Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Yiyun Li

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СКАЧАТЬ “that if we’ve made the decision collectively, you should honor it.”

      I could feel the other girls’ animosity. I had made myself into a hedgehog, with its many arrows, which could neither protect itself nor frighten its enemies, sticking out ridiculously.

      “I’ll sleep alone, then, too,” Nan said.

      “But it’s not fair,” Ping said. “I don’t understand why some people feel they have the right to be special.”

      People make fools of themselves in this or that way— Professor Shan’s words came back to me later that night, when I tried to stay still under the ice-cold quilt; neither you nor I are exempt, she had said, but we do our best, do you understand?

      The snow stopped the next day. The city, having no means to deal with the snow, had been paralyzed by the storm. The afternoon drills were called off, and when we arrived at the city center, with shovels and pickaxes, most of the roads were covered by frozen snow that had been packed hard by wheels and feet. “Soldiers,” announced a general who drove past us in a Jeep with Major Tang, speaking through a megaphone. “You’ve been fed by the army, and now it’s time to prove your value to the army.”

      The city, where proprietors of small shops called out to passersby for business, and peddlers fought to sell fruits and other goods, as I had found out during my only Sunday visit, was vacant. The streetlamps were scarcely lit, perhaps to conserve energy. A few early stars flickered in the sky, which was a smooth dome of deep blue. Once in a while a bus, empty and lit dimly from inside, rattled past us, and we would stop our pickaxes and shovels to watch the wheels leave hard tracks in the newly loosened snow.

      “What do you mean you can’t finish?” Major Tang yelled at Lieutenant Wei, when she reported to him, an hour into cleaning, that she worried we had been assigned too much. The night wind cut into our cheeks as if with a thin blade, but more dispiriting than the pain was the endless road. “The word impossible does not exist in the military dictionary. Now, Lieutenant, do you and your soldiers have the courage to face the challenge from nature?”

      “Yes, Major,” Lieutenant Wei replied.

      Major Tang told us that dinner would be ready only when the road was cleared. “Now let’s sing a song to boost our morale,” he said, and ordered us to sing “The Marching Song of the Red Women’s Warriors.”

      An hour and then two hours later, the platoon still saw no hope of finishing the road. Ping threw her shovel onto the hard snow and began to cry. Our squad leader tried to hush her, but halfway through her sentence, she was choked by tears, too. I leaned on the handle of the pickax and watched a few of my squad mates join in the crying, their world complicated only by the most superficial dilemmas.

      Lieutenant Wei came toward our squad, and without a word grabbed the pickax from my hands and lifted it over her head. The ground shook when the pickax hit the hard snow, and more girls stopped shoveling. Lieutenant Wei looked possessed, her jaws tight, her arms brandishing the pickax with mad force. Ping stopped crying and, shivering, hid behind another girl. Nan shook her head before picking up the shovel again, trying to pry loose the snow that Lieutenant Wei’s pickax had cracked.

      It was after midnight when we returned to the barracks. Nan said that she had changed her mind, and she wanted a bedmate too. “I won’t do it,” I said when my squad mates looked at me, and I said it again to Lieutenant Wei. The lights-out bugle blew, the drawn-out tune seeming to take forever to reach the end. She had no great desire to live, I remembered from one of Lawrence’s stories, underlined twice with red pen by Professor Shan. I wondered if she had thought that she, too, lacked a great desire to live, but that must not be the case: People who do not cling to life perish, one way or another. As far as I could see, Professor Shan would live forever in her flat, watching with all-seeing eyes those who peopled her books; perhaps she was thinking of me at this very moment, shaking her head at my follies.

      I climbed into bed before Lieutenant Wei left the barracks, and turned my back to my squad.

      EIGHT

      IN LATE JANUARY, three days after the Lunar New Year, I left home to return to the army. I did not tell my parents that there was still another week until the holiday leave ended, nor did I inform anyone at the camp of my decision to return early.

      “Would you like me to see you off at the train station?” my mother asked when I came into her bedroom to say goodbye. She was leaning against a stack of pillows on her bed, an old novel, its pages yellow and fragile, resting on her chest as if her hands were no longer strong enough to lift the book. She had become less careful with her looks, strands of hair going astray, pajamas worn all day long where before she had always dressed herself at dawn; she looked frailer, too. On the day I returned from the army, she had seemed happy to see me.

      There was no need, I replied. My father, standing in the doorway with a duffel bag in his hand, waited for us to finish our farewell. In the duffel bag he had packed, heads to ends, two dozen pickled eggs, wrapped up neatly in four columns of newspaper. I had told him not to bother with the eggs, but he had insisted that I looked ill-fed.

      “So, you are doing well in the army?” my mother asked.

      I said that all was well. I had noticed, upon returning, that my mother would sometimes make an effort to chat with me, but her interest was fleeting, and she was easily tired or bored by me; so eventually we settled into the old mode, conversations between us polite and formal. My father, too, seemed to cling to my presence more than before: In the mornings when he returned home from the night shift, he would pick up two pieces of fried bread from the street peddler and watch me eat them before they turned cold. The previous day he insisted on accompanying me when I went to the stores to buy a few things for the camp, looking away when I asked the clerk for sanitary napkins.

      Had they missed me while I was gone? I could not tell. My parents had always been quiet around each other, simple household communications transmitted not by words: My father, upon returning from work in the morning, would brew the tea and then hand a cup to my mother, who would by then have groomed and dressed herself; when breakfast was ready, he’d place her plate first on the table, and she would join us without having to be reminded, though she rarely touched the food. My father would nap from mid-morning to early afternoon, and my mother left the flat when he slept. I never knew where she went, but she always came back and rested in bed when my father got up to finish the day’s chores. When she became weaker, she no longer took long walks when my father napped. They must have talked to each other, but mostly there was silence between them, a comfort more than a reason for resentment. I believe, to this day, that despite its cruelty, fate granted them the best companions they could have asked for in a marriage: They knew what they needed from each other, and they did not request what they could not have.

      My mother told me to come closer to her bed. My father nodded at me in a pleading way, and she told me to bend over so she could have a good look at my face. She touched my cheeks where the frostbitten skin was now puffy and tender, with a yellowish hue, which gave my face the look of a rotten apple. “Look what they did to you,” my mother said, as if she had noticed it for the first time.

      The frostbite is getting better, I said, and then asked my father if it was time for us to go.

      “Things get better. Or else they get worse,” my mother said. “You should learn to take care of your face. You are prettier than you let yourself believe.”

      I don’t mind looking ugly, I said.

      “You should know that you СКАЧАТЬ