Yan Lianke - Serve the People!

`Come on,' she said, `let's have some. After all, we've got something to celebrate, too.'

`What's that?'

`Your making my life worthwhile.'

She went upstairs and fetched, from who knows where, a bottle of mao-tai — the finest, costliest of all Chinese spirits-and two cups. She filled both to the brim, passed one to him and raised hers as if about to toast him. He paused and looked across at her. `If I drink this, you have to tell me the story of howyou came to marry the Division Commander.'

A blank look passed over her face. `You really want to know? All right. As long as you drink up first.'

Promise?'

I promise,' she replied.

He lifted his cup and drank. `Where are you from in the south?'

`Yangzhou,' she answered, after draining her own cup. `Ever been? You northerners are always saying how wonderful Hangzhou and Suzhou are, but Yangzhou's better than both. The girls are much prettier. Apparently, when they were looking for concubines for Deputy Head-of-State Lin Biao, they ignored Suzhou and Hangzhou completely, and chose two from Yangzhou instead.' As she spoke, she refilled both cups and passed his back to him. `Anything else?'

Did the Division Commander choose you, too?'

She swallowed her wine down. Of course. It was when he was on an inspection tour of the hospital. He picked me out straightaway.' Her radiant smile showed how proud she'd been that the Commander had noticed her. At the same moment, however, tears began to splash from her eyes and into her cup.

`What's wrong?' he asked.

`I'm happy. Happy I married the Division Commander.'

`Didn't you know how much older he was?' he asked.

`Yes.'

`And you still married him?'

`He's the Division Commander.'

`But he's impotent.'

`Don't say what you shouldn't say.'

`I'm your husband, I can say anything I want.'

`You're the Division Commander's orderly, and I'm his wife — remember?'

He slammed his wine cup down on the table, glaring at her. `I don't know why,' he said, a sudden, solemn urgency in his voice, `but just then the thought of you wanting to marry the Commander made me want to throttle you.'

She drank another cupful. `Go on then,' she challenged him. `We all have to die sometime, so we might as well go together.' Gulping another cup down, she looked in Wu Dawang's direction, already half-tipsy. `I'm one of the Party faithful, too, you know. I knew more quotations by Chairman Mao than anyone else in the Division Hospital. Once, I recited a hundred of them to the Commander, one after the other. I was word-perfect. I even recited the punctuation. I think that's when he really took a shine to me. First promotion, then marriage. I was perfectly willing to marry him, truly I was, he didn't need to push me in the slightest. But it had never crossed my mind he'd be impotent, or that his first wife had divorced him because of it. Just when I was about to tell him I wanted a divorce, too, he kneeled in front of me. Imagine it! At his age, his rank. He joined the Communists to fight against the Japanese when he was only fourteen. He'd been wounded four times by 1945. Then, during the Civil War, he took a bullet between his legs. He's still got two bullets in him, one in his back, one in his knee. He's got a whole cupboard stuffed with medals and honours. How could I divorce him? A man who'd given everything for the Revolution, kneeling in front of me, crying like a baby?

`Come on,' she continued. If you drink up, I'll recite a hundred quotations by Chairman Mao. If you don't, I'll have a hundred from you.I

`I'd rather hear one of his songs,' he said.

'All right.' Once his cup was empty, she sang `The Morning Sun'. Another cup later, she sang The Long March'. After another, `Self-Reliance'. Soon, the tally of how many cups had been drunk and how many songs had been sung was lost in a drunken haze. When they woke, dusk was falling over the compound. The evening sun shone in through the kitchen window, illuminating a scene of near-orgiastic debauchery: the table scattered with cups, dishes and an empty bottle, the chairs piled with clothes, the floor strewn with chopsticks one pair having inexplicably ended up behind the kitchen door.

Our hero and heroine lay, their arms wrapped around each other, on the cement floor of the kitchen, as nakedly pinkish-white as two pigs tossed by their butcher under his slaughter table. The Serve the People! sign lay unaccountably across their bodies, like a price tag.

HAD LIFE BEEN A GAME all along, or had it only recently become one? Is all the world a stage, the men and women on it merely players? Does passion come from love, or can love come from passion? Does it matter? A river doesn't need to know its source; the source doesn't need to know what rivers it feeds-all that matters is that it does so. In some instances, the question of cause and effect is, ultimately, beside the point. Some things-the love affair between Wu Dawang and Liu Lian being one of them-seem to come from nothing, then return to nothing.

As he worked in the back garden, she would watch him-either from the kitchen doorway or from the side of a vegetable patch, until her thoughts began to wander when, say, a pair of butterflies fluttered languorously past. Blushing slightly, she would go back inside, then re emerge a few seconds later holding the Serve the People! sign behind her back. After setting it down a few feet away from him, she would turn back toward the house.

'Where are you going?' he would shout out.

'To get a drink of water,' she would reply. 'I'm thirsty.'

Not thinking to doubt her, he would carry on with his work until he discovered the sign. He would then look around him, throw down the hoe, take the sign back into the house, replace it on the dining table and, without pausing even to wash his hands or face, gallop upstairs to the bedroom where she would be undressed and waiting for him. No further communication was required. If he gave satisfaction, she would cook him whatever he felt like eating. If not, she would devise some domestic penalty for him. He ate what she cooked for him with an easy conscience, as easy as if he were the Division Commander eating food cooked by his Orderly; it was his reward fora job well done. Her punishments — washing her clothes, cleaning her ears, cutting her nails-he accepted just as easily, as fair penance for a selfish dereliction of duty. Love was a game to be played seriously. Once, she slipped the Serve the People! sign under his knife as he chopped vegetables in the kitchen. After he'd followed her upstairs, the smell of chilli still on his fingers, and given exceptional satisfaction, it was she who returned to the kitchen to pick up where he'd left off. In fact, she took over all the cooking for the next three days, not even allowing him to wash up afterward.

As the affair went on, the Serve the People! sign seemed to grow legs. An instant after she decided she wanted him, it would lodge itself in a blossoming shrub as he weeded a flower bed. Or, as he pruned the vines, it would suddenly appear hanging from a branch, nudging at his shoulder. While he was out shopping for food, the slightest thing could set him off on fantasies, which on discovering the sign lying in wait for him back at Compound Number One-would swiftly become reality. Sometimes, of course, his thoughts would be elsewhere-with his wife and son, for example-but one glimpse of the sign obliterated everything except Liu Lian's glorious body and his desire for it. They would come together whenever and wherever: the sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, study, the Division Commander's conference room; even, under cover of darkness, beneath the vine trellis.

In a few short weeks, they'd become both the masters and slaves of instinct, allowing sex to dominate all other aspects of life. Between them, they could make the sexual act simple one minute, elaborate the next; now perfunctory, now ceremonious; now civilized, now decadent; now relaxed, now painstaking. But it was not until their last week together that their affair attained a truly extraordinary, climactic intensity.