by Tie Ning
Apparently not having the energy to talk at length, Fei had sweat on her forehead. She curled up, holding her thin knees to her stomach, but still tried to continue. Tiao sat on her armchair and gazed at her, recalling scenes of their teenage years … She remembered how, after the three of them—she, Fei, and Youyou—tasted the gourmet food they’d cooked themselves, discussed the Soviet story about jealousy, and appreciated Fei’s “Cairo Night” fashion show, when Youyou sighed that she longed to live as if life were a film, Fei declared proudly, “I am a film.”
I am a film.
Now she was sick. What was all that about being a film? Now she was a disease; a disease, exactly. Fei’s announcement saddened her. Puzzled, she stared at Fei on the sofa and couldn’t understand why Fei had to say it. Why must she say such things? Tiao didn’t want to hear words like that, which made her uncomfortable, both physically and psychologically. She interrupted Fei and said, “Let me pour you a cup of tea. You close your eyes and take a rest.”
Fei said angrily, “Why do you interrupt me? You think I would use your cup to drink your water? I want to smoke. I asked you to bring me an ashtray, and why didn’t you do that? Do you want to suffocate me? You!”
Tiao took a plate from the kitchen, placed it in front of Fei as a makeshift ashtray, and said, “I’ll light the cigarette for you.” She picked up Fei’s lighter and flicked it on awkwardly. The flame shone on Fei’s face, a face full of manic excitement. Fei pulled a cigarette from the pack, moved closer to the flame, and greedily inhaled a few puffs. Then she leaned back on the sofa and swung a leg over the top of it, in a loose and indecent gesture. She breathed the smoke in and out and said, “I am disease. After a while, I became less anxious when I got a venereal disease; I wanted to give the disease to them first, to those stinking men who had status and were so fond of their reputations, and to have them pass it on to their wives. My pastime was to lie in a big dark bed with curtains drawn tightly and imagine their miserable looks after catching the disease from me. I knew the disease wouldn’t defeat them; they have their own discreet channels for treatment—imported shots, expensive medicine—none of that would be in short supply for them. People would be eager to volunteer to supply them treatment, and maybe they would get to stay home and be cured with ease. Do you believe it? I simply liked to imagine the way they looked, miserable and embarrassed, miserable and embarrassed but still with their high-and-mighty expressions … that was truly satisfying—such a pitiful satisfaction was probably all I deserved. Only at moments like these I wouldn’t think myself lower than they were. I live with a clearer conscience than they do. Tell me, don’t I live with a clearer conscience than they do? Don’t stare at me like that. Will you, please? Hey, hey, why don’t you say something?”
Tiao heaved a sigh and said, “Fei, don’t torture yourself like this. Something big must have happened, as big as the sky. Which man have you been staying with recently? Can you tell me?”
Fei said, “I … my beauty is gone. Beauty is gone. Do you understand? I’ve been with nobody recently. I just stay by myself, home alone, at that place of mine in Shenzhen, the apartment that Boss Wang bought me when he was leaving. But something big did happen to me; I became more and more suspicious of one person. I spoke to you about Yu Dasheng, right? Yu Dasheng, the current vice governor of our province, used to be the director of my factory twenty years ago. I told you that I’d tried to use my body and my Coral Jewel watch to seduce him in order to get another job. I sat down on his lap and he lifted me off. He threw me out but transferred me to the office to work as a typist, which didn’t make sense. I’d never met anyone like him in my life, a man who intimidated me but also made me very much want to get close to him. But I didn’t even dare thank him. I felt he was the kind of man who didn’t like to express his personal feelings. He wasn’t cold, just very strong, and you would never know what he was thinking. After I left the factory, I gradually forgot about him. Later, it was Little Cui who reminded me. Last year, Little Cui and Er Ling came to see me out of the blue. His niece—Little Cui’s niece was already so grown up—fell two points short of the college entrance exam and they wanted me to find some connection to smooth things out. I couldn’t think of any, and Little Cui said I could ask the big leader to give a word from above. I said I didn’t know any big leader, and Little Cui said, ‘Don’t you know the vice governor, Yu Dasheng? He used to work in our factory.’ He exchanged a look with Er Ling after saying this, the kind that’s not very straightforward. Apparently they still firmly believed that Yu Dasheng and I had some kind of relationship, just as Little Cui had imagined when he was beating me or bent over my body. These looks and little gestures didn’t bother me anymore. What interested me was that Yu Dasheng was the vice governor of our province. You know I never paid attention to politics, never watched news on TV or read newspapers. It was ridiculous that I didn’t know Yu Dasheng was our vice governor until so late. I felt strangely excited and readily agreed to try to talk to him. I phoned the number that Little Cui provided and reached Governor Yu’s secretary, introducing myself as a worker who had worked in the factory where Governor Yu used to work, an ordinary worker, whom Governor Yu had helped and who just wanted a few minutes of Governor Yu’s time on behalf of a child.
“Two days later, I saw Yu Dasheng at his office. I’d never tried so hard to tidy myself up as I did then, putting on makeup, choosing clothes so carefully, and still I was so dissatisfied with my face. I knew this was because I was getting old, and I had lost confidence in my looks. I had dark circles under my lower eyelids, and my index and middle fingers had been stained brown by smoking. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw that the skin on my cheeks was already a little sunken. I took turns slapping myself with both hands, to speed up the circulation, to make my cheeks full and rosy again. Wasn’t I crazy? I was simply a crazy woman. I walked into Yu Dasheng’s office in fancy clothes and heavy makeup and immediately felt unsteady on my feet. It seemed to me later that it was because the office was so big. Such a big room was intended to make people feel small—and I felt much smaller than usual. I walked to the office desk he sat behind. Hardly moving, he pointed at a cushioned chair in front of the desk and had me sit down. He said, ‘Fei, we haven’t seen each other for many years. My secretary said you came to me on behalf of your child? How old is your child?’
“I said, ‘It’s like this: She’s not my child. She’s my ex-husband’s niece.’ I tried to explain the situation as briefly as possible because I knew that, as always, he preferred things straight to the point with no small talk. After that, I handed that child’s information to him. I noticed he was particularly interested in my hands. So I got a crazy idea, the habit of many years emerging boldly again. I extended the hand with brown, smoke-stained fingers toward his face, almost touching the tip of his nose. I said, ‘Look at my hand as much as you want. You can even … touch.’ As I said this, I was prepared to be thrown out of his office, as I had been years before, and I wouldn’t have regretted it, even had that happened. But, surprisingly, he reached out to hold it, actually taking up my hand and beginning to study it attentively. For a moment I was moved, because the way he held my hand was not like the flirting between a man and woman. He held my hand in his as if it were scalding hot and fragile. There was nothing sexual in his eyes. On the contrary, the expression in them was distant. He seemed to focus on my hand, but also not to. I can’t explain my feelings at the time: I studied his hand while he studied mine. I noticed something very strange; my hand looked very much like his. I must have lost myself at that moment, because something in the depths of my heart made me want to throw myself into his arms and cry and cry, but not the kind of crying a woman does with a man, but like a child with an adult. Do you understand? Not that he could have known what I had in mind, but he immediately let go of my hand and said, ‘I didn’t know a girl could smoke that much.’
“Everything went back to normal. He kept at an appropriate distance and I didn’t
have the nerve to reach out toward the tip of his nose again. Soon he indicated that I should be going, saying, ‘I’ll try my best to help the child. I have a meeting in a moment and you can leave now.’ Apparently he was as good as his word, because Little Cui’s niece was admitted by a university of science and technology. Only, after the meeting, I didn’t get to see Yu Dasheng again. Every time I phoned, his secretary would say that he wasn’t in. I had the sense this vice governor knew everything about me, even my indecency. What right did I have to waste his time? Even though he might be my … he might be my father. Tiao, you will never understand when he took my hand how strong, how irresistible the feeling was.”
“Is this the big thing that you wanted to tell me?” Tiao asked Fei.
“No.” Fei coughed violently. She said to Tiao with an enraged face, “I wanted to tell you that I hate you and I’m disgusted by you, because you’re too healthy and I can’t stand your health.”
Tiao knelt in front of the sofa and wanted to hold Fei’s hands. She said, “You’d get well again, if only you wouldn’t allow yourself to drink and smoke so much.”
Fei threw Tiao’s hand off. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you know I’m contagious? I don’t have venereal disease. Not this time. Venereal disease is nothing! It’s my liver that’s the problem. Liver, liver, liver. It’s liver cancer, late term! Ah, let me live like a disease, let me live like a disease. I am disease. I am disease …”
Tiao’s eyes blurred. It seemed to her that here was a grown version of Quan thrashing her arms and legs. She knelt there, afraid to provoke her further, but she couldn’t stop her, either.
2
“Now you know why I’m talking so much to you. I’m going to die, but I haven’t lived enough,” Fei said bitterly from the sofa.
Tiao took out a blanket and covered Fei. She said, “I’m going to call Chen Zai and ask him to drive over. Let’s go to the hospital now.”
Fei waved her hand and said with a bitter smile, “I just got out of the hospital. I have my diagnosis and I don’t want to go back. Hmm, the doctor didn’t want to tell me in the beginning, asking me to send a family member to him. A family member. Tiao, that’s when I feel the most miserable. What family do I have? Where is my family? I really need one, don’t you think? Even if it’s just to hear a diagnosis of late-term liver cancer.”
Tiao bit her lower lip and almost cried. She said, “It’s my fault, Fei. I haven’t called you for so long. Let’s go to the hospital. Let’s go to the hospital now.”
Fei said, “Don’t cry like a baby. I understand you and am also jealous of you. What woman in love isn’t selfish? Doesn’t everything become secondary compared to Chen Zai? I was really afraid to bother you, which was why I didn’t call. To be honest with you, I even thought about killing myself, jumping from a high building, suffocating myself with gas, or cutting my wrist with a blade … All of it seemed too painful. I just couldn’t do it to myself. Only taking sleeping pills seemed okay, to get sent to another world peacefully, without knowing. I went to two drugstores and bought two bottles of sleeping pills, two hundred pills, which would be enough. I went home, gave myself an herbal bath, put on festive clothes, changed the sheets and pillowcases, and then cleaned the rooms. While I was doing all these chores, I kept thinking about the scenes after my death, thinking about all those men I had been with. Who would feel the saddest after hearing? Who would regret that he hadn’t married me? Who would be sorry for how cruelly he had treated me? How they treated me like I was less than human, like an animal? To put it simply, I hoped my death would send a shock to their hearts for a moment—that it could make some of them feel regret and guilt. For some suicides, the whole purpose is to make the living feel regret and guilt. I was lying on the bed and dumping the two hundred pills onto a piece of white paper and telling myself, ‘I’m going to take the pills. I’m going to take them.’ Then I got obsessed with imagining all kinds of expressions on the faces of those men, as if I were watching a film. I realized later that a person who cares too much what other people would think about her death wouldn’t actually kill herself. The more I looked forward to making others feel guilty, the less I wanted to kill myself. In the end I simply dumped all the sleeping pills in the toilet. My death wouldn’t shake anyone’s soul, so I’m not going to kill myself. I want to live to the last moment of my life. There is only one wish left in my heart: I want to ask you to help me conduct an investigation … help me find out about Yu Dasheng’s past. I know he spent his youth in Beijing. Do you think it’s possible that he’s my father? Ai, besides our hands really looking alike, I have no other evidence. My mother and uncle didn’t leave me any clues.”
Despite deep reservations, Tiao nodded and said, “I’ll try every way I can to help you find out. You can trust me.” Her heart was telling her it was too absurd. Fei missed her father so much that she was already out of her mind. But in a situation like this, she didn’t want to dash Fei’s hopes.
She didn’t expect Fei suddenly to laugh at herself. “Tiao, I’m fine with just having you say that. Do you think I would really expect you to investigate? Who am I? How can I dream of working my way up to attach myself to a governor? Not to mention the fact that he’s not my father. Even if he is, would he admit it to someone like me? Take me home. Call Chen Zai to take me home.”
Next day, Tiao and Youyou, at Fei’s suggestion, went to Fei’s apartment for dinner. She asked Tiao and Youyou to cook, and decided on the menu herself: puffed rice noodles, fried crystal pork, pork skin aspic, muxi pork, and also, for dessert, grilled miniature snowballs. Tiao and Youyou remembered that this had been the menu for their first dinner so many years ago, a banquet that Youyou had spent a large sum of money, fifty-two cents, to put on. Youyou still knew how to make these special dishes. While she and Tiao bustled in the kitchen, Fei also made a request for marinated rabbit head. Tiao remembered that it was the snack that Fei had bought for them on their way back from the film: three cents for a marinated rabbit head, the price of a popsicle, so crunchy and delicious. Tiao asked Chen Zai to go out to buy it. Unfortunately, present-day Fuan didn’t sell that kind of thing anymore, and even Youyou didn’t know how to prepare it.
They sat down to eat, and, of course, to drink wine. They drank red wine. Fei, tormented by pain and sweating profusely, got up from her bed, walked over gracefully, and seated herself, her look of misery gone. Her gaze went around to everyone, charming them all; her manner was elegant and appealing. They couldn’t help feeling that the great beauty Fei had returned. She would use red paper to dye their lips and make them look very seductive, and then she would put on a raincoat to perform “Cairo Nights.” Look, she picked up the glass of red wine and drained it in one gulp. Wasn’t it the drunkenness that made her eyes cloudy? This intoxicating dream life of Fei’s! This determined great beauty!
None of them could taste anything out of these special dishes, but they all exaggeratedly nodded their heads to show how they had found their past; from the pork skin aspic, from the fried crystal pork, they had rediscovered their innocent joy. Except their tears didn’t cooperate but fell into their glasses and made the wine salty. They were laughing.
They were laughing.
Two weeks later, Fei died in the hospital. Tiao and Youyou had taken turns staying beside her bed. No one else came to the hospital to visit her, even though she kept glancing toward the door. Where were those men, those men who’d enjoyed her and used her and were also used by her? Towards the end, Fei stopped glancing at the door; she didn’t have the strength anymore—she slipped in and out of a coma.
She had woken up on a sunny afternoon and recognized Tiao by her bedside. She raised her arm and said, “Come close, come close.” She pointed at her lips and said, “Maybe you won’t believe me, Tiao. I’ve had many men but none of them touched my lips. None of them. I didn’t allow them to. Once, a local rich guy, who got rich by dealing cars, treated me to dinner. He suddenly reached his hand over the table, grabbed my neck,
and attempted to kiss me. I turned my face away and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘What do you think I want to do?’ I said, ‘If you want something, you don’t have to try so hard. We can do it now.’ He gave me a cocky grin and said, ‘I never thought I’d hear you say anything like that so soon. I didn’t expect you to be so straightforward. There are two types of women in my experience—the lowbrow kind and the highbrow kind. The lowbrow let you touch the lower parts of their bodies as soon as you start; and the highbrow only permit you to touch the upper parts. See, I had you in the highbrow category …’ Tiao, come closer, come closer, listen to me. My lips are clean. They’re the only thing on my body that’s respectable. Let me kiss you. Let me kiss you.”
Fei propped herself up stubbornly and held Tiao in her arms, and then with her pale and icy lips kissed Tiao’s left cheek.
