Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

Now Dr. Tang wore the jumper Wu knitted for him openly — it fit really well. Wu liked to look at his mouth chewing in the daylight. The way he ate was very elegant; his mouth made small but accurate movements, adeptly dealing with difficult foods like fish heads or spare ribs. It almost looked like he used his mouth as a knife to perform a quiet operation on food. That mouth of his seemed to be of particular use for eating food and keeping silent — when he wasn’t eating, he was very quiet. His words were rare, which seemed to make his mouth even more precious. Wu would try to kiss him when no one was around, but he would pull away. So she let him be. She didn’t have to kiss him. In some respects, she was easily satisfied. She would confine herself to observing that mouth. From her limited experience of men, she believed he was shy. He was an unmarried man.

She kept telling the sisters that she was going to get a girlfriend for Dr. Tang, but that it was really difficult. Dr. Tang came from a politically-tainted family, and was also raising his niece on his own. The niece, whom Wu had met, was an orphan, the child of his older sister. She kept talking about finding a girlfriend but never took action. Tiao had never seen her bring anyone home who looked like a girlfriend type. During this period, Yixun came home for the change of season and stayed for three days — he had only three days’ vacation. He invited Dr. Tang home to drink beer with him. Back then Fuan didn’t have bottled beer, so beer was sold only in restaurants. The restaurant employees would use a rice bowl as a measure, ladle out the beer from a ceramic barrel, and then pour it into the customer’s own container. The beer didn’t have any head and tasted sour and bitter.

The two men drank beer and ate a roast chicken together, one that Yixun had brought back from Reed River Town. Yixun enquired about Wu’s illness, and when he asked about it, Wu remembered she was sick. She had to be sick, with rheumatic heart disease. Yixun asked about all the details thoughtfully, full of concern for Wu and gratitude to Dr. Tang. Dr. Tang said this type of heart disease was the most common in China, making up 40 to 50 percent of the various heart conditions. Most patients were young or middle-aged, ranging from twenty to forty years old, and the majority were women. It was a form of heart disease that was mainly valvular, caused by acute rheumatic fever, usually attacking the bicuspid and aortic valves, causing stenosis or valve insufficiency and blood circulation stasis that would eventually lead to overall heart insufficiency.

Yixun said, “So, do you think Wu’s dizziness has something to do with rheumatic heart disease?”

Dr. Tang said it was possible because a minority of patients might have shortness of breath or faint when the symptoms got worse. As Dr. Tang was talking, he and Wu exchanged a glance, a quick one, barely noticeable. In the face of Yixun’s careful concern, both seemed a little bit ashamed. They hadn’t expected that Yixun would invite Dr. Tang for a beer and have such a friendly conversation with him. It was, of course, the normal attitude of a normal person: Yixun felt indebted to the doctor for his kindness — Wu described in her letter to him how Dr. Tang came to her rescue when she passed out in the clinic and how he managed to get her into the internal medicine ward. When Dr. Tang told Yixun that there usually wasn’t great danger as long as the patient took care to rest and avoided intense physical activity, Yixun felt reassured.

Three days later when Yixun was returning to the farm, Wu packed the cream-coloured jumper she had knitted into his luggage.

Their house went quiet for a few days. Wu lay quietly on the bed, often without moving, as if she were really afraid of intense activity. Tiao felt everything was fine, as if Dr. Tang had never appeared in their house — which was when she realized that she had never liked Dr. Tang, even if he had saved Wu’s life a hundred times over. But the calm lasted only a few days, after which Wu started to get active. Apparently it had become inconvenient for her to invite Dr. Tang home anymore, or she felt embarrassed to invite him over so quickly — so soon after Yixun had been there. She didn’t want the children to notice the obvious contrast; she already felt Tiao’s awkwardness was harder and harder to handle, so she decided to go out.

She must be going either to the hospital or Dr. Tang’s place, Tiao thought. Wu often went out after dark and didn’t come back until very late. Before she left, she always spent a long time in front of the mirror, combing her hair, gazing at her reflection, changing clothes and practicing pleasant expressions, checking both her front view and side view. How wilted and spiritless she appeared when she was tossing around on her pillow, her hair dishevelled and her eyes dull, with drool at the corner of her mouth, thin and silvery, like a snail track. Had Dr. Tang seen her this way? If Dr. Tang saw this side of her, would he still want her to visit him?

But when Wu stood before the mirror and prepared to leave, she seemed to have turned into a completely different person, enthusiastic and energetic, her entire body lit up like a candle. Sometimes she even brought one or two dishes along, food for Dr. Tang. For this reason she had to enter the kitchen, the place she had always hated. Clumsily, she’d make fried eggplant and beef-carrot stew. She would put up with Tiao’s comments, believing Tiao was just being intentionally hurtful. Tiao made a point of saying that Wu’s cooking was bland, that the beef-carrot stew wouldn’t be tasty if she didn’t use curry powder. Wu then humbly asked where the curry powder was, but Tiao declared happily she didn’t have any and they just couldn’t find curry powder in Fuan, that the curry powder they used to have came with them from Beijing. Wu never noticed that Tiao had been removing the seasonings little by little. She hid them so Wu wouldn’t find them and use them, because they had all become too closely associated with Dr. Tang.

When Wu was not home, Tiao flipped through the pages of The Family Medical Encyclopedia that Dr. Tang had given Wu. She turned to the section on rheumatic heart disease, but unfortunately there were too many words she didn’t understand. She looked at pictures of ugly human bodies, one of which was a woman with a curled, upside-down baby in her belly. Tiao wrote a line in pencil in the margin next to the baby, “This is Dr. Tang.” Why would she pick a baby and make it into Dr. Tang? Was it because only a baby like that was less powerful than she was? She then could freely express her contempt for the adult Dr. Tang through this fetus.

Wu still went to see Dr. Tang, carrying her lunch box, offering Dr. Tang the food she cooked, and herself. One evening she left, and didn’t come home the whole night. It was on that night that Fan had a high fever. Having a fever, having a fever. Precisely the words Fan always used when she was playing the doctor-patient game. Her entire body was burning hot, her face all red, and her nostrils flaring. She said she was very thirsty and wanted Tiao to cuddle her. Tiao held her in her arms and let Fan’s fever scald her. She gave Fan water and orange juice, but neither could lower her temperature. Where was Wu? Both of them needed her. When Fan’s fever made her cry, Tiao cried with her. She patted Fan’s back with her small hand and said, “Let me tell you a story. Don’t you love to listen to stories?” But Fan was not interested in stories. She must have felt terrible. She kept coughing and threw up several times. Her coughing and vomiting made her sound both old and young, like an old man trapped in a child’s body. Tiao’s heart was broken into a thousand pieces; Fan’s suffering gripped her with pain. She hated Wu, thinking how she would shout at her when she came home. She held Fan in her arms all night long. Young and small as she was, she took on the responsibility of caring for Fan, who was smaller and weaker than she. She didn’t close her eyes the whole night, washing her face when she felt sleepy. She was determined to wait for Wu to come home with open eyes, letting Wu see for herself that Tiao had been waiting for her all night. At daybreak Wu opened the door and tiptoed in.