"Lin! Come and help me!" she called out.
"That chicken can't do a thing," Geng Yang said.
"Lin – come and save our children!" she yelled again. Still Lin was nowhere to be seen.
At this moment Mai Dong, her first love, came out of the osier bushes on the bank and began capering about on the beach. He waved his hands and then clapped them above his head, chanting to her merrily, "You can't have them back! You can't have them back!" He was still in his mid-twenties, wearing the army uniform and a crew cut.
She became murderous and picked up a few large cobblestones and threw them at Geng Yang and Mai Dong with all her might.
"Ouch!" Lin yelled as Manna's fist landed on his forehead. He pulled the lamp cord, and the blinding light woke her up. She kept rubbing her eyes.
"Why hit me like that? Oh, my eyes – " Lin stopped, seeing his wife in tears, her face horror-stricken.
"Sorry, sorry, I was having a terrible dream," she said and turned aside. "I dreamed that we lost our children and couldn't get them back." She began sobbing while her arm covered the sleeping babies.
Lin sighed. "Don't think too much, darling."
"I won't," she said. "You go back to sleep now."
He turned off the light and soon resumed snoring softly. Meanwhile Manna's eyes were wide open, watching the clouds being torn to strips by the bare branches waving outside the window. She was wondering why Lin hadn't appeared in her dream, whereas Mai Dong had turned up and ridiculed her so maliciously. What does this mean? she asked herself. Why didn't Lin come to our rescue? Where was he? Is he really too timid to fight to protect us? Why was Mai Dong as mean as that bastard Geng Yang?
Question after question rose to her mind, but she couldn't answer any of them. Her thoughts were in disorder.
Outside, the moon was pale, wavering beyond the dark treetops. The wind was howling and reminded her of the wolves she had often heard at night when she was a child in the orphanage.
11
Manna's heart grew weaker, her pulse more irregular and sometimes thready. Severe pains occurred in her chest and left arm, and at nightfall she would feel dizzy and short of breath. Her heart murmur often turned into a gallop rhythm. The results of a new examination shocked Doctor Yao, an expert in cardiopathy. One afternoon, holding Manna's X-ray against a desk lamp in his office, Doctor Yao told Lin, "Medication may not help her anymore. I'm afraid she doesn't have many years left. Heaven knows why her condition has deteriorated so rapidly."
Hearing the prognosis, Lin almost broke into tears. He said in a choked voice, "Why – why did I let this happen? I'm a doctor, why didn't I detect the real condition of her heart?" He covered his face with both hands.
"Lin, don't blame yourself. We all knew she had a heart problem, but we didn't expect infarction would develop so soon. Some of her coronary vessels must have been blocked long ago."
"Oh, I should have known this. I told her not to eat too many eggs, but she wouldn't listen." Lin struck his knee with his fist.
Doctor Yao sighed. "I wish we had diagnosed it."
"So there's no cure?"
"I've heard some experts in Europe can dilate the coronary arteries, but the technology is not available in our country."
"What should I do?"
"Lin, I'm sorry. " Doctor Yao held Lin's upper arm and shook it gently, meaning he had no idea either. "But you must not be too emotional. Cheer up a little – she depends on you." He paused for a moment while Lin rubbed his stomach with the palm of his hand as though assuaging a pain. Doctor Yao went on, "Don't let her do any physical work, don't make her lose her temper, just make life easy for her."
Lin lowered his head and muttered, "I'll try my best."
"If I were you, I wouldn't tell her about her heart condition, just keep her happy."
"I won't let her know, of course."
Despite Lin's effort to guard the secret, word of Manna's illness soon began circulating in the hospital. The rumor went wild and even claimed that she would definitely die within a year. In a few weeks Manna heard about the true condition of her heart, but she took it with surprising serenity, saying to Lin that she knew her life would be over soon. Her words distressed him.
As she got weaker, her temper became worse. She often yelled at Juli and Lin; sometimes she cried for no apparent reason, like a self-willed child.
Lin tried to do as much housework as he could. He washed diapers on weekends when Juli didn't come to work. In midwinter the tap water was ice cold. His hands ached and itched while he scrubbed at the faucet in front of the house. He had never expected that washing laundry would be a part of his married life. Throughout those years before the marriage, he had washed only his socks and underwear since Manna did his laundry for him. Now, a pile of diapers would be waiting for him every weekend. He dared not complain or think too much, for things could be worse. In spite of all the difficulties, they could afford to hire a maid and he didn't have to wash laundry on weekdays.
On Saturday evenings he would carry out to the faucet a load of baby clothes and diapers and a kettle of hot water, which he would pour over two or three fistfuls of soap powder, and then he would soak the laundry in the suds for a moment. Under the mercury street lamp, the water would glisten in the large basin. Through the loudspeaker atop the roof of the medical building, a soft female voice often sang "A Large River Long and Wide" and "The Five-Starred Red Flag Flies High." Lin would set the washboard against the rim of the sink and start scrubbing the laundry piece by piece with a squishing sound. Soon the detergent water lost its suds and turned cold, and he had to blow on his fingers again and again in order to continue. The toughest part was to rinse the soaped, scrubbed laundry, because there was no hot water available after the initial soak and the tap water was so cold it seemed to bite his fingers with teeth. Yet he kept washing quietly and always avoided greeting those who came to fetch water.
People noticed that Lin's face had grown bony, his cheeks more prominent now. His trousers became baggy on him. Commissar Su's wife would tell her neighbors, "Lin Kong has lost his hips. It's heaven's retribution, serves him right. See who dares to abandon his wife again." Whenever she saw Lin, she would glower at him, spit to the ground, and stamp her feet. He ignored her as though he hadn't heard or seen her. But unlike the crazy woman, his colleagues had stopped joking about him; instead they would shake their heads behind his back.
He was grateful that Hua often came on weekends. She sometimes helped him with the laundry and looked after the babies. She liked feeding them with only one nursing bottle, which made them compete to suck it and crow with pleasure. They would laugh and put out their fat little hands whenever she teased them, calling them "my little precious" while pressing her chin against their chests. She had made them each a bunny hat with frills. By now Manna had become friendly to Hua and had even bought her a pink cardigan. She once told Lin that if only she could have had a daughter like Hua.
After a long sick leave, Manna returned to the Medical Ward. She could work only half a day, but she was paid a full salary. She spent afternoons at home.
One Sunday morning in January, Lin was cooking rice for lunch. While the pot was boiling, he set out for the mess hall to buy a dish. The previous evening, he had seen a notice on the small blackboard at the entrance to the kitchen, saying there would be beef and fried potato for lunch, seventy fen a helping. On his way there he ran into Commissar Su. They talked for a while about initiating a crash program for training paramedics from the local counties the next spring. The prefecture's Department of Public Health had just asked the army hospital for help and was willing to finance the program. This meant the hospital's staff would receive a larger bonus at the end of next year.