Red Azalea

what that might be. She said I wouldn’t be right. I said, If I am right, will you promise to tell me everything? She nodded.

A man, I said, looking straight into her eyes. She lost her calm.

His name was Leopard Lee. He was twenty-four and was the head of Company Thirty-two. He was from the South, from a family of gardeners. He was a delicate man. She had met him at a headquarters meeting two months ago and had secretly thought about him since. She told me that that was it. Her story was done.

I said, Did you two have private talks? She said, What do you mean? How could I do that? Well, how do you know he likes you? I asked. She said, Well, I just feel that he does. She said she of course couldn’t be sure, but anyway this was not what she wanted to tell me. I asked, What’s the problem? She said, I just know I’m not supposed to have those thoughts at all. She said that the awful thing was that she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She was disturbed and she didn’t like that. I joked and said it sounded like a personal-life corruption, that she should bring the problem to the company meeting. She said it’s not nice to make fun of other people’s pain. I asked if it was really pain. She said it is supposed to be pain and it was. It dragged her, burned her. It made her mind pop up dirty thoughts, thoughts about men and teapots.

She looked helpless. I said I had exactly the same symptoms. She asked what had I done about it. I said I read a book. She asked if I had felt better after reading. I said that I did. She asked if she could learn the title of the book. I said, It’s called The Second-Time Handshake. It’s a banned book, I got it from Little Green’s suitcase. It was hand-copied, three hundred pages. She asked what the book was about. I said a story of a man and a woman. She said she supposed the book must have poisoned Little Green’s head. I said that I had to agree. She said she did not want to be misguided by the book. I said of course, but who knows what one’s judgment may truly be. I said that I would not believe a strong-minded person like her would be poisoned by a book. It would be ridiculous. It would be a joke. She said that made sense. She told me to drop the book in her rain boot at night. I then said that I would not be responsible for whatever happened in her head in the future. She said she would take responsibility for herself.

She devoured the book. Yan, the commander, the Party secretary, devoured the handwritten book in three nights with a flashlight in the mosquito net. When she returned the copy, she looked different. She told me, I want to write him. But then her face fell. She said, I can’t. It’s not safe. We went to the brick factory. I asked her to explain to me why it was not safe. She said that the bookish man’s letter to Little Green was opened by Lu-that’s how the company knew where to catch them that night. The Party bosses could look into anyone’s letters and suitcases at any time. There was no rule against this.

I told Yan that I had hated her for exposing Little Green. She said that I should. She lowered her head. She listened to my accusation quietly. I said, You are a murderer. I cried. She said she hated herself but it was what she was made to do. She had known for a long time that Lu had been spying on Little Green. As the Party secretary and commander, she had no choice when the case was reported.

Yan took my hands in hers and rubbed them. Her hands were rough, like those of an old peasant. She said that only now had she understood how unforgivable her act was. She herself now was in Little Green’s position-involved with a man. How unforgivable it was, what she did. She said she was a frog who had lived at the bottom of a well- her knowledge of the universe was only as big as the opening of the well. Her naivete and ignorance made her a murderer. She was fooled by Party propaganda, by Red Flag magazine and the People’s Daily. She was trained to be a murderer. Who was not? She didn’t understand the world around her, the world where the murderers go on living while the innocent die like weeds.

I remembered her snake-catching in the reeds. I asked her about it. Gazing at the sunset, she said that it was for Little Green, to make her come back to her senses one day. She had collected sixty-nine water snakes in a jar, which she stored under our bed. She had to reach the perfect number of one hundred. She said it was the first time in her life she had put faith in superstitions. Her grandmother once collected snakes to cure her disabled sister. When she had one hundred, her sister stood up and walked. She had been paralyzed for six years.

You know the snakes are poisonous, don’t you? I said. She nodded. Her smile was calm and that touched me deeply. I asked if she would allow me to join her. I said I would not be afraid of the snakes. She nodded, grabbing my shoulders.

We went out to hunt for the snakes separately. I never caught one. I was scared of these creatures. Their shape horrified me. The grease on their tails made me paranoid. I had nightmares, my body wrapped in snakes. I didn’t tell Yan about my dreams. I couldn’t believe that she was not scared of them. When she brought more snakes back, I imagined the horror she had gone through. She was my heroine again.

We talked more about men, in particular Leopard Lee. I suggested that, if she wanted, I could be her personal messenger. She shook her head and said if it was wrong for Little Green, it should be wrong for her too. I’m a Party member. I can’t do things I have forbidden others to do. She looked sad but determined. She was being ridiculous, yet her dignity caught my heart. I was drawn to her as I looked at her. I couldn’t have enough of her that evening. She was my Venus.

It’s only superficial, isn’t it? I said on our way back to the barracks. She said suddenly, I bet you can fight with Lu now, because you’ve developed sharp teeth. She laughed. She made a hat of reeds for me as we discussed how the letter should be written and how to find an official excuse for me to deliver it to Leopard Lee.

I felt joy. The joy of being with Yan. The joy of having her depend on me. Two weeks passed. Still Yan had not given me anything to deliver. When she saw me, she avoided the subject. I could tell that she was happy, yet a little nervous. I saw her hang red-colored underwear to dry. Bright red. She hummed songs, spending more time looking at herself in front of a palm-sized mirror by the door. She stopped swearing. I teased her. I swore the words she used to swear. She knew my intention. She just smiled, called me a brat. I asked her about the letter to Leopard. She kept on equivocating. She said that she had no time to write. I said Leopard might have forgotten her. That night, when I was lying in bed, she opened my curtain and threw in a folded letter.

Comrade Leopard Lee:

How are you? I was wondering how the agricultural initiative is progressing in your company. Here we are making good progress. I have thought of our meeting often. It was meaningful as well as politically fruitful.

In the margin Yan had written, “Will you please help?” I took a piece of paper and replied that I would do whatever the Party required of me.

The next day I rewrote her letter. I did not know what Leopard Lee looked like, so I described Yan’s face instead. I tried to imagine what they would do when they would be together, how they would touch each other; just thinking of it made my heart beat fast. I wanted to describe Yan’s body but I had never seen it. I described my own instead, touching myself and imagining my body was hers and my fingers his.

When Yan returned, I whispered that I had finished. She was excited and said that she could not wait for bedtime to read it. I told her that I wanted to see her reading it. Yan said then we should make an excuse to get in bed together. We made a plan and waited for the dark to fall.

After dinner Yan and I sat by the door. She started to repair her rain shoes while I took out my rifle to clean. We said nothing to each other and pretended that we were concentrating on our hands. I took apart the gun and cleaned it. I was absentminded. I stole a couple of moments to glance at Yan. She sanded the cracked shoe, applied glue and let it sit. She didn’t look at me, but I knew that she knew I was looking at her. Her face flushed. She smiled shyly. Lightly, she gave a few blows to the shoes. I adored her shyness because no one else would think that she could be shy. Her intimacy belonged to me.

Lu was reading Mao’s work aloud. Other roommates had being going in and out of the room hanging their clothes on a string, splashing dirty water outside. The male soldiers in the opposite building were tapping their bowls with chopsticks. They sang, “When the sun rises, Oh-Yo, Oh-Yo, Oh-Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo, Oh, Oh…” Their song had no end. The soldiers splashed water on the muddy ground as well and walked into their rooms barefooted. The doors were closed. The song dashed on.

When darkness fell, I was already in bed. I waited for everybody else to get into their beds. I looked around the room through the net. I looked at Lu from the top down. Her concentration amazed me. She really read the Little Red Book every day. I was sure she had memorized every comma and period. Did she enjoy this? Or was she just putting on a show? Or both? Did she ever feel restless? She was young, her body was full. She liked to watch her own feet, I noticed. She often took a long time washing her feet. They were tanned dark brown, and her toenails were as clean as peanuts. They were not like ours, dyed orangish with fungicide. She used vinegar to rub off the dye on her toenails each night as the rest of us slept. Once the strong smell of her vinegar woke me up at midnight and I saw through the net that she had dozed off while applying it. Her feet rested on a stool, like two big rice