The Bathing Women (28 page)

“You’re probably playing a harp for a cow,” Fei said.

“You’re no cow listening to a harp,” Fang Jing said. “You’re a woman with a beautiful mouth. Only the right corner of your mouth might give a nervous twitch once in a while. You must do that unconsciously, but you should try to correct it consciously. Please forgive my straightforward suggestion to a woman with such a beautiful mouth as yours.”

Fei licked her lips unconsciously. This was a mouth she herself truly loved, but she had never been aware of this flaw until Fang Jing pointed it out. She had to admire the accuracy of his observation, although his opinions about mouths could hardly be considered profound. She didn’t want to pursue the topic any further because she’d already started to feel a bit uncomfortable about her mouth. This mouth of hers, which had never kissed or been kissed, was at once full and empty, moist and dry, rich and desolate. It seemed as if it were her last piece of territory, her last piece of virgin land. Fang Jing made her self-conscious about it, and she almost told him this sad secret of hers. Not that his opinions about mouths moved her, but the sophisticated conversation of a mature man confused her. Never in her life had someone like Fang Jing made her the subject of so unique a form of flattery. She thought of what he said about her Vivien Leigh mouth. No matter how sure a woman is that a man has something up his sleeve, she’d have a hard time resisting such flattery. But Fei kept quiet to avoid having the mouth say yes when the heart means no, as the expression goes. No one—not even a celebrity—could broach this subject with her, no more than he could touch the mouth.

If the mouth says yes when the heart means no, who could know exactly what was on Fang Jing’s mind when he talked to Fei about the uses of the mouth? The mouth is truly the mysterious abyss of the human body. Fang Jing’s research on mouths probably needed to stop right there.

So, with Fei falling silent, Fang Jing realized he should change the subject. He stood up and led the way out of the park; he was going to treat Fei to a meal at Da Sanyuan.

Restaurants in Beijing in the mid-eighties had few customers and little variety. Da Sanyuan, a venerable Cantonese restaurant, stood out like a crane in a crowd of chickens. They didn’t spend much time eating. Fei seemed to be the one who governed the rhythm of dinner. She’d said that she needed to get back to Fuan on that night’s train.

During dinner, Fang Jing found a little fault with Fei’s table manners, commenting on the fact that she hadn’t learned to chew with her mouth closed. It was a sharp but warranted bit of fussiness, although almost crass, for what risked injuring a woman’s vanity more than finding fault with her chewing? Fortunately, Fei wasn’t sensitive about this because she hadn’t been aware that chewing without closing the mouth was considered impolite; she didn’t quite understand Fang Jing. Still busily chewing her sizzling beef and working her lips, she said, “You mean I make a smacking sound when I eat?”

“No, no. You’re not making a smacking sound,” Fang Jing said, feeling sorry for her. After all, most Chinese people didn’t know how to eat with their mouths closed, so what? He retreated from his efforts to correct her, saying, “I didn’t mean to offend you. I have a habit: when I’m faced with something or someone beautiful, I want everything about her to be beautiful.”

“You mean chewing only with the mouth closed is considered beautiful?” Fei asked.

“Not beautiful, maybe more … more refined.”

Fei tried to eat with her mouth closed but felt a little awkward, as if the food lost its flavour this way. She watched Fang Jing and saw that he did chew food differently from how she did. Maybe his was the correct way. Their eyes met and they laughed.

After dinner, he took out a deep blue jewellery box from the inside pocket of his suit and said it was a ruby ring that he had bought in Paris. He asked Fei to pass the ring on to Tiao.

He opened the jewellery box and suggested that Fei try it on. He said, “I thought a size six would fit Tiao, so that’s what I got.” Fei put the ring on her ring finger and it felt a little tight. Then it would fit Tiao perfectly, she thought, because Tiao’s fingers were a little thinner than hers. She removed the ring and carefully put it back in the jewellery box.

“What should I say to Tiao?” Fei asked.

“Just tell her it’s a keepsake,” Fang Jing said.

They left Da Sanyuan and the night outside seemed drowned in darkness. They walked to the trolley station and Fang Jing suddenly stopped, standing on the pavement and saying, “Fei, can we part in an unusual way?”

“What way?” Fei asked.

“I think I would consent if you wanted to kiss me.”

“What did you say?” Fei pretended she hadn’t heard properly.

Fang Jing repeated himself. The right corner of Fei’s mouth twitched again unconsciously. Her lips felt swollen, like they were stung by a bee or she had eaten something too spicy. The impression that Fang Jing had made on her from their initial meeting through the dinner was much better than she had expected—his talk in Jing Mountain Park had brought about a strange, and not very respectable, flash of emotion. Even his advice about her chewing had given her the feeling that he was concerned about her. But the way he proposed a farewell kiss brought her back to herself. How conceited and hypocritical! Later, she would wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t said, “I think I would consent if you wanted to kiss me,” but “Can I kiss you?” What would she have done? Maybe she would have broken her rule and let him kiss her—she was no saint. The chance to meet someone like Fang Jing didn’t come along every day. Only once. In her heart, she would have first asked forgiveness of Tiao.

But that was not how Fang Jing had put it.

The cool evening breeze sobered Fei. She suddenly swept aside her nervousness and the sense of inferiority she had experienced in Fang Jing’s company all afternoon; she felt now that she was no less a person than this celebrity in front of her. She stood facing him with her arms crossed and said, “You mean you are willing to grant me a kiss? A kiss, right here on this main street?”

Fang Jing stared at her mouth and said, “I’ve already agreed.”

“But I haven’t agreed,” Fei said. “You think every woman can’t wait to kiss you? Do you want me to thank you for taking advantage of me? You’ve got the wrong person. Isn’t the mouth the path to the heart? Now this mouth of mine is telling you what my heart most wants to say: ‘In your dreams.’” That said, she ran across the street in quick steps, leaving Fang Jing alone in the shadows of the trees on the opposite side.

She sat in the dimly lit, smoke-filled train and felt lucky that Fang Jing’s final proposition had given her a chance, a satisfying chance, to reject and embarrass him. He’d asked for it. In retrospect, she also felt a little panic, she’d come so close—just an inch more and she would have crossed the line and let Tiao down. What kind of person was she? She looked at the dark mass outside and caught sight of her reflection on the window glass, her eye sockets deeply sunken, her face sallow. She suddenly wanted to cry.

5

A well-dressed woman with an elegant gait crossed the main street in downtown Fuan and turned into a quiet alley. She had just been treated to lunch by an author who had published a book with her publishing house. She finished her meal and said goodbye to everyone in her party. Passersby wouldn’t have seen anything unusual about the woman, who strolled at a leisurely pace but who was actually fighting an ongoing battle in her mouth, with the tip of her tongue against her teeth. During lunch, a piece of donkey meat had got stuck in her teeth. Covering her mouth with one hand, she’d wielded a toothpick in the other, but she hadn’t succeeded in dislodging it. There is a saying that goes, “The eyes can’t take a grain of sand.” Actually, a mouth can’t take a grain of sand, either, or a speck of food, or a bit of meat. The foreign thing in the woman’s teeth distracted her, but she managed to appear calm, which was the only way she could behave on the busy street. Tightly, she closed her mouth; fiercely, she used all her strength to lick the crevice with her tongue. Her tongue had already located it but was unable to drag the meat out. Fingerless as the tongue is, all it can do is lick. Her annoyance grew as she licked. It must have been an old donkey, otherwise why was the meat so tough? But why did she have to eat it? Donkey meat is a delicacy of Fuan. Although it’s hardly considered elegant, most Fuaners love it. She loved the meat but not the word “donkey.” Many people avoid saying certain words, and without necessarily having a good reason—she herself didn’t like to say “donkey” because it felt as if she were saying a bad word. Now here she was, troubled by “donkey.” Finally, she turned down a very quiet alley. Looking around and seeing no one, she opened her mouth and inelegantly inserted her hand. Her fingers reached the meat that had been bothering her. With head cocked, and mouth grotesquely gaping, she finally extracted the meat. She felt triumphant. Because her mouth had stayed open for so long, she’d drooled and her jaw felt sore. She wiped away the saliva with a tissue, and to exercise her jaw she loudly smacked her lips. With the help of publicly unacceptable behaviour, she’d finally gotten rid of the “foreign element” in her mouth. Her manners had been truly unrefined, but when she looked around and found the alley still empty, she seemed pleased with herself.

The woman was Tiao.

Who made Tiao a person so generous with life, dutiful to her employer, the publishers, and full of kindness toward her colleagues, and even the unfriendly ones? Who made it possible for her to smile even at people who hurt her? What made her forgiving of Fan’s meanness and tolerant of Fang Jing’s wanton behaviour? Who had such power? Who? Tiao often asked herself these questions. Her heart told her that love and kindness alone wouldn’t have such power. It was Quan.

Quan, who had rushed into the manhole with her little hands waving many, many years ago, had always been the most intimate shadow in Tiao’s heart, her closest companion, who would come at her beckoning but not leave at her dismissal. This little two-year-old beauty turned Tiao into someone furtive, a perennial debtor. Poor and vulnerable. Vulnerable and poor, burdened with a lifelong debt she could never repay, she feared Quan, on whose account she had lost her innocence forever, and she was also grateful to Quan. This dead child terrified and fulfilled her at the same time. She couldn’t possibly have imagined how a dead child would shape a living personality. When people praised her she would lose herself in the momentary intoxication. She almost believed that she was born with such kindness and honesty. How absurd that was! In her heart, she laughed at herself, and speculated maliciously that many excellent people like her, or those who were considered excellent, hid secrets that couldn’t stand the light—were more secretive than ordinary people, she perversely believed. Their values came not from inborn excellence but from their lifelong efforts to annihilate the darkness in their hearts.

Once Chen Zai had told her a story about a worker in the factory in which he used to work. The man lost his father at a young age and his family was very poor. He had to support his mother and two sisters on one salary. But he especially enjoyed helping people, volunteering to fix watches, radios, and bikes for his colleagues, in addition to buying the parts with his own money. Slowly, he became the first person of whom people in need would think. He went to the hospital to take care of the sick for his colleagues and to the train station to pick up people. Later he committed a crime; he strangled his roommate. He committed the murder because the roommate caught him stealing sixty
jin
of rice coupons from him. It was a period of rationing in China, and almost everything had to be bought with coupons. Rice was precious, so rice coupons seemed more precious than rice. At the time they were not twenty years old yet, an age when their bodies were growing and hunger was a constant sensation for them. His roommate had just brought the sixty-
jin
coupon, which his parents had saved and given to him, and he happened to come on the worker when he was stealing his rice coupons. Chen Zai said the roommate must have been shocked—not that someone was stealing his rice coupons, but that the thief was someone of whom no one would ever think this, a person known for his good heart and for having done all he could to help people, never turning down any request for assistance. He was shocked, and his shock must have been hard for the worker to take, so he had to destroy the shock in the form of the person. He strangled his roommate. When the news broke, the entire factory was dumbfounded—no one could believe the worker was a killer. When people learned of the motive, they were even more dumbfounded. So he was a thief; a person who helped people all the time could be a thief. Chen Zai said the worker was soon sentenced to death. On the day of the execution, many from the factory went into the street to see him. Back then, convicts condemned to death would be put on display before the execution; they generally didn’t know that they had the right to refuse to participate in the demonstration. Hog-tied, the worker was escorted on a truck that drove around the city, so every passerby could observe him. Chen Zai also saw him on the truck. He said there was no fear in his eyes. Hatred was there instead. At that moment, Chen Zai felt he couldn’t comprehend him. It was unclear whether the man on the truck hated humankind or merely himself. Those who saw him in the street wouldn’t have known what had happened to him, what he was like before, and it would be impossible for them to know later.

Tiao felt a familiarity and an unease when Chen Zai told her this story, particularly when he said the word “killer.” “Killer”—she’d thought about the word hundreds of times, and sensed some connection between herself and the executed worker. Then she desperately tried to absolve herself: the worker killed to eradicate his own dishonour; she “killed” to eradicate the dishonour of her family. The adults in her family created the dishonour and it should have been those adults who eradicated it, but she took on the responsibility. She played the role. When Quan rushed into the manhole with her little arms waving, Tiao pulled on Fan’s hand. The pull was an attempt to stop Fan and therefore an effort to kill Quan. Who was Fang Jing? Wasn’t Fang Jing the first person who emerged to punish her?