Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

‘I’ll stay with you until the day I die,’ she moaned from somewhere deep inside her.

‘Get an abortion first, then I’ll listen to your crap.’ The editor tried to adopt the authoritative tone he used when answering his subordinates’ questions in the office. This tone of voice commanded obedience. It was used by his leader, his leader’s leader, and every leader above him. Unfortunately, his throat was too narrow to replicate the husky and mellifluous tones produced by the secretary of the municipal Party committee.

‘I’ll give you a hundred yuan,’ he promised, hoping that this would persuade her.

The textile worker was still trembling, her head bowed low. But when she heard those words, she broke into tears again and sobbed, ‘Now that I’ve slept with you, I must stay with you for ever.

‘That’s just what your mother’s taught you,’ he sneered.

‘You said yourself that you didn’t want me to go with any other man.’

‘That was two years ago! I’ve been telling you for months that it’s time you found another man and got married.’

‘I can’t! You’re the only intellectual I know.’

‘Some workers have a bit of culture too, if you look hard.’

‘I only want a writer. If I’m not with a writer, my life will be over. I could never fall in love with an ordinary man. And as for your troubled past and unfortunate family background — they make me love you all the more.’

‘I made all that up,’ the editor confessed, kicking his skinny legs about nervously.

‘I don’t believe you. Why would anyone make up a story about being sent to prison?’

‘I didn’t really go to prison. I was arrested once by the Young Pioneers during the Cultural Revolution, but nothing serious happened. They just locked me up in an office for a couple of hours.’

‘Does that mean that your promotion to editor on the back of private study was invented as well?’

‘All of it,’ the editor laughed, gloating over her misfortune. ‘I’m a nobody. A talentless fool!’ he chirped, his legs now perfectly still. ‘Just hurry up and tell me,’ he added in a harsher tone, ‘are you having that abortion or not?’

She paused for a moment, and said: ‘I’m not really pregnant — I just wanted to see you, I wanted you to spend some time with me. Nobody pays me any attention at work, they all swear at me behind my back. Besides, it’s my birthday today.’ She lifted her face towards the moonlight. As the tears sparkled down her cheeks you could see hidden, behind her tangled fringe, two dark eyes filled with terror and love.

‘You lied to me!’ he spluttered. He imagined pounding her to death. The ground was littered with loose bricks and tiles. He considered drowning her — the sea was just a few minutes’ walk away. He stared at her face. This steadfast, stubborn girl had drained him of all his energy. Nothing could shake her resolve. He grabbed a bunch of her hair and shouted, ‘Open your mouth! Open it!’

As he unzipped his flies again, the textile worker opened her mouth, and staring blankly into the sky, she said, ‘When you’ve had your piss, take me to a restaurant and buy me some birthday noodles. I beg you, just this once …’

At night, after he had massaged his wife to sleep, he would stare at the traces of lipstick around her gaping mouth, and think things through in his mind. It was a precious moment for him. Of course, it was impossible to write novels or poetry during this time, but at least he could relax and enjoy the rare minutes of freedom afforded by his wife’s sleep. She was more talented than him, and came from a better family. The day he first met her his pulse had quickened a beat, and had only slowed down since then when he was asleep.

There was a reason for his fear. He had once witnessed his father-in-law, the political commissar, slap the female novelist on her face. The noise of this slap had reverberated through his head, almost causing him to lose his mind. After that, he was always petrified that his wife might decide to slap him in the same way. Before he first hit the textile worker, violence had terrified him. He had grown up in a quiet household that smelled of soap and Chinese medicine. His father was about the same size as him, maybe a little shorter, and had white, delicate hands which, when he moved them, looked as elegant as a lady’s. He would never have dreamed of using them to hurt anyone. When his father was targeted during the Cultural Revolution, his family cut themselves off from others. Only his mother dared raise her voice at home. When she was happy, she would sing her favourite song — ‘The Tibetan Serfs Sing with Joy at their Peaceful Liberation’. When his father returned from work, he would play cards and Chinese chess with him. Had it not been for the Cultural Revolution, Old Hep would have finished his university course, and would probably have been a university professor by now.

Usually, when he lay in bed beside his wife, he would try to disturb her sleep by pulling over the lamp and shining it on her wrinkled skin. He alone knew the reason why she always insisted on sitting in one particular armchair: it was because the light at that spot was the most flattering. One day she had sat in every seat in the room and asked Old Hep to tell her where the light was kindest to her complexion. When she sat in the armchair he’d chosen, she checked her face in her hand mirror and discovered that the light from the orange lamp beside her did indeed give her skin a serene and youthful glow.

Sometimes he would clench his fists and hiss as he looked down at the sleeping tigress. When she started to snore, he would run over in his mind the details of his secret flings. He was proud of having deceived his wife. He would smirk at the breasts that drooped to either side of her ribcage, and cup his hands over them to show how large his latest girlfriend’s breasts were. ‘They’re this big,’ he would whisper, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with glee. ‘She’s got tits this big, and you’ve just got two little ping-pong balls.’

But tonight Old Hep had lost his courage. All he could do was curl up into a ball, and in the dim light stare at the heap of flesh sprawled beside him. Before she fell asleep, the female novelist had warned him she would visit his work unit again the next day. She had already dropped by his department that afternoon, planning to tell Old Hep’s leader about the affair and plead with him not to take the matter any further. She knew that if her father ever got wind of the situation, she and Old Hep would both be finished. But when she walked into Old Hep’s empty office and discovered the huge stack of love letters hidden in his desk (she was able to prise the drawers open quite easily with the aid of an ordinary penknife), she immediately changed her mind. As the scale of his infidelities became clear, her first instinct was to kill him; her second was to spare his life, but ensure it was a miserable one; her third was to kick him out of the house and wipe him from her mind. After she had rejected the first and the third options, she set to work on the second.

She selected twenty or so love letters that displayed some literary skill, and put them aside to use later as material for her novels. She chose another twenty of the more intimate letters hidden in a notebook labelled ‘Compendium of Beauties’ — a pink exercise book with a picture of a house and a mushroom on the cover — swapped the letters around, scrawled ‘return to sender’ on every envelope and posted them back, so that a few days later each woman would receive a letter that another admirer had written to him. She collected all the sentimental letters from love-struck girls who hoped to conquer the editor with their youthful charms, and posted them to the Party committees of their respective work units. She summoned the leader of the People’s Cultural Centre and made him dispatch official letters to the work units of over seventy other women who’d written to her husband, demanding they conduct investigations into their lifestyles. The editorial department was thrown into chaos.