At this point in proceedings, our love story resembles, perhaps, a steam train halfway up a mountain, each new inch forward demanding an agonizing expenditure of effort. On reaching the peak, of course, the train would regain its momentum and rush exhilaratingly down the other side, through glorious, balmy evening sunshine. But for the time being, Wu Dawang had ground to a halt. He could not explain why he should suddenly find the idea that she was lying naked on the bed so disconcerting. While showering and coming back up the stairs, he had yearned for this as instinctively as dry tinder longs for fire, as fire longs for strong winds. But just as his desire teetered on the edge of realization, timidity barred all further progress.
Time passed, the seconds ticking into minutes, the room still consumed by that irresistible darkness. Wu Dawang mopped his sweat away for a third time.
`Are you all right?' came a gentle voice from the bed.
`Please turn the light on.'
`It's too bright.'
`Please turn it on, I've something I want to say to you.
She fell silent again, as if the effort of considering his request exhausted her ability to generate sound. Listening to his own breath fall through the air and onto the ground, he even began to hallucinate the physical form of her exhalations on the bed. Oppressed almost beyond endurance, Wu Dawang actually began to fear for his life; death either by suffocation, or from shock was starting to seem a real and frightening possibility. In a last desperate attempt at self-preservation, he repeated his request: 'Please put the light on.'
She continued to pursue the most powerful, most expedient course of action open to her-neither speaking nor moving.
As time dragged on in the warm, velvety blackness, Wu Dawang felt compelled to issue a foolish ultimatum.
'If you don't turn the light on, I'm leaving.'
Again foolishly, he took a step backward.
At the sound of this threatened retreat, she sat bolt upright on the bed, groped for the cord and yanked on the light.
Just as it had done three days previously, one sharp click transformed the darkness into radiance.
Just as it had done three days previously, a flash of coloured light scorched his eyeballs. History was repeating itself: a history of unconsummated passion falling anticlimactically away. When all that he'd expected, all that he'd wanted, did in fact come to pass, he was once again incapacitated by panic.
Sure enough, there she sat, like a jade statue, in the middle of the bed beneath the mosquito net, naked except for a corner of red blanket tugged skimpily across her thighs. To Wu Dawang's surprise, however, as Liu Lian appeared before him under that dazzlingly revealing electric light, her face was suffused by a proud confidence in her own dignity. As she stared defiantly at him, her red silk brassiere-an item of clothing that, back then, Wu Dawang had never heard of, much less seen-hung at the head of the bed, glaring lopsidedly, like a pair of bloodshot eyes. Her breasts maintained an attitude of furious immobility, her nipples jutting forward like the pink noses of two indignant white rabbits, bearing solemn witness to the scene playing out before them. Her hair was draped in a frozen wave over her pale shoulders, resembling, in its perfect stillness, fine black wire.
All impulse for passion had died in her, killed not only by the extinguishing of the seductive darkness, but also by his outrageous persistence in remaining motionless before her. He had surely forgotten that he was her General Orderly and cook, that she was the mistress of the house, the Division Commander's wife, that to serve the Division Commander and his wife was to Serve the People. Under the burning white lamplight she faced him, the translucence of her skin generating an aura of irreproachable virtue. While he, by contrast, stood staring like a sordid voyeur. Throughout this stalemate, her own clear sense of superiority-apparent in her piercing glare and mocking lips-cast a chill over the room's stuffy interior.
As normality, with all its subdued frigidity, returned, the sweat on Wu Dawang's face dried. She might have been naked, but she was still the Division Commander's wife. He might have been fully dressed, but still-still-he was only the General Orderly and cook.
`Say whatever it is you have to say,' she remarked lightly.
'I'm afraid,' he mumbled into his chest, after a brief hesitation.
'Of who?'
'Of the Division Commander, and of the Party.'
She gave a cold smile. 'So it's only me you're not afraid of?'
When he slowly looked up, he saw that she had been silently scrutinizing him all the while, as one would examine a utensil. She heaved a long, regretful sigh-the kind that might follow the realization that an object was not fit for purpose — then twisted around to gather up the nightgown lying on the bed and pulled it on.
`You're not worth the mud these walls are made of,' she finally concluded. `I expected more of you, Wu Dawang, I really did.'
III
MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED NEXT had more to do with army protocol than the course of true love.
Wu Dawang spent his whole journey back to barracks that evening-a half-mile that took him across the drill ground-worrying whether his behaviour had been right or wrong. Now that lights-out had sounded, most companies had turned in for the night, and a lonely silence was descending. The moonlight spilled out of the July night sky, tinging the drill ground dark green beneath its cold fluorescence. A cool breeze was starting to blow in from the east, whisking away the scorching heat of day. A few of the older soldiers had crept out from their slumbering companies to gather in small sociable groups in corners of the deserted drill ground-to talk and laugh, to have a drink and a song. The fierce, peppery fumes of their liquor, together with the strains of their revolutionary choruses, floated on the wind, quickening the hearts of all those they swept over.
Wu Dawang also decided not to go straight to bed. He wound his way around those companionable clusters of drinkers to the deserted, southernmost end of the ground. There he sat, alone. To any casual observer, this deep moonlight contemplation might have suggested an inquiry into the fundamentals of existence, into the ethics of love, desire and revolution, into the conflict between honour and self-interest, into duty and hierarchy, human nature and animal instinct. But in reality these thorny abstractions slipped by him like smoke, leaving behind only two considerations: one, Liu Lian's extraordinarily seductive body; and two, the probable consequences of entering into the kind of relations that she seemed to be proposing, and the Division Commander finding out. The simple but powerful blade of his mind stripped the issue of all complexity, leaving only these two principal contradictions. Meditating on the former, he was lost in blissful daydreams; thoughts of the latter called up the terrifying presentiment that just around the next corner of his life an execution ground awaited. On the battlefield, multitudes had met their end at the hands of the Commander-it was common knowledge that during the Civil War, he had blown an enemy's head off at close range before stamping, repeatedly, down on it. Picturing the entire scene to himself- that mangled ball of human flesh trampled beneath the Commander's army boot Wu Dawang shivered and vowed that Liu Lian would have to shoot him before she had her way with him; he would defend, to the death, his honour as a soldier and a revolutionary.