Serve the People! Read Online Free PDF Page B

exposition, propelling the drama forward.

    Wu Dawang opened the door.
    When he entered the room, he discovered it was pitch black: sunk in the total darkness of the country nights he'd known before joining the army, a darkness that left you stumbling blindly into the village's deepest wells and along its gloomiest lanes. To Wu Dawang, it felt like tumbling-in an instant-from blazing, surface sunlight down into the impenetrable obscurity of an underground cave.
    `Liu Lian,' he quavered, `Sister,' as though this were an incantation capable of dispelling darkness and bringing light.
    `Shut the door.'
    Her voice, he) udged, had come from the corner of the bed, which meant she was either sitting on the bed itself or on the chair in front of the dressing table. He reached back for the door, and pulled it shut. `Now come over here,' she continued. Her words had a mysterious traction, dragging him for ward at her command. When he was a few inches from the foot of the bed it gave a slight creak, which told him she was sitting neither on its edge, nor on the chair in front of the table, but was lying right in the middle of the mattress. In the great scheme of this seduction, of course, there was no real qualitative difference between Liu Lian occupying the middle or one side of the bed. But at the time, there was something about the discovery of her precise location that stopped Wu Dawang in his tracks. As the sweat ran off him like rain down a pillar, suddenly all he wanted to do was throw open the window and door to let in the cool night breeze. He listened to her breathing -reeling in and out, as smooth and silken as gossamer thread--while his own rasped rough and heavy in great, strenuous gasps.

    At this point in proceedings, our love story resembles, perhaps, a steam train halfway up a mountain, each new inch forward demanding an agonizing expenditure of effort. On reaching the peak, of course, the train would regain its momentum and rush exhilaratingly down the other side, through glorious, balmy evening sunshine. But for the time being, Wu Dawang had ground to a halt. He could not explain why he should suddenly find the idea that she was lying naked on the bed so disconcerting. While showering and coming back up the stairs, he had yearned for this as instinctively as dry tinder longs for fire, as fire longs for strong winds. But just as his desire teetered on the edge of realization, timidity barred all further progress.

    Time passed, the seconds ticking into minutes, the room still consumed by that irresistible darkness. Wu Dawang mopped his sweat away for a third time.
    `Are you all right?' came a gentle voice from the bed.
    `Please turn the light on.'
    `It's too bright.'
    `Please turn it on, I've something I want to say to you.
    She fell silent again, as if the effort of considering his request exhausted her ability to generate sound. Listening to his own breath fall through the air and onto the ground, he even began to hallucinate the physical form of her exhalations on the bed. Oppressed almost beyond endurance, Wu Dawang actually began to fear for his life; death either by suffocation, or from shock was starting to seem a real and frightening possibility. In a last desperate attempt at self-preservation, he repeated his request: 'Please put the light on.'

    She continued to pursue the most powerful, most expedient course of action open to her-neither speaking nor moving.
    As time dragged on in the warm, velvety blackness, Wu Dawang felt compelled to issue a foolish ultimatum.
    'If you don't turn the light on, I'm leaving.'
    Again foolishly, he took a step backward.
    At the sound of this threatened retreat, she sat bolt upright on the bed, groped for the cord and yanked on the light.
    Just as it had done three days previously, one sharp click transformed the darkness into radiance.
    Just as it had done three days previously, a flash of coloured light scorched his eyeballs. History was repeating itself: a history of