The Bathing Women. Tie Ning

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СКАЧАТЬ face, so she tiptoed to the door and gently pushed it open. A beam of yellow light from the hallway shone on her roommate’s body. She stood in the doorway and angled her head and the mirror toward the light. Tiao looked at her face; it was a beautiful face with a hint of drunken flush. She must have been content with herself at that moment. This girls’ dorm, deep in sleep then, had become rich and peaceful. Tiao was touched by the sight, and not just because of her roommate, but why else, then?

      Another late night, her roommate tossed and turned in her bed after coming back. She leaned her head down to Tiao’s lower bunk and quietly woke her up. Then she climbed down and lay side by side with Tiao, and began to speak in urgent tones. She said, “Tiao, let me tell you—I have to tell you—I’m finally no longer a virgin. A man loves me, and how wonderful a thing it is you couldn’t possibly understand.” She wanted Tiao to guess who the man was, and Tiao guessed a few boys from their class. Miss Upper Bunk said condescendingly, “Them? You can’t mean them!” She said she never would have anything to do with the men on campus. She said they didn’t have brains and she admired men with avant-garde ideas and a unique insight on society, those forward-thinkers who could enlighten people. She had fallen in love with a forward-thinker and that forward thinker liberated her mind and body, turning her from a virgin into a … a woman. “A woman, do you understand or not, Tiao? You have a right to enjoy this, too, and you’ve had this right for a long time, without realizing.” Her upper-bunk roommate described the experience of being with that forward-thinker. She said, “Do you know who he is? You’ll be shocked if I tell you his name.” She paused as if to let the suspense build for Tiao. Tiao was really excited by her words and couldn’t help asking, “Who is he, who is he?” Her upper-bunk roommate took a deep breath and then breathed out a few words gently as if she were afraid of frightening someone away. “The author of Zero Degree File.” The name was indeed breathed out, barely formed on the lips. To this day Tiao still clearly remembers the nervous hot breath of her roommate when she said the words: “Zero Degree File.”

      Zero Degree File was a work of fiction, representative of the “Scar Literature” school, particularly popular among young people, with whom the author of course had made his reputation. At the time, people followed a novel and author with great sincerity and enthusiasm. The enthusiasm might be naïve and shallow, but it had an innocence and purity that would never come again. Tiao would certainly have envied Miss Upper Bunk had she stopped right there, but she couldn’t. She felt compelled to share her intimate happiness with others. She said, “You have to know he’s not an ordinary person but a writer, a writer overflowing with talent. Tiao, you know, only now do I truly understand what ‘overflowing’ means.” She said, “This writer, overflowing with talent, is so good to me. One night I couldn’t fall asleep and I suddenly had a craving for dried hawthorn berries, so I shook him awake and asked him to go out and buy some for me. He actually got up and biked through the entire city looking for dried hawthorn berries. A writer, overflowing with talent, went to buy me dried hawthorn berries in the middle of the night! Did you hear that, Tiao? Did you hear that? Are you still a virgin? Tiao, are you still a virgin? If you are, then you are really being cheated. Don’t you realize how late it’s getting? You’re really good for nothing until you …”

      Tiao didn’t know why her upper-bunk roommate had to associate dried hawthorn fruit with virginity, as if she didn’t deserve to eat dried hawthorn fruit if she were still a virgin. The statement “I’m finally no longer a virgin” jarred Tiao, and made her confused and agitated. In any case, that “finally” shouldn’t be the highest expectation that her roommate should have for her own youth. Maybe she exaggerated. When one era urgently wanted to replace another, everything got exaggerated, everything, from novels to virginity. But the frenzied enthusiasm of her roommate still affected Tiao. When her roommate chattered, she felt like an ignorant moron of a country girl, completely uncultivated, an idiot who’d fallen behind the times and whose youth was flowing away downstream with the current. It was indeed an era of thought liberation, liberation-liberation, and liberation again. The trend swept over Tiao and she felt like she were being dragged along, accused, and ridiculed by her upper-bunk roommate. Her body seemed to be filled with a new and ambiguous desire. She must do something, but even the “must do” was a kind of blind exaggeration. What should she do? She wasn’t dating; there was no man on campus worthy of her attention. Then she should look beyond the campus. One day her roommate said she was going to introduce her to someone. She said, though the guy was neither a writer nor a poet, he was pretty close to poets, an editor for a poetry magazine. She said he was fun to talk to. She said at a literary gathering he read a poem called “My Ass”: “O my ass and this ass of mine, why would I sit down beside the bourgeoisie when I sit down? Stool of the working class, I beg you, I beg you to receive my ignorant ass—even if you are a neglected stool …” Tiao didn’t think it was a poem. Maybe the author was imitating those who did crazy self-denunciations in the denouncement meetings. The “poem” just reminded Tiao of her own butt, making her think about the secret, happy times when she pretended the down pillows were a sofa. She had never realized that one could talk about asses so openly in poetry; after all, very few could have the imposing manner of Chairman Mao, who wrote about asses in his poems. But she went on a date with this editor, deliberately looking for some excitement. After all, she was only a student and the man was the editor of a poetry magazine. An editor was no more than a step below a writer; barely lower than a writer.

      They met on a cold evening in front of the art museum and shook hands with a little stiffness. After the greeting, they began to stroll back and forth. With the thick down jackets and tightly fitting jeans both wore, from a distance they must have looked like a pair of meandering ostriches. Tiao had never gone on a date alone with a man, particularly a man so “close to poets.” As they started to walk around uncomfortably, Tiao was struck with the meaninglessness of it all: What was she doing here? Where did she want to go? Didn’t her roommate tell her that the editor was a married man when she set them up? She meant this to indicate that Tiao could relax; they could date or not, no pressure—can’t a man and woman meet alone, whether they’re on a date or not? In eras like the sixties or seventies it might have seemed absurd, but things were different now. From her roommate’s perspective, only when a single female student dated a married male editor could an era be proved open and a person be proved free. And at this moment, her theory was being put into practice with Tiao’s help. Unfortunately, neither Tiao’s body nor her mind felt free; she was very nervous. When she felt nervous she just babbled. She talked about the boys and girls in her class, the food in their cafeteria, and how their professor of modern literature walked into the classroom with a misbuttoned shirt … she went on and on, quickly and at random, so her conversation wasn’t at all intellectual, clever, fun, or witty. Her mind went completely blank, and her blank mind soberly reminded her again and again how ridiculous her meeting with this “ostrich” beside her was. By spouting endless nonsense, she was simply punishing herself for going on this most absurd date. She rambled on and on, full of anxiety because she had no experience in ending a meeting that should have ended before it began. She even stupidly believed that if she kept on talking without a pause, she could hasten the end of the date. Finally the editor interrupted her, and not until then did she discover how nasal his voice was. She didn’t like men with nasal voices. People who spoke that way sounded pretentious, as if they were practicing pronunciation while speaking. The editor said, “Do you plan to go back to your hometown? Your hometown is Fuan, right? Even though it’s an ancient city, it’s still provincial. I suggest you try and arrange to stay in Beijing for your graduation assignment. It’s the only cultural centre. Of this I’m very sure.”

      Tiao was a little bit offended by the editor’s words. What right did he have to keep saying “your town”? Her upper-bunk roommate said he’d just been transferred to Beijing from Huangtu Plateau a few years ago, and now he talked so patronizingly to Tiao as if he were some kind of master of Beijing. Where was he when she was sipping raspberry soda in the alleys of Beijing?

      Images from the past were still vivid for her: all those things that happened long ago, how she suffered when she first entered the city of Fuan as a young Beijinger. She’d felt wronged as well as proud. She’d tried hard СКАЧАТЬ