“Like hell!” Wang Yinzhi said. “If I hadn’t taken over the business, you’d have gone under even if you had a hundred shops. And you have the nerve to say this shop is yours! You’ve lived off me for a year already, which is all anyone could expect. Now it’s time to give you back your precious freedom. There’s the door. This room is reserved for someone else tonight.”
“I’m your lawful husband, and I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready.”
“Lawful husband,” Wang Yinzhi repeated mawkishly. “Husband. Do you think you’re worthy of the term? Have you fulfilled your husbandly duties? Are you really up to it?”
“Yes, if you’d do as I say.”
“How dare you!” Wang Yinzhi exploded. “What do you take me for, a whore? You think you can order me around any way you want?” As her face turned bright red, and her ugly lips began to twitch, she flung the keys in her hand at his forehead. A sharp pain drilled its way into his brain and a hot, sticky liquid soaked his eyebrows. He reached up to touch it and pulled back a bloody finger, just as a couple of men he knew burst into the room. One was wearing a police uniform, the other was in a judge’s robe. The policeman was Wang Yinzhi’s younger brother, Wang Tiezhi; the judge was her brother-in-law, Huang Xiao-jun. They went straight for Jintong. “What do you say, Brother-in-law?” the policeman said as he drove his shoulder into him. “Anyone who takes advantage of a woman isn’t much of a man, wouldn’t you say?” The judge kneed him in the back. “My sister’s been good to you. Don’t you have a conscience?”
But just as Jintong was about to speak up in defense, a punch in the stomach drove him to his knees and sour liquid shot out of his mouth. Then the policeman leveled him out with a mighty karate chop in the neck. This brother-in-law, the judge, was a onetime military official who’d been a scout for ten years and had such a powerful hand he could break three bricks with a single chop. Jintong was grateful he’d held back a bit; if he hadn’t, he’d have been lucky to keep his head on his shoulders. Cry, he told himself. They won’t hit a man who’s crying. Crying is what weak people do. Crying is a plea for mercy, and real men never ask for mercy. But they kept hitting him, even as he knelt on the carpet, weeping and sniveling.
Wang Yinzhi was also crying, really crying, like a woman abused. “Don’t cry, Sis,” the judge said. “He’s not worth it. Get a divorce. There’s no need for you to throw away your youth. “You, there,” the policeman said, “I suppose you think the Wang family is an easy mark for you. Well, your niece the mayor has been suspended from duties and is under investigation. Your days of bullying people owing to connections are about to come to an end.”
The policeman and the judge picked Jintong up, carried him out of the room and down the dark corridor, past the brightly lit shop and outside, where they dumped him next to a rubbish heap. Like people said during the Cultural Revolution, he was swept onto the rubbish heap of history. A couple of sick cats in the rubbish heap meowed plaintively. He nodded apologetically. We’re in the same wretched boat, cats, so I can’t help you.
Jintong hadn’t seen his mother for at least six months, ever since Wang Yinzhi had kept him under house arrest, and he longed to see the light shining in that window and smell the enchanting aroma of lilacs beneath it. Last year at this time Wang Yinzhi had been a gloomy woman pacing beneath his window. Now he was the gloomy one, as the raucous laughter of the two brothers-in-law emerged from that window. She was too well connected in Dalan, with protectors everywhere, and he was no match for her. It’s another rainy night, but colder. Tears slither down the glass of the display; but this time they’re mine, not hers. How many nights in a person’s life does he find himself with no home to return to? This time last year I was fearful of letting her wander late at night all alone; tonight that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Before he realized it, his hair was soaked by the rain and his nose was stopped up, a sure sign of a cold. He was also hungry, and regretted flinging that wonderful soup at the maid instead of eating it himself. But now that he thought back, her fit of anger wasn’t altogether unreasonable. Any woman with a useless husband has no choice but to take over. Maybe, he was thinking, there’s still a chance. She hit me, but I didn’t hit her back. I was wrong to throw the soup, but I got down on my hands and knees and licked some of it up as part of the punishment the two men dished out. I’ll go over first thing in the morning and apologize – to her and to the Filipina servant. For now, I should be snoring away on the mattress at home. Maybe suffering a bit will do me good.
He recalled the overhang in front of the People’s Cinema, which was as good a place as any to get out of the rain, so he started walking. His decision to apologize to Wang Yinzhi in the morning went a long way toward putting his mind at ease, and he noticed the starlit edges of the misty sky. You’re fifty-four years old; the dirt is already up to your neck, so it’s time to stop making trouble for yourself. What difference does it make to you if Wang Yinzhi has slept with one or a hundred men? A cuckold is a cuckold.
11
Tears wetted my cheeks, all puffy from slapping myself, but the only reaction I got from Wang Yinzhi was a sneer. No indication that this cold-blooded woman had any intention of forgiving me as she fiddled with her key ring and watched my performance.
“Yinzhi, as the saying goes, one day of married life means a hundred days of tangled emotions. I’m begging you to give me another chance.”
“The problem is, we haven’t had our one day of married life.” “How about that night of March 7, 1991? That should count.”
I watched as she thought back to the night of March 7, 1991. Suddenly her face reddened, as if I’d humiliated her. “No,” she said indignantly, “it doesn’t! That was an indecent act, an attempted rape!”
Shocked and angered by her characterization, I asked myself how I could have been worried about losing a woman who could turn on me like that? Shangguan Jintong, after a lifetime of tears and snivel, isn’t it time you took a stand for a change? She can have the shop, she can have everything, except for my freedom. “All right, then, when shall we file for divorce?”
She took out a slip of paper. “Sign this, and it’s done. Naturally,” she added, “as a fair and decent person, I’m giving you thirty thousand yuan as a settlement. Sign here.” I did. As she handed me a bankbook in my name, I asked her, “Don’t I need to appear in court?” “Everything’s been taken care of,” she said as she tossed me the divorce papers, which had already been filled out. “You’re free,” she said.
Now that the final curtain had fallen on this drama, I really did feel as free and easy as I’d ever felt before. Before the night was over I was back home with Mother.
In the days before Mother died, Dalan’s mayor, Lu Shengli, was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to death, with a one-year reprieve. Found guilty of paying bribes, Geng Lianlian and Parrot Han were put in chains and thrown into prison. Their “Phoenix Plan” had been a gigantic hoax, and the loans of millions to the Eastern Bird Sanctuary, guaranteed by Lu Shengli, as mayor, were, for the most part, used as bribes; what little remained was simply squandered. The interest on the loans was never recovered, let alone the loans themselves, but the banks did nothing for fear that the sanctuary would go belly-up; that, in fact, was a worry shared by all of Dalan City. Eventually, this farce of a sanctuary closed its doors, the birds all gone, weeds covering the feathers and bird droppings all over the compound, the workers off to their next employment. But it continued to exist on the books of all the local banks, as the interest mounted.