Lin knit his thick eyebrows without saying a word. Ran Su kept on, "Don't worry yourself about the conditions. If he marries Manna Wu, of course he'll try to have her promoted and improve her status. My question to you is whether you would let her go."
After long silence, Lin muttered as though to himself, "I'm a married man and shouldn't hold her back. It's entirely up to her. "
"Lin, you have a big heart."
They got up, dusting themselves off. By accident, Lin had sat on a yellow mushroom. Touching the wet spot on the seat of his pants, he turned around and asked Ran Su, "How big is the stain?"
"Just the size of an egg."
"Damn, is it very obvious?"
"No problem. If it was on the front, it would leave a small map there and make you more attractive to girls." Ran Su laughed.
"I don't know if Manna can wash it off," Lin muttered. Since the year before last Manna had been doing laundry for him, as most fiancees would do for their men.
They turned back to the barracks. Director Su asked Lin not to reveal their talk to Manna, because he didn't want her to feel he was interfering with her personal affairs. Lin promised he wouldn't say a word.
Manna talked with Lin about Commissar Wei three days later. They both believed this was an opportunity she shouldn't miss. The man was a top officer in the province – if her relationship with him developed successfully, he could arrange for her to be transferred to Harbin. That would open a bright future for her. Possibly the commissar could place her in a crash program for training doctors or in a college to earn a diploma.
In his heart Lin was quite upset about the possibility of losing Manna. He was also angry with the commissar, who could choose any woman simply because he had power and rank. As a man, he was as smart as that old bastard, probably more handsome. Why couldn't he keep Manna? The commissar must have plenty of women already, but he had only one woman. How true the saying was: A well-fed man can never feel a beggar's hunger pangs. Lin was unhappy with Manna too, who, in his eyes, seemed eager to jump at such an opportunity. He said to himself, See how she loves power. She can't wait to drop me.
At the same time, a feeling of relief had been settling in him, because this new development meant that he might not have to push for a divorce every summer – to stir up that hornet's nest in the countryside. If he tried to divorce Shuyu again, heaven knew what kind of tricks his brother-in-law would devise against him. If this state of affairs dragged on, sooner or later Bensheng would come to the hospital to nab him. A few days ago he had told Manna about the judge's demand, and she had said she was unsure whether Lin should give out her name to the court in the future.
Bad-tempered and sarcastic, he began to make fun of Manna whenever he could. At the end of their table tennis game one evening, seeing no one else in the room, Lin said to her, "When you become that big officer's wife, don't forget me, a small powerless doctor who used to play Ping-Pong with you every week. I'll appreciate that."
"For pity's sake, stop it!" she snapped, scowling.
"It's just a joke. "
"You think I enjoy going through this thing? I feel like I'm trying to sell myself."
"Don't take that to heart. I mean – "
"I hate it! You're so happy because finally you can get rid of me."
Her eyes were flashing with anger. She put her Double Happiness paddle into its green canvas case and zipped it up. Without another word she walked out of the room.
Lin was speechless and closed his eyes as though suffering a fit of vertigo. He regretted having made the remark, but he did not follow her out. He wiped the sweat off his face with his cap. After picking up his shirt and the other paddle and turning off the lights, he went back to his dormitory alone.
Later he promised Manna that he wouldn't banter about the subject again.
5
It happened that Commissar Wei was going to stay for a night at Muji City on his way to the border, where he was to negotiate with the Russians for the sovereign rights to a small fortress. The fortress, constructed by the Japanese Guandong Army in the 1930s, was intersected by the boundary line between China and the Soviet Union, and both countries now claimed it. Skirmishes had broken out when soldiers of both sides ran into each other at the fortress, but so far no guns had been fired. Instead, the patrols had used rocks, sticks, and steel whips to strike each other, because neither the Russians nor the Chinese wanted to open fire first – to be blamed for violating the cease-fire agreement.
Before departing for the border, Commissar Wei had the hospital informed that he would be delighted to meet Manna Wu on Tuesday evening at the army's hotel in Muji City. The hospital leaders told Manna to get ready as soon as possible, since it was already Monday.
She was granted leave the next day. Because she would have to wear her uniform, there wasn't much to prepare. All she did was take a hot bath in the bathhouse and lie in bed for almost the whole afternoon, trying to get some sleep. She felt nervous, as if she were going to sit for the exam on the history of international proletarian revolutions that the hospital gave its staff annually. Yet there was neither the pounding of the heart nor the tightening of the chest as she had experienced long ago with Mai Dong and Lin Kong.
Despite making an effort to rest, she could not set her mind at ease, because she didn't know how she would get downtown in the evening after the bus service had stopped. She could walk but it would take at least an hour, and she might be sweating on arrival at the hotel. She didn't know how to ride a bicycle. If only she had dared to ask the leaders to assign an automobile to drive her there. She regretted not having listened to Lin the previous summer when he had offered to teach her how to bicycle.
After dinner, she put on a pair of patent-leather sandals. They were the only thing she could add to the uniform, but the shoes did make her appear taller and gave a touch of elegance to her carriage. She remembered that when she was a little girl, she had often dreamed of wearing a flowered blouse, fluffy and flossy, which made her look like a butterfly fairy and enabled her to soar into the clouds whenever she ordered, "Fly." In her heart of hearts she still cared very much for colorful clothes, though she understood it was inappropriate to wear them at her age.
She was wondering whether she should set out on foot, wearing a pair of sneakers and carrying the sandals in her satchel so that she could wear them for the meeting. As she was brushing her teeth, a jeep with a large fog light on its front arrived. The leaders had made arrangements for her transportation, but they hadn't told her.
With Manna on board, the jeep rolled out of the front gate and turned townward. The army hotel was at the west end of Glory Street, an area that used to be a red-light district. It occupied a black brick building that fifty years ago had been a Japanese brothel whose owner wouldn't take Russian rubles, which were in circulation together with Chinese yuan at the time. He would charge a Chinese customer double the price, even though most of the prostitutes were Korean women pretending to be Japanese ladies. It was the rush hour, and the street was crowded with bicycles. At a crossroads a beefy policeman was shouting at the cyclers through a megaphone and wielding a white zebra-striped truncheon to direct the traffic. The smell of roast mutton and stewed turnip hovered in the air.
The jeep dropped Manna at the front entrance to the hotel and pulled away. For a moment she worried about how to return to the hospital, then she dismissed the thought, feeling certain she could walk back. She wasn't afraid of dark streets, though the sandals might not give her an easy time. A soldier at the front desk told her that the commissar was expecting her in Suite 6 on the second floor. She thanked him and turned to the stairs. Somehow she felt unusually calm.