Waiting

by Ha Jin

  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!

  Doctor Min prescribed coptis powder, which is said to be the bitterest thing on earth and which the babies had to take three times a day. No matter how much sugar the parents mixed with the yellow powder, the twins would cry hard when forced to swallow the medicine. The parents and the maid worked as a team, one holding River, another pinching his nose shut and prying open his mouth with a spoon, and the third thrusting the spoonful of coptis powder mixed with sugar into his mouth, then washing it down with warm water. Done with River, they went on to Lake, who had been bawling furiously.

  A week later the dysentery still persisted; every day each of the babies would relieve his bowels six or seven times. Juli had to take them to the medical building for the drips every afternoon. Their parents were desper
ate.

  Hua came on Sunday morning. At the sight of her stricken half brothers she couldn’t stop her tears. She reminded her father that purslane might help, since in their home village people always used this herb to treat loose bowels. Lin remembered that several years ago when he visited a clinic in the countryside, he had seen barefoot doctors cook purslane stew in a cauldron. The villagers who suffered from diarrhea or dysentery would go to the front yard of the clinic and eat a bowl of the stew. At most it took three bowls to cure the illness. But now it was wintertime; where on earth could he find purslane?

  Nevertheless, he bicycled downtown right away, believing some medicinal herb stores might have dried purslane. He went to every one of them in Muji, but was told that this was an item that no herb store would carry.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “It’s a tradition, I don’t know why not. Perhaps because it’s just a vegetable,” a beardless old clerk told him.

  The babies were getting weaker and weaker. Apparently the coptis powder didn’t work. As a last resort, Doctor Min decided to give them enemas, to wash their bowels with coptis solution directly. This treatment turned out to be very effective. Within three days, new tests showed that the bacteria had disappeared from the babies’ intestines. Yet the symptom did not diminish; the twins continued to have loose bowels. In addition, they wouldn’t pass water: their urine was excreted through their anuses.

  Doctor Min was totally bewildered by this case. After two days’ thinking she decided that though the dysentery had been cured, the twins still suffered from a nervous disorder that was impossible for her to treat. She said to the nurses, “I’m afraid we have to let nature take its own course.”

  Lin and Manna were at their wits’ end, since nobody knew what to do about the babies’ nervous disorder. A cook suggested they give the twins some mashed garlic. They told him that the babies were too young for that. Besides, garlic mainly works as an antibiotic, and the bacteria in the babies’ intestines had been eliminated.

  Then Hua came one evening and told her father, “Mother said you should feed them some mashed taro mixed with white sugar and egg yolk.”

  “How come she’s so sure it will work?” Lin asked. Manna moved closer, listening intently.

  “Mother said it helped me once,” Hua answered. “When I was five and had dysentery, Mother made me drink a lot of herb decoction, but it didn’t cure the disease. Our neighbors thought I was dying and couldn’t be saved. Uncle Bensheng ran to Wujia Town and got the recipe from an old doctor.”

  “How do you cook the egg yolk?” Manna broke in.

  “Just hard-boil the eggs.”

  Though still doubtful, without delay Lin bought five pounds of taros from a vegetable shop and prepared the folk remedy. The twins enjoyed eating the mashed taro, opening their mouths like baby swallows receiving food from the mother bird. To everyone’s amazement, that very night the babies stopped defecating. Within two days they began to urinate normally. Many doctors and nurses harbored misgivings about folk remedies, but this time everybody was impressed.

  At long last the twins were cured, and Lin was possessed by a new, mysterious emotion, which occasionally brought tears to his eyes. He felt the babies had almost become a part of himself. The week before, he had read in Heilongjiang Daily that a retired clerk had donated a kidney to his son. These days Lin kept asking himself whether he could do the same for his children.

  10

  Along with their dysentery, the babies’ nightly wakefulness was also cured. Now they would go to sleep early in the evening and remain peaceful until daybreak. Even when they were given the bottle at midnight and when their father changed their diapers, they would make no noise. Their normal sleep made it possible for their parents to spend some time together in the evening. After the babies fell asleep, Lin and Manna often lounged on the sofa, chatting or watching news or a movie on TV. At last they could enjoy a little peace.

  One evening in late November there was a featured report on TV entitled “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” which showed how some people in the South had responded to the Party’s call and grown affluent. A young man had bought dried mushrooms and ginseng roots from Manchuria and sold them in Fujian Province at higher prices, and within five years he owned seven stores in different cities. An engineer had quit his regular job and made a fortune by running two chicken farms, which employed 130 hands. A middle-aged woman had opened a clothing shop just three years ago, but now she had become a local magnate and had hired sixty workers to make fashionable garments in her shop. At the last Spring Festival she donated ten thousand yuan to an elementary school, so she was admitted into the Communist Party and elected a model citizen. Every one of these entrepreneurs became a legendary figure. A few years ago their ways of making money had been illegal, but now the nouveaux riches were held up as examples for the masses to follow.

  Manna was grating turnips over a terra-cotta basin, while Lin, never interested in making money, was reading a back issue of Popular Medicine, fascinated by an article about a folk way of getting rid of kidney stones. As he was wondering why sesame oil and walnuts were prescribed in the recipe, the woman reporter announced on TV, “Now we have another rich man, from Feidong County, Anhui Province. Comrade Geng Yang.”

  At the mention of that name, Manna let out a moan and dropped the steel grater into the basin. Lin turned his head and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She didn’t respond, her eyes riveted on the TV screen. He turned and saw Geng Yang’s face growing larger and closer. It was almost the same as eleven years before, sallow and long, only less stern and marked with a few wrinkles. Geng Yang had some gray hair now, but he was bulkier and darker, a picture of health.

  The young reporter asked him, “Are you the richest man in Feidong County?”

  He beamed, licking his upper lip. “Well, I never thought I could get rich. I owe it entirely to our Party’s great policy.” Behind him a crane was hoisting a load of bricks onto a building under construction. Three clusters of white sparks were radiating from welding torches in the air. Somewhere a steam hammer was clanking rhythmically.

  “How much did you make last year?” The woman raised the microphone close to his mouth.

  “Twenty thousand yuan.”

  “Wow, that’s about twenty times the amount you pay a worker. How come you made so much?”

  His eyes flickered as though fireflies were flitting in his pupils. Manna recognized the same lustful look in those eyes. “Well,” he said, “this construction company used to lose money all the time. Three years ago they set up a new policy: Whoever managed this company would get ten percent of its profit; but if the company lost money again, the manager would have to pay three percent of the loss out of his own pocket. Nobody would take the risk of steering such a sinking boat. I was the daredevil that stepped in to try.” He tipped his head back and gave a hearty laugh.

  “How did you make this company profitable within a year?”

  “By strengthening discipline and order, by rewarding and punishing the workers fairly and strictly. Everyone here must do his job efficiently, or else we’ll dock a certain amount from his wages. Now the company is organized like an army unit—a battalion, I should say. Each team must carry out its task on time, and I hold its leaders responsible for any delay and sloppy work.”

  “How about this year? How much profit do you expect to get personally?”

  “Probably twenty-three thousand.”

  “So you’re having another banner year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Manager Geng.”

  As the camera panned away from Geng Yang to a roaring bulldozer on the construction site, Manna burst out sobbing, wiping her cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt. Meanwhile Lin was flabbergasted at Geng Yang’s appearance on TV. How could that devil be doing so well? So full of vitality? Enjoying so much fortune and publicity? No wonder Honggan had called him a lucky dog at their wedding last winter.

&nb
sp; Lin got to his feet and went over to Manna as she was screaming, “It’s unfair, unfair!”

  “Shh, don’t wake up the babies.” He sat down beside her, removed the half-grated turnip from her hand and put it into the basin. He held her hand, lifted it up, and pressed it against his cheek. Her fingers were still wet and flecked with bits of turnip, giving off a pungent smell.

  “How come an evil man like him can get rich and famous so easily?” she asked. “The Lord of Heaven has no eyes!”

  Lin sighed, shaking his head. “Life’s always like this, ridiculous—a monster thrives for a thousand years, while the good suffer and die before their time.”

  “How I’m scared of him!” she moaned in tears.

  He turned and embraced her, whispering, “Don’t be scared. He’s not here. I won’t let him hurt you.”

  Gently he twisted the tip of her ear to calm her down, as though she were a little girl who had just come in from a pitch-black night. He went on murmuring, “Don’t be scared.” She put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.

  His words and the warmth of his body invoked in her the old overpowering pain that had arisen from the absence of consolation during the first days after the rape eleven years before, so now she simply couldn’t stop crying, holding him tight and whimpering incoherently. Something in her chest snapped as tears flowed out of her eyes. It was so good to have a trustworthy friend in whose arms she could cry without feeling embarrassed, without being afraid of the kind of ridicule unleashed by the hostile world, without worrying about becoming the target of endless gossip and mockery, and without having to say, “Forgive me.” For the first time she was weeping with abandon, like a child. Her tears soaked the front of his woolen vest. Her thick hair kept touching his chin. He grew tearful too and stroked the nape of her neck.