When the girl walked back from the toilets and returned to her chair, the four other women fell silent. They savoured this moment of secret complicity — they felt united by their shared opinion concerning the new girl’s unusually large breasts. After that, when the girl strode into the office every morning, her eyes full of the joys of spring, the other women would assume fixed grins and exchange knowing looks.
Before she had received her first month’s pay cheque, the girl had already made friends with the secretary, who was the youngest of her four female colleagues. The secretary revealed stories of her husband’s violent temper in exchange for the girl’s descriptions of university love affairs; she offered her a piece of nougat her husband had brought back from a business trip, and the girl gave her a plastic key-ring. Soon they started making jokes about the older colleagues, and were even on the point of sharing secrets about their friends’ private lives.
The atmosphere in the office became strained. After the secretary broke ranks with the three older women, a cold war set in and the solidarity among the ‘old guard’ collapsed. If someone happened to bang a cup on the desk, a minute later, another colleague would slam a cup down more loudly. One morning, the translator walked in wearing a new flowery dress and announced that her chickens had stopped laying eggs and were only fit for the chopping board. Knowing that this was a veiled joke at her expense, the old virgin glanced at the translator and sneered, ‘Did your daughter buy you that dress? It really takes years off you.’ Their battles rolled over into the political study sessions. When the elderly book-keeper finished reading out a report about a local hero who had tragically drowned trying to save the life of a state-owned pig, the translator and the secretary appeared unmoved. They didn’t even attempt a show of grief. Chairwoman Fan noticed their behaviour, and made a record of it in her notebook.
‘They seem to have something against me,’ the girl told the secretary one day after work. By this time, they were already so close that they were sharing snacks at lunchtime. Relations in the office had entered the stage of ‘second-degree combat preparations’. Although one of the cactus plants was still blooming, the other had lost its flowers, and its needles had turned red and hard.
They walked towards the bus stop. For the last two days, they had taken to holding hands when walking outside together. The secretary led the way, and the girl allowed herself to be led. Every woman needs this kind of relationship. The secretary appreciated the intimacy, it compensated for all the domestic misery she had suffered since her wedding day. She enjoyed revealing the secrets of the bedroom to the girl who hadn’t commenced sexual relations (or ‘jumped into the sea’, as the new saying went). In return, she experienced pleasures she had never enjoyed before: the sensation of the girl’s innocent, warm hand in hers; the feeling of pity, similar to the pity a cat might feel before it strikes its prey; the knowledge that she had the power to control what might, or might not, happen to the girl. Her life suddenly seemed more interesting. She had tried to hold herself back time and again, but now she could contain herself no longer and she revealed at last the secret that she shared with her colleagues. ‘They have fallen out with each other because of you,’ she said.
‘What?’ The girl drew in a sharp breath of air. ‘Why?’
The secretary didn’t want to jeopardise her friendship with the girl. So, keeping the girl’s hand firmly in her grip, she said in a comforting tone, ‘Haven’t you noticed what’s been going on?’
The girl with big breasts had no idea what the secretary was talking about.
‘Tell me what you know,’ she cried. ‘Tell me now!’
‘Try and guess first.’
‘Don’t play games.’ The girl’s face turned red.
‘It seems Chairwoman Fan was right.’ The secretary was deliberately dragging things out.
‘Please, sister, I beg you. Tell me.’ The girl shrank back into the role of someone who needs to be protected.
This wasn’t the first time the secretary had been called ‘sister’, so her expression didn’t change. ‘She’s jealous of you — that stupid old hen who can’t lay any more eggs.’
‘What did she say about me?’ The girl’s face turned from red to white.
‘It’s your breasts,’ the secretary said, touching the girl’s arm softly. ‘It’s because you have such large breasts.’ She was now using the tone of voice women adopt when speaking about contraception and sexual matters.
The girl covered her face with her hands and stopped in her tracks. The sense of inferiority that she had buried years before suddenly welled up inside her and dragged her back to the times when she would walk through the crowd hunching her shoulders like an old woman, the two lumps of flesh on her chest filling her with shame and fear. She remembered the time her mother humiliated her in front of her classmates, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself wearing that T-shirt. Everyone can see your nipples!’ That night, she borrowed her mother’s white bra and clamped her breasts to her chest. When she left her home the next day, she sensed that everyone knew that she was a girl with bound breasts.
The self-confidence she had worked so hard to achieve was now crumbling into pieces.
‘What did they say?’ The girl’s faint voice was almost drowned by the loud footsteps on the pedestrian flyover above. The secretary hadn’t expected the girl to be as embarrassed as this. She felt as though she were watching a lamb drowning in water, a lamb she could save with less energy than it would take to blow away a grain of dust. As a married woman, she knew many things the girl didn’t know, but longed to know. Yesterday, she had told the girl about the pleasure of feeling a man’s tongue run down her stomach. When she had brought up the subject of the girl’s breasts a few moments ago, she had felt a dampness seep from between her thighs.
The secretary ventured a further question. ‘Did you rub foreign creams on them, or inject them with something?’ She gazed enviously at the girl’s youthful complexion. It was as rosy as hers was before she married. She could sense how uncomfortable the girl was, and how fast her heart was beating.
In just a few seconds, the girl seemed to age ten years, her entire body appeared to shrink inwards. ‘Never, never,’ she protested. ‘I have never had any injections, or used any foreign cream.’
‘That’s what I guessed,’ the young woman continued. ‘Perhaps Chairwoman Fan was right then.’
‘What did she say?’ For the first time in her life the girl was forced to discuss her breasts in public.
‘That old virgin’s a sly one,’ the secretary said, glancing behind her to check that no one was listening. They had almost reached the bus stop. ‘She said you’ve made them bigger by letting men fondle them. Actually, that’s what I thought too, at first.’
The girl’s face turned red again.
‘Surely someone must have told you!’ the secretary laughed. ‘The more men fondle them, the bigger they get.’
‘I’ve never let any man fondle them!’ The girl’s throat went dry. ‘They’ve always been this big, ever since I was fourteen.’ Her blush was spreading to her ears and neck now.
‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ Although the secretary sympathised with her new friend, she still examined the girl’s face, searching for the truth.