Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

There was an exciting element of unpredictability to her work. Hearing footsteps on the staircase at night, she would speculate, Who could it be? She was unusually vivacious on these occasions and often talked a bit too much, asking this or that as she reignited the alcohol burner to sterilize the needle. If the patient was a child, she would put out all her charm. She would feel sad after the patient left. Pondering over the recent commotion, she would forget to put things away, and then discover that the pot had boiled dry. Such interruptions in her tranquil routine gave rise to a vague feeling of anticipation. Something was fomenting, she felt, from which something might just develop. Once, awakened in the middle of the night by urgent and frightened calls for help at the door, she threw a jacket over her nightgown and rushed downstairs, her heart pounding, to find two men from the provinces carrying someone on a stretcher. The person was critically ill. They had mistaken her for a doctor. After giving them directions to the nearest hospital, she went back upstairs but could not sleep a wink. All kinds of odd things happened in the night in this city. Under the lamp at the entrance to the longtang, the shingle advertising “Injection Nurse Wang Qiyao” looked as if it was waiting patiently to be noticed. The passing cars and the windswept fallen leaves hinted at concealed activities in the dark night.

People came to Wang Qiyao in an unending parade. Those who stopped coming were quickly replaced by others. She would speculate about her patients’ professions and backgrounds and was pleased to find most of her guesses correct as, with a few casual remarks, she pried the facts out of them. Her best sources were nannies accompanying little charges — these eagerly volunteered all kinds of unflattering information about their employers. A number of patients had nothing wrong with them, but came for routine health-enhancing shots, such as placenta fluid. They became so comfortable with her that they would drop by to gossip. Thus, without going out of her house, Wang Qiyao learned a great deal about the neighborhood. This hodgepodge of activity was enough to fill up half her day. Sometimes she was so busy she could hardly keep up with all the goings-on.

The hustle-bustle on Peace Lane was both invasive and highly contagious. Wang Qiyao’s tranquility gradually gave way to frequent footfalls on the stairs, doors opening and shutting; her name was regularly hollered by people on the ground with upturned heads, their fervent voices carrying far and wide on quiet afternoons. Before long, the oleanders, planted haphazardly in makeshift planters formed from broken bricks on balconies, put forth their dazzling flowers. Nothing marvelous had happened to Wang Qiyao, but through careful cultivation her life had also sprouted countless little sprigs that held the promise of developing into something.

People at Peace Lane knew Wang Qiyao as a young widow. Several attempts were made to match her up with men, including a teacher who, though only thirty, was already bald. Arrangements were made for them to meet at a theater to watch a movie about victorious peasants — the kind of thing she detested — but she forced herself to sit through it. Whenever there was a lull in the show, she heard a faint whistling sound coming from the man as he breathed. Seeing this was the best she could do, she declined all further matchmaking efforts on her behalf. As she watched the smoky sky above Peace Lane, she often wondered if anything exciting would ever happen to her again. To charges of arrogance as well as to praise for being loyal to her late husband, she turned a deaf ear. She ignored all gossip and advice, remaining at once genial and distant. This was normal on Peace Lane, where friendships were circumscribed, there being untold numbers of large fish swimming around in the murky waters. Underneath all that conviviality, people were lonely, though often they did not know it themselves, merely muddling through from one day to the next. Wang Qiyao was rather muddleheaded about some things, while she couldn’t have been more clear-sighted about others; the former concerned issues of daily living, while the latter were reserved for her private thoughts. She was occupied with people and things during the day. At night, after she turned off the lights and the moonlight lit up the big flowers on the curtains, she could not help but slip into deep thought. There was a great deal of thinking going on around Peace Lane, but much of it, like sediment, had sunk to the bottom of people’s hearts, all the juice squeezed out of them, so that they had solidified and could no longer be stirred up. Wang Qiyao had not reached this stage. Her thoughts still had stems, leaves, and flowers, which glimmered in the dark night of Peace Lane.

Among Wang Qiyao’s frequent visitors was one Madame Yan, who came quite regularly. She lived in a townhouse with a private entrance at the end of Peace Lane. She must have been thirty-six or thirty-seven years old, as her eldest son, an architecture student at Tongji University, was already nineteen. Her husband had owned a light bulb factory that, since 1949, was jointly operated with the state. He was now the deputy manager — a mere figurehead, according to Madame Yan. Madame Yan painted her eyebrows and wore lipstick even on days when she didn’t leave the house. She favored a short green Chinese jacket over a pair of Western-style pants made of cheviot wool. When they saw her coming, people stopped talking and turned to stare, but she acted as if they did not exist. Her children did not play with the other kids, and, since her husband was driven everywhere by a chauffeur, few people really knew what he looked like. There was a high turnover among their servants; in any case, they were not permitted to loiter when they went out for errands, so they, too, appeared aloof.

Every Monday and Thursday Madame Yan would come for a shot of imported vitamins to help her ward off colds. The first time she saw Wang Qiyao, she was taken aback. Her clothes, the way she ate, her every move and gesture, hinted of a splendid past. Madame Yan decided they could be friends. She had always felt Peace Lane was beneath her. Her husband, a frugal person, had bought the property at a good price. In response to her complaints, he had, in bed, promised many times to move them to a house with a garden. Now that their assets were controlled by the government, they felt lucky simply to be allowed to keep their house. Still, as long as she lived in Peace Lane, Madame Yan felt like a crane among chickens. No one there was her equal and, in her eyes, even the neighbors were no better than her servants. She was therefore delighted to see another woman similarly out of place moving into no. 39. Without seeking Wang Qiyao’s permission, she made herself a regular visitor.

Madame Yan usually showed up in the afternoon sometime after two o’clock, heralded by the fragrance of scented powder and her sandalwood fan. Most of Wang Qiyao’s patients came between three and four o’clock, so they had an hour to kill. Sitting across from each other in the lazy summer afternoon, they would stifle their yawns and chatter on without fully realizing what they were talking about, as cicadas droned in the parasol tree at the entrance to the longtang . Wang Qiyao would ladle out some of her chilled plum soup, which they sipped absentmindedly while exchanging gossip. Then, having thrown off their afternoon sluggishness and cooled off, they would perk up. Madame Yan did most of the talking while Wang Qiyao listened, but both were equally absorbed in the conversation. Madame Yan would go on and on, passing from stories about her parents to gossip about her in-laws; actually, all she wanted was to hear herself talk. As for Wang Qiyao, she listened with her heart and eventually made all business concerning the Yan family her own. When, once in a while, Madame Yan inquired about Wang Qiyao’s family, she always answered in the vaguest terms. She suspected Madame Yan didn’t believe most of what she said, but that was fine — she was free to speculate. Wang Qiyao would much rather that Madame Yan guessed the truth but left things discreetly unsaid; but Madame Yan, who had to some extent figured out the situation, insisted on asking questions pointblank. It was her way of testing Wang Qiyao’s sincerity. Wang Qiyao, for her part, wanted to be sincere, but there were some things that simply could not be spoken aloud. So they went around in circles, one chasing and the other evading, and before they knew it, a grudge had grown up between them. Fortunately, grudges are no impediment to friendships between women. The friendships of women are made of grudges: the deeper the grudge, the deeper the friendship. Sometimes they parted acrimoniously, but would resume their friendship the very next day with a deeper understanding of each other.