Serve the People! (5 page)

As Liu Lian raised herself slowly up from her stool, Wu Dawang glanced up at her, then away again.

Have you washed?' she asked.

'Washed what?' he replied.

'You're covered in sweat.'

He glanced down at his damp work shirt, at the salt marks on his army trousers. Remembering how she'd asked him if he washed every day, how the Political Commissar's orderly had told him that she didn't permit the Division Commander to get into bed without taking a bath first, he started to feel uneasy about introducing the acrid smells of his garden labours into her bedroom sanctuary. 'I wasn't thinking,' he faltered, staring in embarrassment at the sweat stains on his trousers and the crumbs of earth on his shoes. 'I was in too much of a hurry.' Though he spoke in a tone of self-critical apology, a puzzled glint in his eyes inquired as to why, exactly, his personal hygiene should be of such vital import.

She continued to lean against the dressing table, gazing calmly at him, registering though not responding to his bewilderment. 'Put the sign back on the dining table,' she said after a pause, 'then lock the gate, have a shower and come back upstairs.'

He was left no choice but to go back downstairs. 'Plenty of soap!' she shouted out when he was halfway down.

And so he washed.

The Division had taken the unusual measure of installing a showerhead in the Commander's downstairs toilet, under which Wu Dawang was in the habit of giving himself a quick blast whenever he came in from the garden. This time, however, mindful of her intimately explicit instruction, he washed himself all over first with ordinary vegetable soap, and then a second time with perfumed soap, to guarantee that the results would be both clean and fragrant. He scrubbed himself with speedy but meticulous efficiency, attending to every inch and crevice of his body.

If, with the benefit of hindsight, we subject Wu Dawang's assiduous ablutions to rigorous analysis, we are led inexorably to the audacious conclusion that, from its very beginnings, he was a willing coconspirator, or at the very least an eager collaborator, in the liaison that was brewing. At the time, however, he remained unconscious of his own complicity. Again and again, the bars of soap slipped out of his trembling grasp, his heart pounding so wildly he almost feared it would gallop out of his chest. Days - many days - later, Liu Lian would still tease him, stroking his head, about how he had rushed back up to her that evening with streaks of soap running through his hair.

Most of his clothes were in his company barracks, but for emergencies he kept a spare white cotton shirt and pair of yellow underpants in a cupboard in the Division Commander's kitchen. While he hastily dressed, inserting his left leg into his right trouser leg, he found himself unable to master his feelings of agitation through the power of reason; a rush of blood to his head had swept away any possibility of rational thought. All he could grasp, dimly, was that Liu Lian was waiting for him upstairs, like a honeyed trap into which he was longing to step. He hungered for her soft skin as a starving beggar hungers for bread; he thirsted for her rosy, round face as a parched throat thirsts for a sweet, ripe melon.

As he showered, fancying that he could still smell her Osmanthus-flower scent, his overwhelming impulse to succumb to temptation had transformed itself into something altogether more noble-into the will to sacrifice everything for love. At that moment, his only desire was to complete his brisk toilette, then charge directly upstairs to discover what exactly it was she wanted of him, what lay behind that enigmatic sign. He wanted to throw open the door to her bedroom and find out everything there was to know there, like a child desperate to explore a mysterious cave he had chanced upon.

He was still dressing as he climbed the stairs, still struggling to do up his buttons as he reached the top. Time has long since blunted the sense of feverish anxiety that took hold of Wu Dawang as he ascended, dulling the memory of his excitement like so much dust collecting over a cherished memento. By now it was dark outside. Through the window on the firstfloor landing Wu Duwang could see squares of weak yellow light from the barracks windows. Occasionally, soldiers on night duty could be heard shouting to each other across the parade ground. Approaching the door to her room, he heard her soft, padding footsteps.

She was waiting for him behind that door.

He knocked.

Just then, he noticed he'd buttoned his shirt up wrongly. Hastily undoing, then redoing it, he tugged it down flat. As he smoothed out his trousers, he tried to slow his heartbeat, then stood once more, ramrod straight, in front of the door. Having recovered some semblance of calm, he cleared his throat, as if about to launch into a long dramatic monologue, then announced his arrival with the same solemn declaration as three days ago: `Reporting for Duty.'

But the words that emerged no longer resonated from within, but were gasped out, weak and hoarse-as understated in their enunciation as any casual, colloquial interjection. He fell silent again, waiting to be beckoned in as before. This time, however, no such instruction floated out. The only sound was of Liu Lian's footsteps quietly retreating into the room, followed by a dry, cracked cough after she'd sat down on the bed.

Although he understood that her cough was precisely the summons he'd been hoping for, he took a step closer in, to make perfectly sure: `I've showered,' he informed the door. `What was it you wanted?'

This time he received an answer: 'Come on in.'

And that is how simple the whole business was, skipping blithely over a great mass of plot details and connections. But this is just how things were with this love story-its beginning, middle and end bereft of the intervening complexities one might imagine necessary to an affair of the heart. For complexity does not inevitably heighten a story's verisimilitude, or its power to convince; sometimes simplicity and economy make for a more vigorous exposition, propelling the drama forward.

Wu Dawang opened the door.

When he entered the room, he discovered it was pitch black: sunk in the total darkness of the country nights he'd known before joining the army, a darkness that left you stumbling blindly into the village's deepest wells and along its gloomiest lanes. To Wu Dawang, it felt like tumbling-in an instant-from blazing, surface sunlight down into the impenetrable obscurity of an underground cave.

`Liu Lian,' he quavered, `Sister,' as though this were an incantation capable of dispelling darkness and bringing light.

`Shut the door.'

Her voice, he) udged, had come from the corner of the bed, which meant she was either sitting on the bed itself or on the chair in front of the dressing table. He reached back for the door, and pulled it shut. `Now come over here,' she continued. Her words had a mysterious traction, dragging him for ward at her command. When he was a few inches from the foot of the bed it gave a slight creak, which told him she was sitting neither on its edge, nor on the chair in front of the table, but was lying right in the middle of the mattress. In the great scheme of this seduction, of course, there was no real qualitative difference between Liu Lian occupying the middle or one side of the bed. But at the time, there was something about the discovery of her precise location that stopped Wu Dawang in his tracks. As the sweat ran off him like rain down a pillar, suddenly all he wanted to do was throw open the window and door to let in the cool night breeze. He listened to her breathing -reeling in and out, as smooth and silken as gossamer thread--while his own rasped rough and heavy in great, strenuous gasps.

At this point in proceedings, our love story resembles, perhaps, a steam train halfway up a mountain, each new inch forward demanding an agonizing expenditure of effort. On reaching the peak, of course, the train would regain its momentum and rush exhilaratingly down the other side, through glorious, balmy evening sunshine. But for the time being, Wu Dawang had ground to a halt. He could not explain why he should suddenly find the idea that she was lying naked on the bed so disconcerting. While showering and coming back up the stairs, he had yearned for this as instinctively as dry tinder longs for fire, as fire longs for strong winds. But just as his desire teetered on the edge of realization, timidity barred all further progress.

Time passed, the seconds ticking into minutes, the room still consumed by that irresistible darkness. Wu Dawang mopped his sweat away for a third time.

`Are you all right?' came a gentle voice from the bed.

`Please turn the light on.'

`It's too bright.'

`Please turn it on, I've something I want to say to you.

She fell silent again, as if the effort of considering his request exhausted her ability to generate sound. Listening to his own breath fall through the air and onto the ground, he even began to hallucinate the physical form of her exhalations on the bed. Oppressed almost beyond endurance, Wu Dawang actually began to fear for his life; death either by suffocation, or from shock was starting to seem a real and frightening possibility. In a last desperate attempt at self-preservation, he repeated his request: 'Please put the light on.'

She continued to pursue the most powerful, most expedient course of action open to her-neither speaking nor moving.

As time dragged on in the warm, velvety blackness, Wu Dawang felt compelled to issue a foolish ultimatum.

'If you don't turn the light on, I'm leaving.'

Again foolishly, he took a step backward.

At the sound of this threatened retreat, she sat bolt upright on the bed, groped for the cord and yanked on the light.

Just as it had done three days previously, one sharp click transformed the darkness into radiance.

Just as it had done three days previously, a flash of coloured light scorched his eyeballs. History was repeating itself: a history of unconsummated passion falling anticlimactically away. When all that he'd expected, all that he'd wanted, did in fact come to pass, he was once again incapacitated by panic.

Sure enough, there she sat, like a jade statue, in the middle of the bed beneath the mosquito net, naked except for a corner of red blanket tugged skimpily across her thighs. To Wu Dawang's surprise, however, as Liu Lian appeared before him under that dazzlingly revealing electric light, her face was suffused by a proud confidence in her own dignity. As she stared defiantly at him, her red silk brassiere-an item of clothing that, back then, Wu Dawang had never heard of, much less seen-hung at the head of the bed, glaring lopsidedly, like a pair of bloodshot eyes. Her breasts maintained an attitude of furious immobility, her nipples jutting forward like the pink noses of two indignant white rabbits, bearing solemn witness to the scene playing out before them. Her hair was draped in a frozen wave over her pale shoulders, resembling, in its perfect stillness, fine black wire.

All impulse for passion had died in her, killed not only by the extinguishing of the seductive darkness, but also by his outrageous persistence in remaining motionless before her. He had surely forgotten that he was her General Orderly and cook, that she was the mistress of the house, the Division Commander's wife, that to serve the Division Commander and his wife was to Serve the People. Under the burning white lamplight she faced him, the translucence of her skin generating an aura of irreproachable virtue. While he, by contrast, stood staring like a sordid voyeur. Throughout this stalemate, her own clear sense of superiority-apparent in her piercing glare and mocking lips-cast a chill over the room's stuffy interior.

As normality, with all its subdued frigidity, returned, the sweat on Wu Dawang's face dried. She might have been naked, but she was still the Division Commander's wife. He might have been fully dressed, but still-still-he was only the General Orderly and cook.

`Say whatever it is you have to say,' she remarked lightly.

'I'm afraid,' he mumbled into his chest, after a brief hesitation.

'Of who?'

'Of the Division Commander, and of the Party.'

She gave a cold smile. 'So it's only me you're not afraid of?'

When he slowly looked up, he saw that she had been silently scrutinizing him all the while, as one would examine a utensil. She heaved a long, regretful sigh--the kind that might follow the realization that an object was not fit for purpose -then twisted around to gather up the nightgown lying on the bed and pulled it on.

`You're not worth the mud these walls are made of,' she finally concluded. `I expected more of you, Wu Dawang, I really did.'

MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED NEXT had more to do with army protocol than the course of true love.

Wu Dawang spent his whole journey back to barracks that evening-a half-mile that took him across the drill ground-worrying whether his behaviour had been right or wrong. Now that lights-out had sounded, most companies had turned in for the night, and a lonely silence was descending. The moonlight spilled out of the July night sky, tinging the drill ground dark green beneath its cold fluorescence. A cool breeze was starting to blow in from the east, whisking away the scorching heat of day. A few of the older soldiers had crept out from their slumbering companies to gather in small sociable groups in corners of the deserted drill ground-to talk and laugh, to have a drink and a song. The fierce, peppery fumes of their liquor, together with the strains of their revolutionary choruses, floated on the wind, quickening the hearts of all those they swept over.