Though his lips had stopped trembling, they had instead begun to feel numb or scalded, as if by a sudden mouthful of hot soup. The word `Sister' died in his throat, killed by cowardice. Overwhelmed by a searing sense of self-loathing at his own failure of nerve, he resolved to look back up at the Division Commander's wife, his new sister and, with his eyes, to communicate his deep, sincere feelings of gratitude and respect.
He slowly raised his head. After a brief, violent explosion somewhere deep inside him, a gorgeous rainbow unfurled before his eyes-a blinding flash of colour that a second, disbelieving look translated, more matter-of-factly, into the Commander's wife.
The light shone bright as day.
The room was so quiet that you could hear the faint buzz of the light waves colliding and merging with solid objects. Outside, a sentry was pacing about the barracks, his footsteps faint but distinct. Wu Dawang stood there, paralysed, as if he were made of wood, without any notion of what he might do next.
Liu Lian, he now registered, had placed the book down on the bed and, as it turned out, was dressed only in a red-and-blue floral silk nightgown which, in the way of nightgowns, hung loose and flimsy on her as if it might tumble off her body at any moment. It occurred vaguely to him that when he had first come in, he hadn't noticed her state of relative undress because the room had been lit only by dusk. Liu Lian, he deduced, must have had the nightgown on all along, but the evening gloom had prevented him from engaging in a thoroughgoing assessment of the situation. Now, with the light back on and an uninterrupted view, the evidence was there before him, clear as day.
Of course, if it had been merely a question of Liu Lian sitting on her bed in a nightgown, he wouldn't have been hallucinating rainbows where his Division Commander's wife was meant to be. After all, he was no longer a boy, no callow member of the rank-andfile, but a man of rank, a squad leader, a married man-he was one of the few guardsmen who'd actually seen a woman. And what a woman! His wife, let it not be forgotten, was the only daughter of a commune accountant. No — it was all the weather's fault. What with it being so hot, Liu Lian had turned on the electric fan at the head of the bed and, every time it rotated in her direction, it dispatched a rippling breeze under the hem of her nightdress which then travelled inexorably upwards to escape via the neckline. The nightdress was roomy enough that each well-aimed flutter of the fan exposed a delicately shimmering, naked expanse of long, slender, snow-white thigh.
In the interests of laying out all the relevant facts, it should probably be made clear that not only was this the first time in his life that the country-born Wu Dawang had seen a woman in a silk nightgown, but also that an enticingly feminine scent of Osmanthus flower was wafting sedately out from under its hem, engulfing every corner of the room, billowing up around him, constricting his breathing. Its oppressive closeness was drawing the sweat from his palms. It left his fingers powerless stumps, hanging uselessly by his sides, trembling as the sweat coursed down them. A single glance at her brought the rainbow flashing painfully back, scorching his eyeballs. But just as he determined to wrest his eyes away, it became apparent once more that the breeze's only logical exit point was the neck of her nightgown.
And there-just one unguarded glance laterentirely at ease within the air-filled nightdress, were her breasts, as flawlessly, geometrically round as if they had been traced with a compass, rising up large and white as the mazztoiz the fluffily perfect bread rolls so dearly beloved of the Division Commander-that he steamed for his superior and his wife. The moment Wu Dawang's mind wandered from the generous display of Liu Lian's bosoms to the steamed rolls he so deftly prepared, his hands registered an impulse to reach out and knead them.
But he was, when all was said and done, a man of education, a man who'd been to middle school, a man in whom the army had planted ideals, a yearning for the higher things in life. He was a man who enjoyed the esteemed regard and confidence of the Division Commander and of the army as a whole, a man who had pledged to fight for Communism until his dying breath. And he knew as well as his own name that he wasn't a son, or nephew, or brother, or cousin in this house — S he was just a General Orderly. He knew what he should do and say-and what he shouldn't.
The forces of reason hammered down on his overheated brain like hailstones, dousing his raging fires with freezing meltwater. The Commander's wife, he reminded himself, was perfectly entitled to wear whatever she wanted-whatever it happened to reveal in her own marital bedroom. (Barely a month after their wedding, he recalled, his own wife had taken to strolling around their bedroom naked from the waist up, without a trace of self-consciousness.) Women always remained guilelessly pure of heart in the presence of men, he reflected; it was men with their diseased thoughts who were the problem.
And so it came about that, just as Wu Dawang's soul teetered perilously over a precipice of capitalist loucheness, the glorious forces of revolutionary reason rushed to its rescue. His gaze slid peacefully over and away from Liu Lian, as an eagle's eyes would skim a still body of water, and came to rest on the volume of The Selected Works of Mao Zedonzg that she had been leafing through. `Aunt,' he asked again, `will that be all?'
Displeasure flickering across her face once again, Liu Lian tossed aside the book on which he had fixed his glance. `Xiao Wu,' she asked icily, `what must you always remember when working in the Commander's house?'
`Don't say what I shouldn't say,' he responded, and don't do what I shouldn't do.'
`And?'
`To serve you and the Division Commander is to Serve the People.'
`Well said-well said.' Relaxing her expression of affront, she pulled her thoroughly aired nightgown back over her thighs. `Do you know how much older I am than you?' she asked in more kindly, sisterly tones.
No.
'Only fouryears. Still think I'm old enough to be your aunt?' Without waiting for a response, she took a cloth from her bedside and passed it to him. `Dry yourself off, I'm not going to eat you. Seeing as you can't get it out of your head that I'm your Commander's wife, you'd better answer all my questions-just like you'd answer him.'
He wiped his face with the cloth.
`Are you married?'
`Yes.'
`How long?'
`Three years.'
`Children?'
`We had one the year before last. When I took home leave three months ago, you gave me baby clothes to take back as a present. Don't you remember, Aunt?'
She paused, as if something had suddenly stuck in her throat. After a brief silence, she resumed. `Stop calling me that: I'm your sister, remember.'
He looked up at her once more.
`What do you want, more than anything else in the world?' she asked.
`To realize Communism-to struggle for Communism until my dying breath.'
She flashed a curious, cold smile-like a thin veneer of embers smouldering over ice. She repeated her question, a harder set to her features: 'I'm your sister, remember, you have to tell me the truth.'