I left the restaurant and wandered through the streets for hours. I walked from Yuetan Road to Tiananmen Square, and from Jianguomen Avenue to Ritan Park, then returned to the Square, and wandered past Mao’s Mausoleum and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. When I next looked up, I was at the turning into Nanxiao Lane. But I couldn’t go home, because her slippers were on the floor, her black straw hat was on the wardrobe, and the windowsill was piled with her empty yoghurt bottles. She drank two or three bottles a day.
So I kept walking. The wall on my right followed me, then caught up and merged into the red walls of the Forbidden City. I was back at the Square again. I climbed up to the viewers’ podium and lay on the cement floor below the portrait of Mao Zedong. Xi Ping’s face was still shaking before my eyes. The day she went to her aunt I bought her some hawthorn jelly and loaded her cassette player with a recording of her favourite song, ’The Same Old Days’. That evening I waited on the station platform. She stepped off the Tongxian train and complained about the exhausting journey. When we got home, I took off her shoes, pressed my face onto her stomach, inhaled her musty smell, pushed her onto the bed. .
‘Get up, you wretched dog! What are you doing? Where are you from?’ There were three policemen standing by my head.
‘I missed the last train. My head hurts.’ My voice disgusted me.
‘Bullshit! Get out of here!’ At least they didn’t kick me.
My eyes swim across the room. Xi Ping’s belongings are still stuffed in a plastic bag behind the door. As I stare at it, the bag appears to breathe.
‘Go to sleep now, Nannan. You have to be up at seven tomorrow.’
‘I am asleep.’ Tufts of her black hair peep above the quilt.
‘How can you talk if you’re asleep?’
‘I’m sleep-talking.’ She curls up like a little rabbit.
I pull out my letter to the Guangxi Film Studio, and read it again.’. . I am writing to you about my girlfriend, Xi Ping. I have recently discovered that she has been conducting an illicit relationship with a Beijing hooligan. She is cast to play the heroine of the film, a nurse devoted to the cause of the Party. I hope you will inform the director at once, and tell him that Xi Ping is entirely unsuitable for the part of. .’
I take the letter to bed. Nannan crawls sleepily onto my chest. She needs her mother, not me. I have no breasts. I don’t know how to cuddle her or brush her hair.
I turn off the light. The sky outside has cleared. Stars always shine brighter when a wind blows through the night. I will post the letter tomorrow. Never trust a woman again. If I listen to her excuses and take her back I will only have myself to blame. I told her I didn’t believe in love, so why am I so upset? There is a gang of hooligans waiting for me at work. I will murder someone if they try to rectify me again. Fuck the Communist Party! Fuck its eighth bloody ancestor!
I shut my eyes and see myself lying on a cement floor. I have fallen to my death this time. My head is soaking in a pool of blood. Amitabha, Buddha of Infinite Light. Amitabha, Amitabha. .
A Man of Thirty
Today is 18 August 1983. My thirtieth birthday. Before I am out of bed someone bangs on my gate. ‘Ma Jian, hurry! Phone for you!’ I grunt, slip into my flip-flops and stand up. The footsteps walk away. A radio booms down from the apartment block. At the gate I check my pockets, then go back to fetch my wallet, and grab my notebook too while I am about it.
A bus must have just passed, the dust feels hot underfoot. The left side of the lane is in dazzling sunlight, a few people stand in the shade on the right. The owner of the grave-clothes shop is sitting in his doorway. He holds the wooden doorframe with one hand and strokes his bare stomach with the other. ‘Hey! Mr Writer! You’re up early today!’ I grunt a reply and look away. 1 hate the sound of his voice. Ever since I quizzed him about grave-clothes and funerary objects he keeps asking me whether my book is finished yet. ‘You’ve done well there,’ he says, ‘writing about the dead — they’re much nicer than the living.’ The public telephone rests on the windowsill of a small restaurant. A woman in a skirt is standing beside it, waiting to make a call.
Li Tao’s voice rattles through the earpiece. ‘It’s your birthday today, I’ll come round tonight.’
‘Don’t bother, I have nothing to celebrate.’
‘Nonsense. You are having a party whether you like it or not. I’ll bring the food, you get on the phone and ask some friends round. See you tonight.’
I glance at my wallet and notice the woman’s calves shaking impatiently. Blue veins run down her feet and disappear under the black pigskin of her shoes.
‘I’ll pay for this one later, Aunty,’ I say to the old woman seated by the telephone. ‘I have a few more to make. I’ll just let this lady make hers.’
The grocery store owner next door brings out a tray of sliced watermelon. A boy in a white vest snatches a slice then charges down a turning to the right.
‘Fine. I’ll send you the documents. End of the month. Of course they’re imported, I have the receipts. Came back from Guangzhou last month. Great. Don’t forget to bring the application forms. .’ The woman is still talking to the telephone.
Back in my room, I search for the sheepskin camera case I was awarded for a photograph exhibited at the Workers’ Palace. It is too good to use, so I store it in a cardboard box under my bed. I open the zip and pull out a page of newspaper. It is dated 1 May 1982, the month before my divorce came through. I kept it because my prize-winning photograph, ‘Sunset over Yanshan Petrochemical Plant’, is printed on one side, and a review of Guoping’s prize-winning Korean dance, ‘Joy at the Great Harvests of the Agricultural Contract System’, is printed on the other.
I saw her perform that dance in a propaganda show in the Temple of Heaven Park. After she came off stage I went to look for her in the changing pavilion. She was chatting with Hong Ye, laughing and swaying her hips. When she saw me, her face froze.
‘I took ten pictures of you, they should turn out well,’ I said.
‘Hope they’re better than the last ones.’
Hong Ye said, ‘Stop bickering, you two. Come on, Ma Jian, take some photos of us while we still have our make-up on.’ She is a few years younger than Guoping. Five girls rushed out onto the grass and practised their poses. Guoping raised her hands in the air and danced in a circle. In the sun her Korean skirt was as blue as the sky.
A large soprano stepped onto the stage and burst into song: ‘Good manners and civilised behaviour are very important in life. .’ Her voice reverberated between the park’s four walls.
‘You don’t have to stay, Ma Jian. Go home.’ Guoping’s face was glazed with sweat. The pink face powder creasing at the corners of her mouth masked her expression. The bare skin of her ears and neck made me think of her naked thighs.
At the bottom of the camera case I find a bar of foreign soap, still in its wrapper. Wang Ping, the Hangzhou Daily reporter, brought it back from her trip abroad. When our work unit sent a delegation to Norway she was chosen as translator. We met when she visited my department for a foreign propaganda training session. A photograph of a woman with long blonde hair is printed on both sides of the wrapper. When I hold it in my hand my thoughts turn to women.
The pawn shop pays me eighteen yuan: sixteen for the sheepskin camera case and two for the bar of soap. I buy one jin of pickled cabbage and two of sesame seed cakes, and blow the rest of the money on a bucket of beer. Then I create a makeshift table with an old canvas and a wooden crate and cover it with a sheet of newspaper. By the time I have set it with the food and glasses, it is almost dark outside.