9
Manna was given fifty-six days of maternity leave. During the first week she could hardly move about, so Lin did all the housework and cooked for her. She didn't have enough milk for the twins, though Lin made her eat a large bowl of pigs' feet soup a day to increase lactation. The babies had to be fed every three or four hours; because it took at least a month to secure the daily delivery of fresh milk, for the time being Lin had to get powdered milk for them, which was in short supply. Luckily Haiyan helped him buy eight pounds of milk powder in town, though at a higher price.
In the second week after Manna's delivery, Lin hired a maid from a suburban village, a short, freckle-faced girl with a pair of long braids. Her name was Juli. On weekdays she cooked and helped Manna look after the babies, but she returned home at night and couldn't come on Sundays.
Manna meanwhile was getting weaker and weaker. Sometimes she had heartburn and breathed with difficulty as though suffering from asthma. A murmur was detected in her heart. The cardiogram indicated she had a heart condition, which shocked Lin. He withheld the information from her for a week, then decided to let her know. When he told her the truth, she shed a few tears, not for herself but for their babies.
"It doesn't matter for me," she said. "The earlier I die, the sooner I can free myself from this world."
"What nonsense," he said. "I want you to live!"
She lifted her face, and the desperate look in her eyes disconcerted him. "Lin, I want you to promise me something."
"What? "
"Promise me that you'll love and take care of our babies when I'm gone."
"Don't think of that. You'll – "
"Promise me, please!"
"All right, I promise."
"You'll never abandon them."
"I won't, of course."
"Thank you. You've made me feel better." Unconsciously her right palm was rubbing her sore nipple.
Her words upset him, but he had no idea how to distract her from thinking of death. All he could do was insist she must not exert herself in any way or worry about anything. Let him do the housework and receive any visitor she was reluctant to meet.
After an extended argument between the parents, the twins were finally named River and Lake. Their father didn't like the names very much because they sounded too common, but their mother believed the commonness was a major advantage, arguing that with plain names the boys would be easier to raise. Besides, both the characters "river" and "lake" contain the element of water, which represents natural vitality and is pliable, enduring, and invincible.
Many officers' wives came to see the twins, who looked identical to them. The visitors kept asking Lin and Manna, "Which one is River?" or "Is this Lake?" Indeed it was difficult to tell who was who. Even the maid sometimes had to remember that River had a slightly folded ear.
The visitors brought along eggs, brown sugar, dried dates, and millet, saying these things could enrich Manna's blood. Several women told her that she should eat a lot of eggs, at least six hundred in two months, to strengthen her bones. By tradition it was believed that if the mother was well cared for and well nourished in the weeks after childbirth, most of her illnesses would naturally disappear. So some women advised Manna to take care not to catch cold when she went out and not to be too stingy to spend money on nutritious food. Their words saddened Manna, reminding her of her heart condition, of which few people knew.
The visitors all congratulated the couple on having two sons. "You landed two birds with a single bullet," one would say. And another, "What a lucky man!" In everybody's eyes Lin was extraordinarily fortunate, because since the 1970s a rule had allowed no couple to have more than one child. But Lin now had two sons and also a grown daughter. His old roommate Jin Tian was upset when he heard Lin had two boys, because his wife had borne him only a girl. He suggested that Lin do something to celebrate this great fortune, either throw a party or distribute some candies and cigarettes. But Lin was too exhausted to think about that.
Though she managed to eat six or seven eggs a day, Manna's health kept deteriorating. It was beyond her ability to breast-feed and look after the twins. Juli, the maid, could help only a little, because the babies slept a lot in the daytime and would remain awake at night, playing and crying. To stop them from disturbing the neighbors in the same dormitory house, Lin had to hold them by turns. In the beginning, his holding could calm the babies, but soon they wanted more motion and wouldn't allow their father to sit down, so Lin had to pace back and forth to stop them from crying. In addition, he had to hum tunes incessantly. Though exhausted and heavy-eyed, he dared not discontinue. At times he was so miserable that he felt like crying together with his sons, but he controlled himself.
Soon neither of the twins wanted to be left in bed for a minute; the moment Lin put down the calmed one to pick up the screaming one, the babies would join forces crying loudly. So Manna began to take part in pacing the floor. As a result, neither of the parents could get enough sleep. This was too much, but they had no choice. A few weeks later Juli suggested that they get a swaying crib, the rocking of which might keep the babies quiet. Lin bought a large crib immediately and tied its ends to ropes secured to the window frame and the door lintel. The crib worked miraculously; the parents didn't have to pace the room at night anymore. Instead, Lin would sit on the bed and go on rocking the crib, while the babies made noises continually as though talking to their father.
In the meantime, the boys were growing rapidly, each having gained two inches and six pounds in two months. River was now slightly bigger than his younger brother Lake.
One morning Juli pushed the baby carriage out of the hospital to watch a column of police trucks parading criminals through the streets. Two drug dealers had been sentenced to death and a rapist to life. Each of the criminals carried above his head a wooden placard whose base was tied to his back. A young woman was also among them; she, who had once been a teacher in a kindergarten, had locked a naughty boy in a basement to teach him a lesson, but she had forgotten to release him. The child had starved to death, and she was going to serve fourteen years in prison.
When the twins returned home, their faces became bluish. Manna was unhappy and told Juli never to take them out in the freezing weather again. That afternoon the babies began to have loose bowels.
Their father took them to Doctor Min, a young pediatrician who had just graduated from the Second Military Medical University. The diagnosis was dysentery. Like deflated balloons, the twins seemed to have withered all of a sudden, their heads drooping and their eyes lusterless, both whimpering a little and breathing heavily. Juli was scared, declaring tearfully that she hadn't fed them anything unclean. Neither Manna nor Lin blamed her more, though they were baffled by the cause of the disease. Probably the babies' drinking water hadn't been boiled long enough to kill all the bacteria.
To prevent dehydration, the twins had to be given an intravenous drip of glucose and salt water without delay. The nurses went about working on Lake and River at the same time, but the babies' blood vessels were hardly visible and were so thin that the nurses tried several times unsuccessfully to lodge a needle into them. The twins were screaming hoarsely. To Lin, his sons' arms looked almost transparent, so he was impatient with the nurses who couldn't find their blood vessels. Yet he dared not try to do it himself; neither could he watch for long the needles probing beneath his sons' tender skin. They made his heart twinge and his chest contract. For the first time in his life he was experiencing this kind of paternal suffering, which caused him to tremble a little. He realized that he did love the babies, his nose twitching and tears welling up in his eyes. If only he could substitute for them!