It wasn’t until he had served eleven years as editor that Old Hep discovered the true worth of his position. By the end of the summer, he was neglecting his professional duties and focusing all his attention on finding women. Before his visit to a Beijing literary conference held by the Ministry of Culture that spring, he could never have contemplated the possibility that he might one day take a mistress. But at the conference, he met a poetess from Shijiazhuang who, just like his wife, smoked cigarettes and painted her nails red, and was even a Party member too. She was shorter than his wife, however, and had finer bones. During the official speeches, he kept glancing in her direction to check the expression on her face. On the first night, when he was walking along the hotel corridor on his way to the men’s bathroom, the poetess stuck her head around her door and called out to him. Her lights were on, but when he stepped inside her room, she switched them off and wrapped her arms around him. Her tender kisses soothed his nerves, and in less than a minute, his legs stopped shaking.
Two years later, he realised that ever since that night, he had tried to find in other women the sour, sooty smell that infused her hair and the inside of her cotton knickers. That night in Beijing, he learned that he too was capable of committing sinful acts. He said to himself, If a woman is willing to give her body to me, who am I to turn her down?
The following morning, the delegates convened in the conference room and continued their analysis of articles on the political rectification of cultural and artistic troupes. As Old Hep sat in his seat, he felt himself grow bigger and taller. He was wallowing in the joy of entering the sweet apple of Communism. His voice became fluid and natural. As he rose to deliver his speech, the poetess’s naked bottom flashed through his mind. He slowly removed the flowery knickers. Two plump, white buttocks …
‘There are no words to express the greatness of Chairman Mao’s thoughts on literature and art,’ he summed up at the end of his speech. ‘They are simply amazing!’
He returned home a different person. He was now a man of courage, a man who could possess other women.
Before the summer was over, he asked a girl from the local textile factory who was drawing some illustrations for his magazine whether she would like to go out on a date with him, and she accepted. So he took her to the woods behind Red Scarf Park. They sat on a bench and she sketched the golden sunset reflected on the surface of the lake. The water was calm and the air was filled with buzzing insects. The editor, who was now in his late forties, stood behind the girl and breathlessly stared at her delicate ear, and the small hand that was continually hooking a lock of hair behind it. He knew that every young woman in town dreamed of finding a permanent job in his editorial department, and that they regarded him as a successful and influential man. The textile worker had looked deeply flattered when he asked her out on this date. Indeed, he was everything she was looking for in a man. Fired with confidence, he rested his hand on the girl’s shoulder and commented on the branches she was drawing. A blush rose to the girl’s cheeks. Noticing the pencil start to shake in her hand, he moved in closer and wrapped his other arm around her. His balance was not good though, and as he leaned forward, his foot slipped, and he toppled awkwardly to the ground, bringing the girl down with him. He edged over, and without a word, climbed on top of her. She kept her eyes closed throughout, except at the moment of deepest pain, when she opened them briefly and looked into the sky, and saw the clouds turn from red to purple.
Following that successful tryst, he invited her to his office after work on several occasions, hoping to have his way with her again. She accepted every time, and before long became his first official mistress. The joy of possessing a woman, of possessing a virgin, gave him a new lease of life.
‘Before you, I had only ever made love to my wife,’ he told her, as he lay flat across her body.
‘And before I met you, I was a virgin,’ she replied, looking up with a smile.
‘You have turned my life around,’ the editor said, stroking her smooth forehead. ‘I don’t think of myself as middle-aged in the least. I’m only thirty-one years older than you, after all.’
The textile worker boosted the editor’s confidence, and when this confidence spread to his professional life, women began to land on his desk like the manuscripts he received every day. As long as he agreed to publish their works, these women were ready to lay themselves down below his wrinkled body. All he had to do was choose his prey and drop a few subtle hints. He seldom had time to daydream, he was too busy dealing with the growing list of women with whom he was conducting illicit affairs. His secret happiness lent his expression an air of maturity. Nobody knew that when he was chairing the political education meetings at work, or doing the washing-up at home, he was, in his mind, climbing onto a woman, thrusting her legs in the air and subjugating her to his will.
He began to notice the differing ways women behaved during their moments of greatest pleasure. The textile worker paled in comparison with the women who succeeded her. At the peak of her excitement, all she did was let out a soft croak. She never groaned or moaned, or moved her legs about like the more mature women. One woman who stuck most in his mind was a short-story writer from Sichuan. He could never forget the sight of her long dancer’s legs coiled around his elderly body. Unfortunately, once he had published her work, she dropped him like a brick. She proved to be, however, the most memorable woman of all the twenty-one he slept with. In his treasured pink notebook he labelled ‘Compendium of Beauties’, he made a careful record of her birthday, her shoe size and address.
At home, Old Hep became more relaxed, and started to pay more attention to his wife, who had recently brought out her sixth book. (When the professional writer remembers the story of ‘Marx’ and ‘Jenny’ in the novel that made her famous, he is overcome with nausea. Her thinly-veiled autobiographies reek of the fetid regurgitations of her past.) The pockets of Old Hep’s suit were filled with name cards emblazoned with his professional titles of ‘editor-in-chief and ‘Director of the Writers’ Association’. Whenever he met someone for the first time, he would ceremoniously present a card to them with a serious, yet approachable, look on his face. His small stocky build gave people the impression that he was a reliable, hardworking man. After all these years of waiting, he had at last boarded the express train of the Open Door Policy.
After he published the first novel of a local young writer he had discovered (a book the critics later declared to be China’s most avant-garde work of fiction), he gained the respect and admiration of the town’s young literati. They praised his astute eye for talent, and delivered urgent requests to make his acquaintance. To prepare himself for his meetings with them, Old Hep spent many hours trying to learn the phraseology and tone of voice that his wife employed during her literary discussions. Soon he too was able to pepper his speech with terms like ‘the collective subconscious’, ‘twilight mentality’, ‘the absurd’ and ‘pseudo-realism’.
For a while, the female novelist felt left out, and sank into a mild depression. She seemed to have lost the upper hand. When they received visits from women writers who were just like she was twenty years before, she appeared sallow and lacklustre in comparison. Although the new generation of women painted their nails the same shade as hers, they chose to wear not red, but mauve or fluorescent pink lipstick. The fact that she had dared to wear tight jeans a decade before, and had even been prepared to write a self-criticism about it, meant very little to these young women who now preferred to dress in baggy jeans and imported trainers. The most forward-thinking women had already visited Shenzhen and returned with tight, wiry perms. When Old Hep’s wife started sounding off about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the young women drifted to the corner of the room to discuss Heidegger and Robbe-Grillet. Her favourite topic of conversation — her memories of the Cultural Revolution and life in the re-education camp — meant nothing to them. They treated her with the detached indifference with which they would treat anyone else from their parents’ generation.