"I'm quite clear-headed, I couldn't be more so. You can't hoodwink me!"

"What are you making all this fuss about?" He suddenly got angry and went up to her.

"Do you want to kill me?" Qian asked in a strange sort of way. Probably she had seen the anger flashing in his eyes.

"Why would I want to kill you?" he asked.

"You yourself know best," the woman said quietly, holding her breath, frightened.

If the woman had again shouted he was the enemy, probably he would have killed her right then. He couldn't let her come out with those words again, he had to make the woman feel secure, trick her into bed, make a pretense of being a caring husband. He went up to her and slowly said, "Qian, what is troubling you?"

"No! Don't come near me!"

Qian picked up the chamber pot in the corner and hurled it at him. He raised his arms to fend it off, but he was soaked. The acrid smell was worse than the humiliation. He gritted his teeth and brushed off the urine streaming down his face. His lips were salty and bitter, and he spat out with unconcealed derision, "You've gone crazy!"

"You want me certified as mad, but it's not that simple!" the Woman said with a smirk. "I'm not going to let you off lightly!"

He understood what she was threatening, and, before things erupted, he had to burn up those sheets of paper on his desk. He had to bide his time and he had to restrain himself from charging at her. At that point, the urine in his hair had again reached his lips, and he spat it out in disgust but without making a move.

The woman squatted on the floor and started wailing loudly. He could not let the villagers hear her, and could not let anyone see this sight. He dragged her to her feet, twisted her arm to stop her from stamping her feet, and pushed her onto the bed. She struggled, weeping and yelling, so he grabbed a pillow and pressed it over her mouth. He thought he was in hell. This was his life, yet he was seeking to live in this hell.

"Make a noise and I will kill you!"

He made this threat as he moved away from her, took off his clothes, and wiped the urine off his face. The woman was afraid of being killed, and convulsed as she quietly sobbed. The fat plucked hen, innards removed and feetless legs sticking up, looked just like a woman's corpse. It thoroughly disgusted him.

For a long time afterward, he found women disgusting. He had to use disgust to bury his pity for this woman in order to save himself. Maybe Qian was right, he didn't love her, he had simply enjoyed her, he had for some time needed a woman and needed her flesh. What Qian said was right, too, he had not shown her tenderness, it was contrived, he had been trying to manufacture a make-believe happiness. The expression in his eyes when he ejaculated during intercourse must have betrayed that he didn't love her. However, under the circumstances of those times, terror had induced lust from both parties, which afterward did not become love but, instead, simply left behind the hatred that grew out of carnal release.

Qian sobbed and kept repeating, "You've killed me, I've been killed by you…" Through her sobbing and mumbling, he made out that Qian's father had been chief engineer in a factory during the Nationalist period, and that during the period of purifying class ranks, he had been classified as a historical counterrevolutionary by the Army Control Commission. Qian didn't dare curse the injustice against her father, didn't dare curse the revolution, so she could only curse counterrevolutionaries and she could only curse him. But she was also terrified of him.

"It is this era that has killed you," he retaliated. Qian herself had said something like that in her letter. "The reality is that there is no escape for anyone, and it's our fate to care for one another, so don't talk about love!"

"Then why did you pick me? You could have picked that randy little slut. Why did you have to marry me?"

"Who? Who are you talking about?" he asked.

"That Maomei of yours!"

"I don't have anything to do with that village girl!"

"You're in love with the randy little slut, so why are you using me instead?" Qian sobbed.

"I can't make any sense of all this! We can get divorced right away, we can go to the commune tomorrow and announce we had fraudulently signed our names, say it was all a joke, an abominable farce to give the village cadres and the villagers a good laugh!"

Qian, however, said as she sobbed, "I won't make any more trouble…"

"Then go to sleep!"

He got her to get up, and pulled off the urine-soaked sheet and covers from their nuptial bed. Qian, pathetically, stood out of the way. When he had remade the bed, he threw her some clean clothes from her bag, and told her to get changed and lie down. He got water from the water vat, washed himself all over, and sat on the stool by the fire all night.

Would he go on forever like this, caring for her? Wasn't he just a piece of straw to save her? He had to wait for her to fall asleep so that he could get those sheets of paper from the desk and burn them all. If she had a fit again, he would just have to say that she was psychologically disturbed. He would never write anything down again, he would just rot in this stench.

Qian said she hoped that she would die soon. She would never go with him again to desolate places, along cliffs or riverbanks. He would push her down. He could stop thinking about tricking her to go out the door, she would just stay in the house and not go anywhere!

As for him, he wished that she would drop dead, disappear forever, but he didn't say this. He regretted not having got himself a village girl who was physically and mentally healthy and who had not been educated. She would simply sleep with him, cook, and bear his children, she would never invade his inner mind. No, he hated women.

When Qian left, he took her to the bus stop at the end of town. Qian said, "You don't have to wait for the bus to leave, go home."

He said nothing, but hoped that the bus would move off soon.

44

It was winter again, and he was sitting by the brazier made by one of tlie locals, which he'd bought for two yuan. The brazier had an earthenware inset, which kept the hot coals and ashes warm, and to this he added a wire cover on top for his cup of tea. The winter nights were long, and it had already been dark for some time. In the off season in the countryside, the villagers would do their private work during the day, and at night it was pitch-black everywhere, only his house still had a light on. The incident of his quarrelling with his new wife had the villagers talking for ten to fifteen days, then no one asked about it and everything became peaceful again.

People now came to his house, and, without calling out, just pushed open the door and came in to look around, chat, smoke, and drink tea. That was how he received guests, and if people came, he would offer them a cigarette. He had got to know the village cadres well and established a pattern of life that would let others familiarize themselves with this scholar who did not meddle in village affairs. There were always copies of books by Marx and Lenin on his desk, so the village cadres who could read a little had a certain respect for him. Maomei once knocked at his door and asked if he had something good to read; he gave her a copy of Nation and Revolution. She took one look and said, "That's scary, how would I ever manage to read it?"

Maomei had a primary-school education but didn't dare take the book. Another time, his door was open, and having boiled a kettle of water, he was busy washing his sheets. Maomei came to the door and, leaning against the frame, said she could take them to the pond and pound them with a washing rod. She said they would be cleaner, but he declined her kind offer.