The Bathing Women. Tie Ning

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ admitted that the jumper was for Dr. Tang. It was Dr. Tang who had asked her to knit a jumper for him. Dr. Tang was not married yet and he needed someone to take care of him. So she agreed to knit this for him. She was even going to try to find him a girlfriend … She didn’t know why she was babbling all of this to Tiao.

      “Then why did you say you were knitting this for yourself?” Tiao still didn’t let it go.

      Wu’s guilt turned into anger. She said, “What do you want? What do you really want from me? Why do you upset me so much? Don’t you know that I’m ill?”

      “If you’re ill, then why do you spend so much time knitting?” Tiao didn’t back down.

      “I spend so much time knitting because … because I hope to spend more time at home with you. Does my doing this bother you? Look at the other children in the Architectural Design Academy. Don’t they all have to stay home by themselves, pathetically wasting their lives? Not all parents are as lucky as we are: to be able to have one of us at home to take an interest in our children.”

      Tiao didn’t say anything more. She was thinking Wu might be right, but mostly her mind was filled with doubt. Wu spoke about “taking an interest” but Tiao didn’t see any of it from her. She was not concerned about the sisters; didn’t notice Fan had lost her front tooth, and didn’t ask once what they had eaten every day in the last half a year. The way Tiao was mistreated for not knowing how to speak the Fuan dialect—Wu had never asked about any of this. So Tiao was more skeptical than trusting. And she didn’t believe that Wu believed her own words, either. Her years of suspicion crystallized into doubt at that moment. This was sad for both mother and daughter, and something that neither seemed to be able to do anything about, which made it feel more cruel to have to accept.

      Wu didn’t feel she had won just because Tiao didn’t reply, but she preferred not to think about it any further. She was the kind of person who didn’t like to think deeply, a lifelong escapist. Her mind was not large enough to accommodate either caring for others or self-analysis. She clutched the jumper and returned to bed and to her big crumpled pillow to resume knitting. By the lamplight, she used the bamboo knitting needles to pick up the loose stitches one by one and finished the sleeve and the entire jumper in a single night.

      Then she bought some yarn to knit a jumper for Yixun. She changed the colour to a cream. She knitted day and night, her hands flying and her eyes getting bloodshot, as if she wanted to work off her guilt with the unusual knitting as well as ease her nerves. She knitted with great skill and she herself was surprised by the speed: she took only seven days to knit jumpers for two men. Seven days; she had never come close to that mark, not before or afterwards. Whether it was to punish herself for her fall or to ease the way for her to fall further, she didn’t know. She had a feeling that her relationship with Dr. Tang had not yet run its course.

      Neither had had their fill of each other. Almost every Sunday, Dr. Tang came to Wu’s house for dinner. When Wu’s month of sick leave was up, he renewed it for another month. If he continued to renew her sick leave without anyone noticing, wouldn’t she be able to stay at home for a long time? This was something she hardly dared to imagine but wished for with all of her heart. When the Cultural Revolution turned violent, she became what was known as a wanderer, and she really wanted to be one. “Wanderers” was the label given to the faction of people who avoided political campaigns and labour reform and refused to take a stand on matters of principle. This group—muddleheaded, backward—couldn’t be brought onto the stage to play their parts in history. If a doctor were found to provide a false certification for a patient, the consequences could be very severe. They wouldn’t merely say he was violating professional ethics, which wouldn’t be a serious enough charge. They would accuse him of undermining the great revolution, that is, being antirevolutionary. And Dr. Tang might very likely get arrested as an antirevolutionary. Dr. Tang was in fact risking his life, for Wu.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ