by Liu Zhenyun
“Why are you still here, Xiao Lin? And what are you doing? Put it down. I’ll do it.”
Wiping his sweaty forehead with his sleeve, Lin said, “I’m almost done. Don’t worry about it.”
After cleaning the toilet, Lin emptied the wastepaper basket.
When he came back, Zhang had prepared a basin of water for him to wash up, and asked Lin to sit awhile. Zhang poured him tea, peeled an apple, and unwrapped a piece of candy for him. Lin too was touched.
“It’s been a tiring day, Lao Zhang. You should take a break.”
“This young man worked harder than anyone today.” Zhang’s wife said to Lin, “You must be tired.”
“He’s a good kid,” Zhang said to his wife, and he meant it. It looked like the young man had grown up and learned a few things. So Zhang asked him some questions while they were walking down the stairs.
“Lao Sun brought up your situation a few days ago. Not bad. A young man needs to work on moving ahead and not muddle through life as if nothing mattered.”
Lin nodded.
“Treat me like your own son, Lao Zhang, and don’t hold back if you have any criticisms.”
“I won’t. I’ll definitely tell you,” Zhang said. “Sad to say, that’s the way I am. The more I like a comrade, the more demanding I am with him.”
As Lin walked off, Zhang shouted, “Come see me any time.”
“Go back inside, Lao Zhang,” Lin shouted back.
8
Lao Qiao asked for a leave of absence and stopped coming to the office. She also filed a complaint with the bureau, claiming that people were bullying her and she could not continue to work there. The bureau sent someone to the office to see what was going on.
“She’s nearing retirement, so don’t bully her,” the man advised.
The complaint set Sun on edge. This was a critical period, the worst time for anything bad to happen in the office, since the organization section was watching them. Sun was already on pins and needles over the generally cheerless days, and now Qiao had filed a complaint; he could kill the woman. Yet he could not afford to show his displeasure; instead he forced a smile and explained to the man that it was nothing serious.
“It was all over a cricket and going through someone’s drawers. The two comrades had a spat, nothing serious.” Sun added that, as the current head of the section, he was partially responsible for the discord. Promising to take care of the matter, he reassured the man that there was nothing to concern the bureau.
After walking him out, Sun came back and smashed a cup in anger.
“What’s the cunt thinking? She should retire and go home to play with her grandchild. Why is she causing us trouble? Why hasn’t a car run her over?” Then he turned on Xiao Peng:
“And why couldn’t you leave her alone?”
“It’s a lot better when she’s not in. The office is nice and quiet.”
“Quiet?”
After his angry outburst, Sun rode over to Qiao’s place that afternoon, where he put on a smile and tried to talk her into coming back to work.
When he got there, she’d just had a blowup with her domestic helper, who became a punching bag because of Qiao’s bad mood. She’d happened to count the eggs in the kitchen and found they were one short, which was just the evidence she needed to punish the girl by making her work nonstop. The helper normally wasn’t cowed by Qiao, but sensing that her mistress was acting differently than before, she did not fight back, for if Qiao fell ill, as usually happened when she was angry and was laid up in bed, the helper would have to wait on her. Qiao felt better now that she’d vented her anger.
She led Sun into the living room.
“Don’t be upset, Lao Qiao,” Sun said as he set down his briefcase. “Come back to work.”
Her temper flared again at the mention of being upset.
“I won’t. The office has been turned into a zoo and people bully me whenever they feel like it. I can’t work there.”
“Let it go, Lao Qiao. You’re their superior and a party member, so why get angry at the youngsters? Come back to work tomorrow morning, won’t you?”
“I’m superfluous there. The office is like a marketplace, and I’m not going back. I’m going to apply for early retirement.”
“That won’t do, Lao Qiao. The section depends on you for too much.”
She was feeling better, but continued to feign resistance:
“With all those capable people at the office, you don’t need me.”
“We need an old comrade like you to write reports on our office work and compose official documents for the provinces. An official document represents the ministry, and there’s no room for error.”
“You’re right there. Xiao Peng made a mistake last time, which turned us into a laughingstock. She was resentful when Lao Zhang said her thoughts were all jumbled. She’s nothing but a housewife.”
“Put the office work aside and think about personal issues. Lao Zhang has just been transferred, leaving me to take care of everything in the section, so I need all the support an old comrade can give me. There’s so much to do and I can’t do it all by myself. I need the help of an old comrade like you.”
Sun’s plea finally brought a smile to Qiao’s face, but she would not relent.
“I can go back to work, but on one condition.”
“What is it, tell me.” Sun puffed on his cigarette.
“I’ll still be in charge of party matters.”
“Of course. You are the party group leader, after all.”
“If I’m in charge, then I want to reopen the issue we talked about last time. I don’t want Xiao Lin to become a party member.”
Sun was flabbergasted. Xiao Peng was the one who had fought with her, so why was she picking on him? That was preposterous.
“Xiao Peng was the one who quarreled with you, Lao Qiao. Xiao Lin didn’t cause any problems.”
“I’m not looking at it from a personal angle. After what happened, I could tell that he’s two-faced, and we can’t have someone like that in our party.”
“What do you mean, two-faced?”
“He sings a different tune with different people, and he’s gotten real tight with Xiao Peng. I can’t stand people like him. I won’t allow him to join.”
“It’s tough on him, you know,” Sun said with a sigh.
“I won’t go back to work if you’re all keen on standing by him.” Qiao flared up again. “We must have principles when we recruit party members.”
“All right, all right,” Sun conceded. “Come back to work and we’ll talk about his application at our group meeting.”
Qiao went back to work the next day, and everything seemed fine at the section office. Sure enough, she called a party group meeting soon afterward, where she launched an impassioned tirade against Xiao Lin, stressing the need to delay approving his membership in order to rid him of his shortcomings. Sun sat there smoking without saying a word. Lao He made a feeble attempt to speak up for Lin but didn’t want to upset Qiao (strange how they felt they all owed her something when she refused to show up for work). In the end, Lin was the one who suffered the consequences—his application would not be approved for some time.
Revitalized by her victory, Lao Qiao came to work early every morning; no longer a slacker, she seemed to be more cheerful. She even chatted and laughed with the others, a stark contrast with Sun’s low spirits. She talked and laughed with everyone, and sometimes even tried to chat Peng up, but she gave Lin the cold shoulder. Every time he tried to strike up a conversation with her, she would say, “Everyone should focus on doing his job well and nothing else.”
Lin’s face reddened at the rebuke.
He had already learned about the delay in his application approval, but was surprised to discover that the consequence of unintentionally offending Qiao could be so staggering. His diligence at the office was wasted effort, even helping Lao Zhang move. He sometimes felt like throwing everything away and adopting his former, nonc
halant, college student attitude. He could rail against the woman enough that she might fall ill again, maybe even die. But he swallowed his anger when he got home and saw his baby girl. In the end it was Lao Sun, who came to his rescue out of pity.
“Didn’t you impress Lao Zhang? Why don’t you go see him?”
“But he’s not the party group leader. What’s the use of talking to him?”
“Do as I say and go see him. It will help.”
So Lin went to see Zhang, and it worked.
“She should not have done that. Everyone has flaws, and she shouldn’t focus only on yours. I’ll talk to her.”
Zhang went to see Qiao and asked her to correct her views of Lin. She actually listened.
“Don’t mind me, Lao Zhang, I was just venting. We’ll reopen the discussion at the next group meeting.”
“Very good.” Zhang was pleased. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Why would Qiao listen to Zhang? All part of her plan. She had been a troublemaker at work, with erratic performance, even stopped coming to the office for a while, all because she was unhappy with her salary. She was a year from retirement, after a lifetime at the office, and was still a clerk, which she considered an affront. It was not that she wished to be the section head or the deputy; all she wanted was the title of associate research investigator, which would give her plenty of face and something to show her son. But that would require approval from those higher up in the bureau level, including Lao Zhang.
It was an effective move that raised Lin’s spirits—for the moment. Lao Qiao did not reopen the discussion at the next meeting as promised; instead, she voiced another complaint, calling him a sneak. He had gone behind her back and complained to someone at the bureau level. As I said, he’s no good. I was going to reopen the discussion, but this new development shows that we shouldn’t do that. Lin’s application was further delayed, which put him in a terrible mood. He continued to bring in hot water and sweep the floor, and he still talked and laughed with the others, but deep down he was in a funk.
“Don’t look so dispirited, Xiao Lin,” Lao He said. “I wasn’t admitted into the party until I was forty-five.”
“I’m not dispirited.”
But of course he was, and that sometimes carried over at home. He began to lose sleep, as a jumble of thoughts filled his head. One day he was up until five in the morning (but he dared not toss and turn, with the whole family sleeping in the same room), making him so anxious he thought he was about to see stars. He loathed that woman. Yet at work the next day, he mustered the will to fetch water and sweep the floor. When he saw Lao Qiao, he tried hard to chat her up, hoping to smooth over the issues she had with him.
Xiao Peng was also in a bad mood, not over a party membership application, but over a leave of absence that would allow her to spend some time with her aunt at Shijiazhuang.
“What kind of office is this, with this one staying home and that one asking for a leave of absence?” Lao Sun complained. “We might as well shut down altogether.”
“I don’t care if someone else wants to stay home, but I want to take my annual twelve-day vacation.”
“Why can’t you take your vacation in July? Will your aunt be moving out of Shijiazhuang before then? I’ve been there; it’s like a big village. There’s nothing to do there.”
“Yes, there is.”
“No, I won’t approve your leave.”
She could not go without his approval, which put her in a very bad mood. When she saw Lao Qiao prance around in the office, intimidating even Lao Sun, she couldn’t hold back:
“Even Lao Sun is a damned bully, always picking on the weak.”
Nearsighted Lao He accidentally knocked over Peng’s mug, spilling tea all over her desk and into the drawers. She jumped to her feet.
“Are you blind? Why the hell did you do that? Have you learned nothing after all these decades?”
Instead of getting mad at her, Lao He just chuckled as he picked up a rag to wipe her desk and drawers and flick water off her papers.
Peng’s mood improved after this outburst; everyone returned to work and the office resumed an air of normalcy. On the following afternoon, when Peng and Lin were alone in the office, he was still engrossed in his own miserable thoughts. She sneaked up and smacked him on the shoulder. Startled, he was about to explode, but just smiled when he turned and saw it was her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” he said, “nothing, really.”
She changed the subject. “I’ve got two tickets for a three thirty movie. Do you dare come watch it with me?”
He looked around the deserted office. “Sure. Let’s go.”
They gathered their things, but he hesitated as they were leaving. “Will Lao Sun be coming back to the office?”
“Look what you’ve become, all because of party membership. Is it worth it? He went to the ministry for a report and won’t be back today.”
Feeling assured, Lin walked out, just as Lao Qiao returned. He hesitated, so irritating Peng that she demanded loudly, “Do you or don’t you dare to go to the movie?”
Caught in a bind, Lin stood there and, after a glance at Qiao, finally said, “Sure. Let’s go.” He walked off with Peng.
Qiao went to see Sun the next morning as soon as he walked in.
“You see? I was right not to let him join the party. You were away yesterday, so he left hand-in-hand with Xiao Peng to a movie. He even had the gall to say, ‘Sure. Let’s go.’”
“I see. I’ll talk to him,” Sun said with a frown. When he called Lin over, Lin tried to explain what had happened.
“It was about the Sino-Vietnamese war. Boring,” he said.
“I don’t care if it was about the Sino-Vietnamese war or the Sino-Franco war. Just be careful next time, all right? How could you do that in front of her? Don’t you realize the situation you’re in?”
“I do.” Lin nodded. “I’ll be careful next time.” He cursed silently. “What a bitch!” He decided not to divulge the conversation to Peng for fear of causing an argument between the two women, which would bring him nothing but grief.
9
It had been a month since Lao Zhang moved into the building for bureau chiefs. The apartment was nice, which made his wife and daughter happy; but not him, not at first. He felt awkward when he ran into his former superiors when he entered and left the building; life was easier in the old place. But he got used to it as time went by; they were bureau-level chiefs and so was he. Why should he feel awkward? They greeted him, “Have you eaten yet, Lao Zhang?”
In the past he’d put on a smile and say, “Have you, Mr. Bureau Chief?” But now he said offhandedly, “Have you, Old Xu?”
When the others ducked into their chauffeured cars, he did the same. As his car fell in behind theirs, he leaned back and sized up their cars, no longer feeling out of place. The others, on the other hand, were jealous of his good luck, since they all knew how he’d gotten to where he was. It took them some time to get used to the fact that he was now their equal. They were, in fact, a bit put off by the way he acted as their equal and talked among themselves about how he had become conceited and brassy. One day, when he went to visited Bureau Chief Xiong, after some small talk, Xiong said with some hesitation, “Be a bit more humble, Lao Zhang, since you’ve just been promoted.”
Caught off guard, Zhang could only nod, as he broke out in a cold sweat. But when he got home and the cold sweat had dried, his indignation rose to the surface:
“Damn you people! I’m a deputy bureau chief, but you want me to be as humble as a section head. Well, I can be humble, but what about you?”
After venting his anger, he put the whole business out of his mind, took off his clothes, and lay down beside his wife. When he got up the next day, he greeted people and climbed into his car the same as always. After a while the others stopped saying he wasn’t humble enough and accepted the way he was. They began addressing one another as equals, and
once they got used to that, it felt natural, which signaled a tacit agreement that he was one of them.
“I’ll be damned. That Lao Zhang isn’t as worthless as we thought. He might have a pig’s neck, but he has interesting qualities and quite a personality.”
Day in and day out, Zhang led a normal life, traveling between the office and his apartment, like everyone else, until August 2, when something happened, quite by accident, that did not look good for him. Initially, it was known only to a small circle of people, but somehow the news got out and everyone at the bureau heard about it.
Xiao Lin went to work as usual, but something felt different the moment he walked into the building. People were rushing in and out, wearing mysterious looks of excitement. Assuming that pears or chickens were being distributed again that day, he did not give it much thought at first. But when he went to fill his vacuum bottle with water after sweeping the floor, he ran into Xiao Hu from Section 7. “Have you heard?” Hu asked enigmatically.
“Heard what?”
“You really don’t know? Something happened to Lao Zhang. Two days ago. And you still don’t know?”
“Lao Zhang?” Lin was understandably surprised. “What happened?”
“I can’t believe you don’t know.” Hu was unhappy that Lin was so ill informed. “It’s a lifestyle problem.”
“What?” Lin was so flustered he put the vacuum bottle stopper in wrong, and sent it bouncing off the ceiling. When he retrieved it and put it back in the bottle, he’d recovered enough to shake his head.
“Lao Zhang with a lifestyle problem? Impossible. I don’t believe you.”
“You see.” Hu clapped his hands. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
Lin began to waver.