Waiting (29 page)

Lin sighed, not knowing how to reply. He went on writing the phrase " Warmly Welcome" with a brush on a large sheet of paper. They were making posters for a general's visit to the hospital. Lin was among the few skilled with the writing brush, so he had been assigned to the work.

Shiding Mu nudged him and went on, "Already tired out, eh? This is just the first step of a thousand-mile march." He gave a long laugh, which was so loud that it set the pane on a cabinet door rattling for a few seconds.

"Stop it!" Lin snapped.

But they wouldn't leave him alone. A junior officer chimed in, "Lin, by next summer, you'll be a skeleton if you go on like this. You must slow down."

Another man said to Lin with a wink, "You know, lust is the worm that sucks up your marrow."

Then a clerk in round-rimmed glasses dipped a small broom into a bucket, stirring the hot paste made of wheat flour, and recited loudly these lines from an ancient lyric:

They laughed out loud, then continued to talk about women. No wonder the saying went: "At thirty she is like a wolf; at forty a tiger." An old maid must be a wolf as well as a tiger, so only a young lion should engage her in battle. From the outset Lin should have known he was no match and should have set up a few rules with her. The office echoed with chortles. Their jokes made time pass so fast and the work so delightful.

Though he didn't show his anger, Lin was exasperated at heart. He told himself he had to do something to stop people from talking like this.

At home he looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe, which was the only piece of furniture he had bought for the wedding. Indeed his eyes had sunk deeper and seemed larger. His face was pallid, and more white hair appeared at his temples and crown. The gray strands gave him a sense of finality. At medical school twenty-five years before, he had grown some white hair, which later turned black again. Now there was no hope of reversing the gray.

One day he and Manna jumped into bed after lunch and made love. Afterward, he was so exhausted he fell asleep. Manna didn't wake him when she left for work. He went on sleeping until a nurse came at about three to get the key to the storage room. She said a technician from Harbin had arrived to repair the inhalator Lin had locked away. How embarrassed he was. Without washing his face, he set out with the woman for the medical building. On the way he kept telling her that he didn't feel himself.

That evening he said to his wife, "Sweetheart, we can't continue like this. We're no longer young. People have been talking about us."

"I know it's bad," Manna said, "but I can't help myself. Something's eating me inside, as if I won't live for long and have to seize every hour."

"We should save some energy for work."

"In fact, I don't feel well these days. I had my blood pressure checked this afternoon. It was high."

"How high?"

"One hundred fifty-two over ninety-seven."

"That's awful. We shouldn't have sex so often."

"Maybe we shouldn't." She sighed.

They agreed to protect their health from then on. That night they slept peacefully for the first time.

"It's like a cinerary casket," Lin muttered to himself. He referred to a small sandalwood box underneath Manna's clothes in the wardrobe. A bronze padlock always secured its lid. He couldn't help wondering what was inside. Probably money, or her bankbook, or the certificates of merit she had received. Somehow the varnished box had begun to occupy his mind lately.

One evening he asked her in a joking tone, "What are you hiding from me in the box?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The sandalwood box in the wardrobe."

"Oh, nothing's in it. Why are you so curious?" She smiled.

"Can I see what's inside?"

"Uh-uh, unless you promise me something."

"What?"

"Promise you won't laugh at me."

"Of course I won't."

"Promise that from now on you'll tell me all your secrets."

"Sure, I won't hide anything from you."

"Okay, then I'll let you see."

She got up from the bed, went over to the wardrobe, and took out the box. Removing the padlock, she opened the lid, whose underside was pasted over with soda labels. A roll of cream-colored sponge puffed out, atop the other contents. She took the roll out and unfolded it on the bed, displaying about two dozen Chairman Mao buttons, all fastened to the sponge. Most of them were made of aluminum and a few of porcelain. Their convex surfaces glimmered. On one button, the Chairman in an army uniform was wav ing his cap, apparently to the people on parade in Tiananmen Square. On another, he was smoking a cigar, his other hand holding a straw hat, while talking with some peasants in his hometown in Hunan Province.

"Wow, I never thought you loved Chairman Mao so much," Lin said with a smile. "Where did you get so many of these?"

"I collected them."

"Out of your love for Chairman Mao?"

"I don't know. They look gorgeous, don't they?"

He was puzzled by her admiration. He realized that someday these trinkets might become valuable indeed, as reminders of the mad times and the wasted, lost lives in the revolution. They would become relics of history. But for her, they didn't seem to possess any historical value at all. Then it dawned on him that she must have kept these buttons as a kind of treasure. She must have collected them as the only beautiful things she could own, like jewelry.

As he was thinking, a miserable feeling came over him. He didn't know how to articulate his thoughts without hurting her feelings, so he kept silent.

He glanced at the box, in which there were about two dozen letters held together by a blue rubber band. "What are those?" he asked.

"Just some old letters from Mai Dong. " She seemed to keep her head low, avoiding his eyes.

"Can I see them?"

"Why are you so inquisitive today?"

"If it bothers you, I don't have to see them."

"There's no secret in them. If you want, you can read them. But don't do that in front of me."

"All right, I won't."

"I won't lock the box then."

"Sure, I' ll read them and see what a romantic girl you were. "

In his heart he was eager to go through the letters, though he didn't show his eagerness. Never had he seen a love letter except in novels; never had he written one himself. Now he could see a real love letter.

The next afternoon, he came home an hour early and took out the sandalwood box to read the letters. Many of them smelled fusty; they were already yellowish, and some words were too fuzzy to be legible, owing to damp. Mai Dong's writing wasn't extraordinary by any means; some of the letters were mere records of his daily activities – what he had eaten for lunch, what movie he had seen the night before, what friends he had met. But occasionally a phrase or a sentence would glow with the genuine feelings of a young man desperately in love. At one place he wrote, "Manna, whenever I think of you, my heart starts quickening. I couldn't sleep last night, thinking about you. This morning I have a terrible headache and cannot do anything." At another place he declared, "I feel my heart is about to explode. Manna, I cannot live for long if this situation drags on." One letter ended with such an exclamation, "May Heaven facilitate our union!"

Seeing those words, Lin almost laughed. Obviously Mai Dong had been a simple, gushy fellow, hardly able to express himself coherently.

Yet having read all the letters, he felt a doubt rising in his mind. What troubled him was that the desperation Mai Dong had described was entirely alien to him. Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love. Whenever he wrote to Manna, he would address her as "Comrade Manna," or jokingly as "My Old Lady." Maybe I've read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I'm too rational, better educated. I'm a scientist by training – knowledge chills your blood.

At dinner that evening, he said to Manna, "I went through the letters. I can see that Mai Dong was really fond of you."

"No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"He jilted me. I hate him."

"But he loved you once, didn't he?"

"It was just a crush. Most men are liars. Well, except you." She grinned and went on wiping up the remaining pork broth on the plate with a piece of steamed bun.

Her words surprised him. If what she said about Mai Dong was true, then why had she kept his letters in the treasure box? Did she really hate him? He was puzzled.

Manna found herself pregnant in February. After that, she insisted Lin get another bed so they could sleep separately. "I don't want to hurt the baby," she explained, meaning they should stop having sex until the baby was born. He agreed. He borrowed a camp bed from the Section of General Affairs and set it up in a corner of the room.

Her pregnancy came as a surprise to Lin, who had thought that Manna, already forty-four, must be too old to be fertile. Now he was worried, because she had a weak heart. Since they had been married, once in a while she had suffered from arrhythmia, and her blood pressure had been high, though her cardiogram didn't indicate any serious problem. His worry was compounded by the fear that at her age she might not be able to give birth to a baby smoothly. He tried to persuade her to have an abortion, but she wanted the baby adamantly, saying that that was the purpose of their marriage, that she would not be a childless woman, and that this might be her last opportunity. She even told him, "I hope our baby is a boy. I want a little Lin."

"I don't believe in that feudal stuff. What's the difference between a boy and a girl?"

"A girl will have a harder life. "

"Come on, I'm not interested in having another child. "

"I want my own baby."

Unable to dissuade her, he dropped the subject and let her follow her wish.

Her reaction to pregnancy was severe. She vomited a great deal, sometimes even in the small hours. She didn't seem to care about her looks anymore. Her face became bloated, and the skin around her eyes grew dark and flabby as though she had just stopped crying. In addition, she ate a lot; she drank pork-chop soup with shredded kelp in it, saying the baby needed nutrition and tapping her belly, which hadn't bulged yet. What's more, her appetite was capricious. One day she craved sweet potatoes and the next day almond cookies. Then she remembered jellyfish and begged Lin to get some for her. Muji is far from the sea, and even dried jellyfish was a rarity after the Spring Festival. He bicycled about in the evening to look for jellyfish, but couldn't find any. He asked a few nurses, whose families lived in the city, to help, but none of them could do anything. Finally, through a relation of the mess officer, Lin bought two pounds of salted jellyfish at a seafood store.

Manna washed the sand and salt off the jellyfish, sliced them, and seasoned them with vinegar, mashed garlic, and sesame oil. For three days, at every meal she chewed the jellyfish with crunchy relish. She wanted Lin to try a piece, but he couldn't stand the smell.

Then from the fourth day on, she stopped putting the jellyfish on the dining table, as though the dish were unknown to her, despite half a bowl of the leftovers still sitting in the cupboard.

Aunt Cheng, Doctor Ning's mother, stopped by one evening. She told Manna, "You're a lucky woman and can eat whatever you want. In the old days when I gave birth to my first son, I ate only ten eggs. That was all for two months. When I was big with my second child, I was dying to have a roast chicken. Every morning I went to the market to look at the golden chickens at a cooked-meat stand. I had no money even for a wing, just went there to smell some."

The old woman's words reminded Manna of what was good for her, and she began craving roast chicken. So every other day Lin bought her a chicken from a luncheonette nearby, though he was worried about the cost – on his monthly salary he could afford no more than fifteen roast chickens. Fortunately her appetite for chicken lasted less than two weeks. Then she remembered pomegranates, which were impossible to find here in wintertime. How she longed for those pink pearls, sour, pungent, and juicy! One night she even dreamed of a robust tree laden with pomegranates. She told Lin about the dream, saying the auspicious fruit portended that they would have a big boy. Somehow the impossibility of coming by a pomegranate corrected her freak appetite, and she began eating normally again.

Since they'd been married, Lin had read little. His bookcase standing by the door still held his books, but it was also loaded with cups, medicine bottles, eyeglass cases, flashlights, a tumbler doll, and knickknacks. Dust had gathered on the tops of the volumes, but neither he nor his wife bothered to wipe it away. By comparison, Manna was reading a lot, mainly about pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. She checked out all the books the hospital's small library had on the subjects; she was amazed to discover how ignorant she was about parenting. At dinner she would brief her husband on what she had read that day. Most of the time he would listen to her absently; her words entered his head at one ear and left by the other. His lack of interest sometimes annoyed her.

In addition to reading, she was busy preparing clothing and dia pers for the baby. She asked some nurses for their threadbare shirts and pajamas, because diapers should be made of soft, used cloth that wouldn't chafe the baby's skin. In the evening she often went to their neighbors' homes to learn how to make baby quilts and pillows and how to knit socks and booties. She bought three pounds of knitting wool, which cost her over seventy yuan and made Lin wonder why she had become so openhanded, even wasteful – the baby would hardly need so much woolen clothing. But he didn't complain, because she had spent her own money.