Yan Lianke - Serve the People!

She picked up the Serve the People! sign from the table.

He walked over and swept her up in his arms, as one would an exhausted child, then climbed slowly upstairs to the bedroom. The sound of his footsteps on the stairs, crunching the debris of their afternoon's work, echoed through the house like a wooden mallet striking a great empty drum.

THAT NIGHT, REINVIGORATED BY THE chaos they had created, they found new heights of pleasure in each other, before falling into a deep, exhausted sleep. But hunger soon woke them again. With his usual iron self-discipline, Wu Dawang forced his trembling legs to carry him down to the kitchen to Serve the People. Once there, however, he found there were no vegetables left. This discovery would require him to betray their solemn vow not to leave the house-Wa transgression he viewed as seriously as the violation of a religious oath. Fortunately, daylight was not far from breaking after the final night of their three days' self-imposed confinement. Thinking she'd gone back to sleep, he decided not to risk disturbing her by fetching his clothes from the bedroom, and headed, still naked, out into the vegetable garden.

Almost as soon as he'd opened the door, he felt the moon-like an enormous piece of glass-gleaming down at him from a cloudless sky of a pure, midnight blue. Its startling silver-white brilliance filled Wu Dawang with a familiar fear that it might fall from the sky at any moment.

This was the third time in his life Wu Dawang had been seized by this anxiety. The first was the night his father passed away. The second was his wedding night, as the loveless reality of his marriage dawned upon him. He could notyet tell what it meant for him this time.

As he set off down the path through the vegetable garden, Wu Dawang felt overwhelmingly weary. His legs threatened to give way beneath him like straw. But despite his vague sense of moonlit foreboding Wu Dawang's dominant emotion at that moment was still one of happy fulfilment. What more could he hope for? For almost two months, he had lived with the beautiful wife of his Supreme Commander, a ranking officer in her own right, a Party zealot, a model of political correctness who knew The Collected Workv of Mao Zedonzg as well as-better than he did. Not only had she enabled him to enjoy the most exquisitely intense physical pleasures, but she had also promised to arrange the promotion that would en able his family to escape from that benighted wasteland of a village to the glorious city life that he craved constantly- even in sleep. He was about to achieve his very own paradise on earth.

Though he no longer felt as eager to be reunited with his wife, the thought of his son-and their long separation — filled him with impatience for the fourpocketed official's jacket of thick green twill that would mark the start of this new life of ease.

Two months ago, Wu Dawang had wanted this promotion to make good his pledge to the Zhao family. Now, however, he was motivated just as powerfully by a desire to establish himself permanently in the army so that-after this rapturously happy chapter in his life had drawn to an end — he could at least still be close to Liu Lian. For soon enough Wu Dawang would bid farewell to Compound Number One: to its vegetable garden, flower bed, vine trellis and kitchen; to all the objects pots, bowls, ladles, dishes, chopsticks, vegetable sacks-that bore no political messages, no quotations, no slogans, no images of Party leaders, and that had therefore survived yesterday's orgy of destruction. Worst of all, he would have to leave his beloved Liu Lian. For now, he still had no sense of how their parting would affect him, of how much unhappiness lay ahead. Nor did he know that the aftershocks from this love affair of his were about to make themselves felt in unforeseen ways. He had not learnt yet that fate is cyclical: that long periods of calm succeed brief bursts of passionate intensity; that moments of extreme happiness inevitably give way to sorrow.

As Wu Dawang stood deep in thought, Liu Lian, now dressed in a pair of pink knickers and a cream bra, came out into the garden and crept up behind him. After watching him unnoticed for a while, she slipped back into the house to fetch a rush mat, a bag of biscuits and two glasses of water. This second time, she did not worry about disturbing him. Her heavy footsteps startled him out of his covetous dreams and he turned to find her just behind him.

As he sat down on a ridge of earth, he guiltily remembered the call of duty: that he was meant to be cooking her something.

`I'm sorry, I forgot about the vegetables. Forgive me.

Liu Lian neither responded nor registered any displeasure. Her face remained calm, as if nothing had happened. While he'd been outside, she'd got herself in order: she'd bathed, combed her hair and powdered herself with the perfumed talc from Shanghai that in those days was within the reach of only a tiny minority of women. It seemed to Wu Dawang as if she'd left behind those three heartstopping days and nights they had just spent together; as if their eight weeks of living almost as equals were drawing to a close. She was still the Division Commander's wife, the prettiest woman in the barracks, in the entire city even. Though she was dressed only in her underwear, his bedfellow of the past two months had somehow transformed back into agi'ande dame — still beguilingly young and beautiful, but a q ande dame all the same. She walked to the middle of the cabbage patch, pulled up a handful of seedlings and threw them to one side. Unrolling the mat over the cleared ground, she put down the cups and biscuits, then glanced across at him.

`Come and have something to eat. There's something I want to tell you.'

He continued to wonder at the subtle physical change that had come over her- a change that went much deeper than the simple act of her putting some clothes back on. Though he could notyet make sense of it, something had happened. It was clear from the new, quietly commanding tone of her voice alone.

He felt suddenly apprehensive — though whether from fear of her, or of whatever it was that had happened, he could not say. He looked down at her, sitting there before him on the mat. `Shall I get dressed?'

No need.'

You have.'

Do you want me to get undressed again?'

Although that was more or less exactly what he did want, he resisted saying so. In any case, in her pink and cream underwear she was almost as fascinating to him as when she was naked. He went over and sat opposite her, deliberately assuming a childlike pose, drawing both legs up to his chest to cover his penis. She gave him a faint, slightly wounded smile, like an older sister noticing her brother's first physical shyness, then passed him some biscuits.

`Since we haven't much longer together, I ought to serve you.'

They sat together, eating and drinking, the silver of the moonlight washing over the garden. When they'd finished, she brushed the crumbs off the mat, placed the empty cups under a nearby plant and looked up at the sky.

`I think I might be pregnant.'

Though he'd heard her clearly enough, he was unable at first to grasp the full implications of her announcement. After a brief pause, he asked her to repeat what she'd just said. Perhaps because she was surprised by the coolness of his reaction or because she was unwilling to confirm her revelation, Liu Lian merely narrowed her eyes at him, then tilted her head back to contemplate the moon, a glow of secret triumph on her face. A fresh, pungent smell was rising up from the ground: since he'd been locked away in the house, the onions and chives had started to bolt and the night air was now flavoured with their strong, hot scent.

As Wu Dawang noted to himself that the chives would become inedible if they were not cut back soon, the full complexity of Liu Lian's disclosure dawned on him. It had none of the simplicity of a political thought-crime; it was not something that could be rectified by a few years' hard labour. It was an emotional and biological event that broke down all the moral, social, cultural and political boundaries of their world. As the enormous consequence of her words reverberated through his mind, they all but cancelled out his happiness of) ust a few moments earlier. He repeated his question. `What did you) ust say?'