Waiting

by Ha Jin

  “They are for a children’s book. You like them?”

  “Yes. When will the book come out?”

  He knit his brows and muttered, “It was supposed to be out this year, but the publishing house wants to wait.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There’re too many books of this kind on the market. I’m told that the United States is no longer our chief enemy. So they don’t want to publish the book now.”

  “What are they publishing?”

  “Anything related to criticizing Confucius.”

  “Then why not draw something they want?”

  “It’s so hard to predict the wind. If I take up a project now, by the time I’m done with it, it will probably be out of fashion.”

  “I’m sorry.” She truly felt for him.

  He put the drawings back into the envelope. “It’s all right. I just did these pieces as an exercise. But God knows how hard I worked on them.”

  “I can tell you did.”

  A pause set in, and Manna looked across the lake for a view of the other shore. She was struck by the sight of the massive mountain in the southeast. It suddenly brightened as sunlight penetrated the clouds and fell on its craggy shoulders. She said to Liang Meng, “Wow, look at that mountain!”

  “It’s really pretty,” he echoed.

  In the distance, beyond the train station where locomotives were chugging past and puffing dark smoke, the immense mountain rose, tall, rugged, indigo. The jagged rocks on its ridges pierced the mist surrounding it; a footpath could be seen winding up the precipitous slope and disappearing in the clouds. A few birds were soaring almost motionlessly along the middle of a cliff; an air-raid cave beside the path was visible owing to the yellowish fresh earth dumped at its mouth, which formed a gigantic triangle spreading down the slope. The sun cast a few colorful streaks of light above the pine woods that stretched on the western shoulder of the mountain. Suddenly a dusty cloud arose from a ridge; the birds swerved in the air, soaring higher. A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion. Apparently people were quarrying rocks up there.

  “I never thought the mountain looked so awesome,” Manna said to him.

  “Yes, it’s lovely.”

  “We can hardly see it from the hospital.”

  “Because of the smog or too many buildings blocking the view, I guess.”

  “No, not because of those things only. You just forget that the mountain is there and so awesome. You’re too mindful of things and people around you.”

  She grew thoughtful as he straightened his neck and recited loudly, “The mountains and rivers are so enchanting / They have inspired innumerable heroes to compete for them.” He was quoting from Chairman Mao’s poem “Snow.”

  Manna tittered. He turned, looking at her in some perplexity. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She took out her cambric handkerchief and dabbed the sweat from her cheeks.

  Two boys ran by, each with an iron bar in his hand rolling a steel hoop that was the rim of a bicycle wheel. The harsh, metallic noise jarred on Manna’s nerves.

  She stood up and said she had to leave now because she had to sleep a few hours before her night shift. He got to his feet, and together they went back the way they had come.

  Passing the bridge, she caught sight of a bus waiting at the entrance to the park, so she promptly took her leave without saying whether she would like to meet him again. She hurried through the crowd, striding toward the bus. He followed her a few steps, then stood on a stone bench and watched her disappear among the passengers. He waved at the bus as it rolled away with popping coughs. His upper body rose above the pedestrians’ heads bobbing around him. His neck stretched so long that Manna covered her mouth with her palm to keep from laughing.

  When she told Lin about his cousin’s drawings and his reciting Chairman Mao’s poetry, he shook his head and said, “What a bookworm. But Manna, he’s a trustworthy man, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. He’s so strange.”

  “Look, you don’t have to decide now. Think about him. If you want to meet him again, let me know.”

  “Again? Not for a thousand.”

  A week later Lin received a letter and a parcel from his cousin, which contained a pound of dried oyster mushrooms. Liang Meng wrote that he was very interested in Manna and that she seemed to him very “mature and unaffected.” He hoped they could hit it off when they saw each other next time. Since Lin didn’t cook, he gave the mushrooms to Ming Chen, the new director of the Personnel Section, who had treated Lin’s arthritis with acupuncture and always cut his hair.

  Showing Liang Meng’s letter to Manna, Lin said, “You see, he has good sense. You should write him back.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Just tell him what you think.”

  “Lin, he made me feel like a moron. He really is a character.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I wasn’t attracted to him at all. Why did I bother to meet with him in the park?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He felt a surge of delight in his chest, which to some degree embarrassed him. He turned his face away.

  She went on, “In the matter of love, I ought to follow my heart. Even birds may not become mates if you put them together in a cage, not to speak of us human beings. So don’t talk about looking for another man again.”

  “All right.” He heaved a sigh of relief. “So you think I’m a better man?” he asked half-jokingly.

  “If only I didn’t love you so much,” she said. Two or three wrinkles appeared at the left corner her mouth, revealing a shadow of sadness.

  Manna wrote to Liang Meng the next week, saying that she didn’t feel well these days and had to inform him candidly that she suffered from serious rheumatic heart disease. This misinformation must have scared the man. After her letter, Lin never heard from his cousin again.

  3

  The next summer Lin and Shuyu went to the divorce court again. The day before setting out for Wujia Town, he had talked with her, promising to take good care of her and their daughter after the divorce, so she had agreed to it. He told her that all he wanted was a home in the city.

  They waited almost an hour in the courtroom before the judge appeared. He was a tall police officer who had just been promoted to the position; he was so corpulent that he had no neck. Having sat down on a scarlet leatherette chair, the judge licked his buck teeth, then peered at the couple with one eye open and the other shut, as though aiming a gun. His broad, greasy face reminded Lin of the clay statue of a local god in the Divine Horse Shrine west of Goose Village. With his left hand picking a wart under his nostril and with his right forefinger pointing at Lin, the judge ordered, “Now, present your case.”

  Lin began with a slight stammer: “Respectable Judge, I—I came here today to beg you to allow me to divorce my wife. We have been separated for six years, and there’s no love between us anymore. According to the Marriage Law, every citizen has the freedom to choose a wife or a hus—”

  “Excuse me,” the judge cut him short. “May I remind you that the law does not say every married man is entitled to a divorce? Go on.”

  Lin was flustered. He remained silent for a moment while his face was burning. Then he resumed warily, “I understand that, Comrade Judge, but my wife has already agreed to a divorce. We have worked out an arrangement between us, and I shall financially support her and our child afterward. Believe me, I’m a responsible man.”

  As he was speaking, Shuyu covered her mouth with a crumpled piece of paper. Her eyes were closed as though her scalp were smarting.

  The judge turned to her after Lin was finished. “Comrade Shuyu Liu, I have a few questions for you. Now promise me you will think about them carefully before you answer me.”

  “I will.” She nodded.

  “What’s the true reason that your husband wants a divorce?”

  “Don’t have a clue.”

  “Is there a th
ird party involved?”

  “What that mean?”

  The young scribe, sitting behind the judge and taking notes, shook his head, blinking his round eyes. The judge went on, “I mean, has he been seeing another woman?”

  “I reckon there must be lots of them around him in the army. He’s a handsome man, you know.”

  The scribe chuckled, but the judge kept a stern face. “Answer me, do you know if he’s having an affair with another woman?”

  “I’m not sure. He said he needs a family in the city.”

  “A family with another woman?”

  “Probably true.”

  “I have a final question for you. Do you still have feelings for him?”

  “Oh yes, of course,” she moaned, then broke out sobbing, as the last question had touched her heart.

  “Do you still love him?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, wiping her tears, too moved to say more.

  The judge turned to her husband. “Well, Officer Lin Kong, you must confess to the court whether you have a mistress in the city.”

  “I don’t have a mistress, Comrade Judge,” he said in a shaking voice, realizing that the judge meant to drag Manna into the case.

  “Even if you have no mistress, there must be an illicit love affair.”

  “I’ve never had an affair.”

  “Then with whom will you form a new family in Muji? Another man?”

  “Oh no. With a friend of mine.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Is that relevant to this case, Comrade Judge?”

  “Of course it is. We have to investigate and find out your true relationship with her before we can decide how to handle your request for a divorce.”

  “She has nothing to do with this. We have a relationship of pure comradeship.”

  “Then why are you so reluctant to tell me her name and work unit? Do you feel too ashamed, or do you want to cover something up?”

  “I . . . I . . .” Sweat was breaking out on Lin’s face.

  The judge folded a yellow booklet and with it swatted at a hornet fluttering on the table. He missed the insect, which took off buzzing as if catapulted. He was waiting for the husband to answer the question, but Lin remained speechless, unsure about the consequences if he revealed Manna’s name. He glanced at the judge, whose thick-lidded eyes were half closed as though he were about to doze off. Uncertainty kept Lin from saying anything.

  Having waited almost two minutes, the judge cleared his throat and concluded, “All right. If you had not done anything to be ashamed of, you would not be afraid of a ghost knocking at your door. We cannot proceed with this case unless you provide us with that woman’s name, age, workplace, and marital status. Go home and come again when you have the needed information ready. In the meantime, you must treat your wife decently, like a friend and comrade. The court will check on that.” He smiled with one eye screwed up.

  Lin knew it was no use to argue, so he said diffidently, “All right, we’ll come again.”

  As if in a trance, he rose to his feet and turned to the door, Shuyu following. His right leg had gone to sleep and made him limp a little.

  While the couple were inside the courthouse, Bensheng and a dozen men from Goose Village had stood outside, waving spades, flails, hoes, shoulder poles. They threatened to create a disturbance if the judge granted Lin a divorce. A large crowd gathered on the street, believing the maddened villagers were going to beat up the unfaithful husband. Nobody wanted to miss such a spectacle. The judge called the county’s Military Department, which immediately dispatched a militia platoon to keep order outside the courthouse.

  “So he’s a big officer or something? Still he mustn’t be bigger than the law,” a middle-aged woman said to others.

  “Even an emperor isn’t free to divorce his wife,” a toothless crone put in.

  “Men are all alike, beasts.”

  An old man in bifocals retorted, “A woman shouldn’t be allowed to divorce either, or else there’ll be disorder everywhere. The order of the world is rooted in every family, as Confucius said.”

  “What a heartless animal!”

  “He has no reason to do this to her.”

  “The army should send him back and let him scratch a living out of the earth.”

  “I heard he’s a doctor.”

  “Small wonder he has no heart. Doctors are butchers.”

  To the dismay of some of them, the judge had turned down Lin’s petition and therefore precluded the anticipated spectacle. Seeing the husband and wife come out of the courthouse, some spectators whispered that the couple indeed didn’t match. The husband looked quite gentle, in no way like an evil, abusive man, whereas the wife was as thin as a chicken whose flesh, if cooked, couldn’t fill a plate. If they were so different, they might not be able to avoid conflicts. But that should provide no grounds for divorce, because it was normal for a married couple to have a quarrel or even a fist fight once in a while. A good marriage was full of moments of cats and dogs. It was the uneventful marriage that was headed toward disaster. In a word, the differences between the husband and the wife should only help stabilize their marriage.

  Lin’s face turned bloodless when he saw so many eyes in the crowd glaring at him. Hurriedly he and Shuyu left the courthouse for the bus stop. All the way home he didn’t say a word.

  After the couple had left, the militia was withdrawn from the courthouse. But it took half an hour for the crowd to disperse completely. The ground was littered with popsicle wrappers and sticks, bottle caps, cucumber ends, patches of melon seeds.

  That evening Lin bolted the door of his room and remained inside alone, smoking, thinking, and sighing. He felt lucky that the angry villagers hadn’t done any physical harm to him, and that only two women had spat on the ground and balled their fists when he came out of the courtroom. Had he won a divorce, he might not have gotten home unharmed. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to divorce his wife this year. Evidently his brother-in-law had been prepared to deal with him, and he had played right into Bensheng’s hands.

  The next day, after lunch, Shuyu stepped in with a copy of the county newspaper, Country Constructs, which was merely a handwritten, mimeographed affair at the time. “This just came,” she said and handed it to Lin.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked without taking the paper.

  “Bensheng gave it to me. He said there was a pile of it in the commune opera house.”

  She left the newspaper on the short-legged table. On the brick bed Hua was napping, her thick lips puffing up a little when she exhaled. Shuyu unfolded a yellow toweling coverlet and drew it over the child, then went out to wash dishes in the cauldron.

  Lin picked up the newspaper and began looking through it. On page three he saw a short article about his attempted divorce. It stated:

  The County Court declined a divorce case yesterday afternoon. Lin Kong, an army doctor in Muji City of eighteenth rank, appealed to the court for a divorce on the grounds that he and his wife Shuyu Liu no longer loved each other. But Shuyu Liu insisted that she still had deep feelings for him. Hundreds of people sympathetic to the wife gathered outside the courthouse, criticizing the husband for his change of heart and demanding that the authorities protect the woman. The experienced judge, Comrade Jianping Zhou, reprimanded Lin Kong and reminded him that he was a revolutionary officer and a son of a poor peasant. He said to him, “You have forgotten your class origin and tried to imitate the lifestyle of the exploiting class. The court advises you to wake up before you fall into the abyss of misfortune and cannot get out.”

  Everyone was relieved to see the couple come out of the court still married. Some applauded.

  Having read the article, Lin was wretchedly disappointed. He suspected his brother-in-law might have been behind its publication. The author, who had not signed his name, using “Defender of Morality” instead, must have been Bensheng’s friend. Lin clearly remembered that there had been no applause at all when he and Shuyu
came out of the courthouse. Obviously this article was meant to shame him and prevent him from seeking to divorce his wife again.

  How he hated Bensheng! He decided not to speak to him during the remaining days of his leave.

  “Hello, is somebody home?” a throaty voice shouted from the front yard the next afternoon.

  Shuyu went out to see who it was. At the sight of the tall man with a massive scar on his left cheek, she beamed and said, “Come on in, elder brother.”

  The man dropped on a sawhorse a bundle of sweet sorghum canes, each of which was about an inch thick and two feet long. “These are for Hua, from our field,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have carried them all the way here,” Shuyu said. Yet she was happy to see the sweet canes.

  “Is Lin home?”

  “Yes.”

  The visitor was Lin’s elder brother, Ren Kong. He wore a blue jacket with brass buttons and a pair of rubber-toed loafers. He had heard of Lin’s court appearance, so he came to intercede for Shuyu, whom he regarded almost as a sister because she had done so much for the Kongs. Also, a few months ago he had written to Lin, asking him to bring home some Tower Candy for his children, to get rid of roundworms in their bellies. His three sons had all looked sallow for months; lately his youngest son had a stomachache every afternoon, and worms like thick noodles had been found in the boy’s stool. Tower Candy was a sugary pill in the form of a tiny solid cone with spiral grooves on its side. Children in the country loved it and would eat it as a treat.

  The army hospital had several drugs for roundworms, but it didn’t stock Tower Candy. In spite of the regulation that allowed no one to appropriate drugs for personal use, many of the hospital staff got what they needed from the pharmacy. That was why the three pharmacists each had a good number of friends in the hospital and would receive a lot of gifts on holidays. But Lin was too shy to ask the pharmacists for any medicine without a prescription. He had decided to buy some Tower Candy at a department store, but before taking the leave, he had become so engrossed in completing an article on the topic of becoming “Red and Expert” that he totally forgot his promise to Ren to bring some back. Now, his brother’s appearance reminded him of his word. What should he do? He worried, wondering how to come up with an excuse.