J的个人生活

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town many times, but she had always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce. Year after year, they went to Wujia Town and came back with the same marriage license issued to them by the county’s registry office twenty years before.

This summer Lin Kong returned with a new letter of recommendation for divorce, which had been provided for him by the army hospital in Muji City, where he served as a doctor. Once more he planned to take his wife to the courthouse and end their marriage. Before he left for home, he had promised Manna Wu, his girlfriend at the hospital, that this time he would try his best to make Shuyu stick to her word after she agreed to a divorce.

As an officer, he had a twelve-day leave each year. Since the trip home took a whole day–he had to change trains and buses at two towns–he could stay in the countryside only ten days, saving the last day for the return trip. Before taking this year’s leave, he had thought that once home, he would have enough time to carry out his plan, but by now a whole week had passed and he had not yet mentioned a word to his wife about the divorce. Whenever the subject came to his tongue, he postponed it for another day.

Their adobe house was the same as two decades before, four large rooms under a thatched roof and three square windows facing south with their frames painted sky blue. Lin stood in the yard facing the front wall while flipping over a dozen mildewed books he had left to be sunned on a stack of firewood. Sure thing, he thought, Shuyu doesn’t know how to take care of books. Maybe I should give them to my nephews. These books are of no use to me anymore.

Beside him, chickens were strutting and geese waddling. A few little chicks were passing back and forth through the narrow gaps in the paling that fenced a small vegetable garden. In the garden pole beans and long cucumbers hung on trellises, eggplants curved like ox horns, and lettuce heads were so robust that they covered up the furrows. In addition to the poultry, his wife kept two pigs and a goat for milk. Their sow was oinking from the pigpen, which was adjacent to the western end of the vegetable garden. Against the wall of the pigpen a pile of manure waited to be carted to their family plot, where it would go through high-temperature composting in a pit for two months before being put into the field. The air reeked of distillers’ grains mixed in the pig feed. Lin disliked the sour smell, which was the only uncomfortable thing to him here. From the kitchen, where Shuyu was cooking, came the coughing of the bellows. In the south, elm and birch crowns shaded their neighbors’ straw and tiled roofs. Now and then a dog barked from one of these homes.

Having turned over all the books, Lin went out of the front wall, which was three feet high and topped with thorny jujube branches. In one hand he held a dog-eared Russian dictionary he had used in high school. Having nothing to do, he sat on their grinding stone, thumbing through the old dictionary. He still remembered some Russian vocabulary and even tried to form a few short sentences in his mind with some words. But he couldn’t recall the grammatical rules for the case changes exactly, so he gave up and let the book lie on his lap. Its pages fluttered a little as a breeze blew across.

附部分原着2

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 fianc閑 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 centipede 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. She
didn’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.

She revealed Mai Dong’s proposal to nobody except her teacher
Lin Kong, who was known as a good-hearted married man and
was regarded by many students as a kind of elder brother. In such
a situation she needed an objective opinion. Lin agreed that a
marriage at this moment was unwise, and that they had better wait
a while until her graduation and then decide what to do. He
promised he would let nobody know of the relationship. In
addition, he said he would try to help her in the job assignment if
he was involved in making the decision.

She reasoned Mai Dong out of the idea of an immediate marriage
and assured him that she would become his wife sooner or later.
As graduation approached, they both grew restless, hoping she
would remain in Muji City. He was depressed, and his
despondency made her love him more.

At the graduation she was assigned to stay in the hospital and
work in its Medical Department as a nurse a junior officer of
the twenty-fourth rank. The good news, however, didn’t please
Mai Dong and Manna for long, because a week later he was
informed that his radio station was going to be transferred to a
newly formed regiment in Fuyuan County, almost eighty miles
northeast of Muji and very close to the Russian border.

“Don’t panic,” she told him. “Work and study hard on the front. I’ll
wait for you.”

Though also heartbroken, she felt he was a rather pathetic man.
She wished he were stronger, a man she could rely on in times of
adversity, because life always had unexpected misfortunes.

“When will we get married?” he asked.

“Soon, I promise.”

Despite saying that, she was unsure whether he would be able to
come back to Muji. She preferred to wait a while.

The nearer the time for departure drew, the more embittered Mai
Dong became. A few times he mentioned he would rather be
demobilized and return to Shanghai, but she dissuaded him from
considering that. A discharge might send him to a place far away,
such as an oil field or a construction corps building railroads in the
interior of China. It was better for them to stay as close as
possible.

When she saw him off at the front entrance of the Sub-Command
headquarters, she had to keep blowing on her fingers, having
forgotten to bring along her mittens. She wouldn’t take the fur
gloves he offered her; she said he would need them more. He
stood at the back door of the radio van, whose green body had
turned gray with encrusted ice and snow. The radio antenna atop
the van was tilting in the wind, which, with a shrill whistle, again
and again tried to snatch it up and bear it off. More snow was
falling, and the air was piercingly cold. Mai Dong’s breath hung
around his face as he shouted orders to his soldiers in the van,
who gathered at the window, eager to see what Manna looked
like. Outside the van, a man loaded into a side trunk some large
wooden blocks needed for climbing the slippery mountain roads.
The driver kicked the rear wheels to see whether the tire chains
were securely fastened. His fur hat was completely white, a nest of
snowflakes.

As the van drew away, Mai Dong waved good-bye to Manna, his
hand stretching through the back window, as though struggling to
pull her along. He wanted to cry, “Wait for me, Manna!” but he
dared not get that out in the presence of his men. Seeing his face
contort with pain, Manna’s eyes blurred with tears. She bit her lips
so as not to cry.

Winter in Muji was long. Snow wouldn’t disappear until early
May. In mid-April when the Songhua River began to break up,
people would gather at the bank watching the large blocks of ice
cracking and drifting in the blackish-green water. Teenage boys,
baskets in hand, would tread and hop on the floating ice, picking
up pike, whitefish, carp, baby sturgeon, and catfish killed by the
ice blocks that had been washed down by spring torrents.
Steamboats, still in the docks, blew their horns time and again.
When the main channel was finally clear of ice, they crept out,
sailing slowly up and down the river and saluting the spectators
with long blasts. Children would hail and wave at them.

Then spring descended all of a sudden. Aspen catkins flew in the
air, so thick that when walking on the streets you could breathe
them in and you would flick your hand to keep them away from
your face. The scent of lilac blooms was pungent and intoxicating.
Yet old people still wrapped themselves in fur or cotton-padded
clothes. The dark earth, vast and loamy, marked by tufts of yellow
grass here and there, began emitting a warm vapor that flickered
like purple smoke in the sunshine. All at once apricot and peach
trees broke into blossoms, which grew puffy as bees kept touching
them. Within two weeks the summer started. Spring was so short
here that people would say Muji had only three seasons.

In her letters to Mai Dong, Manna described these seasonal
changes as though he had never lived in the city. As always, he
complained in his letters about life at the front. Many soldiers there
suffered from night blindness because they hadn’t eaten enough
vegetables. They all had lice in their underclothes since they
couldn’t take baths in their barracks. For the whole winter and
spring he had seen only two movies. He had lost fourteen pounds,
he was like a skeleton now. To comfort him, each month Manna
mailed him a small bag of peanut brittle.

One evening in June, Manna and two other nurses were about to
set out for the volleyball court behind the medical building.
Benping, the soldier in charge of mail and newspapers, came and
handed her a letter. Seeing it was from Mai Dong, her teammates
teased her, saying, “Aha, a love letter.”

She opened the envelope and was shocked while reading through
the two pages. Mai Dong told her that he couldn’t stand the life on
the border any longer and had applied for a discharge, which had
been granted. He was going back to Shanghai, where the weather
was milder and the food better. More heartrending, he had
decided to marry his cousin, who was a salesgirl at a department
store in Shanghai. Without such a marriage, he wouldn’t be able to
obtain a residence card, which was absolutely necessary for him to
live and find employment in the metropolis. In reality he and the girl
had been engaged even before he had applied for his discharge;
otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed to go to Shanghai, since
he was not from the city proper but from one of its suburban
counties. He was sorry for Manna and asked her to hate and
forget him.

Her initial response was long silence.

“Are you okay?” Nurse Shen asked.

Manna nodded and said nothing. Then the three of them set out
for the game.

On the volleyball court Manna, usually an indifferent player, struck
the ball with such ferocity that for the first time her comrades
shouted “Bravo” for her. Her face was smeared with sweat and
tears. As she dove to save a ball, she fell flat on the graveled court
and scraped her right elbow. The spectators applauded the diving
save while she slowly picked herself up and found blood oozing
from her skin.

During the break her teammates told her to go to the clinic and
have the injury dressed, so she left, planning to return for the
second game. But on her way, she changed her mind and ran back
to the dormitory. She merely washed her elbow with cold water
and didn’t bandage it.

Once alone in the bedroom, she read the letter again and tears
gushed from her eyes. She flung the pages down on the desk and
fell on her bed, sobbing, twisting, and biting the pillowcase. A
mosquito buzzed above her head, then settled on her neck, but she
didn’t bother to slap it. She felt as if her heart had been pierced.

When her three roommates came back at nine, she was still in
tears. They picked up the letter and glanced through it; together
they tried to console her by condemning the heartless man. But
their words made her sob harder and even convulsively. That night
she didn’t wash her face or brush her teeth. She slept with her
clothes on, waking now and then and weeping quietly while her
roommates wheezed or smacked their lips or murmured something
in their sleep. She simply couldn’t stop her tears.

She was ill for a few weeks. She felt aged, in deep lassitude and
numb despair, and regretted not marrying Mai Dong before he left
for the front. Her limbs were weary, as though separated from
herself. Despite her comrades’ protests, she dropped out of the
volleyball team, saying she was too sick to play. She spent more
time alone, as though all at once she belonged to an older
generation; she cared less about her looks and clothes.

By now she was almost twenty-six, on the verge of becoming an
old maid, whose standard age was twenty-seven to most people’s
minds. The hospital had three old maids; Manna seemed destined
to join them.

She wasn’t very attractive, but she was slim and tall and looked
natural; besides, she had a pleasant voice. In normal circumstances
she wouldn’t have had difficulty in finding a boyfriend, but the
hospital always kept over a hundred women nurses, most of
whom were around twenty, healthy and normal, so young officers
could easily find girlfriends among them. As a result, few men were
interested in Manna. Only an enlisted soldier paid her some
attentions. He was a cook, a squat man from Szechwan Province,
and he would dole out to her a larger portion of a dish when she
bought her meal. But she did not want an enlisted soldier as a
boyfriend, which would have violated the rule that only officers
could have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Besides, that man looked
awful owlish and cunning. So she avoided standing in any line
leading to his window.

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