The Bathing Women (18 page)

“Anyway,” he went on, “I think with a little bit of training you should be able to dance well.”

“You need to start out the training young if you want to dance. See how old I am. My waist and legs are too stiff now,” Fei protested, turning at the waist as she spoke, and kicking her legs in a deliberately stiff way.

“Not necessarily true,” the dancer said. “You’re probably not seventeen yet, right? I can take some time to look at your waist and legs. How is Sunday? Sunday in your classroom.”

“Just the two of us?” Fei asked.

The dancer said, “Just the two of us.”

Sunday at the appointed time, Fei walked into the classroom, and the dancer was sitting on the lecture desk in front of the blackboard, waiting for her. She liked the way he looked as he sat on the desk with his long, agile legs dangling and arms folded in front of his chest. Her impression of classrooms was that they were always noisy and smelly. She didn’t like being in them and had never remained in an empty one. As she entered today, she felt waves of vague anticipation. She liked the quiet classroom at this moment because the dancer was sitting on the lecture desk and there was no one else seated at the rows of desks.

At the sight of her, he jumped down, slipping off his watch and putting it on the desk. “Come, let’s get started.”

He walked up to her, asking her to lean against a desk in the first row and hold the edge for balance. Then he took hold of her ankle and raised it up, little by little. The leg was not trained, after all, and before he pushed it too high, she said, “No, no, it hurts too much.” So he let her leg drop, but his hand stayed on her ankle. She stood against the desk, and he knelt to caress the ankle, tentatively and gently, but at the same time firmly, showing no intention of letting go. His hand kept moving up, going up her calf, and reaching her thigh. He said, “I’m checking on the proportion of your calf to your thigh. Just right. Just right. And there is also this delicate kneecap.” He held her delicate knee for a while, moved his hand up to touch her waist, and slid it smoothly under her shirt, which had been loosely tucked into a leather belt, pushing directly up to her breasts. She didn’t know at what point she had been laid down on the desk, his head, with its luxuriant hair, bent over her breasts. He leaned down over, greedily sucking and biting her. Then the hand that had risen from her ankle slid down, down to her flat stomach and between her legs. His fingers were as nimble as his dancer’s legs, making her body writhe involuntarily. The writhing invited him to go deeper and deeper. She longed for him to finger her and stab her, stab her moistness and destroy the trembling deep inside her …

Fei fell in love with the dancer, although their first intimacy stopped right at that point. She longed to see him day and night, so he took her home when his wife wasn’t there. He was a married man, and she knew it, but she didn’t want to think about that. She just liked to be with him, and liked to hear him whisper in her ear that she was his tender little cat, meaty little pigeon, shameless little slut … he had plenty of sweet talk, and he also combed and braided her hair, which made her heart swell. No one had braided her hair since her mother died. It was a service that she didn’t expect to receive from such a handsome man. He stood behind her, and as she sat, absorbing his scent through the back of her head, she fantasized sitting like this in a trance and letting him braid her hair for her entire life, not leaving, even when his wife came home. She actually wanted to beg his wife to agree to let the three of them live together.

Later, she got pregnant and wasn’t afraid at all. She naïvely believed, Now that I have your child you have to marry me. Marry me, and let me go away with you, leaving Fuan, leaving all that filthy gossip behind. Because she was with him, she started to pay attention to her reputation, trying to avoid the filthy gossip directed at her. She didn’t really value herself; it was him that she treasured. She wanted to be worthy of him.

When she told him that she was pregnant, he was scared to death. “No, no, no, no …” he said, a series of noes in a single breath. After that he heaved a sigh and pulled her by the hand to make her sit down. He said, “That won’t work. You should know you’re still a child.”

She asked him, “Then why didn’t you think of me as a child when you laid me down on the desk?”

He said, “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. What made me love you so much? What made you so lovable?”

She said, with tears streaming, “Then why don’t you want me?” He then began to explain how law and marriage work. She had no concept of law; no one had ever spoken to her about law in such a serious way. She only knew if she killed someone she had to pay with her life, and if she owed someone money she had to pay it back, things even an idiot would understand. But she’d never thought about killing someone, nor did she owe anyone money. What did law have to do with her life? Now, as a sixteen-year-old, pregnant with this man’s child, she had to listen to him babble about the law. According to him, they had violated some law, which scared her a little. She said, “Then what should I do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but, whatever it is, you’ll have to … have to get rid of the child.” She told him she was afraid to go to the hospital herself and wanted him to accompany her. He said that was impossible. The troupe had just given him an important assignment. He spoke about a faraway place in Sichuan Province. “There’s a famous group of clay sculptures called
Rent Collection Yard
in Sichuan, have you heard of it? It shows how this big landlord Liu Wencai bullied and oppressed his tenant farmers. Our troupe is planning to base a dance drama around the sculptures. They want to send me to Sichuan to observe and come back and do the choreography. A dance drama out of
Rent Collection Yard
—think of it, maybe it will cause a big sensation around the country. It isn’t just the usual dance show, but a political mission. Do you understand?” She didn’t know anything about political missions, though she thought she’d heard of Liu Wencai and
Rent Collection Yard.
But none of that interested her; she just wanted to know when he would be returning. He replied vaguely that it might take some time, anything from ten days to three months. A political mission couldn’t be concerned about time. He then mentioned Liu and
Rent Collection Yard
over and over like a broken record, as if to make Fei feel that if she needed to resent something, she should resent those two things. These were what took him away from her and prevented him from accompanying her to the hospital.

She lowered her head, no longer speaking. Then he slipped the watch off his wrist and handed it to her and said, “I want to give you this watch as a keepsake. It’s a brand-name watch, a Shanghai Coral Jewel.” He lifted her left hand and put it on her wrist. The men’s watch, with a metal wristband, hung loose and heavy on Fei’s delicate wrist. She remembered how their affair had begun that Sunday in the classroom with his slipping off his watch and walking to the desk. She remembered the way he slipped it off. Now she saw the gesture again and realized their affair would probably end here. She saw the end even though her brain was a little numb. She did not remember afterwards how he gently manoeuvered her out the door, gently but giving her no chance to resist. She remembered only that she opened the door one last time, asking him helplessly, “What should I do?”

He put his shoulder against that half-opened door and said in a lowered voice, “Doesn’t your family live in the hospital? You should ask your uncle to come up with something.”

Fei left his building and went back into the street, walking to the riverbank to sit down. The river wasn’t polluted then, and the slow-moving water didn’t stink as it would later. Although layers of paper, posters, and slogans covered the bridge, the river still flowed in its ancient way. Fei hadn’t felt it was realistic when she saw characters in movies or comic books run to a riverbank when they couldn’t solve their problems. Only now, as she sat down by the river herself, did she find it believable. If the city has a river, people will run to the riverbank when they have something they have to think through. A river is fair and calm. A river never classifies people by their social standing. A river can purify people’s eyes and hearts. Fei sat there thinking for a long time. She thought about many, many things, and finally she remembered the scrap of paper that a boy in her class had put on the back of her chair: “bastard daughter.” She was a bastard daughter herself, and she couldn’t let this life in her belly become another. She didn’t have the right, and she had to get rid of it. She was thinking that maybe the dancer had a point. Why didn’t she ask her uncle for help? She’d almost forgotten that her uncle was a doctor and that she lived right in the hospital.

What time is it? she wondered. She looked at the Coral Jewel man’s watch on her wrist and saw it was pretty late. Because of the watch, she had the luxury of asking herself the time. She took the watch from her wrist, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and put it in her pocket. Even in her saddest moment she never thought of throwing the damn watch into the river. She valued the watch, after all. Back then, a Coral Jewel watch was a considerable piece of property, even to an adult. Her hard thinking by the city moat was over. She’d sorted out her own thoughts carefully and simply. In the end, there were only two actions that summed up her relationship with the dancer. He slipped off his watch the first time and put it on the desk, and he slipped off his watch the second time and put it on her wrist. She smiled to herself ironically, dusted off her behind, and went home.

7

Fei came home with the watch in her pocket. As soon as she walked in the door, she put on a tough expression for the conversation with Dr. Tang. The tough look twisted her face, which was her strategy for hiding her intense fear. She wasn’t sure how her uncle would respond. Maybe he would kick her out.

Dr. Tang was quiet for a long time after hearing what Fei had to tell him. He just stared with his dark bullet eyes at his niece, as if he wanted to read in her face whether she was talking nonsense or telling the truth. Finally, he was sure that she was telling the truth. By nature he was a quiet man and usually didn’t have much to say to her, and now he had even less. He nervously clenched his hands tightly, his knuckles turning white. Fei said, “Uncle, say something.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Have you ever thought about the difficulties that grown-ups have to deal with?”

Fei shot back at him, “How about you? Have you thought about the difficulties I face?”

“What difficulties do you face?” he said. “I took you from Beijing and offered you a place to live. I gave you food and sent you to school, and I think I’ve done all the things that I should have done for my dead sister. But look at what you’ve done! Do you have any self-respect?”

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“You don’t have self-respect, but I do,” Dr. Tang said. “Don’t you see that I’m still alone because of you? Who would want to marry a man who lives with his niece? Do you understand?”

“I do. That’s why I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

Dr. Tang said, “What do you mean by that?”

“If you help me with this surgery,” she said, “I’ll leave home immediately. I’m about to graduate from high school and I can support myself.”

Dr. Tang said, “What? What did you just say? You want me to do the surgery for you? Me?”

“Yes, aren’t you a doctor?”

“What nonsense are you talking? This is an ob-gyn’s area, not an internist’s. It’s impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?” she persisted.

Dr. Tang said, “If I say it’s impossible, then it’s impossible. I can’t do it.”

“Then I’ll go to an ob-gyn myself,” Fei said, “and I won’t go anywhere else; I’ll just go to the ob-gyn at your hospital—”

Dr. Tang immediately interrupted her. “Shut up, will you? Do you think I will let you do that and publicly shame us? Shame yourself and shame me? Shame our family? Now you must answer a question for me.”

“What question?”

“Who is he?”

Fei didn’t answer.

“Who is he?” Dr. Tang repeated. “You must tell me.”

“What if I don’t tell you?”

“Then I’ll go to your school and find out.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Fei finally said, “but only if you answer a question of mine: Who is my father?”

“Why do you ask me this question now?” said Dr. Tang.

Fei went on, “Both of you, you and Mum, always hid it from me, but I have the right to know. I have even more of a right to know now. Who should be responsible for me, after all? Who else would it be if not my father? Will you tell me who my father is, and where he is?”

“Didn’t we tell you that he was dead?” said Dr. Tang.

“I don’t believe it,” Fei insisted. “What is his name, how did he die, and where did he die? Why do I know nothing about it? And you try to force me to tell you my private business.”

Fei’s mention of her father stopped Dr. Tang from pressing her further, as if the deal had fallen through. He would rather give up on knowing the man who had taken advantage of his niece than tell her about her father. But the real problem hadn’t been solved; the problem was Fei’s surgery, something that Dr. Tang found thorny and irritating, which angered him but about which he could do nothing. He couldn’t come up with a better idea. He stood and paced back and forth in their two-bedroom apartment, subconsciously glancing at the partly filled bookshelf in the corner. Other than a plastic fluorescent portrait of Chairman Mao, which gave off a green glow in the dark, there were only clinical reference books on internal medicine. He didn’t have any ob-gyn books. Fei said, “Uncle, are you going to do the surgery for me or not?”

“No, it isn’t possible,” he said. “I won’t do it. It’s dangerous. It’s your life we’re talking about.”

Fei said, “I’m not afraid.”

Dr. Tang sneered. “Hmmm, I know you’re not afraid. Would you do it if you were afraid?”

Fei sneered back at him, something she probably picked up from a movie. “You’re not afraid, either. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have written a phony sick-leave note.”