The Bathing Women. Tie Ning

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      When he pressed his long, lean body on her ample body, she suddenly felt an unprecedented sense of liberation. Yes, liberation, and she didn’t feel guilty at all. Only then was she convinced that she would truly be adopted by Dr. Tang. The floodgate to her pure desire was thrown open. She clutched his waist with her hands, and she coiled her legs high, hooking her feet tightly around his hips. She didn’t stop and didn’t allow him to stop. Still in motion, she took a pillow and put it under her hips. She wanted him to go deeper and deeper. Until maybe it wasn’t about going deeper anymore; it was about going through her entire body, to pierce her body entirely.

      3

      The night arrived like this: right in the middle of her boredom and brazen anticipation. She inhaled the smell of the laundry room from the pillow, along with the special smell of disinfectant from the hospital ward … laundry room and disinfectant. A healthy woman is put into an isolated room and the mixture of these two smells produces a crazy arousal in parts of her body.

      At this time, in this moment, Wu was suppressing her excitement, waiting in the dark. The night before, as he was leaving her room, Dr. Tang told her that maybe she should have rheumatic heart disease. He would provide her certification of the diagnosis and a note for sick leave, a note that would allow her to rest for a month, which was the longest time that a physician in charge at People’s Hospital could prescribe. She didn’t want to concentrate on the thought that this was what she was waiting for, this note that would allow her to stay at Fuan and at home; that would make her seem degraded. The implication of exchange was all too obvious. She preferred to think she was waiting for the fulfillment of her sexual desire. She had experienced a feeling with him that she had never felt before. It seemed to be a kind of pleasure brought on by a nervousness and secrecy, and also a kind of submission to fate as thorough as if she were falling into an abyss.

      He arrived, and when he put the note into her hand, she turned off the light again. This time she had the urge to caress him; it might be the female’s most primitive physical expression of gratitude. She stroked his hair and his face, which she was not really familiar with; she lay down on him and looked for his lips. She hadn’t touched his lips and he hadn’t touched hers, either. She discovered he didn’t like her to get near his face. When her hair brushed the corner of his mouth, he reached out his hands to hold her head, as if to avoid her. He held her head and pushed it all the way down, down. Her head, mouth, and face slipped further and further down, over his chest and stomach, then to that thicket of thorns, dense and a little scratchy. She didn’t remember when he left the room. When she calmed down and was about to wipe her body, she noticed that she was still clutching the sick leave note.

      She left the hospital and returned home. She announced to the sisters that she could stay at home for a month, a month. After she said that, she lay back on her bed. She remembered she had rheumatic heart disease, so she needed to lie in bed. She leaned back against that big wide feather pillow and wrote separate letters to Yixun and to the farm leader, enclosing the certificate of diagnosis and the sick leave note. She asked Tiao to go out to post the letters for her. Tiao held the letters and asked her, “Mum, what do you want to eat?”

      What do I want to eat? Wu listened to Tiao’s question and looked at her eleven-year-old daughter. The question obviously showed her daughter’s concern for her, and it was unusual for a girl at such a young age to know how to take care of people, but the closeness between mother and daughter also seemed to be missing. Tiao never played cute with her, nor did she ever throw tantrums. And Wu never knew what was in Tiao’s small head. Fan, who had just turned six, seemed to be under her older sister’s influence. She stood next to Tiao and asked Wu in an adult way, “Mum, what do you want to eat?” As if she could cook anything her mum wanted to eat. Looking at her daughters, for a moment Wu felt like she had become a guest in the house, and the two sisters were the hosts. But she still gave serious thought to what she wanted to eat. She said, “Mum wants to eat fish.”

      Tiao posted the letter at the post office, then went to the grocery store and bought a big live carp. The grocer tied the fish’s mouth shut with a string of iris grass and handed it over to Tiao. She always remembered the price of that carp: ninety-five cents. She would forget many things over the years but not the ninety-five-cent carp. Her mood at the time was also memorable: she walked home carrying the swinging fish, straining a little bit, but feeling happy, confident, and proud. She liked having Wu back to prop up the family; she also wanted Wu to see that Tiao was not an ordinary girl in her parents’ absence. She wasn’t only capable of buying things, but she also knew how to cook them. She returned home, put the fish in the sink, removed the scales, cut open the belly, rinsed the cavity, drained it, picked up the cleaver and made diagonal cuts on the fish’s body, then patted a thin layer of cornstarch onto the fish and fried it … In the end she produced a braised carp and took it to Wu. Her little face was red from the heat of the greasy smoke, and the sweat made her fringe stick to her forehead; the sleeves of her shirt were rolled up, revealing her tiny arms.

      Fan ran around and cheered; she was proud of her older sister. She also took the opportunity to show off her own cooking tips, saying, “Mum, do you know what to do if you accidentally break the fish’s gallbladder when you’re cleaning it? You pour some white wine right away into the fish belly …”

      Tiao’s braised carp took Wu by surprise. She felt a lump in her throat, yes, a lump, and then she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried since getting home; the tears came from the kind of guilt that can’t be eased with an apology. She realized then that she hadn’t asked about the two children’s lives since she came home, how school was, what they ate every day, and whether they were being bullied or not. She really wanted to hold them to her breast and hug them tightly, but she didn’t seem able to. Not every mother is capable of loving her child, although every child in the world longs to be loved. Not every mother can give off the maternal glow, although every child in the world longs to be bathed in it. Tiao always guarded herself against possible closeness with Wu, including the occasions when her mother cried. When tears threatened to bring them closer to one another, Tiao got embarrassed. This would be their regret, as mother and daughter, all their lives: they almost never could laugh or cry at the same time; either the mother was half a beat slower, or the other way around. That was why Wu’s tears now couldn’t move and comfort Tiao; Tiao just tried her hardest simply to understand her mother, and felt proud of herself for the effort.

      They began to eat the fish. Wu said, “I’m going to knit a jumper for each of you.” She said it eagerly, as if knitting jumpers were another form of embrace. She couldn’t hug them, so she was going to knit for them. Tiao said, “Knit one for Fan first. Rose is the prettiest colour, isn’t it, Fan?”

      Fan said, “Rose is the prettiest colour and it’s the only colour I want.” This loyalty of hers to Tiao, this enthusiastic response, made Tiao feel like it had been a dream whenever she recalled it later. Next, as if to go along with the pleasant atmosphere, Wu talked about her plan to invite a guest over for dinner. She said that during her stay in hospital, she had been really fortunate to have Dr. Tang. So, to express her gratitude, she wanted to invite him over for dinner. She said, “You’re both young and don’t know how hard it is to see a doctor.” If there hadn’t been this Dr. Tang, her life might have been in danger, not to mention the sick leave. She deliberately said the words “sick leave” softly, under her breath, but Tiao still heard her. If there hadn’t been this sick leave, she wouldn’t be able to stay at home for a month. Tiao said she didn’t understand. “Didn’t you get the sick leave because you were sick? Why was it because of the doctor that you got the sick leave?”

      Wu said, “Not every patient could get permission to rest. To put it simply, Dr. Tang is important and someone we should thank.”

      So they thanked him. It was a Sunday and Wu broke her routine and got up early. She asked Tiao to help her in the СКАЧАТЬ