Having waited almost two minutes, the judge cleared his throat and concluded, "All right. If you had not done anything to be ashamed of, you would not be afraid of a ghost knocking at your door. We cannot proceed with this case unless you provide us with that woman's name, age, workplace, and marital status. Go home and come again when you have the needed information ready. In the meantime, you must treat your wife decently, like a friend and comrade. The court will check on that." He smiled with one eye screwed up.

Lin knew it was no use to argue, so he said diffidently, "All right, we'll come again."

As if in a trance, he rose to his feet and turned to the door, Shuyu following. His right leg had gone to sleep and made him limp a little.

While the couple were inside the courthouse, Bensheng and a dozen men from Goose Village had stood outside, waving spades, flails, hoes, shoulder poles. They threatened to create a disturbance if the judge granted Lin a divorce. A large crowd gathered on the street, believing the maddened villagers were going to beat up the unfaithful husband. Nobody wanted to miss such a spectacle. The judge called the county's Military Department, which immediately dispatched a militia platoon to keep order outside the courthouse.

"So he's a big officer or something? Still he mustn't be bigger than the law," a middle-aged woman said to others.

"Even an emperor isn't free to divorce his wife," a toothless crone put in.

"Men are all alike, beasts."

An old man in bifocals retorted, "A woman shouldn't be allowed to divorce either, or else there'll be disorder everywhere. The order of the world is rooted in every family, as Confucius said."

"What a heartless animal!"

"He has no reason to do this to her. "

"The army should send him back and let him scratch a living out of the earth."

"I heard he' s a doctor. "

"Small wonder he has no heart. Doctors are butchers."

To the dismay of some of them, the judge had turned down Lin's petition and therefore precluded the anticipated spectacle. Seeing the husband and wife come out of the courthouse, some spectators whispered that the couple indeed didn't match. The husband looked quite gentle, in no way like an evil, abusive man, whereas the wife was as thin as a chicken whose flesh, if cooked, couldn't fill a plate. If they were so different, they might not be able to avoid conflicts. But that should provide no grounds for divorce, because it was normal for a married couple to have a quarrel or even a fist fight once in a while. A good marriage was full of moments of cats and dogs. It was the uneventful marriage that was headed toward disaster. In a word, the differences between the husband and the wife should only help stabilize their marriage.

Lin's face turned bloodless when he saw so many eyes in the crowd glaring at him. Hurriedly he and Shuyu left the courthouse for the bus stop. All the way home he didn't say a word.

After the couple had left, the militia was withdrawn from the courthouse. But it took half an hour for the crowd to disperse completely. The ground was littered with popsicle wrappers and sticks, bottle caps, cucumber ends, patches of melon seeds.

That evening Lin bolted the door of his room and remained inside alone, smoking, thinking, and sighing. He felt lucky that the angry villagers hadn't done any physical harm to him, and that only two women had spat on the ground and balled their fists when he came out of the courtroom. Had he won a divorce, he might not have gotten home unharmed. Maybe he shouldn't have tried to divorce his wife this year. Evidently his brother-in-law had been prepared to deal with him, and he had played right into Bensheng's hands.

The next day, after lunch, Shuyu stepped in with a copy of the county newspaper, Country Constructs, which was merely a hand-written, mimeographed affair at the time. "This just came," she said and handed it to Lin.

"Where did you get it?" he asked without taking the paper.

"Bensheng gave it to me. He said there was a pile of it in the commune opera house."

She left the newspaper on the short-legged table. On the brick bed Hua was napping, her thick lips puffing up a little when she exhaled. Shuyu unfolded a yellow toweling coverlet and drew it over the child, then went out to wash dishes in the cauldron.

Lin picked up the newspaper and began looking through it. On page three he saw a short article about his attempted divorce. It stated:

Having read the article, Lin was wretchedly disappointed. He suspected his brother-in-law might have been behind its publication. The author, who had not signed his name, using "Defender of Morality" instead, must have been Bensheng's friend. Lin clearly remembered that there had been no applause at all when he and Shuyu came out of the courthouse. Obviously this article was meant to shame him and prevent him from seeking to divorce his wife again.

How he hated Bensheng! He decided not to speak to him during the remaining days of his leave.

"Hello, is somebody home?" a throaty voice shouted from the front yard the next afternoon.

Shuyu went out to see who it was. At the sight of the tall man with a massive scar on his left cheek, she beamed and said, "Come on in, elder brother."

The man dropped on a sawhorse a bundle of sweet sorghum canes, each of which was about an inch thick and two feet long. "These are for Hua, from our field," he said.

"You shouldn't have carried them all the way here," Shuyu said. Yet she was happy to see the sweet canes.

"Is Lin home?"

"Yes. "

The visitor was Lin's elder brother, Ren Kong. He wore a blue jacket with brass buttons and a pair of rubber-toed loafers. He had heard of Lin's court appearance, so he came to intercede for Shuyu, whom he regarded almost as a sister because she had done so much for the Kongs. Also, a few months ago he had written to Lin, asking him to bring home some Tower Candy for his children, to get rid of roundworms in their bellies. His three sons had all looked sallow for months; lately his youngest son had a stomachache every afternoon, and worms like thick noodles had been found in the boy's stool. Tower Candy was a sugary pill in the form of a tiny solid cone with spiral grooves on its side. Children in the country loved it and would eat it as a treat.

The army hospital had several drugs for roundworms, but it didn't stock Tower Candy. In spite of the regulation that allowed no one to appropriate drugs for personal use, many of the hospital staff got what they needed from the pharmacy. That was why the three pharmacists each had a good number of friends in the hospital and would receive a lot of gifts on holidays. But Lin was too shy to ask the pharmacists for any medicine without a prescription. He had decided to buy some Tower Candy at a department store, but before taking the leave, he had become so engrossed in completing an article on the topic of becoming "Red and Expert" that he totally forgot his promise to Ren to bring some back. Now, his brother's appearance reminded him of his word. What should he do? He worried, wondering how to come up with an excuse.