Usually, when he lay in bed beside his wife, he would try to disturb her sleep by pulling over the lamp and shining it on her wrinkled skin. He alone knew the reason why she always insisted on sitting in one particular armchair: it was because the light at that spot was the most flattering. One day she had sat in every seat in the room and asked Old Hep to tell her where the light was kindest to her complexion. When she sat in the armchair he’d chosen, she checked her face in her hand mirror and discovered that the light from the orange lamp beside her did indeed give her skin a serene and youthful glow.
Sometimes he would clench his fists and hiss as he looked down at the sleeping tigress. When she started to snore, he would run over in his mind the details of his secret flings. He was proud of having deceived his wife. He would smirk at the breasts that drooped to either side of her ribcage, and cup his hands over them to show how large his latest girlfriend’s breasts were. ‘They’re this big,’ he would whisper, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with glee. ‘She’s got tits this big, and you’ve just got two little ping-pong balls.’
But tonight Old Hep had lost his courage. All he could do was curl up into a ball, and in the dim light stare at the heap of flesh sprawled beside him. Before she fell asleep, the female novelist had warned him she would visit his work unit again the next day. She had already dropped by his department that afternoon, planning to tell Old Hep’s leader about the affair and plead with him not to take the matter any further. She knew that if her father ever got wind of the situation, she and Old Hep would both be finished. But when she walked into Old Hep’s empty office and discovered the huge stack of love letters hidden in his desk (she was able to prise the drawers open quite easily with the aid of an ordinary penknife), she immediately changed her mind. As the scale of his infidelities became clear, her first instinct was to kill him; her second was to spare his life, but ensure it was a miserable one; her third was to kick him out of the house and wipe him from her mind. After she had rejected the first and the third options, she set to work on the second.
She selected twenty or so love letters that displayed some literary skill, and put them aside to use later as material for her novels. She chose another twenty of the more intimate letters hidden in a notebook labelled ‘Compendium of Beauties’ — a pink exercise book with a picture of a house and a mushroom on the cover — swapped the letters around, scrawled ‘return to sender’ on every envelope and posted them back, so that a few days later each woman would receive a letter that another admirer had written to him. She collected all the sentimental letters from love-struck girls who hoped to conquer the editor with their youthful charms, and posted them to the Party committees of their respective work units. She summoned the leader of the People’s Cultural Centre and made him dispatch official letters to the work units of over seventy other women who’d written to her husband, demanding they conduct investigations into their lifestyles. The editorial department was thrown into chaos.
When Old Hep sauntered in through his front door that evening, after abandoning the textile worker in the ruined factory, he was met by a flying thermos. Fortunately it struck his chest, not his head. Bowing his head in shame, he could see his wife’s tie-dye skirt printed with pictures of ancient philosophers. (This garment was for export only — no one else in town had one like it.) As it approached him, he searched his mind for a way to handle the situation. But before he had time to reach a decision, a slender leg sheathed in a transparent nylon stocking (also imported) popped out from under the skirt and kicked him in the groin. Old Hep shrieked with pain, and cowered on the floor just like the textile worker had done a few hours earlier. The pain was excruciating. He saw a sea of gold stars dart before his eyes. The female novelist kicked him again and Old Hep’s tired shoulders caved in. Then the novelist dragged him into the light, seated herself in her armchair, handed him his pink exercise book and told him to read from it the passages she had underlined in red pencil.
Everything that happened after that had vanished from his mind by the time he was lying in bed, apart from his tearful confession, and his wife’s demand that he apologise officially to his work unit and submit himself to investigation. ‘If you don’t do as I say, I will take you to court,’ she threatened before dozing off.
Now she was sleeping like a log, and Old Hep was lying awake beside her, miserably counting the hours until dawn. In the past the night had belonged to him, but now everything was finished and all that remained for him was fear. This fear coursed through his blood, then spread to his bones and nerve channels. He felt like the dead rat he had once seen lying on a cold street corner. It had lain there for three days. In his mind, he always connected the rat with a female colleague, because she had dared walk up to within a step of it and stand over it with her legs wide open. When she dragged him over to take a look, he shrieked with terror and felt as though his head were about to explode. It was the same fear he felt when the Red Guards dragged his father to their front door and pulled him into the baying crowds outside. He knew that in these moments of terror, he was naked and alone. The face of the rotting rat flashed once more before his eyes. The Red Guards were pushing him into a well of darkness, the tigress was baring her teeth, ready to devour him. No one was coming to his rescue. He and his father were surrounded. The voices of the crowd were so deafening that all he could hear was the rage thundering through his body. He knew that they — the crowd outside — were one great mass, and that he was on his own. For a moment, he could see his own eyes grafted onto the dead rat’s face. They were dirty and motionless, but alive. They could see everything.
What he had appreciated most after he got married was the security of living under the tigress’s benevolent protection. He could hide quietly behind her while she dealt with any problem that turned up. She was tall and sturdy, a wall he could lean against. Had she not been swept up by the Open Door Policy, permed her hair, glossed her lips and been included in The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers, his life would still be worth living now. Her strict and inflexible attitude suited him well; he had grown accustomed to it. She was a mother to him and he enjoyed living under her wing. He had hoped that his life would continue like this for ever.
In the early hours of the morning, her breathing grew deeper and louder, and once again he was seized by the recurring terror of being swamped by a baying crowd. He sensed his wife seize his arm and shove him outside the door. Immediately he was surrounded by a hostile mob. There was nothing for him to grab hold of, he was alone and powerless. His eyes were open like his father’s, like the dead rat’s, but he couldn’t see a thing.
An idea suddenly came to him. ‘I must escape!’ he muttered. ‘Make sure they never catch me.’ He thought about a divorcee he’d been seeing on the side. She lived on her own. Perhaps he could stay with her. Although she wore lipstick and painted her nails like his wife, and even read the same books as her, at least she didn’t have a bad temper. Her main fault was that she always burst into tears after a couple of drinks. But lying in his bed, he could no longer remember her name. He thought of all the women listed in his ‘Compendium of Beauties’, but couldn’t put names to any of them either. Then he thought about the textile worker, and how her lips had trembled with fear the first time he kissed her.