Yan Lianke - Serve the People!

`Go to sleep. I'm going to the toilet.'

Afterward, he sat alone in the courtyard, sunk in desolation. When he stared up at the pale crescent moon floating amid the clouds, he felt a vertiginous tremor of fear-a fear that it might fall from the sky.

The April stars sprinkled their light over the courtyard in the middle of his family's thatched, threeroom, mud-brick compound. Sitting in its centre, serenaded by cicadas and smelling the spring grass on the air, he gazed blankly up at the silver moon, as if communing with it on the subject of his marriage.

In the end, of the two newlyweds it was Wu Dawang who broke first, who could stand the torment of sexual deprivation no longer. Eventually, when the moon sank and the stars faded, he went back inside, undressed silently and lay down beside her, the scent of the paste used to festoon the walls with proclamations of `Double Happiness' still hanging faintly over the room. Though she was in bed, Ezi was not asleep and from under her quilt wafted the earthy, headily unfamiliar smell of a peasant girl. 'It's almost light,' she murmured, 'where have you been?' When he pulled back the quilt, sultry with her body warmth, he suddenly encountered her innocently rustic scent. The room was dark apart from the pale dawn haze at the window. He allowed himself two quiet, cautious inhalations, two lungs full of night air infused with that feminine fragrance. He tried to slip under the covers, to suppress all desire for her by the strength of his will, through the military self-discipline that he had learnt over the past year. Yet in that bed, under that quilt, his hand found itself moving recklessly down over her shoulder. In the moment it took him to compare the feel of her skin with silk, his willpower was broken and he was upon her.

Although she too was clearly ablaze, prey to exactly the same primitive, instinctive desire, she struggled out from underneath him, shrank backward-as if flinching from a needle-and pushed his hands from her. Once more, they lay side by side in the still night, at an impasse.

'You're my wife now, Zhao Ezi,' he said. 'If you stop me one more time, I'll have to force you.'

'You can have me,' she answered, 'but I wantyou to promise me three things first.'

'And they are?'

'One, next year when you come home on leave, I want you to bring me an army uniform.'

'Fine, I promise.'

'Two, I want you to earn a commendation every year, and to telegram me the good news as soon as you get it. It's not just about the honour, the production team will award me ten Juan, too.'

`Agreed. And the third?'

'I want you to kneel in front of me, right now, on the bed, and swear you'll work hard after you go back to the army, obey your commanders and do whatever it takes to become a Party official so I can move to the city.'

'I already promised all that in the pledge I wrote for your father.'

'I don't care. I wantyou to swear it all over again, kneeling in front of me. Then you can have me.'

He knelt on the bed, facing his wife. 'If I, Wu Dawang, fail to work hard and obey the Party, I deserve to be struck five times by lightning. If in this lifetime I fail to win promotion and give you, Zhao Ezi, a home in the city, may Heaven above condemn me to die without descendants.'

Whether out of hunger for professional advancement, oryearning for his wife's curvaceous form, Wu Dawang delivered his oath in low fervent tones, with the solemn, almost devout urgency born of intense impatience. His declaration made, he studied her face. 'Will that do?' he asked softly.

'I believe you.'

Then, in one decisive manoeuvre, he drew the body of his new wife-the body that had been his from the start of their negotiations but which she had nevertheless resolved to barter against some better, future existence-to him.

With this, sexual intimacy began between them — but love ended.

From that point on, he was allowed to have his way with her every night. But, as regular as clockwork, just as he reached orgasm she would pipe up with: 'You must work hard when you return to the army, Dawang.' In another, more mundane context, these words would have struck him as no more than an affectionate reminder, but spoken on the brink of climax they chilled him like a drenching in icy water. The vague semblance of affection that existed between them thus became as fragile as a sheet of sodden paper, useless as a medium for expressing emotional truths.

FOR Wu DAWANG, IT WAS the contrast with his dispiritingly frigid marriage that truly validated his affair with Liu Lian, that gave him eyes to appreciate, once he had stepped under her mosquito net, the glories of love. To his mind, the frequency with which he and Liu Lian made love represented the soundest, the most sublime proof of their feelings for each other. For close on two months, day and night they luxuriated in passion's lake, dazzled by its surface shimmer, intoxicated by each glittering droplet. Regrettably perhaps, neither understood that a dangerously raw sexual undercurrent was choosing its moment to tug them both down.

Not long after their liaison began, Liu Lian had telephoned the Captain and Political Instructor of Wu Dawang's company to say that she was afraid of being alone in the house at night with the Division Commander away. Having taken her criticism to heart, she told them, Wu Dawang had given complete satisfaction ever since. As a result, for the rest of her husband's stay in Beijing she would prefer it if Sergeant Wu slept in the house rather than returning to barracks every evening.

Wu Dawang's immediate superiors readily agreed, emphasizing to Liu Lian that any inadequacy on the part of her orderly reflected directly on the company itself. If she found him guilty of further oversights or carelessness, she should address her criticism to him, then lodge an extra complaint against them and the company's Party representatives. And that is how easily the scene was set for this extraordinary affair. So easily, in fact, that in time its hero and heroine came to forget that it was only theatre, and not life itself. Like method actors, they played their roles for real.

Every day Wu Dawang still tended the vegetable garden at the back of the house, and the flowers and shrubs at the front. But what had been a professional duty now became a performance given for the benefit of passersby, to reassure them, as they glanced in through the gate, that all was exactly as it ever had been: that Liu Lian was still the Division Commander's wife, and Wu Dawang the Division Commander's General Orderly. Only our chief protagonists could know of the great, underlying change that had taken place behind this facade.

Before, he'd always needed to watch the time as he worked in the garden, returning to the kitchen to have meals ready exactly on time. Now, however, he dawdled outside as he pleased. When mealtimes approached, Liu Lian would beckon him in from the doorway not to cook for her, but to keep her company while she cooked; another symptom of the revolutionary goings-on inside Compound Number One. The first meal she'd ever cooked him was breakfast, which she brought to his bedside just as he'd brought her the bowl of egg-drop soup that first, fateful morning. Waking from the deep slumber that follows a night of passion, he'd found the sun streaming in through the curtains and Liu Lian gone. Pulling himself up with a start, he found her sitting next to him on the edge of the bed, gazing at him as he slept.

`Heavens,' he began to apologize, `I haven't gotyour breakfast ready.' She stroked his cheek, her face breaking into a sweet smile, as if his return to consciousness had instantly driven away melancholy.

`It's my turn to Serve the People,' she said. Lifting up the bowl of egg soup she had prepared, she fed it to him, mouthful by mouthful. She took the last few drops into her own mouth, then gently released them into his, with a touch of her lips. In thanks for this bowl of soup and for the gift of a love whose depths he'd not yet fathomed, he then slowly undressed her until she stood like a jade pillar naked before the bed. Although they'd lived for days as husband and wife, although they'd made love more times than he could remember, this was the first time he'd admired, with such lingering calm, the whole of her-her marvellous, nude form, illuminated by the single, oblique strip of sunlight that a crack in the curtains had let in. He considered her hair, her pink and white complexion, her body, as flawlessly fair as the moon and stars and unblemished by a single mole or imperfection, her breasts, still as gravity-defying as a twenty-year-old's. Her stomach had not a single line across it, not a whisper of a crease or mark or blotch. A hand skimming over the silky skin under her breasts-as white as if it'd been dusted with crushed Osmanthus petals might have imagined it was touching a moonbeam.