Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

“I’ll tear out your tongue if you ask Zhuang Laoshi what to eat again,” Niu Yueqing said, before going out the door and walking downstairs. She stopped and shouted up, “Liu Yue, bring me a handful of watermelon seeds, will you?”

The girl grabbed a handful of seeds and took them down for Niu Yueqing, who walked off to work, cracking seeds along the way. Liu Yue went back into the living room and sat down with some seeds of her own before heading over to the study.

She looked inside. “What are you writing? Why don’t you open the window a crack? You’re disappearing into a cloud of cigarette smoke.”

“Leave me alone. I’m writing a rebuttal.”

Feeling bored, she went to her room to sew buttons on a shirt, but fell asleep before she was finished.

Zhuang felt jumpy after an hour of writing, so he called the magazine office to ask for Zhou Min. When Zhou picked up the phone, Zhuang told him to relate what had happened at the Performance Evaluation Office to the editor-in-chief; Zhou was to stress to him that Zhuang would personally go see the head of the Department of Culture. After the call, he felt like snacking on something, so he went into the kitchen, where he spotted a plate of plums on the table. He picked one up and ate it, and, wanting to share some with Liu Yue, he called out to the girl, but got no response. So he went to her bedroom. She was lying on her back; a button on her open blouse had been sewn on, but she hadn’t had time to cut off the thread on the needle. The skin below her bra looked fair and tender. Zhuang laughed and, unable to resist, unhooked her bra and untied her skirt so he could quietly feast on her pretty body. ☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐ [The author has deleted 38 words.] Afraid that he might wake her up, he rubbed a plum gently on that special place, and, to his surprise, it opened up to catch the plum, presenting a remarkable sight. Laughing silently, he gently backed out of the room to resume his writing in his study, and promptly forgot about it.

At around ten o’clock that morning, someone knocked at the door. He went to answer it; it was Mr. Huang, the plant owner, drenched in sweat and looking harried.

“Ai-ya. I was afraid you might be out. Great, you’re home. I made you three curio cases and brought them over in a three-wheeler. They’re downstairs, but don’t worry. I’ll carry them up for you.”

“Why did you do that? You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. Wait, Liu Yue and I will give you a hand.”

“I can’t let you help,” Huang said as he walked downstairs. “Just Liu Yue will do.”

She was half-awake when Huang knocked on the door. Then she heard Zhuang opening her door, so she shut her eyes and went back to sleep. When she then heard someone calling her to move something, she got up and ran for the bedroom door, realizing that her blouse was unbuttoned and she wasn’t wearing her bra and skirt. A stuffed-up sensation down below caught her attention. She shrieked, and that reminded Zhuang of what he had done earlier. He shut the door and walked over.

“You’re so bad, Zhuang Laoshi.”

“What’s Laoshi done now?” He feigned ignorance. “Ai, Liu Yue, what have you put down there? Trying to pickle a plum?”

“Right,” she said. “A plum in sugar water. Want some?”

He went up and pressed her down to retrieve the plum, but he had to part her labia to get to it.

“It’s not clean,” she said when he was about to put it in his mouth.

“Every part of Liu Yue’s body is clean.” He took a bite before she snatched the remaining piece and put it in her mouth. They giggled.

“You’re teasing me with this prank,” she said. “Would you do that with Wan’er?”

“I wanted to share some plums with you, but you were asleep. You looked so fetching, I couldn’t help myself.”

“You don’t love me anymore,” she pouted. “I’m just a servant to you. She was mean to me when we argued, but instead of saying anything to her, you slapped me. No one’s ever done that to me, not even my parents.”

“How else could I have given her a way to save face? You were in the wrong, and you got sassy when I came home. If I hadn’t slapped you and she suspected us, what do you think she would do to you? And now you’re mad at me.”

“Why didn’t you say even a word to her?”

“She is, after all, the mistress of the house. I didn’t say anything to her in front of you, but do you know what I did after you went to Wan’er’s? Nothing physical, but our hearts grew more distant, while my heart is now closer to you after the slap.”

“Liu Yue is a fool, and you’re trying to fool her,” she complained.

Plant owner Huang knocked again, so she quickly dressed and went out with Zhuang to open the door and help Huang and another man move the cases inside. He had already worked up a sweat; his shirt was dripping wet.

“Liu Yue, maids at the prime minister’s house are more powerful than a county official. You work for a writer, so that makes you one, too. Mr. Zhuang doesn’t have to come help me, but you should. No matter what anyone says, I’m one of the city’s outstanding agricultural entrepreneurs.”

“Didn’t you notice that I had something in my eye that made it water?” she said before going downstairs to help with the second case.

When all the cases were in, Liu Yue went into the bathroom to wash her hands and wipe her privates with a towel, singing a tune the whole time she was in there.

“You have such a nice voice, Liu Yue,” Huang said. “Why don’t you come out and sing for us?”

She stopped singing. After emerging from the bathroom, she made tea and carried out the plums from the kitchen. Huang said he couldn’t eat anything sour, that just looking at tart fruit made his teeth hurt.

“Too bad for you,” she said. “If you don’t want them, Zhuang Laoshi will eat them all. He loves the things.”

After picking one out for Zhuang, she dusted the curio cases and pointed out where they should go.

“I hope you like them, Mr. Zhuang,” Huang said. “A man like you, who has made so many important contributions, must have a case or two. You can’t display all your antiques on bookshelves. I had these made long ago, but I couldn’t find the time to come into the city until this morning, when I brought my wife to the hospital in a truck.”

“The hospital? Is she all right?” Zhuang asked. “She looked fine when I saw her.”

“Speaking of that, why didn’t you stay? If you’d written your book there, I could have preserved the room as a cultural relic and turned it into an exhibit hall in the future. You’ve seen my wife, who is not a very presentable woman. She loves to talk and is lucky her mouth is made of flesh and blood. If her lips were made of clay, they’d have broken into pieces long ago. Women, especially those in the countryside, have no vision. She knows nothing about my career, let alone my aspirations. She is definitely not my soul mate. With a wife like that, I don’t even feel like talking, but she won’t give me a minute’s peace. She’s always nagging me about one thing or another, constantly raising hell, and now she’s gone and drunk pesticide, a whole mugful. What could I do but send her to the hospital?”

“Pesticide?” Zhuang was stunned. “Mr. Huang, you’re in big trouble. That’s like poking a hole in the sky. You should be at the hospital, not bringing me curio cases.”

“When I took her to the emergency room, the doctor said the husband should stay away in cases when a couple has argued and the wife takes poison, because she won’t cooperate with the doctor if she sees her husband. That made sense to me, so I left a woman there to help out, and here I am. So what if she dies — I didn’t strangle her. I carried out my responsibility as a husband by taking her to the hospital.”