"Uh-uh, unless you promise me something."
"What?"
"Promise you won't laugh at me."
"Of course I won't."
"Promise that from now on you'll tell me all your secrets."
"Sure, I won't hide anything from you."
"Okay, then I'll let you see."
She got up from the bed, went over to the wardrobe, and took out the box. Removing the padlock, she opened the lid, whose underside was pasted over with soda labels. A roll of cream-colored sponge puffed out, atop the other contents. She took the roll out and unfolded it on the bed, displaying about two dozen Chairman Mao buttons, all fastened to the sponge. Most of them were made of aluminum and a few of porcelain. Their convex surfaces glimmered. On one button, the Chairman in an army uniform was wav ing his cap, apparently to the people on parade in Tiananmen Square. On another, he was smoking a cigar, his other hand holding a straw hat, while talking with some peasants in his hometown in Hunan Province.
"Wow, I never thought you loved Chairman Mao so much," Lin said with a smile. "Where did you get so many of these?"
"I collected them."
"Out of your love for Chairman Mao?"
"I don't know. They look gorgeous, don't they?"
He was puzzled by her admiration. He realized that someday these trinkets might become valuable indeed, as reminders of the mad times and the wasted, lost lives in the revolution. They would become relics of history. But for her, they didn't seem to possess any historical value at all. Then it dawned on him that she must have kept these buttons as a kind of treasure. She must have collected them as the only beautiful things she could own, like jewelry.
As he was thinking, a miserable feeling came over him. He didn't know how to articulate his thoughts without hurting her feelings, so he kept silent.
He glanced at the box, in which there were about two dozen letters held together by a blue rubber band. "What are those?" he asked.
"Just some old letters from Mai Dong. " She seemed to keep her head low, avoiding his eyes.
"Can I see them?"
"Why are you so inquisitive today?"
"If it bothers you, I don't have to see them."
"There's no secret in them. If you want, you can read them. But don't do that in front of me."
"All right, I won't."
"I won't lock the box then."
"Sure, I' ll read them and see what a romantic girl you were. "
In his heart he was eager to go through the letters, though he didn't show his eagerness. Never had he seen a love letter except in novels; never had he written one himself. Now he could see a real love letter.
The next afternoon, he came home an hour early and took out the sandalwood box to read the letters. Many of them smelled fusty; they were already yellowish, and some words were too fuzzy to be legible, owing to damp. Mai Dong's writing wasn't extraordinary by any means; some of the letters were mere records of his daily activities – what he had eaten for lunch, what movie he had seen the night before, what friends he had met. But occasionally a phrase or a sentence would glow with the genuine feelings of a young man desperately in love. At one place he wrote, "Manna, whenever I think of you, my heart starts quickening. I couldn't sleep last night, thinking about you. This morning I have a terrible headache and cannot do anything." At another place he declared, "I feel my heart is about to explode. Manna, I cannot live for long if this situation drags on." One letter ended with such an exclamation, "May Heaven facilitate our union!"
Seeing those words, Lin almost laughed. Obviously Mai Dong had been a simple, gushy fellow, hardly able to express himself coherently.
Yet having read all the letters, he felt a doubt rising in his mind. What troubled him was that the desperation Mai Dong had described was entirely alien to him. Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love. Whenever he wrote to Manna, he would address her as "Comrade Manna," or jokingly as "My Old Lady." Maybe I've read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I'm too rational, better educated. I'm a scientist by training – knowledge chills your blood.
At dinner that evening, he said to Manna, "I went through the letters. I can see that Mai Dong was really fond of you."
"No, I don't think so."
"Why not?"
"He jilted me. I hate him."
"But he loved you once, didn't he?"
"It was just a crush. Most men are liars. Well, except you." She grinned and went on wiping up the remaining pork broth on the plate with a piece of steamed bun.
Her words surprised him. If what she said about Mai Dong was true, then why had she kept his letters in the treasure box? Did she really hate him? He was puzzled.
Manna found herself pregnant in February. After that, she insisted Lin get another bed so they could sleep separately. "I don't want to hurt the baby," she explained, meaning they should stop having sex until the baby was born. He agreed. He borrowed a camp bed from the Section of General Affairs and set it up in a corner of the room.
Her pregnancy came as a surprise to Lin, who had thought that Manna, already forty-four, must be too old to be fertile. Now he was worried, because she had a weak heart. Since they had been married, once in a while she had suffered from arrhythmia, and her blood pressure had been high, though her cardiogram didn't indicate any serious problem. His worry was compounded by the fear that at her age she might not be able to give birth to a baby smoothly. He tried to persuade her to have an abortion, but she wanted the baby adamantly, saying that that was the purpose of their marriage, that she would not be a childless woman, and that this might be her last opportunity. She even told him, "I hope our baby is a boy. I want a little Lin."
"I don't believe in that feudal stuff. What's the difference between a boy and a girl?"
"A girl will have a harder life. "
"Come on, I'm not interested in having another child. "
"I want my own baby."
Unable to dissuade her, he dropped the subject and let her follow her wish.
Her reaction to pregnancy was severe. She vomited a great deal, sometimes even in the small hours. She didn't seem to care about her looks anymore. Her face became bloated, and the skin around her eyes grew dark and flabby as though she had just stopped crying. In addition, she ate a lot; she drank pork-chop soup with shredded kelp in it, saying the baby needed nutrition and tapping her belly, which hadn't bulged yet. What's more, her appetite was capricious. One day she craved sweet potatoes and the next day almond cookies. Then she remembered jellyfish and begged Lin to get some for her. Muji is far from the sea, and even dried jellyfish was a rarity after the Spring Festival. He bicycled about in the evening to look for jellyfish, but couldn't find any. He asked a few nurses, whose families lived in the city, to help, but none of them could do anything. Finally, through a relation of the mess officer, Lin bought two pounds of salted jellyfish at a seafood store.
Manna washed the sand and salt off the jellyfish, sliced them, and seasoned them with vinegar, mashed garlic, and sesame oil. For three days, at every meal she chewed the jellyfish with crunchy relish. She wanted Lin to try a piece, but he couldn't stand the smell.
Then from the fourth day on, she stopped putting the jellyfish on the dining table, as though the dish were unknown to her, despite half a bowl of the leftovers still sitting in the cupboard.
Aunt Cheng, Doctor Ning's mother, stopped by one evening. She told Manna, "You're a lucky woman and can eat whatever you want. In the old days when I gave birth to my first son, I ate only ten eggs. That was all for two months. When I was big with my second child, I was dying to have a roast chicken. Every morning I went to the market to look at the golden chickens at a cooked-meat stand. I had no money even for a wing, just went there to smell some."
The old woman's words reminded Manna of what was good for her, and she began craving roast chicken. So every other day Lin bought her a chicken from a luncheonette nearby, though he was worried about the cost – on his monthly salary he could afford no more than fifteen roast chickens. Fortunately her appetite for chicken lasted less than two weeks. Then she remembered pomegranates, which were impossible to find here in wintertime. How she longed for those pink pearls, sour, pungent, and juicy! One night she even dreamed of a robust tree laden with pomegranates. She told Lin about the dream, saying the auspicious fruit portended that they would have a big boy. Somehow the impossibility of coming by a pomegranate corrected her freak appetite, and she began eating normally again.