Serve the People! Read Online Free PDF Page A

stairs, her soft plastic slippers, fashionable at the time amongst the wives and daughters of well-to-do city families, slapping percussively over the floor. Her anger echoed out from the strident clack of her footsteps. A shiver, then an electric current of panic ran through his entire body. Without another word, he picked up the vegetables from the floor, put them in the sink, hastily washed the mud off his hands and followed her upstairs. He stationed himself in the doorway to her bedroom, head bowed like a scolded child, or a new recruit come to confess a transgression to his commanding officer.
    'Sister,' he called out softly.
    The instant he'd uttered the word, he marvelled at how easily it had come out; as if without noticing he had said something that would change the course of world events. As Liu Lian sat with her back to the door, in front of the old-fashioned dressing table mirror, it was a change in her countenance a faint, trembling resurgence of colour-that fully alerted Wu Dawang to what he'd) ust done. Her face had a slightly dazed look, as if she'd just woken from a dream, while the two curves of her shoulders registered a delicate tremor, like two large apples hanging in the gentlest of breezes. Watching her turn gently around on her stool, he finally became unmistakably aware that those two momentous syllables had slipped out from between his lips.This one word had toppled the Great Wall of hostility that had divided them; it seemed to have set her alight, like a single spark from one edge of a prairie lighting a pile of dry tinder heaped at its other. Wu Dawang contemplated the effect of his utterance, not yet conscious that, like a key inserted into an old iron lock, it had with a single smooth action unlocked the door to love, permitting it to swing gloriously open like the great gate in a besieged fortress.

    As Liu Lian raised herself slowly up from her stool, Wu Dawang glanced up at her, then away again.
    Have you washed?' she asked.

    'Washed what?' he replied.
    'You're covered in sweat.'
    He glanced down at his damp work shirt, at the salt marks on his army trousers. Remembering how she'd asked him if he washed every day, how the Political Commissar's orderly had told him that she didn't permit the Division Commander to get into bed without taking a bath first, he started to feel uneasy about introducing the acrid smells of his garden labours into her bedroom sanctuary. 'I wasn't thinking,' he faltered, staring in embarrassment at the sweat stains on his trousers and the crumbs of earth on his shoes. 'I was in too much of a hurry.' Though he spoke in a tone of self-critical apology, a puzzled glint in his eyes inquired as to why, exactly, his personal hygiene should be of such vital import.
    She continued to lean against the dressing table, gazing calmly at him, registering though not responding to his bewilderment. 'Put the sign back on the dining table,' she said after a pause, 'then lock the gate, have a shower and come back upstairs.'
    He was left no choice but to go back downstairs. 'Plenty of soap!' she shouted out when he was halfway down.

    And so he washed.
    The Division had taken the unusual measure of installing a showerhead in the Commander's downstairs toilet, under which Wu Dawang was in the habit of giving himself a quick blast whenever he came in from the garden. This time, however, mindful of her intimately explicit instruction, he washed himself all over first with ordinary vegetable soap, and then a second time with perfumed soap, to guarantee that the results would be both clean and fragrant. He scrubbed himself with speedy but meticulous efficiency, attending to every inch and crevice of his body.
    If, with the benefit of hindsight, we subject Wu Dawang's assiduous ablutions to rigorous analysis, we are led inexorably to the audacious conclusion that, from its very beginnings, he was a willing coconspirator, or at the very least an eager collaborator, in the liaison that was