Ha Jin - A Free Life

Nan 's mind was teeming with thoughts. Deep inside he knew he was at fault. Pingping had lashed out at him not so much because of the money he had spent on Beina as because he had kept her letter as a kind of memento. Before they married, she had let him read all the love letters the naval officer, her former boyfriend, had written her, and then she burned them all in his presence. Oddly enough, he didn't have any letter from Beina at that time and couldn't convince his bride-to-be that there had been no correspondence between him and his former girlfriend since they had lived in the same city. To make her believe him, he showed her a photo of that woman, then dropped it into a stove. Now his wife must have thought he had been in touch with Beina all these years and that from the very beginning he hadn't leveled with her. To her, he was a double-faced man.

It took him almost an hour to walk around the lake, which should have taken at most half the time. Approaching his house, he wondered if he should enter it now. All the lights were off in there, and the windowpanes kept reflecting the slashes of the lightning in the north, where the sky was beginning to jump a little. It threatened rain, the oak leaves fluttering in the gathering wind, so he decided to go in.

As he stepped into the living room, a pair of arms wrapped around him and Pingping's hot face came against his cheek. She whispered, " Nan, forgive me. I can see the letter is old, the edges of the paper already yellowed. I was nasty just now. Can you…?" Her words were muffled as he pressed his lips on her mouth. In response, she began kissing him as hard as if she wanted to breathe with his lungs. He could feel her heart knocking against his half-numbed chest. He touched her breasts, which were warm and heaving. A knot of feeling was quickly unfolding in him, and his hand slipped behind her to unbutton her dress.

"Don't. Taotao can hear us," she said.

He stopped and went into their son's room. The boy was dozing on his bed, his feet rested on the floor and his face toward the ceiling. Nan covered Taotao's stomach with a shirt, closed the door, and returned to Pingping. "He's sleeping. I'll be careful," he said, and his hands resumed caressing her.

She slid down to the floor, pulling him down with her. Then they started peeling off each other's clothes.

Soon she began panting and trembling a little. A few tears welled out of her eyes. Instead of being rough with her, he licked her wet cheeks, and her tears tasted a bit tangy, reminding him of the bitter-melon soup they'd eaten two days before. He adjusted her body to make her lie comfortably so that he could stay in her for a long time.

"Don't cry," he murmured. "Just relax and imagine we're on our honeymoon."

At those words she broke into smothered sobs, which startled him. He regretted having said that because never had they honeymooned anywhere and his words must have caused her to feel sad about their life. He said, "Forgive me for saying that."

"Make me happy."

He nuzzled her neck and nibbled her ear.

DESPITE their reconciliation, Pingping's furious response to that letter brought the memories of Beina back to Nan. For two days he couldn't stop thinking about his ex-girlfriend. He tried to sidetrack his mind, yet somehow it couldn't help but stray to that woman, the fountainhead of his misery. Every remembered detail-a peculiar frown of hers or an indolent gesture or a petulant pout-seemed pregnant with meanings he hadn't thought of before, and whenever he was unoccupied he'd attempt to decipher those hidden messages as if they had really been there all along but he had overlooked them. One incident still stung his heart whenever he thought of it. Three months after Beina declared she'd washed her hands of him, Nan had run into her one morning in a park, where she and her new boyfriend were walking, her hand on his arm. It was windy and the ground was frozen, cobblestones glazed with ice on the path leading to a white building beyond a grove of trees. Nan turned away, pretending he hadn't seen them. But suddenly he slipped and his legs buckled; he stretched out his hand and grabbed a birch sapling to break his fall. Yet his copy of Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State dropped on the ground, and the author's bushy beard on the front page kept fluttering, ruffled by the wind. From behind came that woman's ringing laughter, silvery and icy, which pierced his heart. He picked up the book and dashed away, sending flocks of crows and pigeons into explosive flight. He ran, ran, and ran until he could hardly breathe, until his heart was about to burst.

He was unsure whether she had laughed out loud to make him mad so as to bring him back to her or just to wound him. He'd prefer to believe it was just another wile of hers.

A few weeks before, he had burned the notebook containing the poetry he had written for her. He declared to her face that he had gotten rid of all the silly poems. Yet there still remained one piece that he had never shown her, known only to himself. He wrapped it into the jacket of his copy of Book of Songs, an ancient poetry anthology compiled by Confucius. He brought the book to America and had kept the poem in it all these years.

One night after his wife and son had gone to bed, he took out the poem and read it again. It went:

The Last Lesson

He smiled after reading the poem, which he couldn't say he still liked and which was probably sappy and unfinished. But it was something that had once been close to his heart, and he wanted to keep it. He wrapped it back into the jacket of the book and put it on the shelf beside his desk.

Lying on his bed, again he wondered whether he had been too impatient with Beina. For example, after she hadn't shown up at the beach, he had simply stopped offering her swimming lessons. Then came another breakup of theirs. Although tough in appearance, he couldn't really disentangle himself from her. One day he even went to the cafeteria near her dorm, just to look at her. She caught sight of him but pretended not to have seen him and kept talking loudly with the man in front of her in the mess line. Now and again she tossed a glance at Nan. When she had bought her lunch, she turned around and headed in his direction, but her eyes looked away. As she was drawing near, he spun around and rushed out of the dining hall.

If he had spoken to her, probably he could have resumed teaching her how to swim the next summer. That would have given him an opportunity for more physical contact with her. Sure, she wouldn't change much, but he could take her willfulness and caprice with aplomb to show he had a large heart. Eventually he might have gained the upper hand with her. Yet he was bitter and too proud of himself. It was his silly self-pride that gradually cemented the barrier between them. If only he'd had thicker skin; if only he had played fast and loose with her; if only he could have made her suffer.