Niu Yueqing’s heart raced after hearing Huiming’s lengthy discourse, which was almost like a sutra. For a while she thought the nun was talking about Tang Wan’er, who knew how to make everyone like her. Could she have known all these things? Then she felt that Huiming must be talking about her. Had she lost Zhuang’s love because she lacked the necessary understanding? What surprised her most was how much the young nun knew about men and women. “I’m amazed by what you know, Abbess Huiming.”
“Is that so? Then you’ll be shocked if I continue.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I’ll be frank with you, since you treat me like a friend and have come to see me. Has it occurred to you that I’m being very rude sitting in bed while talking to you? I had an abortion two days ago.”
“An abortion?” Niu Yueqing cried out.
“Close the door so the others won’t hear us. Yes, I had an abortion. You’re probably going to change your opinion of me and will never come again. But it’s true. When I noticed something different, I put an herbal formula together and aborted the fetus. Well, you can go now if you want.”
Niu Yueqing was tongue-tied, too worked up to even look at the nun, not because she did not want to embarrass Huiming, but because she felt so awkward. Muttering something incomprehensible, she got up and went home.
For seven days in a row, she asked for sick leave and stayed home. Since her discovery of Zhuang’s affair with Tang Wan’er, nothing had pained her more than the actions of her beloved husband. But now even Huiming, a nun, had had an abortion. So what else was real in this world? What was left that was credible and admirable and worthy of her belief? She turned these things over and over in her mind, to the point that she actually fell ill. Dander fell from her body, which she didn’t even notice until she was putting on her socks one day and saw a pile of something that looked like chaff. The following morning when she made her bed, she spotted the same thing on the bed, which made her itch all over. Taking off her clothes, she realized that her skin was rough and scaly, like snakeskin or tree bark. That night she got undressed and, using a brush, washed her body over and over. She went back to work on the eighth day and didn’t return home until very late. Her mother stopped her in the doorway and examined her closely.
“What are you doing, Mother? Can’t you see it’s me?”
“I don’t really recognize you. What’s happening to you?”
“Take another look, then, Mother,” Niu Yueqing said with a smile. “Have I gotten prettier or uglier?”
“Your brows are darker, and what happened to the sun spots on your face?”
“Well, that’s better.” Niu Yueqing told her mother she had had some work done on her face — her brows had been tattooed, and the dark spots had been removed with a chemical peel. She would have to continue that treatment for seven days, after which the spots would be gone. Besides that, she wanted to surgically raise the bridge of her nose, eliminate the wrinkles in her forehead and her belly fat, and reduce the size of her feet.
“Then you won’t be my daughter anymore.”
From that day on, the old lady could not stop grumbling that Niu Yueqing was a fake, no longer her daughter. When they went to bed at night, she reached out to touch Niu Yueqing’s brows, nose, and chin, and was besieged by doubts. One day she said that someone had replaced the TV with a fake; on another day she complained that the pot, too, was a fake. She even doubted the relatives and neighbors who came to visit them, which led her to wonder about her own authenticity. She demanded to know the truth from her daughter.
. . .
After admonishing Zhou Min to get him to return to Tongguan and rescue Tang Wan’er, Zhuang returned to his apartment, where he discovered that Niu Yueqing had left him. He had suddenly become a lonely man in a cheerless house, like a nest with broken eggs after the hens have flown the coop. He saw her request for a divorce. Before that time, he would have jumped at the suggestion, and he was astounded to see the letter in front him. After reading it, he let out a loud laugh and made himself a strong cup of coffee, feeling an unusual sense of relief. But after spending a day in the room alone, the emptiness got to him; he had to put on the funereal music and turn the volume all the way up before he could lie down peacefully in bed to think. In the past, whenever he’d had a dalliance with Tang Wan’er, Liu Yue, or even Ah-can, he had come home hoping that Niu Yueqing would scream hateful words at him. If she ignored him, he felt bad; if she devoted all her care to him, he felt guilty. Tormented by these reactions from his wife, he had hoped more than once to end the marriage. Now it was finally going to be over, and all he could think about were her positive traits, which, however, did not motivate him to go to Shuangren fu and ask for her forgiveness. It was obvious to him that getting back together would be virtually impossible. First of all, would she be able to live with the shadow of his relationship with Tang Wan’er? Besides, how would he deal with his feelings for the woman? It was she who had infused him with new emotions and new desires, and now that she had been plunged into an abyss of suffering, could he continue to live as if nothing had happened with a clear conscience? Even if he could bear the pain, wouldn’t that mean he would carry the burden of double crimes on his back for the rest of his life? But — but on second thought, it was precisely because of his encounter with Tang Wan’er, to which he had given himself body and soul, that he had inched closer and closer to the quagmire. In order to extricate himself, he judged her by applying the moral standards and norms for women, hoping that he would come to hate her and be able to forget her. But he could not think of any sinfulness on her part, or anything that would make him loathe her. He tried many times to forget her, but each time he ended up missing her more. It was like knowing that the glass of wine in front of him was laced with poison, but, unable to resist the tempting color and heady aroma, he took a drink. Meng came to see him once, criticizing him for being cocooned so long in literary creation that he no longer knew how to live in society. He dealt with everything as if it were art, which was what had gradually put him in this state, and look where that had gotten him. Now did he plan to continue the way it was? “You worry that you can’t let this one or that one go. But what about yourself? You’re a celebrity, and a celebrity must live a more carefree and expansive life than others, while you, just look how you suffer.”
Zhuang laughed silently, saying that Meng’s ideas were alien to him. He hadn’t agreed with Meng’s opinions before, and he wouldn’t agree with them now; all he wanted was for his friends to butt out. He said that Tang Wan’er was gone and Niu Yueqing had left home, which was a punishment from God. He and he alone would have to endure it.
After buying a case of instant noodles and doing his laundry for a few days, he was so bored that he went to Meng’s place and invited Zhao and Hong over to drink. He turned into a glutton at the sight of liquor, getting so drunk that he disgusted himself. So he got on his scooter each day, Walkman headphones over his ears, and roamed the city listening to music, his hair flying. Sometimes he wondered if a woman might stop him and ask for a ride; or he might even block the way of a pretty woman on the open road. But all he did was return after a frenzied ride, his face nearly unrecognizable from dust and sweat.
On this day, when he was out on his usual roam, an idea flashed into his mind, so he rode to the southern suburb to see the cow. The late autumn sun was still powerful; the corn had been harvested, but the soil had yet to be turned over, leaving dust to roll across a brownish-yellow expanse. When he got to the grounds outside Aunty Liu’s house, he was greeted by dozens of farm cattle; none was tied to a rope, and none was tethered to a stump or a millstone. Instead, they were looking into Liu’s yard through the crumpled fence, so he followed their eyes. The cow was lying down, looking like a pile of hide-covered bones. Aunty Liu was squatting by the cow’s head, stirring feed in a wooden basin. After parking his scooter, Zhuang walked in. Aunty Liu looked up silently, tears running down her cheeks. Knowing that the cow would not survive, he consoled himself with the fact that his timely arrival had made it possible for him to see her one last time. He pulled up a blade of pungent silver grass and put it by the cow’s mouth. She twitched her ears with difficulty, as a way to greet him; there was something sticky around her eyes, which were only half-open. She smelled the grass that lay on her drooling tongue. “Didn’t I tell you to go buy a bottle?” A man’s thick voice could be heard from inside the house. “What are you doing out there? There’s no use giving her food now.” He came out with another man and stood on the steps. All Zhuang sensed at first was a white glare, which turned out to be a long, thin blade in the man’s hand. Liu’s husband had a stubble-covered face, bloodless and ghastly pale. “Oh, you’re here,” he said when he spotted Zhuang. “Come inside for tea.”