Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

Although the editor still walked to work each morning with rosy cheeks and an eager smile, he would now return home with an ashen face. After he entered his flat, he would remove his shoes, sink into his sofa and start dreaming he was hauling furniture around the room. Sometimes a heavy jujube chair weighed down on him so heavily that his head dripped with sweat. One day, as smells of boiled chicken bones wafted from the kitchen, he dreamed he was dislodging a huge fitted unit from the wall. When he woke up a few minutes later, stirring the chicken soup, he felt a sudden urge to smash the unit on the head of the boorish two-bit writer from the provinces who was showing off to his wife in the living room, then grab his lousy novel and tear it to shreds. Instead, he diluted the beer with water and sprinkled sand over the rice before he carried the meal next door. Then he watched his wife and the guest wince as their teeth grated against the sand. His legs trembled with excitement. He swore that if that wretched writer stayed one more day in their flat, he would dilute the beer with piss.

But at home, he was still a servant, always having to check the expression on his wife’s face before making a move. She ordered him about with the ferocity of a tigress, and he did as he was told. After completing his marital duties, he would squeeze the sperm from his condom, as she requested, and smear it over her face and thighs. (She’d read in a magazine that the most expensive French face cream was manufactured from sperm, and always insisted that Old Hep rub the entire contents of his condoms into her skin.) When he was with the textile worker, he was able to ejaculate into her mouth then demand she swallow every drop.

‘On my face!’ the tigress growled, as the editor climbed back onto the bed and leaned over her. Old Hep noticed that there was very little sperm in his condom, and put it down to the secret tryst he’d enjoyed the day before. As he carefully rubbed the remaining drops onto his wife’s face, he cursed inwardly: ‘You ugly old bat. Your face is as furrowed as the fields of Dazhai.’

He kept rubbing until the sperm had dried onto her skin like white face powder. ‘I could do what I liked with her,’ he said to himself. ‘She let me grab her tits and suck them dry. Hers were much whiter and softer than yours.’ When he got out of bed to wash his hands, he felt his empty testicles begin to warm again.

Once he started taking mistresses, he was no longer plagued by his recurring dream about tipping truckloads of earth into the sea. But when the textile worker said she would only break up with him on condition he gave her a child, he once again stepped into the cabin of the huge truck, and looked through his rear mirror at the mounds of earth dropping into the waves of the ocean. During his afternoon break in the editorial office, he would drive the truck back and forth in a daze. His colleagues would notice him staring at the wall, smiling, then frowning at the calendar that was already two years out of date. They knew that he was sinking into a daydream, and they would take advantage of this time to slip off to buy a snack or make a telephone call.

When he was in this dream state, his colleagues could tell what he would be capable of doing from the different expressions on his face. If he was frowning, he would still be able to hear the telephone and look at his manuscripts; he could even stand up, shake hands with a visitor and pace about the room. But when he woke up, he would forget everything that had happened. When his lips curled into a faint smile, the most he could do was rise from his seat, walk to the thermos flask and empty some hot water into his cup. He alone knew that at this point the truck he was driving was moving with particular speed and agility. However, when the truck started racing across the surface of the sea and was about to carry him into the blue sky, his expression became deadly earnest, and his eyes would fix on some distant point. Sub-editor Chen, who knew a few things about the art of Qigong, claimed that this was the look of a man gazing into eternity after emerging from a deep meditation.

‘He’s entered the realm of emptiness,’ ‘Old Qigong’ explained to the art director who was attempting to grow a goatee. ‘His soul has left his body. He’s as dazed as you were that night you got drunk and pulled your trousers down.’

Although the editor’s daydreams were very intense, they seldom lasted more than twenty minutes.

When it first became obvious that he was daydreaming at home, the female novelist made fun of him. ‘Have you lost your ears, you moron?’ she laughed when he failed to respond to her question. At that moment, he was staring at the crockery in the sink and the water gushing from the tap, while in his mind he was climbing a tree to pick from its branches the candyfloss he loved to eat as a child. When he failed to answer her a second time, his wife stormed into the kitchen, grabbed a carrot, and with the might of an army general, stabbed it into his back. Immediately, he leapt from the branches, crashed into the trunk, then landed in a confused heap on the kitchen floor. He woke up to find himself sprawled on a pile of potatoes, looking up at his wife with a ladle in his hands.

From then on, he was careful to dream with just one side of his brain, and use the other side to carry out his duties in the real world. Although he couldn’t always avoid some overlap between one world and the other, he usually managed to keep things under control.

Then one day, the textile worker finally found her way to his flat. She had tried to follow him home for days, but since he always took a different route, she often lost track of him. Old Hep was not in when she knocked. She considered leaving straight away, but the female novelist could sense that something was up, and that the young woman was embroiled in some way with Old Hep. When she asked her how they knew each other, the textile worker burst into tears and refused to say a word. The novelist promptly shooed her away, and decided to wait until Old Hep’s return before commencing her investigation.

‘Did you sleep with that girl or not?’ she asked her husband as he walked through the door.

He looked up at her with terror. He knew how fierce she could be, and knew that what stood behind her was even more ferocious. Her commissar father could beat the life out of him. He saw her standing before him, legs apart, as steady as a suspension bridge, and he confessed everything.

The textile worker was immediately interrogated by her leaders. They criticised her ‘petit-bourgeois liberalism’ and told her that she would be denied promotion for two years. Her supervisor took advantage of the situation and ordered her to straighten her perm and stop wearing flared trousers. The next day she turned up at the factory in plaits and baggy slacks. But her spirit was still strong, and as soon as she clocked off after lunch, she let her hair down again, put on some lipstick, and made her way to Old Hep’s office.

‘I don’t care about anything any more,’ she whined, as she chased him around his desk.

‘If my wife catches sight of you again, my life will be over.’ His leaders had passed by that morning to warn him to pay attention to his lifestyle. ‘You must leave now. I have a meeting to go to,’ he lied.

‘But there’s something I must tell you.’

She followed him out of the building. They walked through the crowd, one in front of the other, as though they were strangers.

‘What did you tell your factory leaders?’ he asked.

‘I admitted that we’ve been sleeping together for years,’ she said to the nape of his neck, desperately trying to keep up with him.

Old Hep felt as though his head were about to explode. His steps became heavy.