Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Zheng was ham-fisted when it came to practical things, but he was terribly earnest, especially when Tianyi asked him to do something. He had big fleshy hands, with fat fingers that looked like pickled mouli. He had big feet too, and stomped heavily along. But his handsome face, his bright eyes and his eloquence far outweighed any impression of clumsiness.

On this particular day, the mayonnaise was especially well-received and was soon finished. Dusk had fallen and one by one, they put on their costumes and went for a swim. Tianyi always enjoyed wearing her costume. It was very striking and looked good on her dainty figure, unlike the clumsy, baggy garments most women wore for swimming. Tianyi had found hers in a shop on fashionable Wangfujing Street. It was obviously a smuggled import, and caught her eye instantly. The fabric was light and thin, the bust was well-cut and it was a pretty colour, bright red scattered with big and small white spots. Tianyi fell in love with it straightaway. It was more than 70 yuan , shockingly expensive back then, but Tianyi bought it without a moment’s hesitation.

Tianyi’s shopping fell into two categories: things she absolutely had to have as soon as she laid eyes on them, and bargain buys that she wore a couple of times, then discarded. The swimsuit fell into the first category, of course. And so, come dusk, Tianyi, her beautiful figure clad in her equally beautiful costume, was frequently to be seen swimming at the Miyun Reservoir.

To Tianyi’s surprise, Zheng made no attempts to conceal his admiration. His feelings were as transparent as a child’s. As soon as she went to swim, he got in too. When she went in one last time, he had been lying sprawled, exhausted, on the embankment, chatting to friends. But as soon as he spotted her in the water, he jumped in regardless.

They were very conspicuous, since there was no one but the two of them in the reservoir. Everyone else was on the bank, watching them as if this was some kind of performance. It was getting quite dark and there was an evening breeze. Tianyi found it delightful. Slowly she slid through the water, heading for a little boat that bobbed up and down. It was a ramshackle craft, probably belonging to a local peasant who kept there for catching fish or clams.

As Tianyi remembered it, a girl on the bank was making fun of Zheng’s swimming style: ‘He looks like he’s banging a drum with his arms!’ she laughed. Tianyi glanced back and, in that instant, the old man in the sky got angry. There was a loud clap of thunder, followed by streak after terrifying streak of lightning. A fierce wind gusted and churned the water around them.

The girl’s teasing comments were still ringing in Tianyi’s ears but around her everything was different. The heavens had darkened like the bottom of a cooking pot, and dense clouds boiled like pitch. Tianyi felt as if her body had been dyed black by the pitch. She reached a pale arm above the waves, reached as high as she could, out of the pot, but her head was still submerged. She swallowed some water, water that boiled like pitch, and was scalded by a gut-wrenching fear.

She was fully aware of what was going on, however. Before long her hand bumped against the boat but it bobbed up and down and she could not keep hold. Finally, her fluttering fingers touched a solid object, and her flutters of anxiety eased. Next, the sturdy arm she had felt gripped her, and anchored her firmly to the boat.

It was the first time in her life that she had embraced a man while almost naked, though it meant little to her in her state of terror. Even so, she saw his body. Down his back ran a long knife scar. She fingered the scar ever so lightly and he instinctively shrank away, as if he did not want her to know about it, so she withdrew her hand. After a long moment, she became aware that she was in his arms. He seemed quite bashful and held her with great diffidence.

‘You were trembling,’ he said. She pushed away from him, and he from her, and let go of her hand.

‘Was I? I didn’t realize …’

With an effort, after a long pause, he managed to get out: ‘Did you see the scar on my back? From an operation I had when I was young.’

‘What operation?’

‘When I was little, my elder brother got some scalding rice porridge spilt on him. He needed a skin graft.’

‘And they used your skin?’

‘Yes. That was OK, but the problem was that afterwards, a large area of skin got infected, and they had to cut out a lump of flesh and sew it up again.’

‘Good heavens!’ Tianyi exclaimed. ‘it sounds like you were carved up by a butcher!’ And they both laughed.

Her favourite reads at that time were Ethel Lilian Voynich’s The Gadfly and Turgenev’s On the Eve . She was entranced by their cool super-heroes, who could suffer any amount of pain without a murmur of complaint. As regards the infatuated Arthur in The Gadfly and Insarov (in On the Eve ) and their heroines, she did not particularly take to Arthur’s Gemma but adored Insarov’s Elena. She even made a series of paintings of Insarov and Elena, portraying the Bulgarian revolutionary in bold outline, forceful, with a lean, rather pale, face of magnetic attractiveness. The Gadfly she imagined in the same way. These revolutionaries, in Tianyi’s fantasies, became her ideal men. Thus, when she met Zheng for the first time, she was magnetized by his casual willingness to suffer anything without a murmur of complaint.

Sadly, Zheng was not lean and lanky, he was healthy and sunny-natured, with a pair of beautiful crystalline eyes, so translucent that it seemed unimaginable they would ever cloud over.

Tianyi put her fingers gently on the scar again. This was an extraordinarily bold gesture for her to make, quite out of character. She expected something earth-shaking to happen. But now it was Zheng was missed his chance. So like a man. He had put the girl he loved on a pedestal. He could only do as he pleased with a girl he did not love, or even despised. He was also embarrassed to admit that he was still a virgin, and had no experience with girls.

His feelings towards Tianyi were conflicted. He loved her but he respected her at the same time. She was a woman he could only admire from a distance and could not be intimate with, even though he wanted her, badly. In a word, he wanted her to make the first move, even if it was just to give him a clear hint. After all, she was a highly accomplished writer — she must be able to express her feelings for him in words, spoken or written. If she kept him at a distance, it must mean she did not love him. Having misinterpreted her attitude and convinced himself that she did not love him, he resigned himself to having her as his very best and closest friend. So on this stormy evening, the most important of Tianyi’s life, when she was sure something would happen, Zheng fatally misjudged Tianyi’s bold move.

Just now, in the boat, Zheng was in turmoil. If the sky had been a bit lighter, Tianyi would have seen his face flush as scarlet as a drunken prawn. This was the moment when Zheng should have striven for victory, but he failed to seize the opportunity. He said: ‘Do you think the people on the bank can see us?’ The words, so trivial, were like a bucket of cold water to Tianyu. She instinctively looked towards the shore, but their friends had all ducked inside the tents for cover, and were just black shapes.

No doubt Zheng lived to regret his mistake. But the person who really got it wrong was Tianyi. Her great failing was that she took everything too much to heart. Even the smallest slight, and she wanted to get her own back on the perpetrator. Tianyi felt wounded at Zheng’s failure to respond to her hint, very seriously wounded.

The worst of it was that she buried her feelings very deep. No way was she going to let on that she had been hurt. She covered it up, and so well that no one would have known that she was not happy. She put on a mask, beneath which she supressed her unhappiness. Let no one say that she was petty-minded. We have already said that Tianyi was an aesthete who put beauty above everything. It was not only other people’s image that mattered to her, her own image did too, very much so.