Her temper grew worse with age. Whenever Old Hep did something to annoy her, she would twist his arm behind his back, flay her hand in the air like a kung-fu actress and kick him in the shins. His ignorance of cultural matters became the focus of her anger, and she was horrified when he finally admitted to being baffled by the new genre of ‘Misty Poetry’. At the dinner table, he would hear his wife and her young guests discuss ‘structuralism’, ‘low-flying aircraft narrative’ and ‘sickroom mentality’, terms he couldn’t find in the dictionary. Before he discovered that he was capable of taking mistresses, all he could do was listen respectfully and stare at his wife as she held forth.
When the beer and foreign nicotine reached her bloodstream, her speech and facial expressions became more animated. Feeling crushed by the vibrant tone of her voice, he would often seek comfort from a daydream. He could divide his dreams into separate parts like a string of sausages, cutting off in between one scene and the next to fetch a plate of radishes from the kitchen or to pour out more tea for the guests. As long as his wife didn’t shout for his attention, his dream could continue episode after episode.
As his status in the home sank lower and lower, he realised that only in the kitchen could he feel free and act as he pleased. He could hurl bottles of rice vinegar on the floor without having to ask for their permission; he could slam his cleaver onto the chopping board whether there was meat lying on it or not. He could even kill things on this board. Transforming living creatures into dead creatures became his favourite pastime. When he gazed down at a chicken he had just beheaded struggling feebly in his hands, the troubles that plagued him in the outside world vanished from his mind. The instant the living animal became a dead corpse, he would scream a torrent of obscenities. One day, he pressed a live carp onto his board, thrashed his cleaver down and shouted ‘Stinking hag!’ as the head fell onto the cement floor.
Before he knew he was capable of taking mistresses, the only way he could escape his wife’s control was to sink into a daydream. When he lay down in bed beside her, giving her one of the face massages outlined in her copy of A Learner’s Guide to Cosmetic Massage, he would calm his mind with a dream about purple dustbins. It was a dream he indulged in quite regularly, and that seemed to alter slightly each time he had it. To find the dustbin, he had to travel a hundred metres in space-time, turn four corners, skirt a wall caked in flaking white ash, weave down an alley dotted with heaps of charcoal briquettes, pass a beer stall, a children’s bookstore, two private restaurants, a shop selling burial clothes (a shiver always ran down his spine when he saw the mural showing dead corpses rising to heaven in a swoon), until he at last reached the purple dustbins at the back of the bicycle parking lot. Sometimes he would see his father pop out from one of the bins, remove his glasses, and peer at him with a sneaky look in his eyes. He knew that in thirty years’ time, he would look identical to this man, only without the glasses.
When he had this dream several years later, the dustbin ended up boarding a plane. He was standing on a bus at the time, having spent an afternoon of passion with his young mistress in a ruined factory by the sea. The bus was jolting from side to side. While his body was still weak from the ejaculation and his heart still beating fast, he pulled the purple dustbin out of the plane and dragged it down into the ocean. The dustbin then became a mass of white manuscript paper drifting through his head. ‘Like birds in flight,’ he murmured as he returned to his senses.
(‘I like being around unhappy people,’ the blood donor says.
The writer remembers that the man sitting beside him was once famed for his ability to pass wind. In the re-education camp, he once farted thirty-six times in one day. The writer also recalls how his friend bought a handful of lice off a villager for five yuan, then hid them under the quilt of Commander Li to punish him for snoring so loudly in his sleep.
He’s capable of anything, the writer thinks to himself. But he’s never had any success with women. He doesn’t know how to treat them. All our old friends from the camp are married with children now, but he’s still single. Surely he must get lonely! The writer’s mind returns to the female novelist. During the Cultural Revolution, she was sent to a camp only eight kilometres away from theirs. She fell in love with Huang Gang there. He was a handsome young activist, the son of an ambassador, apparently. She and Huang Gang were the first couple in the area brave enough to live together without getting married. When they heard that the camp’s leaders were about to send the militia to arrest them on charges of illegal cohabitation, she went directly to the headquarters and threatened to kill herself if any of them laid their hands on her. There was a Communist Party membership badge with a picture of Chairman Mao pinned to her lapel at the time, so no one in the camp dared take the matter any further.
In her mind, Huang Gang was a modern-day Marx, and she was his Jenny, his political aid and lover. Had Huang Gang not been committed to a mental hospital a few years later, perhaps they would have married eventually, and she wouldn’t have ended up with the wretched editor. The only purpose the editor served her now was to act as a contrast to her own success. What she longed for, though, was a man of steel, a hero or Jesus figure, so that she could take on the role of a protective tigress, or of a spoilt, attention-seeking child. When the Marx she was infatuated with was toppled from his position by a rival clique, she immediately fell from grace. With no man in her life to order her about, she became embittered and arrogant.
Then she met the editor and fell in love. But soon after she married him, she discovered, to her dismay, that he was a weak and feeble character, and she longed all the more for a man who could strike her with a whip, then gently wipe away her tears. Her drive to find a new man propelled her out of the flat and into the arms of her admirers. She looked for things in other men that the editor couldn’t give her. One night, after one too many drinks, she visited the professional writer’s flat with a look of despair in her eyes. The writer understood that, having been raised by a strict Communist cadre, she was ill equipped to deal with the torments of love. He knew that despite her flamboyant exterior, her heart was empty.
‘We’re beyond salvation. There’s nothing any of us can do to help,’ the writer mumbles to himself in the dark.
‘I like to be with unhappy people,’ the blood donor repeats.
‘No one in this world is truly happy.’ The writer is still thinking about the female novelist and the editor.)
When winter was setting in, Old Hep would start dreaming about apples. He would burrow through the sweet juicy fruit like a worm, gorging himself on the ripe flesh, carving out paths in all directions, then smearing his excreta onto the walls with the tip of his tail, leaving dark brown tunnels behind. All he wanted was to eat, then lie down quietly to digest. Nobody could interfere with him inside the fruit, and since apples are meant to be eaten, they raised no objections either. He moved in wide circles around the core, occasionally breaking through the peel. For some reason, he was convinced that the capital lay at the core, and he was afraid to approach it. He suspected that Chairman Mao and the senior cadres of the Central Committee lived there. As long as he kept clear of the core, he felt free to eat and wander at his will. In the world of the juicy apple, he at last found some peace and contentment.
‘Is this not Communism?’ he often chuckled to himself, as he lay in bed next to his wife who was unaware of the dream he was having. His dreams were not always so enjoyable, though. Every year on National Day, he would dream he was climbing a silk-cotton tree that was circled by loaves of golden bread. He knew that if he didn’t control himself, he would end up scaling the trunk for ever. One night, as he reached for the highest branch, his wife shouted, ‘Get off me, you bastard!’ He woke to find himself clutching her hair. He quickly smoothed it back in place and fell asleep again, although he was too afraid to continue his dream.