一地鸡毛 (5 page)

But he cannot think of a suitable hospital. At this moment the door opens. His wife has come back from work. Looking at his watch, he sees it's already 7:30. Seeing his wife, he worries again. Closely watching his wife's expression, he introduces the two parties to each other. Of course his wife doesn't look pleased at seeing the guests and the room full of smoke and spit. She merely nods her head and goes to the kitchen. A moment later, a quarrel is heard. His wife is blaming the childminder. It's already 7:30 pm. Why has nothing been prepared for the child? Young Lin knows the blame is meant for his ears. He is to blame for his carelessness. Engaged in conversation with his teacher, he forgot to ask the childminder to cook for the child first. Young Lin, his wife, the childminder, the child plus the two guests, there are six of them for dinner. But the dinner is nowhere near ready. So he asks his teacher to sit for a while and then goes to the kitchen to explain to his wife. First of all, he takes out the fifty yuan awarded by his work unit as a present for her. Then he explains that he really can do nothing about it. Unlike other visitors, this is his former primary school teacher. Just cook a meal for them and that is all. His wife knocks the five notes out of his hand and says:

"Damn it! Who hasn't got a teacher! How can I take care of a teacher when my child is waiting for a meal!"

Pulling at her, he says: "Lower your voice. They'll hear you!"

She raises her voice even more: "Let them hear it! Guests come almost every day. I'm not running a hotel. I can't stand it any longer if it goes on like this!" Then she leans against the edge of the sink and bursts into tears.

Young Lin is in a towering rage. But it's no use flying off the handle now. His guests are still waiting in the inner room, he has to go back and keep his teacher company. Evidently the teacher has heard their quarrelling. After all his teacher is a cultured man, unlike the other folks from hometown who put on airs if not properly entertained. He immediately declares loudly: "Don't bother, Young Lin. We've had our dinner already. We are staying in an underground hotel in Jinsong. We just wanted to see you and bring you some local products. We must leave after this cup of tea. We'll miss the bus if we stay late!"

He zips open a canvas bag and lets his son take two big tins of sesame oil to the kitchen.

Young Lin feels this is even harder to bear. He is sure his teacher hasn't had dinner yet. What he just said is deliberately for his wife's ears for fear that Young Lin will feel awkward. Maybe the two tins of sesame oil have worked or his wife has found her conscience again. Anyway, she cooks for them and has done well: Four dishes, one of which, fried shrimp meat, is usually meant for their child. They finish the meal and Young Lin sees his teacher and the son off. On the way the teacher keeps saying:

"I have troubled you with my visit. I didn't plan to come but my wife kept persuading me so I came."

He cannot help feeling sad when he sees his teacher's grey hair, halting steps and the wrinkles in his face full of dust. He didn't give his teacher time to wash his face. He says:

"Teacher, you are ill. You need to come to Beijing for treatment. Let me first look for a cheap hotel for you to stay and tomorrow I'll go and look for a hospital."

The old man stops him with his hand:

"Don't bother about me. I've got another way." He takes off his cap and produces a slip of paper. "I was afraid that I wouldn't find you so I went to Section Chief Li of the County Education Bureau. A former classmate of his is head of department of a big work unit. Look! He has written a letter for me! This man is such a high-ranking cadre. I'm sure he'll be able to help me!"

On hearing this, Young Lin doesn't insist. For if he tries, he can't be sure of finding a good hospital, and he may only waste his teacher's time. Better let them go and ask the head of department for help. So he sees his teacher off on a public bus and says goodbye. The bus drives away with his teacher still waving to him in the distance, all smiles, even when he is lurching backwards and forwards from the sudden stops and starts. Tears well up in Young Lin's eyes. His teacher smiled at him just as he did when he was in the primary school. After the bus is out of sight, he walks back home alone. He now feels weighed down as if a mountain is resting on his back. With every step he is at a risk of being crushed.

The next morning, Young Lin reads the newspaper in his office and sees a memorial article for a great leader who passed away many years ago. The article elaborates on how much this leader respected his teachers and concerned himself with education. He once sent for two of the teachers who had taught him in his early youth, the only two who were still alive, arranged for them to stay in the best place in Beijing and showed them around the whole city. Young Lin thinks highly of the late leader. But now when he reads the article, he can't hold back his curses:

"Who doesn't want to respect one's teachers and show concern for education! I would love to let my teachers stay in the best place and show them around Beijing, too. Do I have the power to do so?"

He throws the newspaper into a dustbin.

4

The child falls ill. She has a running nose and a cough. The wife says: "Your teacher had pulmonary emphysema when he visited us. Perhaps he's given it to our child."

Young Lin also worries a lot whenever the girl falls ill. Her illness makes a great difference to the family. When she is ill, one of them at least, either him or his wife, has to ask for leave to stay at home and look after her. The childminder alone is not good enough over such a period. But on hearing his wife wildly blaming his teacher, his indignation is greatly aroused. As a punishment after his teacher left, Young Lin didn't talk to her for two days, because she had hurt his feelings by embarrassing him in his teacher's presence. For that meal you prepared, my teacher paid two big tins of sesame oil weighing about five kilos. At the free market in Beijing sesame oil is sold at eight yuan per half kilo. Five kilo means over eighty yuan. Was your meal worth that much? When she uses the sesame oil his wife also looks ashamed for a few days. She too feels she went too far. Now that the child is sick, she wants to take it out on her husband and retaliate using his teacher as a pretext. Young Lin is not polite to her. He says:

"Better check the child's illness first. What if it's not pulmonary emphysema? Isn't it immoral to blame a person without any proof?"

So the two of them ask for leave and take the child to hospital. It's no simple matter to have a diagnosis done. Basically, one thing is needed: money. For a child to see a doctor these days, twenty to thirty yuan is the minimum cost, including unnecessary medical tests and prescriptions. Young Lin feels that life is bearable if people in other occupations become dishonest, but unbearable if doctors are dishonest, too. Once his child had a runny tummy, going to the hospital cost him seventy-five yuan. It's true. Annoyed and amused at the same time, his wife asked him while shaking her both hands:

"Is the excrement worth seventy-five yuan?"

Each time they take the child to hospital, they feel they have been cheated.

But there is no alternative, they have to go. Take the present situation for example. On their way to the hospital, the child's temperature has gone up. The couple forget to accuse each other, forget that they are going to be cheated again. All their attention is on the child and they hurry to catch a bus to the hospital.

A check shows that it is nothing but a cold. Yet they are informed at the cash desk of the hospital pharmacy that the charge for the prescription is 45.58 yuan. Shaking the prescription, his wife says:

"Look. Got ripped off again. Shall we pay for the medicine or not?"

He does not reply. Just now he was anxious that for some unknown reason the child was running a high fever. He was not sure whether it was contracted from his teacher. Now the diagnosis reveals that it is just a cold. He feels relieved. At the same time he begins to feel indignant again with his wife. You said that it was because my teacher had an infectious disease. Hasn't the diagnosis proved that it's a cold? He wants to have the matter out with her before tackling the question of having been ripped off or not. Seeing the crowd of people queuing at the pharmacy and lots more coming and going, he feels this is not the right place to discuss things. That's why he didn't reply. Full of resentment he just says to her:

"Don't come if you are afraid of being ripped off. Who asked you to come and forced you to pay for the medicine?"

His wife picks up the child at once: "If that's what you think, I won't take the medicine!" She starts to walk away.

She acts rashly when she feels wronged and Young Lin is worried. He knows what his wife is like. If she heads in one direction, not even the most strenuous effort will be able to turn her around. How will they treat the child without medicine when they're back home? So he hurries after her and blocks her way, saying:

"Why? Come on! When it comes to such a matter, you can't act this way. Give the prescription to me."

But this time his wife is not acting out of a grudge. She looks at him and declares:

"We won't buy the medicine. Isn't it just a cold? There is still some leftover from the medicine I got from my work unit the last time I caught a cold. The child can take some of that. The prescription will probably just be Cefalexin tablets, Chinese medicine to be taken with boiling water, antipyretic pills and the like. That's all you'll get even though you spend more money."

Young Lin retorts: "Your medicine is for adults. For children there should be something different."

His wife assures him: "There's nothing different. You give a child a smaller dose. Leave it to me. I can cure her within three days and save the forty-five yuan. When the medicine is finished, I'll ask my unit for more."

Young Lin feels that what his wife has said is reasonable. He feels the child's forehead and finds the temperature has dropped, but he doesn't know whether it is because of the sleep she has just had or because of the hospital smell. Her eyes are bright again. She points at the Hami melons on a stall opposite the hospital and asks for some. Now that the case is less serious, Young Lin thinks it's alright to give his wife's idea a go. So they leave the hospital and buy the child a piece of Hami melon. After eating it, she is even more active and gets down to play with her father. She has even stopped coughing. He is happy, so is his wife.

Now that they are happy, they relax. Young Lin won't take his wife's remark about his teacher's disease seriously any more. It was just a thoughtless grumble when she was too worried to keep her temper. Now he has straightened out his thinking. The child's illness is not serious and his wife's bright idea has saved forty-five yuan on medicine. Isn't that as good as earning forty-five yuan for nothing? The thought makes them even more cheerful. Young Lin feels like giving his wife a treat. As they pass through the street full of stalls selling snacks, he turns to her:

"You like stir-fried liver, don't you? Why not have a bowl?"

His wife tut-tuts, saying: "One yuan fifty a bowl just for fun. It's not worth it."

He immediately takes one yuan fifty out of his pocket and hands it over to the vendor: "A bowl of stir-fried liver, please."

His wife glances at him with embarrassment, then sits down to eat it. The way she eats the stuff shows she really loves it. She even puts into her mouth the two pieces which the child spits out when she finds them too hard to chew. She insists that Young Lin has a taste of the soup. He isn't too keen, to him it looks like a bowl of muck. But his wife keeps offering it in gentle, soft voices and with eyes full of tenderness as she had been before they got married, so he has to take a mouthful. In a hot, coriander-flavoured soup, it tastes delicious. When his wife asks him what he thinks, he answers that it is nice. She glances at him affectionately. He didn't expect a bowl of fried liver could make them relive the tender feelings of the past. The feelings are kept till the evening. The child is not seriously ill so she plays by herself after her mother has given her some medicine. By the evening, she stops coughing and sleeps soundly. When the snoring of the childminder is heard from the outer room, Young Lin and his wife are both filled with passion. It is just as good as when they were newly married. Afterwards, caressing each other, they have a chat about the cause of their child's illness. The wife freely admits in her anxiety she wronged his teacher today. He replies, "We are to blame for not having taken good care of the little thing so that the quilt was kicked aside and left off all night." His wife says that it is not the points. There is only one person to blame. His heart misses a beat and asks who she is referring to. His wife points toward the hall, the outer room—she means the childminder. Then she recounts the childminder's faults: She's too concerned with what she can get out of us, she takes no initiative in doing the chores, and dawdles over her work, she's always visiting the childminders' dormitories and tells everyone our family secrets, she doesn't even have any feelings toward the child. She lets her play alone with water while she takes a nap or watches TV when we are working. How can our daughter avoid catching a cold? His wife says she is determined to dismiss the childminder by September when the child can start going to nursery.

The next morning Young Lin feels their feelings about the childminder were right. As usual, his wife goes off early to work while he goes to queue for bean curd. He should have gone to work after that but because it is drizzling and not so many people came to buy bean curd, it doesn't take as long today. Glancing at his watch, he finds that he still has some time to spare. Concerned about the child's illness, he goes back home again to have a look but discovers that childminder is busy cooking for herself. The bed hasn't been made, the child's breakfast hasn't been prepared and she hasn't had her medicine. The nanny has let the child play with a basin of water with which she washed her face. Early that morning, Young Lin and his wife just ate some food leftover from the day before. They added some hot water and washed it down with pickled vegetable. It is all right for the childminder to cook porridge since she doesn't eat leftovers. But instead, she is cooking fine noodles in the small wok which is meant for cooking the child's meals. A delicious smell greets him as he enters the room. She has put coriander, dried bean curd and an egg in the noodle soup. Seeing Young Lin return unexpectedly, she hurriedly tries to hide the egg under the noodles with her chopsticks. However, he has already seen it. He feels himself bristling with anger. Isn't she trying to fool us by secretly cooking nice meals for herself while neglecting the child? Things are not easy for you, neither are they for us. We are wrong to blame you for everything, that's true, but you don't merit the slightest respect, understanding or sympathy if you yourself are not in the least conscientious. But he does not censure the childminder. Usually, catching her red-handed would be a handy opportunity to criticize her to her face. It would give him the great satisfaction of revenge. But the childminder is just like that. You cannot be sure that she won't take it out on the child after you go. How could he bear to let the child suffer because of his action? So he just furiously seizes the basin of water which the child is playing with and pours it into the lavatory bowl. The child's nose is running again. Because the water has been taken away, she rocks herself on the floor and cries. He doesn't take any notice of that. He goes off to work, slamming the door behind him. As he hurries down the stairs, he curses to himself: "Damn you! I'll make sure you're gone by September!"