The Bridegroom

by Ha Jin

  “Shut up!” Director Yu said. “You couldn’t handle a tiger, so we gave you a man.”

  Hurriedly, we removed the animal skin from the driver, who was unconscious. His lips were cut open; his mouth and eyes were bleeding.

  Old Min, still unable to stop chuckling, poured some cold water on Little Dou’s face. A moment later Little Dou came to, moaning, “Help . . . save me . . .”

  The medic began bandaging him, insisting we had to send him to the hospital without delay. But who could drive the truck? Secretary Feng rubbed his hands and said, “Damn, look at this mess!”

  A young man was dispatched to look for a phone in order to call our company to have them send out the other driver. In the meantime, Little Dou’s wounds stopped bleeding, and he was able to answer some questions, but he couldn’t help groaning every few seconds. Old Min waved a leafy twig over Little Dou’s face to keep mosquitoes and flies away. Tired and bored, Huping was alone in the cab, napping. Except for the two leaders, who were in the bushes talking, we all lounged on the grass, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes.

  Not until an hour later did the other driver arrive by bicycle. At the sight of him some of us shouted, “Long live Chairman Mao!” although the great leader had passed away five years before.

  The moment we arrived at the hospital, we rushed Little Dou to the emergency room. While the doctor was stitching him up, the medic and I escorted Huping back to the mental ward. On the way, Huping said tearfully, “I swear I didn’t know Little Dou was in the tiger.”

  After a good deal of editing, the fake-tiger part matched the rest of the scene, more or less. Many leaders of our prefecture saw the new part and praised it, even though the camera shakes like crazy. Several TV stations in the Northeast have begun rebroadcasting the series. We’re told that it will be shown in Beijing soon, and we’re hopeful it will win a prize. Director Yu has promised to throw a seafood party if our series makes the finals, and to ask the Municipal Administration to give us all a raise if it receives an award.

  Both the driver and Huping are still in the hospital. I was assigned to visit them once a week on behalf of our company. The doctor said that Little Dou, who suffered a concussion, would recuperate soon, but Huping wasn’t doing so well. The hospital plans to have him transferred to a mental home when a bed is available there.

  Yesterday, after lunch, I went to see our patients with a string bag of Red Jade apples. I found the driver in the ward’s recreation room, sitting alone over a chessboard. He looked fine, although the scars on his upper lip, where the stitches were, still seemed to bother him, especially when he opened his mouth.

  “How are you today, Little Dou?” I asked.

  “I’m all right. Thanks for coming.” His voice was smoother, as though it belonged to another man.

  “Does your head still hurt?”

  “Sometimes it rings like a beehive. My temples ache at night.”

  “The doc said you could leave the hospital soon.”

  “Hope they’ll let me drive the truck again.”

  His words filled me with pity, because the other driver had just taken an apprentice who was likely to replace Little Dou eventually. So I gave him all the apples, even though he was supposed to have only half of them. He’s a bachelor without any family here, whereas Huping has two elder sisters who live in town.

  I found Huping in his room. He looked well physically but no longer possessed any princely charm. He had just returned from kung fu exercises and was panting a little. He wiped his face with a grimy white towel. The backs of his hands were flecked with tiny scars, scabs, and cracks, which must have resulted from hitting sandbags. I told him that we had received over three hundred fan letters addressed to him. I didn’t reveal that more than ninety percent of them were from young women and girls, some of whom had mailed him sweetmeats, chocolates, raisins, books, fountain pens, fancy diaries, and even photos of themselves. How come when a man becomes a poor wretch he’s all the more splendid to the public?

  Huping grinned like an imbecile. “So people still think I’m a tiger-fighter?”

  “Yes, they do,” I said and turned my head away. Beyond the double-paned window, the yard was clear and white. A group of children were building a snowman, his neck encircled by an orange scarf. Their mouths puffed out warm air, and their shouts rose like sparrows’ twitterings. They wore their coats unbuttoned. They looked happy.

  Huping stroked his stubbly chin and grinned again. “Well,” he said, “I am a tiger-killer.”

  Broken

  During the lunch break, Manjin’s colleagues again talked about the typist Tingting. Chang Bofan, the director of the Youth League of the Muji Railroad Company, said, “Who knows? She may already be broken.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Shuwei, an older clerk.

  “Haven’t you seen the way she walks?” Bofan picked his flat nose, staring at the chessboard before him.

  “No. Tell us how she walks.”

  “With splayed feet. She must be as broad as a city gate.” The office rang with laughter. Bofan slapped a green cannon in front of a red elephant on the chessboard. Then they stopped laughing as the door opened and the director of the Cadre Section, Tan Na, walked in. She wanted to see a league member’s file, which Manjin helped her find in a cabinet.

  When talking about Tingting, they rarely failed to mention Benchou, who was a senior clerk in the Security Section at the railroad company’s headquarters and could often be found in Tingting’s office. Benchou was in his early forties, dark and handsome, but he was married and had two children. “An old bull wants to chew tender grass,” people would say behind his back. Both Bofan and Shuwei disliked Benchou, because he had gotten two raises in the past three years, whereas they each had only one.

  Shen Manjin was new in the Communist Youth League Section and was too young and too shy to join others in talking about women; but he was also eager to know more about Tingting, the pretty girl who was being courted by several sons of the top officials of the Muji Railroad Company. To him she seemed too flimsy, coquettish, and expensive, like a gorgeous vase only good for viewing. She rode a galvanized Phoenix bicycle, wore a diamond wristwatch, and was dressed in silk in summer and woolens or furs in winter—during which season she changed her scarves every week and sometimes even put on a saffron shawl. Manjin had been to her office a few times to deliver documents that needed typing. She seldom said an unnecessary word to him. When they ran into each other in the building, she would tilt her head a little, just to acknowledge that she saw him.

  Most of his colleagues were either married or engaged, and would eat in the dining room of the guesthouse that provided board and lodging for locomotive engineers, stokers, train police, and attendants. Food was inexpensive there and of better quality. You could buy meat and vegetables separately, and a chef would cook them in a wok for you within minutes. The manager of the guesthouse would grant the dining privilege only to some of the cadres who worked at the company’s headquarters, which was close by. If he wanted, Manjin could eat there every day; but six days a week he would walk farther east and have lunch and dinner in the Workers Dining Hall, near the company’s shopping center. He was interested in the girls who ate at that place, in particular a group of nurses who were on the company’s basketball team. They were tall and handsome; of them, he was most attracted to the one who played center. She looked healthy and sturdy, with a thin, white neck, her hair coiled like a pair of earphones. If he were to marry, he would have a tall wife, so that his children would be taller than himself and would have no difficulty in finding a spouse when they grew up.

  Before he was promoted to the Youth League Section, few girls had shown any interest in him. He was squat and nondescript, with narrow eyes and a round, pimply chin. These days, however, he found that once in a while a girl would shoot him a glance, but not those tall nurses, whose shoulders he could barely reach when standing in the same line with them to buy food. Yet his recent promotion had b
oosted his confidence to some extent, because it partly corroborated the prophecy, made by a fortune-teller in his hometown, that eventually he would rise above thousands of people. Indeed, his section was in charge of over a hundred branches of the Youth League, all together more than five thousand young men and women working along the railroads. What’s more, the section didn’t have a vice director yet. Several times his boss, Chang Bofan, had said to him in private, “You’ll have a bright future, Manjin. Work hard, our section will be yours. I shouldn’t be here.” True, Bofan was already forty-three, too old to run the Youth League.

  Bofan also advised him to improve his handwriting, because the Political Department always needed cadres who could write well. Handsome penmanship would give him some leverage in his career; following the director’s advice, Manjin often stayed in the office after dinner and practiced his handwriting.

  One evening in early July, after a hot bath at the guesthouse, he returned to his office and began copying the pen calligraphy of Chairman Mao. The window overlooked the vast square in front of the train station. The dusk was turning purple, and some automobiles passing by had their lights on. A few food vendors gathered at the roadside, shaking bells and crying for customers.

  Manjin hadn’t copied half a page when the door opened. In came Bofan, Shuwei, and four other men. One of them wore a pistol and two carried wooden sticks under their arms; they all held long flashlights. “Manjin,” Shuwei said, “are you going to join us?”

  “For what?” asked Manjin.

  “It’s already eight o’clock. Liu Benchou and Wang Tingting are still in her office. We’re sure they’ll do something tonight, and we mean to catch them.” Shuwei’s mouth bunched up like a snout, his gray mustache spreading fan-shaped.

  Manjin took a flashlight out of his desk drawer, but they didn’t leave immediately, as they were waiting for the right time. He wondered why on earth Tingting was so attracted to Benchou, a married man who was old enough to be her uncle. How could this dark fellow be superior to those young dandies with powerful fathers?

  The door opened again. A slender clerk tiptoed in, reporting with a grin, “They went down to his office.”

  Two men stood up, about to make for the door. “No rush,” Bofan said. “Let them warm their bellies down there for a while.”

  So they waited another ten minutes.

  When they were approaching Benchou’s office with their shoes in their hands, they heard half-smothered giggles coming from inside. Shuwei looked through the keyhole, but no light was on in there. Then came Tingting’s panting and moaning. “Yes, yes, like this! Oh, my fingers and toes are all tingling.”

  “Ah, you’re so good,” Benchou groaned. He chuckled some, then hummed the obscene tune of “Little Girl, Grow Up Quick.”

  Bofan whispered to Shuwei and Manjin, “Go to the backyard and wait at the window. Don’t let them get away.”

  They left noiselessly along the corridor as Bofan pounded on the door and yelled, “Open the door, open it now!”

  Something crashed in there. Bofan shouted again, “If you don’t open the door, we’ll force it. Comrades Liu Benchou and Wang Tingting, you’ve made a mistake, but it will be a matter of a different nature if your attitude is so stubborn.”

  Manjin, Shuwei, and another man hurried out of the building and ran toward the window. The second they arrived there, the window popped open and out jumped a person, who landed on the ground and began crawling away. “Don’t move,” Shuwei shouted.

  Three flashlight shafts were fixed on the person, who was Tingting. She rolled under a Yellow River truck parked nearby. At this moment all the lights in the office were turned on. Manjin heard Bofan, inside, order loudly, “Hold him! Take his belt off.”

  Tingting was trembling, covering her eyes with one arm, her other hand on the ground supporting her upper body. Apparently she saw the stick in Shuwei’s hands and was afraid he would strike her. “You come out,” he said. “We won’t hit you.”

  “I, I . . .” Her teeth were chattering and she couldn’t speak. They pulled her out while she was sobbing.

  “Stinking broken shoe!” the other man cursed.

  Manjin felt uneasy, seeing that Tingting had lost all her charm, her permed hair bedraggled. She looked much older, as though in her forties, five or six wrinkles on her forehead.

  They took her back to Benchou’s office, where a man was busy shooting photographs of the tangled sheets, quilts, and pillows on the cement floor. A used condom was lying beside Benchou’s blue cap; the photographer took a picture of that, too. On the tip of a stick held by a man were Tingting’s panties, which were decorated with white fringe and a swarm of lavender butterflies. Benchou hung his head, holding his pants with both hands; his face was marked with reddish patches; obviously they had slapped him. As Shuwei was putting the condom and a few pubic hairs into an envelope with a pair of chopsticks, Bofan said, “All right, we have the adulterer and the adulteress and the evidence. Let’s take them to the Cadre Section.”

  Benchou and Tingting were led into different rooms. The interrogation didn’t start immediately. Manjin wondered why Bofan and the others wouldn’t hurry to interrogate them. They were smoking, reading newspapers, and drinking tea in another office, where three men were playing checkers.

  When Director Tan Na arrived an hour later, Manjin was told to join in questioning Tingting. His task was to take notes. Tan Na presided over the interrogation, at which Bofan and Shuwei were also present.

  “Comrade Wang Tingting,” Tan Na started huskily, “you made a grievous mistake, but don’t panic. You still have a chance to redeem yourself.”

  Tingting nodded, her thin lips bloodless and her eyes dim and sheepish. She dared not look at anybody.

  Tan Na went on, “First, tell us how many times you and Benchou had sexual intercourse.”

  “I’m not sure,” she muttered.

  “Does this mean more than once?”

  Tingting remained silent. Tan Na said again, “Come on, Wang Tingting, the honey season isn’t over yet. How can you be so forgetful?”

  Seeing that she was too stubborn to answer, Bofan rose to his feet, picked up a sheaf of paper filled with handwriting, and told her, “Look here, Liu Benchou has already confessed everything. Why should you still try to protect him? Now it’s up to you to show us a good attitude. We don’t have to hear anything from your mouth.” He sucked his teeth, two of which, the front ones, were rimmed with stainless steel.

  Tingting trembled. Her large eyes turned around, looking from one face to another. Manjin could tell she was terrified by Bofan’s words. He was surprised too, because the other group hadn’t begun interrogating the adulterer yet.

  “That’s right,” said Director Tan, whose doughy face and slit eyes were absolutely still. “We just want to see your attitude. Now, tell us how many times.”

  “Four.”

  “Where did they take place?”

  “In his office.”

  “All four times?”

  “No, we were at another place once.”

  “Where was that?”

  “On the train to Changchun.”

  “You mean in a berth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of being caught?”

  “It was in the middle of the night.”

  Tan Na pointed two fingers at her and said sharply, “What I mean is, don’t you feel ashamed to do such a thing in a public place?”

  Tingting didn’t answer but gave a sob instead. Bofan and Shuwei smirked; Tan Na remained expressionless. She went on. “Was that the first time?”

  “No, the third time.”

  “All right, tell us why you had such an abnormal relationship with him. Didn’t you know he was married? Didn’t you know it was illegal for him to sleep with you?”

  “I knew, but . . .” She wiped the tears off her cheeks.

  “But what?”

  “He said he’d help me know what a man was like.”
>
  “When did he say that?”

  “Toward the end of May.”

  “Where?”

  “In his office.”

  “Why did you go to his office alone? To deliver yourself?”

  “No. That afternoon we all pulled up grass in the backyard. After the work, I went to his office to return a hoe.”

  “And that’s when he started?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He explained why the male organ was called a ‘cock.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that by nature it was always restless and about to fly.”

  For a moment nobody said a word. Tan Na’s eyes moved to Shuwei, who was wheezing, trying hard not to laugh. Then she returned to Tingting and asked, “What did he do next?”

  “He, he held me, fondled my breasts, and drew up my skirt.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “How could I? You don’t know how much strength he has.”

  Bofan and Shuwei covered their mouths with their palms. Tan Na asked, “What else did he say?”

  “I was scared. He said he wouldn’t hurt me. I was afraid his wife might know. He said he didn’t go to bed with her very often, and she couldn’t know because she was so cold.”

  “What did he mean by that? What exactly did he say?”

  “He said she, she had a cold pussy and couldn’t feel anything.”

  Shuwei chuckled, but stopped at Director Tan’s stare. Manjin was shocked by Tingting’s words, wondering why she divulged so much. She wouldn’t betray Benchou on purpose, would she? Heaven knew why she made a fool of him and his wife like this. Maybe she did this to protect herself, or maybe she was mad at him.

  Tan Na asked again, “How did you two have sexual intercourse the first time?”

  “What do you mean?” Tingting’s eyes flapped.

  “Who was atop whom?”

  “He was on me.”

  “From the front?”

  “Yes.”

  “From the behind?”

  “Yes.”

  “How deep did he get into you?”