Yan Lianke - Serve the People!

Who is it?' they both heard Liu Lian shout out from upstairs.

`The Political Instructor from the Guards.'

Her footsteps creaked softly down the stairs.

It was obvious that Liu Lian was alone in the house. Proving himself to be, after all, a man of tact and sensitivity, the Political Instructor pushed Wu Dawang forward, then retreated into his shadow.

The door opened and Liu Lian appeared dressed in a bright red, knitted nightgown, almost as heavy as a coat. Perhaps it hadn't even occurred to her that Wu Dawang might try to catch one more glimpse of her before leaving her hair was dishevelled, her face sallow with fatigue. More importantly, beneath her robe her stomach protruded slightly, but distinctly. She was clearly pregnant. Suddenly aware of the apparent unseemliness of the situation, she glared at the Political Instructor, who gazed off into the middle distance, pretending not to notice. In awkward silence she and Wu Dawang stood facing each other across the threshold, each waiting for the other to speak. Wu Dawang was bewildered-mesmerized-by the bulge of her stomach, unable to take his eyes off it. At last, with a poke in the back from the Political Instructor, he managed a couple of words. `I'm leaving,' he said softly.

`I know,' she replied. `On the 12:30 train.'

`I wanted to see you, just one more time, before I went.' He held out a shiny paper bag to her, as if returning something she had lost and he had found.

She glanced down at his outstretched hand. 'What is it?'

'It's a packet of pine kernels. They're a present I brought you from home.' Finally accepting the bag, she examined it carefully, and even opened it and tried one. Still chewing, she turned and went upstairs without a word.

That crumpled bag of pine nuts broke the impasse of this last encounter. During her absence Wu Dawang took the opportunity to step inside. In the sitting room, all was exactly as it had been when he had first started work in the house, except that in place of the framed quotation exhorting its beholder to `Take Pride in the Traditions of the Revolution, Struggle for Glory' that they had smashed, there now hung another, equally large glass-framed print declaring that `Without a People's Army, the People Have Nothing'. He wanted to take a look in the kitchen as well-his centre of operations for so many months and the place where, in many respects, life had truly begun for him. And around the dining room, to see whether that all-important sign was still there. He wanted to ask Liu Lian if she would give it to him-as a souvenir.

But just as he thought he might explore further, Liu Lian came swiftly down the stairs, holding a rectangular object half an inch thick, a few inches wide, just over a foot long-wrapped in red silk. She walked over and handed it silently to Wu Dawang.

`What's this?' he asked.

`What you were about to ask for.' He pulled the silk back at a corner. Blushing, he hastily wrapped it back up.

`Sister,' he murmured, looking across at her.

After glancing nervously out of the door, she raised her hand to stroke his face. `Did your Political Instructor ask you to ask me to speak to the Division Commander for him?'

Wu Dawang nodded.

The rims of Liu Lian's eyes seemed to redden. `I'm afraid you'll have to tell him and your Captain that I'm sorry, I can't help them. The authorities have already approved the Commander's final report and agreed that all troops remaining in barracks are to be sent home. You've all suffered because of me. Quick, off you go now and tell the Captain and the Instructor that I'll do whatever I can to help them after they've left the army.'

Wu Dawang stayed put.

'Off you go, the Division Commander's going to be home any minute.'

Still Wu Dawang did not move, his face pale, uncomprehending.

Her mouth twisting into a kind of smile, Liu Lian took his hand and ran it over her swelling stomach, then urged him again to go. `Best hurry,' she shouted out at the Political Instructor, still standing in the shadows, `or he'll miss his train.'

As she walked them to the gate Wu Dawang could smell the scent of sweet, ripe apple on her as it floated off into the night air.

Three days later, the final demobilization of the division was officially announced. All those who knew of Wu Dawang's affair with Liu Lian, and all those who did not, were scattered to the winds. The secret sank without trace, like a piece of gold thrown into the sea.

Wu DAWANG ENTERED MIDDLE AGE. While the details of his life over the previous decade and a half — how exactly he, his wife and son had enjoyed their heavenly urban existence — would have eluded a casual observer, the physical toll the years had taken was readily apparent in the resigned creases of his expression, in the coarsening of his complexion. A closer look might have caught, in addition to the lines time had etched, a mood of melancholy that aged him far beyond his years. His was a face that had admitted failure, its strength sapped by the social transformations that had bewildered and exhausted his generation. Even in his youth, he had shown little defiant swagger when confronted by life's tribulations. And now, fifteen years after his departure from the army, as he reappeared at the gate to the Commanders' Compound in the military quarter of the provincial capital, any fighting spirit had been truly ground out of him. He had known for some time that his old Division Commander had been made Provincial Commander-in-Chief, while his beautiful wife Liu Lian continued to bask in her husband's reflected glory. A quick glance at the television or newspaper told him all he needed to know about the former Division Commander's situation in life, but his only clues about Liu Lian were fragments of hearsay from former comrades-in-arms with an ear for society gossip.

One winter's day, as a thick blanket of snow settled over the buildings, ring road and overpasses of the provincial capital, Wu Dawang's eye was caught by a boy in his midteens from the Supreme Commanders' Compound in the military quarter, skating and sliding at dusk with a crowd of other children over the frozen Jinshui river. After studying him from a distance for some time, Wu Dawang, dressed in an old-fashioned army coat, set off down the wide road that ran east along the river. Soon he found himself at the main gate to the Commanders' Compound.

This gate bore no resemblance to its counterpart in the former Division barracks that lay a couple of hundred miles east of the provincial capital, and had long since become a sprawling factory complex. The gate in front of Wu Dawang had pretensions to the monumental, flanked on either side by pillars that towered like city walls, their great capitals clad, at unimaginable expense, in imported stone. The gate's crossbeam-clad in this same stone-was studded with ingeniously recessed electric lights and hung with two enormous lanterns left over from National Day celebrations. Two sentries were stationed on two square, red-and-white striped platforms half a foot off the ground. Each shouldered rifles, obliged by the aura of imposing immensity that attached itself to the gate and to the Compound, and by the constant audience of traffic and passersby, to stand guard in stiff, solemn silence. Wu Dawang did not approach the gate but kept his distance on the pavement outside, observing the Compound's comings and goings until past ten o'clock that night, when he disappeared into the bustling city.

He paid his second visit the following morning. His years in the army enabled him to make a few common sense deductions about how one might gain entry to such a compound. As a result he strolled, unchallenged, past the sentries and on toward Number One.

Though different in detail, the general pattern of the place was remarkably similar to the house and garden in which Wu Dawang had worked fifteen years ago. Behind wrought-iron railings lay a patchwork of flower beds and bare vegetable plots, their furrows still visible beneath the snow. There was even a trellis covered in wiry vines, its network of snow-coated branches like frosted fish scales. Into Number One's gate-which was large enough for cars to pass through-was set a smaller gate for pedestrians. As Wu Dawang approached, a sentry standing to one side of the weather-beaten gatepost stared suspiciously at him. After issuing him with a chilly good morning, the sentry asked, in a louder voice, who he was looking for.