Yu Hua - Brothers

Baldy Li cried out, "Who is it? What do you want?"

Terrified, Deputy Liu said he didn't want anything in particular, just that he was worried because he hadn't seen Boss Li all morning. Baldy Li grunted and said, "I'm fine. I'm still sleeping with Lin Hong."

When Lin Hong finally emerged from Baldy Li's office soon after, Baldy Li wanted her to go home in his white BMW. Lin Hong, however, declined, afraid that would attract more attention and make her a laughingstock in the community. She said that she would walk home instead. She slowly trudged home, her genitals throbbing with every step. Lin Hong finally believed the rumors that Baldy Li was a beast of a man and that every woman left his bed more dead than alive.

When she finally got home, several neighbors looked at her curiously, but she pretended not to notice as she proceeded into the house and shut the door. She lay in bed fully clothed; by evening she still had not gotten up. Her thoughts in a jumble, she spent a long time thinking back over the events of the night before, with every detail appearing clearly in her mind s eye. She also recalled her twenty years living with Song Gang, as well as Song Gangs departure more than a year earlier. After he left she felt that their shared experiences became more and more distant, whereas her memories of her night with Baldy Li were indelibly printed on her brain. At the thought of Song Gang, Lin Hong began to cry, but she understood that, after having spent the night with Baldy Li, she was now entangled with him, regardless of how guilty and humiliated she felt.

News of the scandal involving Baldy Li and Lin Hong circulated throughout the town. From Baldy Li's appearance in court, followed by the Virgin Beauty Competition, the Russian painters arrival, and Lin Hongs unveiling of the portrait, Baldy Li had provided the townspeople with four consecutive surprises, making every day seem as fresh as the morning sun. Even in their wildest dreams, the people of Liu had never imagined that the host of Baldy Li's portrait unveiling ceremony would be not the secretary-general of the United Nations, but, rather, Liu Town's own homegrown beauty, Lin Hong. Everyone was shocked — this was truly an unexpected development. Then they remembered how Baldy Li, in a fit of anger, had gone to the hospital and had a vasectomy thereby cutting off the possibility of having descendants — and hadn't that been done for the sake of this very same Lin Hong? What did it matter that the portrait unveiling ceremony hadn't turned out as expected? The truth is, Baldy Li had gotten what he had wanted from the very start: He had succeeded in bedding her. His lightning-fast seduction of Lin Hong was just as he always said: One should get up right from wherever one has fallen down — that is the only way to succeed. When everyone thought of it this way, the entire situation began to make perfect sense. They concluded, "This was unexpected yet perfectly understandable."

BALDY LI let Lin Hong rest for four days, but by the third night her body had become excited again. She tossed and turned, yearning for Baldy Li to come and press his body down on hers. Her desire had lain dormant for the entire two decades of her marriage to Song Gang, and now that it had suddenly been roused by Baldy Li at the age of forty, it started to surge. For the first time in her life, she discovered her body and the fact that she had a strong libido. On the fourth night, when Baldy Li's black Mercedes drove up to her door, her entire body started to tremble as soon as she heard the honking of the horn. She walked out the front door with quivering legs and climbed into the car.

In the days that followed, Baldy Li's Mercedes and BMW shuttled Lin Hong back and forth every day. Sometimes the BMW would come in the middle of the day, and sometimes it would be the Mercedes in the middle of the night. Baldy Li had countless affairs to attend to and therefore didn't always have free time. When he was free, however, he would sleep with Lin Hong. She was no longer bashful, and whenever she hugged Baldy Li, it seemed as if she wanted to suffocate him. She would even undress him. Baldy Li had never expected that Lin Hong would be so passionate, and he remarked in surprise, "Fuck, you're even hornier than I am."

Lin Hong had learned her lesson that first night and knew that she couldn't endure Baldy Li's lovemaking three or four times in a row. Therefore, she made a pact with him that they would not have sex more than twice in any twenty-four-hour period — and ideally no more than once. Lin Hong then said something that made Baldy Li burst out laughing: "Let me live a few more years."

For the next three months Lin Hong made love to Baldy Li virtually every day — in his bed, on the couch in his office, in the private room of the restaurant, and in the private room of the nightclub. In the Mercedes one night Baldy Li suddenly became aroused and wanted neither to go home and do it in bed nor to go to his office and do it on the couch but, rather, to do it right there in the car. He asked the driver to go to the restroom and stay there for an hour and a half, regardless of whether or not he needed to piss or shit. Then Baldy Li and Lin Hong intertwined their limbs in the back of the car and moaned and cried as they got it on for more than an hour.

After Baldy Li had had crazy sex with Lin Hong for three months, he suddenly felt that the sex had become stale. They had done it on the bed, on the couch, on the floor, in the bath, in the car; they had done it standing, sitting, kneeling, missionary and doggy style, sideways and up and down. In short, they had tried every position imaginable, and Lin Hong had cried out every imaginable sound. After the lovemaking lost its freshness for Baldy Li, he began to reminisce and remarked that it would have been perfect if only they had been able to make love twenty years earlier. Baldy Li told her that back then, as soon as it got dark, he would always fantasize about those three parts of her body as he masturbated. He asked her, "Do you know how many days a year I masturbated to you?"

Lin Hong shook her head. "No."

"Three hundred sixty-five days a year. I didn't even take time off for New Years or other holidays."

Then Baldy Li's eyes grew bright as he cried out, "And to think that at the time you were still a virgin!"

After he had repeated this three times, he decided to send Lin Hong to a hospital in Shanghai to have hymen-recon surgery. Once she became a virgin again, he would make love to her once more and pretend that it was taking place twenty years earlier. After that they would never do it again. "With that, I'll return you to Song Gang!"

Realizing that their time together was about to be up, Lin Hong became very depressed. She had fully indulged her own craziness, and during this period her heart and body had become increasingly separated from each other, as if countless mountains and rivers had come between them. Her heart longed every day for Song Gang, but her body lusted for Baldy Li. She didn't know how, without the powerful Baldy Li, she would ever make it through the interminable nights. Her desire was like a forest fire, and once it started burning, it was almost impossible to extinguish. She realized sadly that she could never return to her former state of abstinence. She hated herself for this, but there was nothing she could do about it.

At this point, Lin Hong began to sense that Song Gang was about to return home to Liu. Wandering Zhou, who had led him away in the first place, had suddenly reappeared in Missy Sus snack shop a month earlier. Lin Hong had heard about this and also seen him with her own eyes. At that moment she had felt a jolt of surprise and wanted to rush over to him and ask about Song Gang, but just then Baldy Li's white BMW had driven up, and she lost her courage. Afterward she sent Deputy Liu to ask Wandering Zhou on her behalf, and she learned that Song Gang was temporarily unable to return. Wandering Zhou told Deputy Liu that Song Gang was still selling health products in Hainan, where he had already made a considerable profit, and therefore had no interest in coming home.