“What would you like?”
“Fish — a soup or a stew.”
Nimei looked at her wristwatch. “It’s almost four. It may be too late for today, but I’ll go and tell the kitchen manager.”
Director Liao thanked her, though he didn’t look happy, his thick-lidded eyes glinting as the muscle of his face suddenly hardened. Nimei noticed it, but she pretended she had seen nothing. Although one of the hospital leaders had informed her that the nurses should show special attention to Liao, she didn’t bother too much about him. There were too many other patients here. From the sickroom she went directly downstairs to the kitchen and told the manager to have a fish stew made for the patient the next day. Meanwhile, her mind couldn’t help thinking of Hsu Peng’s letter. She returned to the office, took it out of the drawer, and read it again before she left for home.
Walking along Peace Avenue, she was thinking of Hsu Peng. On the street, dozens of trucks and tractors traveled north or south, transporting lumber, cement, pupils, tomatoes, pumpkins. Even the vehicles’ blasting horns and the explosive snarls of their exhaust pipes couldn’t interrupt Nimei’s thoughts. Her mind had slipped into the quagmire of the past. She and Hsu Peng had been in love once. That was seventeen years ago, in her home village. After her father had died of tetanus, contracted in an accident at the village quarry, many matchmakers came to see her mother, intending to persuade her to marry off Nimei inexpensively. The widow, however, declined their offers, declaring that her daughter had already given her heart to a man. Most people believed her, because they often saw Jiang Bing, a young mess officer from the nearby barracks, visit her house on weekends. Each time, he’d arrive with a parcel under his arm, which the villagers knew must contain tasty stuff from the army’s kitchen. Behind dusty windowpanes numerous eyes would observe this small man appear at dusk, as though he were a deity of sorts, knowing the secret of abundance and harvest.
The villagers were hungry. Two years in a row, floods had drowned most of their crops. Dozens of people had died of dropsy in the village, where wails often burst out like cock-a-doodle-doos in broad daylight. So people thought Nimei a lucky girl, as she was going to marry an officer with infinite access to food.
Indeed, Nimei had lost her heart to a man, but he was not the mess officer. In secret she had been meeting Hsu Peng on the bank of Snake Mouth Reservoir on Tuesday afternoons, when she was off work from the commune’s clinic. He was a platoon leader and had graduated from high school — much better educated than most of the army men. Later, when her mother urged her to marry Jiang Bing, Nimei opposed her wish, saying she hardly knew him. She revealed to her that she loved another man, also an officer, but her mother was adamant and gruffed, “What’s love? You’ll learn how to love your man after you marry him. I never even met your father before our wedding.”
Nimei showed her mother a photograph of Hsu Peng and begged her to meet the platoon leader in person, hoping his good manners and manly looks might help dissuade her, but her mother refused. Meanwhile, the small mess officer came at least twice a week, as though he had become a part of the family. Every Saturday evening the widow expected to see him and find out what he had brought. Sometimes his parcel contained a braised pig’s foot, sometimes a bunch of dried mushrooms, sometimes a string of raw peanuts, sometimes two or three pounds of millet or sorghum. While most cauldrons in the village had rusted because there was little to cook, and while hundreds of people had faces bloated like white lanterns because they had eaten too many locust blossoms, Nimei and her mother never went without. Their chimney puffed out smoke on Sunday mornings, the fragrance of food drifting away from their yard, and children would gather along the high fence to sniff the delicious air.
Fully content, the widow was determined to give her daughter to Jiang Bing. One evening she wept, begging Nimei, “You must marry this man who can save us!” Out of pity and filial duty, the daughter finally yielded.
When she told Hsu Peng that she could not disobey her mother and had to marry the other man, he spat a willow leaf to the ground and said with a ferocious light in his eyes, “I hate you! I’ll get my revenge.”
She turned and ran away, tears stinging her cheeks in the autumn wind. Those were his last words for her.
Nimei had been married to Jiang Bing for sixteen years, and had left the countryside when he was demobilized, but she had never forgotten Hsu Peng’s angry words and his maddened, lozenged eyes. At night, awake and lonesome, she’d wonder where Hsu Peng was and what he was like. Was his wife kind-hearted and pretty? Did he still serve in the army? Had he forgotten her?
Despite thinking of him often, she had dreamed of him only twice. Once he appeared in her dream as a farmer raising hundreds of white rabbits; he looked robust and owned a five-room house with a red tiled roof. In her other dream he was gray-mustached and bald, teaching geography in an elementary school, spinning a huge globe. Afterward she was a little saddened by his aged appearance. But who wouldn’t change in seventeen years? Her own body was thick and roundish now, the shape of a giant date stone. There was no trace of her slender waist, admired so much by the girls in her home village. Her chin had grown almost double, and she wore glasses. What hadn’t changed was her sighing and murmuring in the small hours when her husband wheezed softly on the other bed in their room. What remained with her were Hsu Peng’s last words, which had somehow grown more resonant in her mind each year.
“Want some tea?” Jiang Bing asked Nimei.
“Yes.” She was lying on her bed with both hands under her neck. The room still smelled musty, though the windows had been open since she came home two hours ago.
“Here you are.” He put a cup of tea on the glass tabletop and walked out with a stoop. He went back to their daughter’s room to help her prepare for language and chemistry exams. The girl had not passed the admission test for business school the previous year, so this fall she would take exams for nursing school. In the living room, Nimei’s mother and her eleven-year-old son, Songshan, were watching TV, which was showing a kung fu movie made in Hong Kong. Their hearty laughter and the bleating music echoed through the house. Outside, a pair of caged grasshoppers were chirping languidly under the eaves, and the night air smelled of boiled corn and potato.
Why does Hsu Peng want to see me? Nimei wondered. Didn’t he hate me? Even if he no longer hates me, surely he must hate my mother and Jiang Bing. It’s good that they have never met. Why is he eager to visit me and my family after so many years? Does this mean he still has feelings for me? Eager to fan the old flame? If he knew what I look like now. .
She turned from side to side, wondering about Hsu Peng’s motivation but unable to guess. Then a thought, which had lurked at the back of her mind, came to the fore. Hadn’t he said he was a divisional commissar? He must be a general, a VIP. Did this mean he was going to flaunt his high rank in her face? Always so imposing, he hadn’t changed.
The image of such an important officer’s presence in her shabby house troubled her. In her mind’s eye she saw a brand-new jeep parked by their front gate. While the commissar sat inside the house, his chauffeur and bodyguards chatted noisily with the men and children from the neighborhood who gathered around the vehicle. This was awful, too shameful for her to stand. Her own husband was merely a senior clerk in the General Service Section of the hospital, his civilian rank equal at most to a battalion commander’s. If only Jiang Bing had held a position one or two ranks higher. Such a useless man.
On the other hand, Hsu Peng’s presence in her house could produce a positive effect. After he left, she would reveal to her mother who this general was. His visit would impress the old woman and make her understand what an unforgivable mistake she had made in forcing Nimei to marry Jiang Bing. It was time to teach the crone a lesson, so as to restrain her from nagging incessantly.