In the event, nothing happened in the way she had imagined. Still afraid, she insisted on turning the light off. She really had no idea that Mo, as a man, needed to be stimulated by seeing her to get turned on. Mo actually suspected that Tianyi had some physical blemish that she dare not let him see. He lost his erection and had some difficulty getting it back. Tianyi made a grab for the condoms. By now frantic, Mo begged her: ‘Can’t we do without?’ ‘No way!’ Tianyi was adamant. ‘I fall pregnant very easily.’ Mo drooped again. After a lot of trying, he managed it in a more or less sort of way. What a magnificent body, but it’s good for nothing, he thought to himself. Even his hick of a wife was a better bet. She might have been flabby, but at least she knew how to have a good time! He didn’t know why he had gone to all this trouble. When the lights were out, all women were pretty much the same.
Watching Mo throw on his clothes and leave, Tianyi knew that yet another man had come and gone in her life. But this time, she had no regrets. His body had taught her to understand herself: she was not a woman who could separate lust from love, or go to bed with a man for whom she felt nothing, and she was deluding herself if she thought otherwise.
18
Qiang grew colder towards Tianyi. Finally one day he erupted when Tianyi got to work late, and lambasted her. Tianyi was mortified as she listened to his stinging remarks. From then on, they did not speak anymore even if they met. When Tianyi saw him from a distance, she lifted her chin and walked by as if he were not there. Qiang paid her back in her own coin, lifting his already lofty chin and turning on his heel. It was the gossip of the company — Qiang and Tianyi had had a bust-up. And everyone knew the reason: Tianyi had got hold of a book called Old City and Qiang had been severely criticized by his bosses for it, so severely that it could blight his career. According to colleagues in the Arts Department, what Tianyi had done was political entrapment!
Most of the staff in the Arts Department were women with some sort of acting background, and they loved to bitch. Tianyi remembered something her mother always used to say, that whores were heartless and actors immoral. The truism served her well now. The women quickly taught her, however, that certain other maxims were nonsense: return good for evil, persistent effort would be rewarded, no need to gild the lily, people will help you out in your hour of need. In this company, everyone was only out to make big bucks, and as fast as possible. Added to which, the place was full of flatterers and toadies, with a knife up their sleeves, a smile on their faces and a foot stuck out ready to trip you up. But she was treading on very thin ice, and she felt too intimidated to do anything about it. Whatever would be, would be. She was going unarmed into battle, so she might get shot at, but the wounds were unlikely to be fatal.
In the past, Tianyi had been under Wei Qiang’s protection, and the ex-actresses had not dared do anything to her. But now they could see that she had been well and truly dumped and, as is the way of things, everyone was ready to hit a woman who was down. After all, she had been chucked out like an old cleaning rag, why shouldn’t everyone scuff her underfoot? She had only written one big book, The Tree of Knowledge in the eighties, nothing more! She was just one among so many writers in that decade. And hadn’t she just been an assistant in the Academy of Letters, a blue-stocking? What was she doing butting into the world of showbiz? She had no talent and no style in a world where both counted, and she was a bit of a ditherer, too. It was true she had put out some new stuff but she had not made any kind of a name for herself, and in the world of arts and entertainment, if you were a nobody, the safest thing was not to stick your head above the parapet.
Tianyi continued to hold her head high, but she also felt confused and distressed. She could not understand it. Qiang’s entreaties that she should contact Wusheng for him still rang in her ears. She had taken on that responsibility unhesitatingly, for the sake of their friendship. Where had she gone wrong? Where?
But very soon, Tianyi was jolted from this particular crisis and plunged into a much deeper one. This time she was truly shaken to the core.
One day, a dismal drizzle was falling and the Beijing streets were unusually quiet. Tianyi, dressed casually in trousers and a top, slipped quickly into the military compound and to the door of the flat where Zheng’s parents lived. Zheng’s mother had phoned her. She found Mrs Ke with tears pouring down her face. Even Zheng’s father was weeping. Tianyi knew at once that it was serious.
With shaking hands, Zheng’s mother gave her a piece of paper. Tianyi could see it was Zheng’s handwriting but, for a long time, she could not bring herself to read it. She stared vacantly at his mother’s hand, with its stubby, fleshy, carrot-like fingers. Can hands and fingers be inherited, she wondered vaguely? She seemed to see those fingers mixing the mayonnaise, clutching a pair of chopsticks with clumsy earnestness. The tears welled and her eyes misted over.
‘Child, what’s up! What is it? Read the letter!’ Zheng’s mother was shaking her with both hands. The elderly pair were alarmed at her Tianyi’s deathly pallor and rigid expression.
Tianyi pulled herself together and peered at the scribbled writing. She had teased Zheng so often about his terrible handwriting but now all she wanted to do was to press those beloved words against her cheeks, into her heart. ‘If prison conditions don’t improve within two weeks, I’ll take my own life in protest!’
She knew, as everyone who knew Zheng did, that he meant what he said. Just at the time when her head and her heart had been so full of Qiang, Zheng was enduring the hardships of prison. Number Two Prison was different from Qin Cheng Prison, he wrote. Here he only had four square metres of space, one-third of which was taken up with the latrine, which teemed with maggots in hot weather. The stink was terrible. He was tormented by flies, mosquitoes and fleas, and covered in lumps and bumps from their bites. The itching was unendurable, and he scratched and scratched, until he had wounds so deep that he could see the bone gleaming white underneath!
When she left Zheng’s parents that day and got on the metro, she wept uncontrollably, beyond embarrassment and ignoring the shocked stares of her fellow passengers. She just wanted to know why. Why was the goddess of liberty so pitiless? People had not advanced a single step in a hundred years, and every step forward had to be paid for with someone’s blood! The state was a meat grinder, one enormous meat-grinder that had destroyed the dreams of those whom the heavens loved. How many exceptional men and women had been minced to fragments in its jaws? Wasn’t the law of nature survival of the fittest? But it was the best who were being destroyed by this process, the best! How many really excellent people had fallen in the last few years? Too many!
Many years later, when she mentioned Zheng’s time in prison to his parents again, she found them indifferent. The old man chuckled: ‘Wherever our boy goes, he’s always lucky. Even those years he spent in prison, he really got treated well.’ He talked as if it were all a lifetime ago. Distressed, Tianyi protested gently: ‘He had a terrible time in Number Two Prison. He got a message out to me that he was going to kill himself in protest at the conditions.’ But then she realized that this was quite the wrong thing to say. There was not the slightest reaction from anyone except for Zheng’s mother. This woman who back then had wept and begged Tianyi to help, now said dismissively: ‘That was only for a short time. Why rake it all up again now?’ Tianyi’s mouth dropped open and she looked from one person to another. Every one of them was busy stuffing their mouths with food. No one appeared in the slightest bit moved.