by Ha Jin
She revealed Mai Dong’s proposal to nobody except her teacher Lin Kong, who was known as a good-hearted married man and was regarded by many students as a kind of elder brother. In such a situation she needed an objective opinion. Lin agreed that a marriage at this moment was unwise, and that they had better wait a while until her graduation and then decide what to do. He promised he would let nobody know of the relationship. In addition, he said he would try to help her in the job assignment if he was involved in making the decision.
She reasoned Mai Dong out of the idea of an immediate marriage and assured him that she would become his wife sooner or later. As graduation approached, they both grew restless, hoping she would remain in Muji City. He was depressed, and his despondency made her love him more.
At the graduation she was assigned to stay in the hospital and work in its Medical Department as a nurse—a junior officer of the twenty-fourth rank. The good news, however, didn’t please Mai Dong and Manna for long, because a week later he was informed that his radio station was going to be transferred to a newly formed regiment in Fuyuan County, almost eighty miles northeast of Muji and very close to the Russian border.
“Don’t panic,” she told him. “Work and study hard on the front. I’ll wait for you.” Though also heartbroken, she felt he was a rather pathetic man. She wished he were stronger, a man she could rely on in times of adversity, because life always had unexpected misfortunes.
“When will we get married?” he asked.
“Soon, I promise.”
Despite saying that, she was unsure whether he would be able to come back to Muji. She preferred to wait a while.
The nearer the time for departure drew, the more embittered Mai Dong became. A few times he mentioned he would rather be demobilized and return to Shanghai, but she dissuaded him from considering that. A discharge might send him to a place far away, such as an oil field or a construction corps building railroads in the interior of China. It was better for them to stay as close as possible.
When she saw him off at the front entrance of the Sub-Command headquarters, she had to keep blowing on her fingers, having forgotten to bring along her mittens. She wouldn’t take the fur gloves he offered her; she said he would need them more. He stood at the back door of the radio van, whose green body had turned gray with encrusted ice and snow. The radio antenna atop the van was tilting in the wind, which, with a shrill whistle, again and again tried to snatch it up and bear it off. More snow was falling, and the air was piercingly cold. Mai Dong’s breath hung around his face as he shouted orders to his soldiers in the van, who gathered at the window, eager to see what Manna looked like. Outside the van, a man loaded into a side trunk some large wooden blocks needed for climbing the slippery mountain roads. The driver kicked the rear wheels to see whether the tire chains were securely fastened. His fur hat was completely white, a nest of snowflakes.
As the van drew away, Mai Dong waved good-bye to Manna, his hand stretching through the back window, as though struggling to pull her along. He wanted to cry, “Wait for me, Manna!” but he dared not get that out in the presence of his men. Seeing his face contort with pain, Manna’s eyes blurred with tears. She bit her lips so as not to cry.
Winter in Muji was long. Snow wouldn’t disappear until early May. In mid-April when the Songhua River began to break up, people would gather at the bank watching the large blocks of ice cracking and drifting in the blackish-green water. Teenage boys, baskets in hand, would tread and hop on the floating ice, picking up pike, whitefish, carp, baby sturgeon, and catfish killed by the ice blocks that had been washed down by spring torrents. Steamboats, still in the docks, blew their horns time and again. When the main channel was finally clear of ice, they crept out, sailing slowly up and down the river and saluting the spectators with long blasts. Children would hail and wave at them.
Then spring descended all of a sudden. Aspen catkins flew in the air, so thick that when walking on the streets you could breathe them in and you would flick your hand to keep them away from your face. The scent of lilac blooms was pungent and intoxicating. Yet old people still wrapped themselves in fur or cotton-padded clothes. The dark earth, vast and loamy, marked by tufts of yellow grass here and there, began emitting a warm vapor that flickered like purple smoke in the sunshine. All at once apricot and peach trees broke into blossoms, which grew puffy as bees kept touching them. Within two weeks the summer started. Spring was so short here that people would say Muji had only three seasons.
In her letters to Mai Dong, Manna described these seasonal changes as though he had never lived in the city. As always, hecomplained in his letters about life at the front. Many soldiersthere suffered from night blindness because they hadn’t eaten enough vegetables. They all had lice in their underclothes since they couldn’t take baths in their barracks. For the whole winter and spring he had seen only two movies. He had lost fourteen pounds, he was like a skeleton now. To comfort him, each month Manna mailed him a small bag of peanut brittle.
One evening in June, Manna and two other nurses were about to set out for the volleyball court behind the medical building. Benping, the soldier in charge of mail and newspapers, came and handed her a letter. Seeing it was from Mai Dong, her teammates teased her, saying, “Aha, a love letter.”
She opened the envelope and was shocked while reading through the two pages. Mai Dong told her that he couldn’t stand the life on the border any longer and had applied for a discharge, which had been granted. He was going back to Shanghai, where the weather was milder and the food better. More heartrending, he had decided to marry his cousin, who was a salesgirl at a department store in Shanghai. Without such a marriage, he wouldn’t be able to obtain a residence card, which was absolutely necessary for him to live and find employment in the metropolis. In reality he and the girl had been engaged even before he had applied for his discharge; otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed to go to Shanghai, since he was not from the city proper but from one of its suburban counties. He was sorry for Manna and asked her to hate and forget him.
Her initial response was long silence.
“Are you okay?” Nurse Shen asked.
Manna nodded and said nothing. Then the three of them set out for the game.
On the volleyball court Manna, usually an indifferent player, struck the ball with such ferocity that for the first time her comrades shouted “Bravo” for her. Her face was smeared with sweat and tears. As she dove to save a ball, she fell flat on the graveled court and scraped her right elbow. The spectators applauded the diving save while she slowly picked herself up and found blood oozing from her skin.
During the break her teammates told her to go to the clinic and have the injury dressed, so she left, planning to return for the second game. But on her way, she changed her mind and ran back to the dormitory. She merely washed her elbow with cold water and didn’t bandage it.
Once alone in the bedroom, she read the letter again and tears gushed from her eyes. She flung the pages down on the desk and fell on her bed, sobbing, twisting, and biting the pillowcase. A mosquito buzzed above her head, then settled on her neck, but shedidn’t bother to slap it. She felt as if her heart had been pierced.
When her three roommates came back at nine, she was still in tears. They picked up the letter and glanced through it; together they tried to console her by condemning the heartless man. But their words made her sob harder and even convulsively. That night she didn’t wash her face or brush her teeth. She slept with her clothes on, waking now and then and weeping quietly while her roommates wheezed or smacked their lips or murmured something in their sleep. She simply couldn’t stop her tears.
She was ill for a few weeks. She felt aged, in deep lassitude and numb despair, and regretted not marrying Mai Dong before he left for the front. Her limbs were weary, as though separated from herself. Despite her comrades’ protests, she dropped out of the volleyball team, saying she was too sick to play. She spent more time alone, as though all at once she be
longed to an older generation; she cared less about her looks and clothes.
By now she was almost twenty-six, on the verge of becoming an old maid, whose standard age was twenty-seven to most people’s minds. The hospital had three old maids; Manna seemed destined to join them.
She wasn’t very attractive, but she was slim and tall and looked natural; besides, she had a pleasant voice. In normal circumstances she wouldn’t have had difficulty in finding a boyfriend, but the hospital always kept over a hundred women nurses, most of whom were around twenty, healthy and normal, so young officers could easily find girlfriends among them. As a result, few men were interested in Manna. Only an enlisted soldier paid her some attentions. He was a cook, a squat man from Szechwan Province, and he would dole out to her a larger portion of a dish when she bought her meal. But she did not want an enlisted soldier as a boyfriend, which would have violated the rule that only officers could have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Besides, that man looked awful—owlish and cunning. So she avoided standing in any line leading to his window.
2
In the mid-1960s the hospital had only four medical school graduates on its staff. Lin Kong was one of them. The rest of the seventy doctors had been trained by the army itself through short-term courses and experience on battlefields. In addition to his diploma, Lin carried on each shoulder one bar and three stars, having the rank of captain and a monthly salary of ninety-four yuan. Understandably some nurses found him attractive, especially those new arrivals who didn’t know he kept a family in the countryside. To their disappointment, they would find out later that he was already married. Word had gone about that his wife was eight years older than he and had been taken into his family as a child bride when he was just seven. It was said that she had been his nanny for many years. For all the rumors, nobody could tell exactly what his wife was like.
From their days in the nursing school, friendship had developed between Lin and Manna. He had been a teacher but without any airs, unlike most of the other instructors. For that she had respected him more. Now as they worked in the same department, she gradually grew attached to this tall, quiet man, who always spoke amiably to everybody. When others talked with him, he would listen patiently and give weight to their ideas. Different from most young officers, he seemed very mature for his age, which was thirty. His glasses made him look urbane and knowledgeable. People liked him, calling him Scholar or Bookworm, and every year he had been elected a model officer.
When Manna told Lin that Mai Dong had broken their engagement, he said, “Forget him and take good care of yourself. You’ll find a better man.”
She was grateful for his kind words. She was certain that unlike others, he would not gossip about her misfortune behind her back.
One day in the summer, she stopped by his dormitory to deliver the journal Studies in Military Medical Science and some pills for his arthritis. Lin was alone in the bedroom he shared with two other doctors. Manna noticed a tall wooden bookcase beyond the head of his bed, against the wall. On the shelves were about two hundred books. Most of the titles were unfamiliar to her—Song of Youth, Cement, The History of International Communism, War and Peace, The Guerrilla Detachment on the Railroad, White Nights, Lenin: World’s First Nuclear-Powered Ice-Breaker, and so forth. On the bottom shelf there were several medical textbooks in Russian. That impressed her greatly, since she had never met a person who could read a book written in a foreign language.
By contrast, Lin’s two roommates, as though illiterate, owned no books. On one of their bedside desks, a brass artillery shell, a foot in length and four inches in diameter, stood beside a lamp, which was made of conch shells glued together. Yet they both had flowered quilts and pillows, whereas Lin’s bedding was in plain white and green—a standard army set. His mosquito net was yellowish, its bottom edge frayed. It reminded Manna of a whisper among the nurses that Lin was so tightfisted he would never buy an expensive dish. She didn’t know whether that was true, but she had noticed that unlike other men who would bolt down their meals, Lin often ate in a fussy manner like a woman doing needlework.
To her surprise, Lin bent down and pulled a washbasin out from under his roommate Ming Chen’s bed, saying, “We have some fruit here.” In the basin were about twenty brown apple-pears, which the three doctors had bought together the day before.
“Oh, don’t treat me like a guest,” she said.
“No. You’re lucky today. If you come tomorrow, they’ll all be gone.” He picked up a large pear and with his foot pushed the basin back under the bed. The metallic rasp on the cement floor grated on her a little. “I’ll be back in a second,” he said and went out to wash the pear.
She picked up a book from his bed, which was written by Stalin, entitled The Problems of Leninism. Opening it, she found a woodcut bookplate on its inside front cover. At the bottom of the plate was a foreign word, EX-LIBRIS, above which was an engraving of a thatched cottage, partly surrounded by a railing and shaded by two trees with luxuriant crowns, five birds soaring in the distance by the peak of a hill, and the setting sun casting down its last rays. For a moment Manna was fascinated by the tranquil scene in the bookplate.
When Lin came back she asked him, “What does this mean?” She pointed at the foreign word.
“It’s Latin, meaning ‘from my collection.’ ” He handed her the pear. She noticed he had long-boned hands, the fingers lean and apparently dexterous. He should be a surgeon instead of a physician, she thought.
“May I look at some of your books?” she asked.
“Of course, you’re welcome.”
She took a bite of the pear, which was juicy and fragrant and reminded her of a banana she had eaten many years ago. She began flicking through several books. They all carried the same woodcut plates behind the front covers, and some thick volumes had Lin’s personal seal on their fore edges. She was impressed by his caring for the books and would have loved to see more, but she couldn’t stay longer because she had a package to deliver to another doctor.
After that visit, she started to borrow books from Lin. The hospital had a small library, but its holdings were limited to the subjects of politics and medical science. The two dozen novels and plays it had once owned had been surrendered to the bonfires built by the Red Guards before the city hall two months ago. Strange to say, Lin’s books remained intact. No one seemed to have reported him, and none of the hospital’s revolutionaries had suggested confiscating Lin’s books. Manna soon discovered that several officers were using Lin’s library in secret; sometimes she had to wait for a novel to come back from another borrower.
She wasn’t a serious reader and seldom read a book from cover to cover, but she was eager to see what Lin and his friends were reading, as though they had formed a clandestine club she was curious about.
On National Day, October 1, she ran into Lin before the hospital’s photo shop, which was run by an old crippled man. Lin asked her if she could help him make dust jackets for his books. He explained, “It’s not safe to show their titles on the shelf. Everybody can see them. I’ve wrapped up half of them already.”
“I’ll come and help. You should’ve told me earlier,” she said.
When she arrived at his dormitory that evening, Lin’s roommates, Ming Chen and Jin Tian, were there, bent over a chessboard, playing a war game and drinking draft beer, which they poured from a plastic lysol can sitting on a desk. Ming Chen was an acupuncturist and Jin Tian an assistant surgeon, both trained by the hospital. Lin took out a thick roll of kraft paper, a pair of scissors, and a packet of adhesive tape. Together he and Manna began working on the books while his two roommates were battling noisily on the chessboard.
“Foul,” Ming Chen shouted. “My colonel killed your captain.” He had rancid breath, which Manna could smell three yards away.
“Come on,” Jin Tian begged, “let me take back a move this once, all right? I let you do that just now when my land mine blew up your field marshal.”
“Give m
e that piece, Bean Sprout.” Ming Chen reached across the desk for Jin Tian’s fist, which had grabbed the captain.
Dodging his opponent’s hand, the spindly Jin Tian said, “Watch your mouth!”
“I watch your mother’s ass.”
“Knock it off, man! We have a lady comrade here.”
“From now on no false move!”
“Okay.”
Lin and Manna were working quietly. The books were lying on his bed. One by one they placed them on the table, wrapped them up, then returned them to the bookcase. Three or four times her hand touched his as they reached out simultaneously for the scissors. She tried to smile at him but felt herself blushing, so she kept her head low. In the presence of his boisterous roommates, she had lost her natural manners. If the other two men hadn’t been around, she would have talked some with Lin, which was what she was eager to do.
Within two hours every volume was cloaked in a kraft jacket. Standing together on the shelves, the books now looked indistinguishable to Manna.
“My, how can you tell one from another?” she asked Lin, drinking a bottle of mineral water he had opened for her.
“No problem, I always can tell which is which.” He smiled rather shyly, two pink patches on his cheeks. She felt he avoided her eyes.
In addition to wrapping the books up, he thumbtacked a piece of white sheeting to the bookshelf as a curtain. Now he seemed to have closed his library forever. She couldn’t help wondering how he could get along with his two roommates, who were so different from him. He must be very good-natured.
