The Noodle Maker(41)

But tonight Old Hep had lost his courage. All he could do was curl up into a ball, and in the dim light stare at the heap of flesh sprawled beside him. Before she fell asleep, the female novelist had warned him she would visit his work unit again the next day. She had already dropped by his department that afternoon, planning to tell Old Hep’s leader about the affair and plead with him not to take the matter any further. She knew that if her father ever got wind of the situation, she and Old Hep would both be finished. But when she walked into Old Hep’s empty office and discovered the huge stack of love letters hidden in his desk (she was able to prise the drawers open quite easily with the aid of an ordinary penknife), she immediately changed her mind. As the scale of his infidelities became clear, her first instinct was to kill him; her second was to spare his life, but ensure it was a miserable one; her third was to kick him out of the house and wipe him from her mind. After she had rejected the first and the third options, she set to work on the second.

She selected twenty or so love letters that displayed some literary skill, and put them aside to use later as material for her novels. She chose another twenty of the more intimate letters hidden in a notebook labelled ‘Compendium of Beauties’ – a pink exercise book with a picture of a house and a mushroom on the cover – swapped the letters around, scrawled ‘return to sender’ on every envelope and posted them back, so that a few days later each woman would receive a letter that another admirer had written to him. She collected all the sentimental letters from love-struck girls who hoped to conquer the editor with their youthful charms, and posted them to the Party committees of their respective work units. She summoned the leader of the People’s Cultural Centre and made him dispatch official letters to the work units of over seventy other women who’d written to her husband, demanding they conduct investigations into their lifestyles. The editorial department was thrown into chaos.

When Old Hep sauntered in through his front door that evening, after abandoning the textile worker in the ruined factory, he was met by a flying thermos. Fortunately it struck his chest, not his head. Bowing his head in shame, he could see his wife’s tie-dye skirt printed with pictures of ancient philosophers. (This garment was for export only – no one else in town had one like it.) As it approached him, he searched his mind for a way to handle the situation. But before he had time to reach a decision, a slender leg sheathed in a transparent nylon stocking (also imported) popped out from under the skirt and kicked him in the groin. Old Hep shrieked with pain, and cowered on the floor just like the textile worker had done a few hours earlier. The pain was excruciating. He saw a sea of gold stars dart before his eyes. The female novelist kicked him again and Old Hep’s tired shoulders caved in. Then the novelist dragged him into the light, seated herself in her armchair, handed him his pink exercise book and told him to read from it the passages she had underlined in red pencil.

Everything that happened after that had vanished from his mind by the time he was lying in bed, apart from his tearful confession, and his wife’s demand that he apologise officially to his work unit and submit himself to investigation. ‘If you don’t do as I say, I will take you to court,’ she threatened before dozing off.

Now she was sleeping like a log, and Old Hep was lying awake beside her, miserably counting the hours until dawn. In the past the night had belonged to him, but now everything was finished and all that remained for him was fear. This fear coursed through his blood, then spread to his bones and nerve channels. He felt like the dead rat he had once seen lying on a cold street corner. It had lain there for three days. In his mind, he always connected the rat with a female colleague, because she had dared walk up to within a step of it and stand over it with her legs wide open. When she dragged him over to take a look, he shrieked with terror and felt as though his head were about to explode. It was the same fear he felt when the Red Guards dragged his father to their front door and pulled him into the baying crowds outside. He knew that in these moments of terror, he was naked and alone. The face of the rotting rat flashed once more before his eyes. The Red Guards were pushing him into a well of darkness, the tigress was baring her teeth, ready to devour him. No one was coming to his rescue. He and his father were surrounded. The voices of the crowd were so deafening that all he could hear was the rage thundering through his body. He knew that they – the crowd outside – were one great mass, and that he was on his own. For a moment, he could see his own eyes grafted onto the dead rat’s face. They were dirty and motionless, but alive. They could see everything.