The Bathing Women

4

It wasn’t as though she didn’t want to write back to Fang Jing; she put off writing because she didn’t know what to say. Maybe everything had happened too quickly. In any case, she couldn’t treat Fang Jing’s letter from San Francisco as a casual note. She carefully read the letter over and over, and time and again it brought her to tears. She’d never read such a good letter, and she had no reason to doubt the author’s sincerity.

So she started to write back. “Mr. Fang Jing, how are you?” she wrote. Then she would tear the letter up and start over. He was so important and she was so insignificant. She lacked confidence and was afraid of making a fool of herself—but how could she write a letter of the same quality as a celebrity like Fang Jing? It was impossible; she had neither the writing talent nor the emotional maturity his letter displayed. Just based on the letter alone, Tiao felt that she had already fallen in love with him. And she had to fall in love with him because she believed he had fallen in love with her—and it was her good fortune to be loved by him, she thought selflessly. At her age and with her lack of experience, she couldn’t immediately tell the difference between admiration and love, or know how quickly a feeling driven by vanity might get the better of her. Maybe at those times she thought about her senior-year roommate. Compared to Fang Jing, who was that writer of her roommate’s, with his “overflowing talent”? How could her love affair match Tiao’s secret life now? College life, the flare of red-hot emotion that came and went quickly.

Once again she started to write a reply to him, but finally could only come up with those few words, “Dear Mr. Fang Jing, how are you?”

She went out and found a second-run cinema to watch a movie of his, to meet him on the screen. She listened to his voice, studied his features, and savoured his expressions. She tried very hard to memorize his looks, but when she returned home and lay in her bed, she found she had completely forgotten. It frightened and worried her, and seemed like a bad sign. The next day she took the opportunity to watch the movie again. She stared at him on the screen, as if she had found a long-lost family member. She still couldn’t compose the letter. Then she received his phone call at her office.

He phoned at a time that everyone was in the office. The chief editor said to her, “Tiao, your uncle’s calling.” As soon as she walked to the phone and picked up the receiver, she recognized his southern-accented Mandarin. He said the following paragraph in one breath, with some formality and a tone that left her no room for contradiction: “Is this Comrade Yin Xiaotiao? This is Fang Jing. I know there are a lot of people in your office. You don’t have to say anything. Don’t call me Mr. Fang Jing. Just listen to me. I’ve returned to Beijing and haven’t received a letter or phone call from you. It’s very likely that you’re laughing at me for being foolish. But please let me finish. Don’t hang up on me and don’t be afraid of me. I don’t want to be unreasonable. I just want to see you. Listen to me—I’m at a conference at the Beijing Hotel. Can you arrange to come to Beijing to solicit manuscripts? I know editors come to Beijing all the time. You come and we’ll meet. I’ll give you my phone number for the conference. You don’t have to respond to me right away, though of course I want to have your immediate response, your positive response, very much. No, no, you should think it over first. I have a few more things I want to ramble on about, I know I don’t seem very composed, but I have somehow lost control of myself, which is very unusual for me. I would rather trust my instincts, though. Please don’t be in a hurry to refuse me. Don’t be in a hurry to refuse me. Now I’m going to give you the number. Can you write it down? Can you remember it …?”

She was very bad at memorizing numbers, but she learned Fang Jing’s number by heart even though he said it only once. She went to Beijing three days later, and saw him in his room at the Beijing Hotel. When she was alone with him, she felt he seemed even taller than when she had first met him. Like so many tall people, he stooped a little. But this didn’t change his bearing, that arrogant and nonchalant attitude he was famous for. Tiao thought she must have appeared affected when she walked into his room, because Fang Jing seemed to catch an uneasiness from her. He gave her a broad smile, but the easy, witty manner of the conference was gone. He poured her a cup of tea but somehow managed to spill the hot tea, scalding Tiao’s hand as well as his own. The telephone rang endlessly—that was the way the celebrities were, always pursued by phone calls. He kept picking up the phone, lying to the callers without missing a beat: “No, I can’t do it today. Now? Impossible. I have to go see the rough cut in a minute. How about tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll treat you at Da Sanyuan …”

Sitting on the sofa listening quietly to Fang Jing’s lies, Tiao sensed an unspoken understanding grow between them, and in herself a strange new feeling, dreamlike. She was grateful for all those smooth lies, thankful that he was turning those others down for her, with lies made for her, all of them, for the sake of their reunion. She started to relax; the phone calls were precisely what she needed to give herself the time to regroup.

Fang Jing finally finished the calls and came over to Tiao. He crouched down right in front of her, face-to-face. It was a sudden movement, but the gesture was quite natural and simple, like a peasant tending crops in the field, or an adult who needs to crouch down to talk to a child, or a person who crouches down to observe a small insect like an ant or beetle. With his age and status, the crouching gave him an air of childish naughtiness. He said to Tiao, who was sitting on the sofa, “How about we go out? Those phone calls are pretty annoying.”

They left the room and went to the hotel bar. They chose a quiet corner and sipped coffee. He was holding his pipe. After a short silence, he began to speak, saying, “What do you think of me?”

She said, “I respect you very much. Like so many people, I admire your movie A Beautiful Life. Like me, a great many people hold your talent in high regard. In our editors’ office, you’re often the topic of discussion. We—”

He interrupted her and said, “Are you going to talk to me in this sort of tone all night? Are you? Tell me.”

She shook her head and then nodded. She’d wanted to restrain her excitement in this way. She already found herself liking to be with him very much.

Then he said, out of the blue, “You stood apart from the crowd at the conference, naïve but also seeming to have a mind of your own. I saw at a glance that you were the person that God sent to keep an eye on me. I can’t lie to you; I want to tell you everything. I … I … I …” He puffed on his pipe. “Do you know that what I wrote to you was what was on my mind? I had never written to a woman, never. But I couldn’t help it after I saw you. I am well aware of my talent and gifts, and I am also well aware that they’re far from being fully developed. I will be much more famous than I am now. The day will come. Just wait and see. I also want to talk about my attitude towards women; I simply don’t reject any women who approach me. Most women want me for my fame, maybe my money, too. Of course, some don’t want anything from me, just want to devote themselves to me. They are especially pathetic, because in many respects … I am actually very dirty—I hope I am not frightening you with my words.”

His words did frighten her quite a bit. All exposed things are frightening, and why would he treat her to such an exposed view of himself? She felt sorry for him because of that “dirtiness.” She’d thought what she was going to hear would be much more romantic than this. Just what kind of man was he exactly? What did he want from her? Tiao was puzzled but knew well she didn’t have the ability to take the initiative in their conversation. She was passive; she had been passive from the very start, and she could have no idea that the passivity would later produce something evil in her.

“Therefore …” He took another puff of his pipe and said, “Therefore, I don’t deserve you. It looks like I’m pursuing you now, but how could I possess you? You’re a woman who can’t be possessed—by anyone. But I’ll be with you sooner or later.”

She finally spoke. She asked, “What leads you to such a conclusion?” His directness made her heart race.

But he ignored her question completely; he just continued, “You and I will be together sooner or later. But I want to tell you that even though someday I will be madly in love with you, I will still have many other women. And I will certainly not hide that from you. I’ll tell you everything: who they are, how it happened … I’ll let you judge me, punish me, because you’re the woman I love the most. Only you deserve me to be so frank, so truthful, and so weak. You’re my goddess, and I need a goddess. Just remember what I say. Maybe you’re too young now, but you’ll understand me, you definitely will. Ordinary people might think I’m talking like a hooligan. Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not.”

Hearing such words from Fang Jing, Tiao didn’t want to label them the language of a hooligan. But what was it exactly? Should a married man with a successful career say those things to an innocent girl? But Tiao was lost then in the labyrinth created by his nonsense, as if under a spell. She strained to understand his philosophy and rise to the state of consciousness he had attained. A strange charisma came from the arrogance he projected and his domineering manner. The hints of coldness that occasionally strayed from his passionate eyes also drew her deeply in. She couldn’t help beginning to question herself just to keep up with his thinking: What kind of person was she? What kind of person might she become? What was her attraction to this celebrity anyway …?

Strangely, he did not move closer to Tiao as he talked. He leaned back instead, putting more distance between them the more he spoke. His hunger for her was not going to end in a simple, impulsive touch and physical closeness. The way he kept proper physical distance didn’t seem to be the behaviour of an experienced man who was so used to being spoiled by women.

It was not until very, very late that Tiao left the Beijing Hotel. Fang Jing insisted on walking her back to her small hotel.

The evening breeze of late spring on broad Changan Avenue made Tiao feel much more relaxed. At that moment she realized how exhausting it was to be with him. It would always be exhausting, but she would be willing to be with him for many years to come.

He walked at her left side for a while and then at her right side. He said, “Tiao, I want to tell you one more thing.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“You’re a good girl,” he said.

“But you don’t really know me.”

“True, I don’t know you, but I’m confident there is nobody else who understands you better than I do.”

“Why?”

“You know, after all, this is a matter that has been decided by mysterious powers, but you and I have a lot of things in common. For instance, we’re both sensitive, and below our surface indifference, we both have molten passion …”

“How do you know I have molten passion? And what do you mean by describing me as indifferent? Do you feel that I didn’t show you enough respect?”

“See, you’re starting an argument with me,” he said with some excitement. “Your arrogance is also coming out—no, not arrogance, it’s pride. I don’t have that sort of pride; the pride is yours alone.”

“Why is it mine alone?” She softened her tone. “If you didn’t have pride at your core, how could you be so outspoken—those words you said a little while ago at the hotel?”

He suddenly smiled with some concern. “Do you really think that’s pride? What I actually have at my core is more like insolence. Insolence, you understand?”

She couldn’t agree with him, or she couldn’t allow him to describe himself this way. Only many years later when she reflected on this did she understand that his self-analysis was really quite accurate, but she resisted him fiercely at the time. She started to tell him about all of the feelings she had for him—as she read his two letters, while she watched his movie again for fear of forgetting what he looked like. She spoke with a great deal of effort, sometimes worried she might not be expressing herself well enough with her words. When she mentioned his heavily-scarred arm in the movie, she couldn’t help starting to cry. So she paused until she could hold her tears back. He didn’t want her to continue but she insisted on speaking, not to move him but to move herself. She had a vague sense that the man before her, who had suffered more than enough, deserved everything he wanted. If he were sent to a labour camp again, she would be his companion in suffering all her life, like the wives of those Decembrists in Russia, who were willing to go into exile in Siberia with their husbands. Ah, to prove her faithfulness, bravery, nobility, and detachment, she simply couldn’t help wanting to relive the era that had tormented Fang Jing. Let an era like that be the measure of her heart—but who the hell was she? Fang Jing had a wife and a daughter.

They arrived at her small hotel while she was talking. She immediately stopped speaking and held out her hand to him. He looked into her eyes while holding her hand and said, “Let me say it one more time: you’re a good girl.”

They said goodbye and he turned around. She walked through the hotel gate but immediately came back and ran into the street. She called out to stop him.

He knew what she wanted to do, he told her later.

Now he remained where he was and waited for her to come to him. She ran over, stopped in front of him, and said, “I want to kiss you.”

He opened his arms to hold her loosely, so loosely that their bodies didn’t come close. She went on tiptoes, raising her face to kiss him, then immediately let him go and ran into the hotel.

Fang Jing could never forget Tiao’s first kiss, because it was so light and subtle, like a dragonfly skimming the water. It could not actually be considered a kiss, at most it was just half a kiss, like a flying feather gently brushing his lips, an imagined snowflake melting away without a trace on a burning-hot stove. But she was so devoted and shy. It was impulsiveness caused by too much devotion, and too much shyness that caused … what did it cause? She nearly missed his lips.

Maybe it was not only that. When Tiao ran so decisively toward Fang Jing, her heart had already started to hesitate. All by herself, she felt she had to run to this man. She responded to her own prompting in one moment, by letting her lips slip away from the unknown in the next. It was hesitation caused by fear, and caution caused by discretion.

It was the solemn and hasty half kiss, so pure and complicated, that prevented Fang Jing from returning her kiss. He didn’t dare. And when he loosely encircled her slim and supple waist with his arms, he knew his heart had been captured by this distant and intimate person.

5

The letters he wrote to her were usually very long, and his handwriting was very small. He used a special type of fountain pen to write, which produced extremely thin strokes, “as thin as a strand of hair,” as the saying goes. This sharp pen allowed him to write smaller and more densely packed characters, like an army of ants wriggling across the paper. He wrote the tiny words greedily, wrestling them onto the white paper. He used those tiny words to invade and torture the white sheets, leaving no breaks for paragraphs, and paying no attention to format and space. He was not writing words; he was eating paper and gnawing on paper with words. It looked as though he were driven to use those tiny black words to occupy every inch of the paper, to fill all the empty places on every sheet of white paper with those tiny black words, transforming pieces of thin paper by force into chunks of heavy dark clouds. He couldn’t help shouting at the sky: Give me a huge piece of white paper and let me finish writing the words of my entire life.

No one else wrote to her like that before or afterwards. Ten years later, when she read those letters with critical detachment, the patience he took in writing pages of tiny words, the vast amount of time he spent on writing such letters, the hunger and thirst with which he fought for every inch of paper with his words and sentences, could still move her somehow. What she valued was this meticulous patience, this primitive, sincere, awkward, and real dependence and love between paper and words, whether it was written to her or some other woman.

He wrote in his letter:

Tiao, I worry about your eyes because you have to read such small writing from me. But still I write smaller and smaller, and the paper gets thinner and thinner because I have more and more to say to you. If I wrote in big characters and used thick paper, it might not be safe to send it to your publishing house. People might think it is a manuscript from an author and open it for you.

He also talked about his absurd experiences, in some of the letters.

Tiao:

You’re not going to be happy to read this letter, but I must write it because you’re watching me anyway even if I don’t write it. You have been watching me all the time. A few days ago, I was on location at Fang Mountain—you know what I’m talking about, the place where I shot Hibernation. I was making love to actress so and so (she is even younger than you are, and not very well known) but I felt terrible. Maybe because everything was too rushed, and she was too purposeful and too blunt. She had been chatting me up for the last few days, not that she wanted to angle for the part of the heroine in this film—the heroine had been cast long ago. She was manoeuvring for the next role. She was hoping I’d give her a juicier part in my next film. Clearly, she has some experience with men. She is straightforward, not allowing a man to retreat, but my male vanity made me hope she at least had some feeling for me. Unfortunately she had none. She doesn’t even bother to flirt with me. To girls of her age, I might just be a boring, dirty old man, even though I’m not fifty years old yet. But she wanted to make love to me badly. I admit her body attracted me, but I kept my attitude toward her light, only kidding with her. Later I was turned on by my contempt for her but I didn’t understand why I was thinking about you at the time. It was because of you that I so yearned to get a kiss from her. Nothing else but her kiss, wholehearted, passionate, a kiss that risks a life, like the kind I want from you, although I have never got it. The only thing you granted me on that evening I can’t forget, after which I couldn’t sleep, was utmost power, the power of “not daring.”

There was nothing that I didn’t dare to do to so and so. I stopped her when she rushed to take off her clothes. I told her to kiss me and she did as I said. She pressed against my body and wrapped her arms around my neck, kissing me for a long time, often asking, “Is that enough, is that enough?” She kissed me deeply and thoroughly, her tongue going almost everywhere she could reach in my mouth, and yet she seemed distracted. I closed my eyes and imagined it was you, your lips and your passionate kisses. But it didn’t work. The more she kissed me, the more I felt it was not you. And she apparently grew impatient—it was precisely because she became impatient that I insisted on having her continue to kiss me. I held her around the waist with my hands, not allowing her to move. We two looked like we were struggling with one another. Later, everything finally went in a different direction because she snuck her hand from my neck and started to touch and fondle me. She was nervous and I could understand her nervousness. She didn’t know why I wanted her only for kissing; she must have thought it wasn’t sufficient, that the kissing alone was not going to satisfy my desire and therefore her desire was even less likely to be satisfied.

She fondled me anxiously as if to say, even though my kisses didn’t seem to satisfy you, there is something more that I’m willing to give you … we started to make love, but you were everywhere before my eyes—I’m so obscene, but I beg you not to throw away the letter. In the end I felt horrible. On the one hand I imagined it was you who lay under me, my beloved, but when I did, the guilt I felt was so strong that it kept me from achieving the pleasure I could have had. The guilt was so strong that I couldn’t tell who exactly lay under my body then or exactly what I was doing after all. Eventually I had to use my hand to … I could only get release with my own hand.

I’m willing to let you curse me ten thousand times. Only when you curse me does my empty soul find a peaceful place to go. Where can my soul rest safely? Maybe I demand too much. Why, when I kept getting those prizes I dreamed of—success, fame, national and international awards, family, children, admiration, beautiful women, money, etc.—and the rest … —did my anxiety only deepen?

I had a woman before I was married. She was a one-legged woman, fifteen years older than I was. She was a sadist. I took up with her because even though I was the lowest of the low I still needed women. Or you could say she took up with me. But I never guessed that she didn’t want me for the needs that a man could satisfy. She had only one leg but her physical strength was matchless. I certainly couldn’t match her, with that body of mine weakened by years of hard labour and starvation. She often tied me up late at night and pricked my arms and thighs with an awl, not deep, just enough to make me bleed. What shocked me even more was the time she lifted up the blanket when I was dead asleep, and began frantically plucking my pubic hair … she was crazy. She must have been crazy. But I didn’t go crazy and I think it must have had something to do with the mountains I saw every time I went out. When I stepped out of the low, small mud hut and saw the silent mountains, unchanged for more than ten thousand years, when I saw the chickens running helter-skelter in the yard and dung steaming on the dirt road, the desire to live surged in me. I developed a talent: even when she tortured me until my body was bloodstained and black and blue all over, as soon as she stopped, I could fall back asleep immediately, and without having a nightmare. But today, I have to ask myself again and again: What do you want in the end, what do you want after all?