Who was this woman? She had been with him thirty years ago, when he was twenty-nine. She must have been somebody before Mrs. Yang, because Meimei was twenty-four now and she had told me that she was born three years after her parents got married. This meant his marriage had started twenty-seven years ago when Mr. Yang was thirty-two, three years after the unidentified woman turned him down. Why wouldn’t she accept his offer? He was not persecuted in the late 1950s as hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were, so it was unlikely that she rejected him for a political reason. Then why? Because she didn’t love him? Or for some other personal reasons?
“Don’t judge me by my appearance!” he cried. “It’s true that for years I never spoke to you and treated you like a stranger. But let heaven witness how in my heart I was dying for one woman only, and that was you! If I had spoken to you, believe me, I might’ve collapsed at your feet. Except for avoiding you, there wasn’t another way to contain my emotions and keep myself together in appearance. Now I’m too old to conceal my true feeling. It doesn’t matter how you feel about me, I’ve always loved you — loved you. At night when I can’t sleep, I’ll turn in bed thinking of you, only you.” He gave a long sigh.
So for all thirty years his heart had been possessed by this woman. Didn’t he love his wife? Probably not. Small wonder their marriage wasn’t a happy one.
He continued, “Don’t cry, Lifen. Don’t cry, my dear. I used to think that my heart would grow cold and exhausted as my belly grew forward. But no, in here”—slowly he drew his right hand closer to his chest—“there’s always the young man’s heart that desires and desires, hungrily.”
He fell silent, tears spurting out of the wrinkled corner of his eye and running down toward his ear. I moved over and wiped them off with my fingers.
So her name is Lifen, but Lifen who? I wondered. Does Meimei have any idea about this woman? Mr. Yang transferred to our school from Nanjing University twenty-eight years ago, and Meimei grew up here, unlikely to have known Lifen in person, who must have remained in Nanjing. Could Lifen have been the cause of his job transfer? In other words, did he come to Shanning University, a smaller and shabbier school, so as to shun her?
“Oh, I hate you!” he roared with a contorted face. “If only I had known your cunt was never idle at home!”
His ferocious voice shocked me. Why was he so furious at Lifen? They must have gotten quite intimate, or he wouldn’t have made such a crass remark. Then I remembered that three weeks ago he had mentioned some woman’s nipples that tasted “like coffee candy.” Maybe they belonged to Lifen.
My train of thoughts proved wrong. He croaked, “I–I believed that at least I had a faithful wife and a lovely daughter at home, but you betrayed me!” His face twisted, its wrinkles deepened into furrows.
Now he was accusing his wife! So this might have no connection with Lifen. It was almost unthinkable that Mrs. Yang could have had an affair. She was a high-cheeked woman and kept to herself most of the time; on the other hand, though rather shriveled now, she must have been quite pretty when she was young. Mr. Yang’s words—“a faithful wife and lovely daughter at home”—implied that he had been separated from his family, so the conversation might have taken place soon after their reunion. When could this separation have happened? During the Cultural Revolution? It was possible, perhaps when he was sent to the countryside.
This time I guessed right. He spoke again, in a relaxed tone of voice. “In the fields we worked like beasts of burden. When we were gathering in soybeans, I had to bend so low and so long that I couldn’t keep my back straight the next morning. But I always gritted my teeth to endure the back pain. I could do that not because I recited poetry in my heart but because I saw you and Meimei in my mind’s eye — you two were my hope. Little Chang couldn’t stand the torment any longer, and one afternoon he slashed his wrist with a sickle, bleeding to death. We wrapped him in a reed mat, buried him on the bank of a swamp, and didn’t even have time to find a stone to mark the pile of dirt. I didn’t kill myself, though I thought about it many times. Why not put a period to the endless sentence of suffering? Perhaps death was no more than a long sleep from which you didn’t need to wake up. Yes, why not uproot this misery once and for all? I didn’t take my life because I wasn’t cruel or courageous enough to desert you and our daughter. So I hoped and hoped, dreaming that someday I would come back as happy as Tu Fu when he returned home from the war-ridden land. I would shout his lines, ‘My wife and children are aghast to see that I’m alive, / All our neighbors gather along our walls watching me home.’ But my home was no longer the same. It’s broken because of you!” He burst out sobbing.
I felt so miserable that my jaws went numb, but I wouldn’t blame Mrs. Yang. Unlike many women who divorced their condemned husbands at that time, at least she hadn’t left him; instead, she waited for him, raised their daughter alone, and kept the family intact. It wasn’t easy to live like a widow with a husband alive who was a Demon-Monster. Meimei told me that for two years people would point at her mother’s back on the streets. Besides, Mr. Yang might never have loved his wife wholeheartedly, if his love for Lifen was that deep and that hopeless.
Seeing that more tears were coming out of his eyes, I picked up a towel. As I was about to wipe them off, he wagged his head, striving to lift his hand to stop me. “Leave me alone!” he cried without opening his eyes.
I obeyed him, standing back. He went on, “You ask me to forgive you for sleeping with him? I forgive you for that, but I shall never forgive you for writing me those false letters telling me how much you loved and missed me. You deceived me. It would’ve been better if you had told me the truth. That would have prevented me from dreaming. I survived only because I held fast to an illusion. Oh, what a fool I was! Why was I such a coward? Why didn’t I slash my wrist too?”
How had he discovered the affair? Did Meimei know anything about it? He seemed quite nasty to his wife, unfaithful though she might have been. An affair didn’t have to mean she hadn’t loved him. He had forgotten that he was far away from home and that a woman in her situation would need a man around.
Then I asked myself, If Meimei two-timed you, would you still accept her as your wife? I didn’t know how to answer.
Mr. Yang sighed, “Ah, life, what an ocean of grief!”
For a moment silence filled the room. Then he declared in all sincerity, “I’m only afraid I’m not worthy of my suffering.” His assertion made my gums itch.
19
It was almost midmorning. I opened the window of our bedroom to let in some fresh air. Outside, on the sun-baked ground a pair of monarch butterflies was hovering over an empty tin can, which was still wet with syrup. The colorful paper glued around the can showed it had contained peach wedges. I turned away from the window and resumed scrubbing a shirt soaking in my basin. Huran had athlete’s foot, and from under his bed his shoes emitted an odor like rotten cabbage. Mantao stood in the middle of the room and repeatedly raised a set of sixteen-pound dumbbells above his head. His dark bangs, in a sideswept wave, almost covered his right eye. His face was soft and pale; a film of perspiration coated his forehead. In fact we had another roommate, a graduate student in the Philosophy Department, whose bed was next to mine, but he had never used it because his wife had an apartment in town. His absence pleased us somewhat, as we could have more space just for the three of us, although in wintertime we often wished he had slept in here at night so that his body heat could have made the unheated room a little warmer.