by Ha Jin
After everybody was seated, Lin went across to the judge and handed him the letter of recommendation.
Following the formality, the judge asked him to present his case to the court. Remaining in his seat, Lin said, “There has been no love between us, so we are applying for a divorce. Please don’t take me for a heartless man, Comrade Judge. My wife and I have been separated for seventeen years. I’ve always been good to her and—”
“Let’s get this straight first,” the judge cut him short. “You said ‘we are applying for a divorce,’ but the letter of recommendation only mentions your name. Is your wife applying for a divorce too?”
“No, I’m sorry. I apply for it myself.”
The judge was familiar with this case, knowing Lin had been involved with another woman in Muji City, so he didn’t bother to question him further. He turned to Shuyu and asked if the husband’s statement was true.
She nodded, her “yes” almost inaudible.
“You two have not slept together for seventeen years?” asked the judge.
She shook her head.
“Yes or no?”
“No.”
“Would you accept a divorce?”
She didn’t answer, her eyes fixed on the wide floorboards, which warped in places. Lin stared at her, thinking, Come on, say yes.
For a minute or so she made no sound. Meanwhile the judge was waiting patiently, waving a large fan, on which a tiger stretched its neck howling with a mouth like a bloody basin. He said to her, “Think hard. Don’t rush to a decision.”
Her brother raised his hand. The judge allowed him to speak.
Bensheng stood up and said, “Judge Sun, my sister is an illiterate housewife and doesn’t know how to express herself clearly, but I know how she feels.”
“Tell us then.”
“It’s unfair for Lin Kong to do this to her. She has lived with the Kongs for more than twenty years, serving them like a dumb beast of burden. She looked after his sick mother until the old woman died. Then his father fell ill, and for three years she took care of the old man so well that he never had a single bedsore. After his father was gone, she raised their daughter alone and worked inside and outside the house like a widow, although her husband was still alive. She has lived a hard life, all the villagers have seen it and say so. But during all these years Lin Kong kept another woman, a mistress, in Muji City. This is unfair. He can’t treat a human being, his wife, like an overcoat—once he has worn it out, he dumps it.” Bensheng sat down, his face red and puffing out a little. He looked a bit tearful.
His words filled Lin with shame. Lin didn’t argue, seeing his wife wipe her tears. He remained silent.
With a wave of his hand, the judge folded up the tiger fan and clapped it against the palm of his other hand. Then he brought his fist down on the desk; dust jumped up, a few yellowish skeins dangling in a ray of sunlight. He pointed at Lin’s face and said, “Comrade Lin Kong, you are a revolutionary officer and should be a model for us civilians. What kind of a model have you become? A man who doesn’t care for his family and loves the new and loathes the old—fickle in heart and unfaithful in words and deeds. Your wife served your family like a donkey at the millstone. After all these years, the grinding is done, and you want to get rid of her. This is immoral and dishonorable, absolutely intolerable. Tell me, do you have a conscience or not? Do you deserve your green uniform and the red star on your cap?”
“I—I’ve tried to take care of my family. I give her forty yuan a month. You can’t say that I—”
“This court declines your request. The case is dismissed.”
Before Lin could protest more, the short judge got up and strode away to the side hall, where the bathroom was. His fat hips swayed while the floor creaked under his feet. His cap still perched on the desk. The policewoman eyed the back of the judge, a faint smile playing around her lips.
It was noon. The sun was blazing outside. Because many people had left the fair, the street was less crowded now. Harness bells were jangling languidly in the distance. A group of schoolgirls skipped and danced over a chain of rubber bands on the sidewalk, singing a nursery rhyme. The cobbled street, whitish in the hot sunlight, had puddles of rainwater here and there. Seeing a young woman selling plait ribbons, Lin stopped to buy a pair for Hua. But he wasn’t sure of what color his daughter liked. Shuyu told him “pink.” He paid half a yuan for two silk ribbons.
Together they went into Sunrise House at a street corner, a small restaurant that offered mainly wheaten food. They sat down at a table by a window. The oak tabletop looked greasy, its center marked with a few grayish circles. A ladybug was crawling along the rim of a glass jar containing a bunch of chopsticks, its wings now rubbing each other deliberately and now revolving like a pair of miniature rotor blades. A waitress came and greeted them pleasantly as though she had known them, saying, “What would you like for lunch today? We have noodles, beef pies, leek pancakes, sugar buns, and fried dough sticks.”
Lin ordered a plate of cold cuts—pork liver and heart cooked in aniseed broth—and four bowls of noodles, two of which were for his brother-in-law. Shuyu and he would each have one bowl.
In no time the dish came and then the steaming noodles, which were topped with starchy gravy made of minced pork, snap beans, scallions, coriander, and egg drops. While stirring the noodles with a pair of chopsticks, Shuyu spilled a blob of gravy on her left wrist. She raised her hand and licked it clean.
They ate quietly. Lin didn’t want to talk, his heart numb. He had tried to hate his brother-in-law when they left the courthouse, but he hadn’t been able to summon any intense emotion.
After finishing his first bowl of noodles, Bensheng broke the silence, saying to Lin, “Elder brother, don’t take to heart what I said in the court. Shuyu’s my sister and I had to do that.” His thin eyes were glittering as he chewed a piece of pork heart.
“I understand,” said Lin.
“So, no hard feelings?”
“No.”
“We’re still one family?”
“Yes.”
Shuyu smiled and sucked her noodles vigorously. Lin shook his head and heaved a sigh.
The tractor driver, Dragonfly, had promised to wait for them at the crossroads by the post office, but when they arrived there after lunch, there was no shadow of the tractor. Apparently it had left for home, so they had to walk a mile to the bus stop in front of Green Inn. Bensheng couldn’t stop cursing Dragonfly all the way.
Manna Wu had been in love with Lin Kong for many years, still waiting for him to divorce his wife so that they could get married. Summer after summer he had gone home and tried to carry through the divorce, but never succeeded. This year Manna did not expect a breakthrough either. According to the army hospital’s rule, established by Commissar Wang in the winter of 1958, it was only after eighteen years’ separation that an officer could end his marriage without his wife’s consent. The commissar had died of hepatitis the next summer, but for twenty-five years the rule had been strictly observed in the hospital.
By 1983, Lin and his wife had already been separated for seventeen years, so with or without Shuyu’s agreement, he would be able to divorce her the next year. That was why Manna was certain that he wouldn’t make a great effort this time. She knew the workings of his mind: he would always choose an easy way out.
The day after Lin was back from the countryside, he went to Manna’s dormitory and told her about the court’s rejection. She responded unemotionally, “Before you left, I knew it wouldn’t work out.”
He clasped his hands around his knee and said, “Don’t be so upset. I really did my best.”
“I’m not upset.”
“Come on, next year I’ll divorce her, whether she agrees or not. Let’s just wait another year, all right?”
“Another year?” Her voice turned rather shrill. “How many years do you have in your life?”
He remained silent for a moment, his chin propped on his palm. Then he sai
d, “After all, we’ve waited so many years. Only one year more.”
She lifted her face, staring at him. “Look at me, Lin. Am I not becoming an old woman?”
“No, you’re not old, dear. Don’t be so grouchy.”
True, she wasn’t old, just in her early forties. Her face had a few wrinkles, but her eyes, though a little wide set, were still bright and lively. Despite some gray hair, she had a fine figure, tall and slender. Seen from behind, you could easily take her for a woman of thirty.
The door opened and Manna’s roommate Nurse Hsu came in, humming “On the Sun Island,” a popular song. Seeing Lin sitting on the edge of her bed, which was opposite Manna’s, Nurse Hsu stuck out her tongue and made an apologetic face at the couple. “Sorry for disturbing you,” she said.
Lin said, “I’m sorry for taking your space in here.”
“That’s all right.” Nurse Hsu went over to her bedside cupboard and took out a large tomato. Hurriedly she walked out, crooning the song again.
Lin got to his feet and closed the door. Silence followed, as though neither of them wanted to talk anymore.
He began washing his hands in Manna’s yellow enamel basin supported by an iron washstand in a corner. He threw a few handfuls of water on his face, then said to her, “I have to go to work. I’ll see you this evening, all right?” He wiped his face with her white towel.
She nodded without speaking.
They both worked in the Medical Department of the hospital, Lin as a physician and Manna as a head nurse. Though they were an acknowledged couple, they couldn’t live together and could only eat at the same table in the mess hall and take walks on the hospital grounds. The hospital’s regulations prohibited a man and a woman on the staff from walking together outside the compound, unless they were married or engaged. This rule had been in force for nineteen years since 1964, when a nurse got pregnant by her boyfriend, who was an assistant doctor. After the pregnancy was discovered, the couple confessed they had met several times in the birch woods east of the hospital. Both were expelled from the army—the man became a village doctor in his hometown in Jilin Province while the woman was sent to Yingkou City, where she packed seafood in a cannery. Then the Party Committee of the hospital made this rule: two comrades of different sex, unless married or engaged, must not be together outside the compound.
The rule was devastating to many nurses at the time, because, fearful of being punished, unmarried male officers in the hospital soon turned their eyes on young women in the city and nearby villages. Most of the nurses resented it, but for nineteen years the rule had been strictly observed. Whenever offenders were discovered, the leaders would criticize them. Because Lin was a married man and Manna couldn’t become his fiancée, they were not allowed to walk together outside the hospital grounds. By now, after so many years of restriction, they had grown accustomed to it.
PART
1
1
Lin Kong graduated from the military medical school toward the end of 1963 and came to Muji to work as a doctor. At that time the hospital ran a small nursing school, which offered a sixteen-month program and produced nurses for the army in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. When Manna Wu enrolled as a student in the fall of 1964, Lin was teaching a course in anatomy. She was an energetic young woman at the time, playing volleyball on the hospital team. Unlike most of her classmates who were recent middle- or high-school graduates, she had already served three years as a telephone operator in a coastal division and was older than most of them. Since over 95 percent of the students in the nursing school were female, many young officers from the units stationed in Muji City would frequent the hospital on weekends.
Most of the officers wanted to find a girlfriend or a fiancée among the students, although these young women were still soldiers and were not allowed to have a boyfriend. There was a secret reason for the men’s interest in the female students, a reason few of them would articulate but one which they all knew in their hearts, namely that these were “good girls.” That phrase meant these women were virgins; otherwise they could not have joined the army, since every young woman recruited had to go through a physical exam that eliminated those with a broken hymen.
One Sunday afternoon in the summer, Manna was washing clothes alone in the dormitory washroom. In came a bareheaded lieutenant of slender build and medium height, his face marked with a few freckles. His collar was unbuckled and the top buttons on his jacket were undone, displaying his prominent Adam’s apple. He stood beside her, lifted his foot up, and placed it into the long terrazzo sink. The tap water splashed on his black plastic sandal and spread like a silvery fan. Done with the left foot, he put in his right. To Manna’s amusement, he bathed his feet again and again. His breath stank of alcohol.
He turned and gave her a toothy grin, and she smiled back. Gradually they entered into conversation. He said he was the head of a radio station at the headquarters of the Muji Sub-Command and a friend of Instructor Peng. His hands shook a little as he talked. He asked where she came from; she told him her hometown was in Shandong Province, withholding the fact that she had grown up as an orphan without a hometown—her parents had died in a traffic accident in Tibet when she was three.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Manna Wu.”
“I’m Mai Dong, from Shanghai.”
A lull set in. She felt her face flushing a little, so she returned to washing her clothes. But he seemed eager to go on talking.
“Glad to meet you, Comrade Manna Wu,” he said abruptly and stretched out his hand.
She waved to show the soapsuds on her palms. “Sorry,” she said with a pixieish smile.
“By the way, how do you like Muji?” he asked, rubbing his wet hands on his flanks.
“It’s all right.”
“Really? Even the weather here?”
“Yes.”
“Not too cold in winter?” Before she could answer, he went on, “Of course, summer’s fine. How about—”
“Why did you bathe your feet eight or nine times?” She giggled.
“Oh, did I?” He seemed bewildered, looking down at his feet.
“Nice sandals,” she said.
“My cousin sent them from Shanghai. By the way, how old are you?” He grinned.
Surprised by the question, she looked at him for a moment and then turned away, reddening.
He smiled rather naturally. “I mean, do you have a boyfriend?”
Again she was taken aback. Before she could decide how to answer, a woman student walked in with a bucket to fetch water, so their conversation had to end.
A week later she received a letter from Mai Dong. He apologized profusely for disturbing her in the washroom and for his untidy appearance, which wasn’t suitable for an officer. He had asked her so many embarrassing questions, she must have taken him for an idiot. But he had not been himself that day. He begged her to forgive him. She wrote back, saying she had not been offended, instead very much amused. She appreciated his candor and natural manners.
Both of them were in their mid-twenties and had never taken a lover. Soon they began to write each other a few times a week. Within two months they started their rendezvous on weekends at movie theaters, parks, and the riverbank. Mai Dong hated Muji, which was a city with a population of about a quarter of a million. He dreaded its severe winters and the north winds that came from Siberia with clouds of snow dust. The smog, which always curtained the sky when the weather was cold, aggravated his chronic sore throat. His work, transcribing and transmitting telegrams, impaired his eyesight. He was unhappy and complained a great deal.
Manna tried to comfort him with kind words. By nature he was weak and gentle. Sometimes she felt he was like a small boy who needed the care of an elder sister or a mother.
One Saturday afternoon in the fall, they met in Victory Park. Under a weeping willow on the bank of a lake, they sat together watching a group of children on the other shore flying a large kite, which was a paper c
entipede crawling up and down in the air. To their right, about a hundred feet away, a donkey was tethered to a tree, now and then whisking its tail. Its master was lying on the grass and taking a nap, a green cap over his face so that flies might not bother him. Maple seeds floated down, revolving in the breeze. Furtively Mai Dong stretched out his hand, held Manna’s shoulder, and pulled her closer so as to kiss her lips.
“What are you doing?” she cried, leaping to her feet. Her abrupt movement scared away the mallards and geese in the water. Shedidn’t understand his intention and thought he had attempted something indecent, like a hoodlum. She didn’t remember ever being kissed by anyone.
He looked puzzled, then muttered, “I didn’t mean to make you angry like this.”
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“All right, I won’t.” He turned away from her and looked piqued, spitting on the grass.
From then on, though she didn’t reproach him again, she resisted his advances resolutely, her sense of virtue and honor preventing her from succumbing to his desire. Her resistance kindled his passion. Soon he told her that he couldn’t help thinking of her all the time, as though she had become his shadow. Sometimes at night, he would walk alone in the compound of the Sub-Command headquarters for hours, with his 1951 pistol stuck in his belt. Heaven knew how he missed her and how many nights he remained awake tossing and turning while thinking about her. Out of desperation, he proposed to her two months before her graduation. He wanted to marry her without delay.
She thought he must have lost his mind, though by now she also couldn’t help thinking of him for an hour or two every night. Her head ached in the morning, her grades were suffering, and she was often angry with herself. She would lose her temper with others for no apparent reason. When nobody was around, tears often came to her eyes. For all their love, an immediate marriage would be impracticable, out of the question. She was uncertain where she would be sent when she graduated, probably to a remote army unit, which could be anywhere in Manchuria or Inner Mongolia. Besides, a marriage at this moment would suggest that she was having a love affair; this would invite punishment, the lightest of which the school would administer was to keep the couple as separate as possible. In recent years the leaders had assigned some lovers to different places deliberately.