She stared at him. `What did you) ust say?'
`I'm boiling hot,' he said. `Wash my clothes.'
His tone was precisely the one he would have used with his wife, expecting her to wash and cook for him when he came in from the fields. He was not, however, speaking to his wife. Displeasure flashed across Liu Lian's face. Ignoring the uniform, she pointed silently at the Serve the People! sign, a faint jeer about her mouth. She then turned toward the shower room, her toiletries still cradled in her arms.
From the kitchen, Wu Dawang had an uninterrupted view of the sign. Though its text and images had been tarnished by cooking smoke, its message still chimed across at Wu Dawang like an alarm bell, reminding him of the role he'd been assigned to play in Compound Number One, of the inferior status that a peasant soldier could shake off only in his fantasies.
He slowly retracted his hand and uniform. Squatting down onto his heels like a deflated leather ball, he let his clothes fall to the ground. He gazed out of the back door, into the vegetable garden. At one side stood a small copse of poplars, their trunks cracked open into fissured knots that stared back at him. The colour drained from his face, he turned back to the Serve the People! sign, then sprang up and ran to the shower room. No Liu Lian. He pounded up the stairs to the bathroom where he discovered her dabbing her face with some of the powder she'd just bought. Charging in, he gathered her up in his arms and began staggering off with her toward the bedroom. In the confusion of this hasty manoeuvre, and as she was struggling to free herself, she knocked a framed scarlet and yellow quotation by the Chairman off the wall. A second later, he accidentally trod on it, shattering the glass and embellishing the Great Truth beneath ('Without a People's Army, the People Have Nothing') with a large, dusty footprint.
A stunned silence fell.
He put her down. They looked at the smashed quotation, then at each other.
`What the hell have you done?' she demanded.
You were the one who knocked it off the wall.'
She looked down at his footprint. `One call to Security and you're a dead man.'
`Is that what you're going to do?'
She glanced at his stricken face. `I might. And I might not.'
His voice became more cajoling. `You were the one who made me come upstairs. If you hadn't, it wouldn't have fallen off the wall, would it?'
Liu Lian looked at him like a mother would at a son who'd just slapped her. As she stared hard at him, her expression of startled uncertainty changed into shocked indignation. `What did you just say?'
`I said, it was you who made me come upstairs.'
When?'
`Just now, in the kitchen, when you pointed at the Serve the People! sign.'
She laughed drily. She had meant to remind him of the sign's literal meaning, of his real status in the house, but he had chosen to understand only the private sexual code they had devised for it; to serve her according to less conventional Communist principles. She had no idea what had passed through Wu Dawang's head as he'd squatted, staring out at the garden, that a long-hidden resentment at the rigid hierarchy all around him was about to burst forth. As she contemplated his simple, honest face, compassion welled up inside her. She felt she'd treated him unfairly. She placed his hand on her breast, as if to comfort him, and traced her own soft, slender finger across the back of it. This familiar, affectionate gesture offered Wu Dawang first sexual encouragement, then opened the floodgates to his suppressed, unarticulated feelings of discontent. With reckless abandon, he scooped her up in his arms, carried her over to the bed further trampling the Chairman's quotation underfoot threw her down on it and began roughly undressing her.
She lay on her back, both legs in the air, submitting to this unceremonious treatment. As he entered her, he was overcome by a new kind of happiness a triumphant sense of taking revenge for some past wrong, of getting the better of an oppressor. The strange thing, though, was that, far from outraging her, this almost animal outburst of his seemed to be giving her just as much pleasure. Her startlingly loud, raw, uninhibited sobs urged him on until, finally victorious in his complete possession of her, he collapsed to the ground at the foot of the bed, naked and dripping with sweat. The fragments of glass and damaged quotation lay around him like rubbish.
She lay quietly on the bed, also naked except for a pillow pulled over her thighs. Both stared, unmov ing, up at the ceiling, sunk in postcoital anticlimax.
The midday sun poured in through the window, illuminating golden stars of airborne dust. While the songs of sparrows and turtledoves clattered around them, the cicadas sounded hoarse, exhausted, their voices dying away almost as soon as they'd made themselves heard. They lay there in silence, letting the time pass between them, a sense of extraordinary fatigue hanging in the air.
`What time is it?' she eventually asked, still without moving, as if the ceiling might supply the answer.
`I don't know,' he replied, also to the ceiling. `Are you hungry?' he asked.
No. Wu Dawang, we've become animals.'
`I don't care.'
Where did all that come from?'
`All what?'
`All that just now.'
`I feel like I'm full of hatred, inside. Somehow,) ust then, it all came out.'
`Who do you hate?'
`I don't know.'
Is it me?'
`No, I don't think so.'
`I feel like that, too.'
Who do you hate?'
`I'm not sure either.'
She sat up and put her clothes on, then lay back down on the bed. `There's no one around,' she said. `I wish we could spend the rest of our lives locked in here together.'
When's the Commander back?'
`Don't worry yourself about that. But the minute he is, I'll get him to fix your promotion.'
At the very least, let's lock ourselves in here for a full three days and three nights before he comes back. Then, when he does, I'll go back to my company. Whatever happens, I can't stay here.'
Why not?'
`D'you think I could face him after everything that's happened between us?'
A silence spun out between them, as he waited to hear what she thought would happen between the two of them when the Division Commander came home. Instead, she eventually asked him: `What did you buy in town?'
He told her about the food he'd bought.
`How long will that last us?' she wanted to know next.
Over a month.'
She sat up and combed a hand through her tangled hair. Standing up, she glanced down at his naked body. Then she wandered, smiling, downstairs.
When he heard her go outside, he picked himself up from the floor and went across to the window. He saw her walk over to the entrance to the com pound with an iron lock in her hands, check to left and right that no soldiers were approaching along the road, and pull the two iron gates shut. Putting her hands through the gates, she padlocked them together on the outside to give the illusion that no one was at home. Returning to the house, she locked both front and back doors.
The stage was now set for the culminating seventytwo hours of their affair. He dressed while he waited for her. By the time she reappeared, however, she'd already taken off all her clothes again. They stood facing each other across the bedroom doorway.
`I've locked everything up,' she said.
We haven't much rice,' he replied.
`I've checked. There's still half a bag in the cupboard.'
'That should be enough.'
'Why have you put your clothes back on?'
He undressed again, folding his uniform carefully away in her wardrobe as if he planned never to put it back on.