In Old Hep’s mind, her supplicant pose affirmed the correctness of his behaviour. He abandoned all sense of restraint. At last he was making up for all those lost years.
As dusk gave way to night, Old Hep felt an uncontrollable urge to possess her. He climbed on top of her and took command of her weak and feeble body. She clenched her teeth and croaked as he bit her nipples and tugged her hair. Although she was taller than him, each time she struggled to her feet he managed to kick her down again.
‘Will you leave me alone now?’ he shouted.
‘I’ll do anything to make you happy,’ she answered, gazing up at him adoringly before collapsing again onto the grass.
‘Haven’t I made myself clear?’ he said, pulling up his trousers. ‘I never want to see you again!’ Then he spat on the ground and walked away.
(Suddenly the lights come back on in the eighth-floor flat. What is love exactly? the writer asks himself. He glimpses a cloth doll slumped in the corner of his room, and wonders what it’s doing there. He often catches sight of it, although he usually suspects his eyes are playing tricks on him, because he only ever sees it at night, or when he’s drunk or lost in thought. Perhaps there really is a cloth doll under the chair. Maybe it was given to him by some woman, or left behind by a friend. Or perhaps the previous occupant of the flat flung it in the corner in a fit of anger. No one has ever bothered to lean down and pick it up. The dirtier the doll gets, the less willing he is to touch it.)
The editor’s drawers were filled with love letters. Because this town is built beside a deep-water port, it was one of the first places to benefit from the relaxed trade regulations of the Open Door Policy. As its economy flourished, the town grew and a new urban district was constructed on the farmland that lined the coast. Hordes of peasants from inland villages poured into this district to sell their produce and search for new jobs. Soon everyone in China had heard of this town, and the name of Old Hep’s literary magazine grew in prestige. He was happy with his job. His colleagues in the editorial department regarded him affectionately. In the political study sessions, his fellow Party members admired his open-minded opinions and his courage in giving voice to minor grievances. The new recruits looked up to him; when chatting with them, he would always drop words like ‘sexy’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘tasteful’ into his conversation to make them feel at ease. He knew that as long as the textile worker didn’t decide to cause any more trouble, he could remain safely in his post until retirement. He racked his brains, thinking of ways to get rid of her. Since she had lost all her self-respect, he knew he could torture her as he wished. As the weeks passed, he discovered that he enjoyed tormenting her, and since she was a willing victim, they ended up seeing more of each other than ever.
He was aware that it was he who had fallen for her first. On her first day in his office, he told her about how hard he was working on his novel, and about the chess competitions he’d won at school. He presented himself as a man who had suffered much in life, and who was in desperate need of consolation. When the textile worker glanced up at him, there was no love in her eyes. But she needed a father figure, and was flattered that the editor was paying her so much attention — no man had shared such intimate thoughts with her before. So when he wrapped his arms around her in the woods behind the park, she didn’t push him away. For a while everything was fine, they satisfied one another’s needs. The textile worker wasn’t wrong to fall in love with Old Hep, her mistake was to cling to him after he had moved on to his next prey. Her love for him destroyed her.
Each time Old Hep tried to break up with her, she said she would only agree on condition he gave her a baby before they separated. This demand crushed his spirit, and he soon resumed his habit of escaping into daydreams.
Although the editor still walked to work each morning with rosy cheeks and an eager smile, he would now return home with an ashen face. After he entered his flat, he would remove his shoes, sink into his sofa and start dreaming he was hauling furniture around the room. Sometimes a heavy jujube chair weighed down on him so heavily that his head dripped with sweat. One day, as smells of boiled chicken bones wafted from the kitchen, he dreamed he was dislodging a huge fitted unit from the wall. When he woke up a few minutes later, stirring the chicken soup, he felt a sudden urge to smash the unit on the head of the boorish two-bit writer from the provinces who was showing off to his wife in the living room, then grab his lousy novel and tear it to shreds. Instead, he diluted the beer with water and sprinkled sand over the rice before he carried the meal next door. Then he watched his wife and the guest wince as their teeth grated against the sand. His legs trembled with excitement. He swore that if that wretched writer stayed one more day in their flat, he would dilute the beer with piss.
But at home, he was still a servant, always having to check the expression on his wife’s face before making a move. She ordered him about with the ferocity of a tigress, and he did as he was told. After completing his marital duties, he would squeeze the sperm from his condom, as she requested, and smear it over her face and thighs. (She’d read in a magazine that the most expensive French face cream was manufactured from sperm, and always insisted that Old Hep rub the entire contents of his condoms into her skin.) When he was with the textile worker, he was able to ejaculate into her mouth then demand she swallow every drop.
‘On my face!’ the tigress growled, as the editor climbed back onto the bed and leaned over her. Old Hep noticed that there was very little sperm in his condom, and put it down to the secret tryst he’d enjoyed the day before. As he carefully rubbed the remaining drops onto his wife’s face, he cursed inwardly: ‘You ugly old bat. Your face is as furrowed as the fields of Dazhai.’
He kept rubbing until the sperm had dried onto her skin like white face powder. ‘I could do what I liked with her,’ he said to himself. ‘She let me grab her tits and suck them dry. Hers were much whiter and softer than yours.’ When he got out of bed to wash his hands, he felt his empty testicles begin to warm again.
Once he started taking mistresses, he was no longer plagued by his recurring dream about tipping truckloads of earth into the sea. But when the textile worker said she would only break up with him on condition he gave her a child, he once again stepped into the cabin of the huge truck, and looked through his rear mirror at the mounds of earth dropping into the waves of the ocean. During his afternoon break in the editorial office, he would drive the truck back and forth in a daze. His colleagues would notice him staring at the wall, smiling, then frowning at the calendar that was already two years out of date. They knew that he was sinking into a daydream, and they would take advantage of this time to slip off to buy a snack or make a telephone call.
When he was in this dream state, his colleagues could tell what he would be capable of doing from the different expressions on his face. If he was frowning, he would still be able to hear the telephone and look at his manuscripts; he could even stand up, shake hands with a visitor and pace about the room. But when he woke up, he would forget everything that had happened. When his lips curled into a faint smile, the most he could do was rise from his seat, walk to the thermos flask and empty some hot water into his cup. He alone knew that at this point the truck he was driving was moving with particular speed and agility. However, when the truck started racing across the surface of the sea and was about to carry him into the blue sky, his expression became deadly earnest, and his eyes would fix on some distant point. Sub-editor Chen, who knew a few things about the art of Qigong, claimed that this was the look of a man gazing into eternity after emerging from a deep meditation.