Ha Jin - Waiting

So Lin planned to introduce the two in June.

Liang Meng came to Muji as planned. The mail office called Lin and notified him of his cousin's arrival. Lin sauntered to the front entrance to meet him. He and Liang Meng shook hands for a good ten seconds and then waved at the soldier in the sentry box; together they turned and went on into the hospital.

"Did you have a good trip?" Lin asked his cousin.

"Yes. But the train was so crowded I couldn't find a seat."

"Do you have a place to stay in town?"

"Yes, in the Fine Arts Institute."

While walking they glanced at each other continually. Liang Meng's smile reminded Lin of their adventures on the Songhua River twenty-five years before. His cousin had been an excellent swimmer, able to float on his back as if taking a nap, whereas Lin had not dared enter the main channel and had always dog-paddled in the shallows. Life had passed like a dream — twenty-five years were gone in a blink of an eye. Look at his cousin now — he resembled a typical middle-aged man.

"Elder brother, this is a gorgeous place," Liang Meng said sincerely. "It's so clean here, everything's in order."

Lin smiled, amazed by the comment. Yes, he thought, if compared with a coal mine.

He led his cousin to the dormitory. To his surprise, his roommate Jin Tian was there with his fiancee, frying some walleye pollack on a kerosene stove. It was almost three o'clock, so he took Liang Meng directly to Manna, knowing she worked the second shift these days, slept in the morning, and must be up now. He felt bad for his cousin, who looked tired, but he couldn't find a peaceful place where Liang Meng could rest awhile before meeting Manna. Another inconvenience was that if they met in the hospital, Lin had to accompany them like a chaperon; otherwise the intention of Manna's being alone with a male stranger would have been construed by others.

They found Manna in her bedroom, but one of her roommates was still sleeping in there, so together the three of them went out to look for a place where they could talk a little. On their way Lin bought three sodas at a refreshment stand sheltered by a khaki sunshade in front of the grocery store.

Before the medical building they found an unoccupied granite table beneath a grape trellis. They sat down, each drinking a bottle of Tiger Spring soda. The air was intense with camphor, and bumblebees were droning and darting about. A fat larva, hanging from a long strand of silk spat by itself, was wriggling upward in a slanting sunbeam that filtered through the grape leaves. Doctors in white robes were passing by, with either a folded newspaper or a stethoscope in their baggy pockets. Two nurses were pushing a long wheeled oxygen cylinder like a torpedo, giggling, poking fun at each other, and shooting glances at Manna.

Liang Meng, looking troubled, told them he had to give up the wood-engraving class and return home within two days, because his daughter had been struck by inflammation of the brain and was just out of danger in the hospital. He had to phone home in the evening to check on her condition. Manna realized he had come all the way mainly to meet her.

She wondered whether he actually measured five feet ten as his letter claimed. He was a scrawny man and looked older than his age. His appearance was unusual. His hairline had receded almost to the center of his crown, making his shiny forehead bulbous. But his eyebrows were broad and thick, and reached the lids of his deep-socketed eyes. Under his hooked nose was a protruding mouth whose lower lip enfolded the upper. When he spoke, his head would tilt to the right as though there was a pain in his neck.

"What kind of grapes are these?" Liang Meng rose from his seat and plucked a green grape from the vine above his head.

"No idea," Lin said tepidly.

Manna was rather surprised by his terse answer. Just now when they arrived at her dormitory, Lin had been happy. Why did he look rather sullen now? She said to the high-spirited guest, "I don't know either."

Liang Meng put the grape into his mouth and began chewing it. "Bah! it's no good, too sour." He spat its skin and pips to the ground. "We have lots of grapes in our yard."

"Really?" she asked. "Are they good?"

"Of course. Sweet and big."

Despite seeing Lin frown a little, she asked again, "What kind of grapes are they?"

"Mainly Fragrant Rose and Sheep Nipples. We have a bumper harvest this year. The trellises nearly collapsed, and I propped them up with wood stakes. What happened is that we buried some dead animals at the roots of the grapevines in the spring. God, that doubled the yield."

"What animals did you bury?" she asked.

"Well, some dead chickens and ducks, and a mad dog, that was our neighbor's. The dog bit a schoolgirl and was shot by the police." He turned to Lin. "Elder brother, I meant to ask your professional opinion. Do you think it safe to eat grapes fattened up by a rabid dog?"

"I have no professional opinion," Lin said curtly. Then he caught himself and added, "What a question! By common sense that should not be a problem."

Manna was intrigued by Liang Meng's talking of grapes. Evidently he was a family man; he even raised poultry, although he was a sort of intellectual. Perhaps she should find out more about him.

Since the hospital was an inconvenient place for more conversation, Lin suggested that the next day his cousin and Manna meet and talk by themselves somewhere in the city. They agreed to rendezvous at Victory Park. Perhaps the Songhua River was a more pleasant place, but there were always so many people on the bank that they might miss each other.

Victory Park lies at the southern end of the city. It was built in 1946, in memory of the Russian soldiers who had fallen while fighting Japanese troops in Manchuria toward the end of the Second World War. At the main entrance to the park, a stout statue of a fully equipped Russian soldier stood against an obelisk; his helmet and the barrel and round magazine of his submachine gun were missing, chopped off by the Red Guards at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. But currently the statue was under repair, surrounded by scaffolding. On the ground, in front of the monument, a slogan was still legible: "Down with Russian Chauvinism!" Those words had been scraped off, but the dark strokes remained distinguishable on the grayish concrete.

Manna arrived at ten o'clock. Inside the park, Victory Lake was greened by drooping willows. Two young men, apparently college students, were laughing heartily and paddling a dinghy, whose bow carried a line of words in red paint: "Long Live Chairman — !" The word "Mao" had washed off. A few pairs of white ducks and wild geese were swimming near the bank. Manna leaned over the railing on a stone bridge and observed carps gliding in the water beneath, most of them about a foot long. She had on a yellow poplin shirt, which together with the army skirt made her look younger and more curvaceous. She was sweating a little because of the long walk, so she remained in the shade of a willow, which sheltered almost a third of the bridge. A sudden breeze blew a few candy wrappers into the air, and a brown plastic bag was flapping on the blossoms of a cherry tree. She remembered meeting her first love, Mai Dong, at this place. That had been eight years before. How time had passed. The park was different now, almost unrecognizable; it had become a zoo, noisy and crowded, with hundreds of animals kept in iron cages and deep concrete pits. On the opposite shore, behind rows of trees, stood several new buildings.

Her memory of Mai Dong feeding mallards with popped rice on this very bridge brought a slight contraction to her chest. Where is he now? she wondered. What a heartless man he was. Does he really love his cousin? What does he do for a living? Is he still in Shanghai? Does he often think of me?