say there, Ji, where’d the fellow who sold sesame oil move to?”

  “Don’t know,” the man said.

  “Your stall was right next to his. Do you mean to tell me he didn’t say anything when he left?”

  He pointed to Xuelian.

  “See the way she’s crying. She owes some money and is in a real jam.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “How about for my sake then?” the pork seller said, pointing his cleaver at the peddler. “If I hear you say that again, I’ll kick your stall over. You’d be smart to believe me.”

  As he cocked his leg to do as he threatened, the man ran out from behind his counter and wrapped his arms around the pork seller.

  “Take it easy, Brother Zhang. Three months ago he got into a fight with the chicken seller, and word has it he moved to Yuegezhuang. But that’s all I heard.” He glared at Li Xuelian. “Now, since I answered your question, how about buying some of my intestines?”

  Yuegezhuang, located in the northern suburbs, also boasted a farmer’s market. Hearing that Yue Xiaoyi hadn’t left Beijing calmed Xuelian considerably. She also realized that she should have made it worth the peddler’s while to give her the information she wanted. She rewarded the pork seller with profuse thanks, but he waved her off.

  “I hate seeing people pick on the poor.”

  He shouldered his load and walked off.

  The ambulance drove off on its hour-long drive to Yuegezhuang, where Xuelian and Anjing went into the market to look for Xiaoyi. Since the Donggaodi peddler hadn’t said where in the market Yue had set up shop, they had to check every stall from east to west and north to south. No Yue Xiaoyi, in fact, not a single seller of sesame oil. Worried that they hadn’t conducted a thorough search the first time, she and Anjing canvassed the place again. Xuelian experienced another panic attack, afraid that her cousin had moved a second time or that the intestines seller had lied to her. But none of that really mattered; Yue was not at the farmer’s market. Now she didn’t know what to do. Anjing’s sense of restlessness matched hers.

  “Is this going to get done or isn’t it? I don’t have time to keep searching for people!”

  He looked at his watch.

  “It’s already noon, and all we’ve done is talk. I still have to buy medical supplies. No more looking. I’m taking you back to Bullhead and turning you over to the hospital manager. You can work things out with her.”

  This increased Xuelian’s anxieties, which stemmed both from her inability to find Yue Xiyi and the further delay in her attempt to stage her protest. Noon already. Little more than a day remained before the Congress would end. Time, as the saying goes, waits for no one. At that moment she made up her mind: whether or not she found her cousin and whether or not she was able to pay the money she owed, she was not going back to the Bullhead Hospital with Anjing. But how was a woman in her fifties, so ill she could not walk without breaking out in a sweat, going to free herself from a healthy young man standing right next to her? At that moment she heard a shout behind her:

  “Ribbon fish from Zhoushan, special close-out sale, fifteen yuan a catty.”

  That voice, it sounded familiar. She spun around to see who it was. There at a peddler’s stall a man in rubber boots, with sleeve protectors on both arms and rubber gloves, was separating frozen ribbon fish with a screwdriver. It was her cousin, Yue Xiaoyi. She’d found him; her legs turned weak. He’d moved to Yuegezhuang after all, and was now selling fish instead of sesame oil. Once her legs were firmly under her again, she shouted:

  “Xiaoyi.”

  He looked up to see who was calling him. It took a moment, but he recognized Xuelian. That was a shocker. Not that she’d trailed him from one place to another, but:

  “How did you get so skinny, Sis? I barely recognized you.”

  As tears rained from her eyes, she said:

  “I’ve been sick. But you, why are you selling fish now?”

  “The price of sesame seeds spiked this year, so I couldn’t make a living selling the oil.”

  He led his cousin over to a nearby wall.

  “Are you here to protest again?”

  She nodded.

  “No wonder. People from the county have been around here many times. Every three days or so lately. Yesterday they came by twice.”

  The news unsettled Xuelian, who knew she had to move on before they found her.

  “I have to leave.”

  She turned to walk away just as Anjing ran up and took her by the arm.

  “You can’t leave. Where’s our money?”

  She’d momentarily forgotten that she’d come looking for Xiaoyi because she needed money. So she told her cousin, in detail, what had happened to her in Bullhead Township, how she owed the hospital there five thousand yuan, and that she’d only paid them two hundred. Xiaoyi turned to Anjing.

  “I’ll pay you what my cousin owes you,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “But I don’t have that much on me.”

  “Then don’t even think of leaving,” he said to Xuelian.

  “Wait here, both of you,” Xiaoyi said. “I’ll go to the bank.”

  He asked a pig-intestines peddler in the next stall to look after his fish stand while he was gone, took off his rubber gloves and sleeve protectors, and rushed out of the farmer’s market, leaving Xuelian to wait there with Anjing. Not five minutes later, Wang Gongdao led his men into the area. When they spotted Xuelian, their gleeful surprise was as great as a hungry fly seeing blood. They quickly surrounded her. Since s
he had committed no crime, they could not cuff her. A breathless Wang Gongdao was smiling.

  “Cousin,” he said, “you’ve led us on a merry chase.”

  Ignoring him, she turned to Anjing.

  “It’s all your fault,” she complained. “You’ve ruined my chances.”

  Anjing stood there wondering what was going on. Did she owe these people money too?

  “Get in line,” he said to Wang, ignoring Xuelian. “You can deal with her after she’s paid what she owes us.”

  He had no idea who these people were, and before Wang had time to respond, the heavyset Hou stepped up and shoved Anjing.

  “Step aside,” he said. “If she owes you money, take her to court. We’re on official business. Understand?”

  Thinking he was confronted by the police, Anjing stood there blinking, not daring to say another word. Normally a chatterbox, now that he was up against someone harder than him, he kept his mouth shut.

  “Cousin,” Wang said to Xuelian with a smile, “come back with me instead of protesting, what do you say? We knew you’d come to see Xiaoyi sooner or later, since he’s family.”

  Xuelian stiffened her neck.

  “You wouldn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t going to protest. In the process you’ve driven me to this. If you won’t let me do it, I’ll kill myself right in front of you.”

  As Wang turned and signaled someone in the distance, she saw some men emerge from a marked car and run toward her. She assumed they were police, but when they were close enough to make out, she saw that one of them was her son, Youcai. She was stunned at the sight of the son who had grown up with his father, but had developed a fondness for his mother as a young adult. The year before, when they’d met on the street, he’d handed her two hundred yuan. Her first thought was that he was being held hostage by the court as a way to force her to go back with them. But that did not seem likely. Though she favored her son over her daughter, her daughter at least had grown up with her. They shouldn’t have tried to keep her from what she wanted to do by turning her son into a pawn. But in all her dealings with these people, they had never shied from pulling tricks out of their bag.