It was against this idyllic backdrop that, three days ago, as dusk was falling on whichever secret meeting had been scheduled for the second day of the Commander's all-important two-month study-anddiscussion conference on streamlining army administration and performance in Beijing, after Wu Dawang had taken dinner with Liu Lian and begun clearing the table, she had sent in his direction a glance beneath whose coolly decorous exterior burned a seething fire. Taking the Serve the People! sign from its place against the wall, she set it down on the mahogany dining table-as lightly, nonchalantly and guilelessly as if she were asking him to fetch something from the yard, or pick something up from the floor.
`Xiao Wu,' she said, tucking the diminutive xfan in front of his surname in a casual, blandly affectionate kind of way, `whenever this sign's not in its usual place, it means I need you upstairs for something.'
Her communication concluded, she knocked the wooden sign meaningfully against the table — a cool, darkly enigmatic sound, like that of jade on agate. Then, just as she did after every meal, she glided sedately up the stairs.
He stood there, dazed, not sure what was next expected of him, a hint of pleasurable disquiet percolating through him. He gazed at her retreating figure as if it belonged to a woman he'd never seen before, following it with his eyes until she turned the bend in the stairs and her shadow disappeared like a tree's evaporating at sundown. He then returned the sign to its proper place, and set about his usual washing of the dishes and other richly revolutionary chores around the house.
Even today, that dusk still gleams bright in his memory, the dying sunlight as red as a political slogan freshly daubed across a wall. After Serving the People a respectable while in the kitchen, he went out into the front yard. There he pruned a few superfluous blooms off an extravagantly vigorous bush of scarlet roses, letting them fall into the plastic bucket reserved for the household of the top-ranking officer- even his deputy received only the old-style iron model. After he had watered the other roses and shrubs by the cobbled pathway, the sun finally sank beneath the horizon, taking its vermilion blush away with it to the west. This is the time, on the plains of eastern Henan, when evening cedes peacefully to night, when the voices of the cicadas fade away to almost nothing the occasional chirruped exception echoed through the barracks like a rousing army chorus, bringing a welcome respite from the eerie quiet. Just beyond the red-lacquered gate of the Division Commander's compound, the footsteps of the relief patrol clattered across the courtyard. Looking up, Wu Dawang recognized a member of his old company, and they exchanged salutes through the reinforced steel gate. He then went back inside the house, still carrying his bucket.
It was at this moment that Liu Lian quietly lit the firebrand of love in her innocently unknowing orderly. He immediately saw that the sign he had returned to its proper home only half an hour ago had been placed, with heart-stopping brazenness, in the middle of the living room, against the bottom of the stairs. Time had begun to wear the stairs' red lacquer into cracks and scars, exposing in places the grain of the wood, which, like the coquettish features of capitalist women in films, now peeped coyly out at the room. Wu Dawang wasted no time: the sign's new position was a silent call to arms more impera tive than any barked order. It told him that upstairs there was work for him, and for him alone.
He immediately set down his bucket, as if a command was echoing through the house. But only a few steps up, his mind cast back six months to the day he'd first reported for his new duties. You needn't concern yourself with the upstairs,' the Division Commander had said, an understated steeliness to his voice, `and especially if my wife's not about.' These words now rang in Wu Dawang's ears as deafeningly as if Chairman Mao himself had spoken them, and when he reached the bend in the stairs he slowed and lightened his step-as if the treads were made of glass, barely able to support his weight.
The residual glimmer of the dusk was seeping through the window, like silk gauze washed red and white. A faint yet pervasive scent of decay floated about him. He couldn't tell where it was coming from-the wooden window or door frames perhaps, or the lime cementing the greenish-black bricks-but it was, somehow, curiously feminine. Though he knew perfectly well that it was utterly inappropriate for him to feel now, obeying the summons of his Commander's wife, as he had done on his way to meet his own intended for the first time, still his heart began thumping uncontrollably. This state of agitation, brought on by the prospect of presenting himself before Liu Lian, was unbecoming to a revolutionary soldier's dignity and education, to the lofty emotional and ideological state he aspired to. And so he pulled himself up, thumped his chest and reminded himself severely that he was climbing the stairs because there was work for him at their summit-as if a crucial link in the great chain of Revolution were waiting for him up there, leaving him no choice but to go and retrieve it.
Once he had, with some effort, managed to dam the busy brook of counterrevolution within and calm the beating of his heart, he completed his ascent with a light, steady tread. It didn't take him long to work out that the arrangement of the first floor was precisely the same as the ground: two rooms to the east, a toilet to the south and an extra room facing west. Located directly above the kitchen and dining room, this extra space seemed to be fitted out for conferences, its centre ringed by a circle of wood-framed sofas and tea tables, its walls hung with all manner of administrative and military maps.
This, plainly, was the Division Commander's workroom-like a novelist's study, but a hundred thousand times more important. Wu Dawang blinked at the frenzies of blood-red arrows and multicoloured lines swarming over maps punctuated by brightly scrawled circles, triangles and squares-as if an entire garden had burst into glorious bloom inside the house. He instinctively averted his gaze, suddenly understanding the Commander's warnings about going upstairs. If a man was allowed even a glimpse of the doorway to secrets, those secrets were as good as out. As a soldier, Wu Dawang's sacred mission in life was to keep military secrets secret: to make it his business not to mind what wasn't his business. It was this discretion that had won him the affection and trust of the Commander, his wife, the Revolution and the state.
Once his heartbeat had slowed again, a new, solemn self-possession descended on him. He fixed his gaze on an old-fashioned carved door to his left. Striding over to it, he raised his shoulders and straightened his spine-precisely as any rank-andfile soldier who found himself in the doorway to his Division Commander's office should tilted his head back, thrust both chest and eyes forward and barked out six over-enunciated syllables: `Reporting for Duty.'