The Bathing Women (19 page)
Authors: Tie Ning
Dr. Tang’s expression changed. He walked toward Fei and patted the table gently, “What sick-leave note? What nonsense are you talking?”
Fei said, “You wrote a fake sick-leave note for Tiao’s mother. You and she also … have acted like hooligans. You thought I didn’t know? I’m going to expose you. I’m going to the revolutionary committee of your hospital to expose you.” She stood up as she was talking, and ran to the door like a wild animal. She was afraid she was going to cry if she stayed any longer. She felt very sad for her underhanded behaviour and for bringing up her innocent friend, Tiao, although she did resent Tiao’s mother.
Dr. Tang stopped his niece, saying, “You’re getting hysterical. Don’t be so hysterical!” He grabbed her arms to force her to sit, trying to maintain his adult dignity as much as possible. “Stop your hysteria. I will think about the surgery. Give me some time.”
Dr. Tang racked his brain. He worked in a place where there were countless doctors, but he knew he couldn’t get help from anyone because of the need to protect Fei’s reputation, so he could only rely on himself. He must take the risk. He borrowed a few books to get an idea of the surgery and the instruments he would need. Then, during the day, he inspected an ob-gyn operating room. He decided to jimmy the door open at night to get in, block the window with a blanket to prevent the light from being seen outside, and then perform the surgery in secret. It took him about a week to finish the preparations. He knew he couldn’t delay. The longer he waited, the more dangerous the procedure became.
They did it. To prevent Fei from making noise because of the pain, he gagged her mouth with gauze beforehand.
Dr. Tang, who was no stranger to human organs and had interned in the surgery department as a medical student, was not at all confident about this minor ob-gyn operation. But this was not the only reason that he’d tried so hard to avoid doing this for Fei. Even if he were an ob-gyn doctor, he would have been unwilling to perform such surgery on his niece. He felt that it was cruel, a humiliation that life had dealt him, and that Fei was ridiculing him. He couldn’t imagine having to accept such a reality, but he had to. Fear forced him to accept the situation, and fear also saved him, leaving him no room for delay. Once he stood in front of the operating table, in his terror, Fei became neither a man nor a woman, neither a family member nor a stranger. She was simply not a living person. She was politics, and she was Dr. Tang’s fate. He was not performing a surgery, either; he was praying for fate to help him survive.
Everything was finally completed in a stumbling sort of way. Fei couldn’t help clinging to her uncle, and they embraced, weeping uncontrollably. In the tears, their unspoken trouble and sadness were expressed, and their feelings for each other were reestablished. There was forgiveness in the weeping. Their blood tie—that profound, ancient magic—connected them, body and soul. They were family, no matter how much they had neglected each other.
This would be the only surgery that Dr. Tang would ever perform, an ob-gyn surgery. When he stood at the top of a chimney near the end of his short, unhappy life, the last place he cast his glance at was the window of the ob-gyn operating room at People’s Hospital. He reflected on his own life and felt there were too many areas where he had stinted on his orphaned niece. He had neglected her and resented her, seeing her as the stumbling block of his life. Only in thinking of her as an obstacle did he give her her due. He had risked arrest, dismissal, and prison to save her precious reputation with his mediocre surgical skills.
At the Spring Festival that year, Captain Sneakers returned from the countryside to Fuan for the holidays. Late one night, he and his former gang members broke into one of the apartments in the rows of one-story dorms and gang-raped the head nurse of internal medicine, the female “spy” who scrubbed the rest-room, swept the hallways, and confessed the passwords “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”
Captain Sneakers had planned to break into Fei’s home to revenge himself on her. He had heard about her affair with the dancer. He took a knife with him, intending to slash her face to get even with her for his humiliation. When he lifted the woman, fast asleep, from the bed, he found he’d picked the wrong person. But he didn’t spare her, the old beauty, the old beauty from the old society. He also let his gang members take turns with her. He held the knife to the old woman’s neck, listening to them panting over her body in the dark. He was thinking that, after all, she wasn’t Fei. If it were Fei, he wouldn’t let them do this to her. He felt, as he listened to their panting, that at least he had a conscience when it came to Fei. Fei, you little piece of damaged goods. He cursed her in his heart. You have this old woman under our bodies to thank. Because of her you get to keep your pretty face. I really want to slash your fucking face …
The head nurse went to hospital security after daybreak to report the attacks on her. But who would pay attention to her? The victim of the rape was not a decent woman. An old female spy got raped. An old female spy who was born to be raped. Who else should be raped if not her?
Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?
From the ocean.
1
There is no such thing in the world as a never-ending banquet. The more sumptuous the banquet, the sadder and lonelier the aftermath. Tiao, Fei, and Youyou had had their secret celebrations, with the grilled miniature snowballs, the Ukrainian red cabbage soup, the sporty boating clothes, and the mysterious “Cairo Night,” in which they submerged and isolated themselves. Tiao even believed that she would never have to worry about anything anymore, not school or family. She already had a world of joy. It was Quan who ruined that joy. Quan’s presence was like crows’ wings, whose flapping and flying made her heart feel gloomy and heavy.
Tiao was deeply unhappy about Quan’s birth. To express her unhappiness, she completely ignored her youngest sister and lavished attention on Fan. She loved Fan, and Fan loved her. Fan obeyed her unconditionally in almost everything, and the foundation of their love was indestructible. Even when Fan had barely learned to talk, she would cheer enthusiastically for her sister, Fan’s clumsy tongue spitting out incomprehensible words. When Tiao tried to kill a fly with a fly swatter, no matter whether she hit it or not, killed the fly or not, Fan would simply make the same loud announcements, “Shmashed. Shmashed.” She praised and encouraged her sister, making Tiao believe that even if the world stopped turning and the seas ran dry, she and Fan would still be inseparable.
They had depended on each other when their parents were away at the Reed River Farm. Fan loved to eat apples and beltfish and Tiao would try to buy them for her whenever possible. She knew their money was not enough for both of them to eat these treats every day, so she taught herself to dislike eating apples and beltfish. She would just watch Fan eat. It was fun to watch Fan eat fish because when she finished a piece, she would use the fish skeleton to comb her hair. “This is a comb,” she told Tiao happily. Tiao stopped her even though she liked her cleverness and imagination. She didn’t want Fan to get her hair dirty. She washed Fan’s hair and feet. They washed their feet every night before bed, sitting on small stools, face-to-face, with the washing basin between them. Tiao liked to smell Fan’s toes, fat and slightly sour-smelling. She washed very carefully, reaching in between every one of Fan’s toes. Sometimes she forgot to keep a towel handy, so she used her own trousers instead, letting Fan rub her feet on them. She could have left the basin and got a towel, but she liked to have Fan dry her feet on her trousers.
“I’ll wipe them,” Fan would say. “I’m really going to wipe them hard.” Tiao then placed both of Fan’s dripping feet on her knees and let Fan playfully kick her feet on her knees, so foot-washing became a game, a shared silliness between them.
If they were walking on the street and Tiao had a basketful of groceries, Fan would always lend a hand. The lending a hand was precisely that, Fan putting her hand on the basket without lifting any of the weight. She just held on to the edge as if she were carrying the basket along with her sister. She loved to help with the work because she loved her sister.
If Fan was bullied by someone in the complex, Tiao would stand up for her against the bullies faithfully to the end. She put aside any shyness or reserve she had. Once, a boy, at the entrance to the building, held out a piece of soap that looked like a rice ball, and he said to Fan, “Lick it. Lick it. It’s a rice ball and tastes very sweet.” Fan stuck out her tongue and was about to lick it. Tiao happened to be passing by. She grabbed the soap and forced it into the boy’s mouth. She actually did that. She stuffed his mouth with soap until he began to cry. He bent over, squatted on the ground, and threw up over and over again. Tiao took Fan by the hand and went home with her head high. As soon as she entered the house, she told Fan, “That was soap, not a rice ball. Besides, even if it was really a rice ball, you still shouldn’t eat it. You can’t just eat other people’s stuff like that without thinking. Will you remember this?” Fan kept nodding her head. She would never forget any of Tiao’s words.
Then Quan was born a year after Wu’s return from the Reed River Farm. By then, the discipline at the farm had slackened quite a bit, and many people in the Academy had found excuses to come back and stay at home. Wu simply raised Quan in plain sight of everyone. She no longer mentioned her rheumatic heart disease, and the baby in her arms was the most convincing reason for her to be at home. As a nursing mother, she had the right to stay at home with her baby.
The house was a mess, and Tiao had to do a lot of chores. Wu made her warm up Quan’s milk one moment and wash her nappies the next. Tiao slammed the milk pot and dented it. She wouldn’t wash the nappies carefully—just dipped them into the water quickly and then snatched them out. She favoured Fan and let Fan drink all the orange juice that Wu bought for Quan. When Quan was a year old and could eat mashed pork floss, she decided to use Quan’s pork to make sandwiches for Fan. By then Fan had already realized that she had lost her mother’s favour and went around dispirited because of it. She would eat the pork-floss sandwiches in big bites and snuggle up close to Tiao, to show the whole family and the whole world: No big deal. No big deal. I have my sister who cares for me.
She exaggerated her loss of favour and fall in status to get attention. What else could she do? She resented Quan, and her resentment was the genuine article, without the least little bit of exaggeration. It was also simple, unlike Tiao’s, which was difficult to put into words. Fan hated Quan because Quan was pretty and also knew how to please people. Particularly when she could walk on her own, when she could be taken outside into the complex by an adult, her sweet and beautiful little face and naturally curly brown hair made almost every neighbour fall in love with her. The more people liked Quan, the angrier Fan got. She took every opportunity to pinch Quan with her nails on her chubby arms and legs and small shoulders. She used her thumb and index finger to pinch a little bit of flesh, just a little. It felt like being bitten by an ant, but the pain was enough to make Quan grimace and cry. Fan was not afraid at all. Quan couldn’t tell on her, because she couldn’t talk.
Wu often took Quan for a walk on the small road in front of their building. When she had things to do, she would ask Tiao or Fan to take her instead. Fan avoided this kind of chore; she didn’t like to be with Quan. The passing neighbours would stop to play with Quan and ignore her, as if she were only along to be Quan’s foil, giving Fan a sharp pang of jealousy. So Fan would knit her eyebrows and make a great show of having cramps in her legs: “Owww, my legs have cramps, owww …” moaning and falling back—butt-first—on the bed. Wu would then ask Tiao to take Quan for a walk, often just as she was going to Youyou’s home to study recipes and experiment with cooking. Quan, who loved walking and knew how to entertain people with her expressive gestures, had cost Tiao precious time and interrupted plans for quite a few high-toned banquets with Youyou. But she didn’t make up excuses, as Fan did. She obeyed Wu, brought a little stool to the front of the building, and sat down to read. She would read her book for a while and then lift her head to take a look at Quan, who would be strolling aimlessly nearby.
Occasionally her eyes met Quan’s and she would coldly study the dark little eyes of this younger sister. Something was wrong about Quan—Tiao felt it from the very beginning, and now the fact that Quan strolled around the whole courtyard in broad daylight made her feel very uneasy. She wasn’t jealous of Quan’s prettiness and perfection. She had heard from adults that if a child was too good-looking when she was little, she would go downhill and turn out to be ugly later. So she was not resentful of Quan’s good looks. Besides, what was the big deal? Why the fuss about her looks? She was almost two years old and still didn’t know how to talk. Maybe she was a mute. Tiao felt that something was wrong because she was suspicious about Quan’s origin. She believed her birth was a terrible trick Quan had played on their family. She had her reasons for thinking so after Fei came to see Quan.