Waiting

Her initial response was long silence.

"Are you okay?" Nurse Shen asked.

Ma

On the volleyball court Ma

During the break her teammates told her to go to the clinic and have the injury dressed, so she left, pla

Once alone in the bedroom, she read the letter again and tears gushed from her eyes. She flung the pages down on the desk and fell on her bed, sobbing, twisting, and biting the pillowcase. A mosquito buzzed above her head, then settled on her neck, but she didn't bother to slap it. She felt as if her heart had been pierced.

When her three roommates came back at nine, she was still in tears. They picked up the letter and glanced through it; together they tried to console her by condemning the heartless man. But their words made her sob harder and even convulsively. That night she didn't wash her face or brush her teeth. She slept with her clothes on, waking now and then and weeping quietly while her roommates wheezed or smacked their lips or murmured something in their sleep. She simply couldn't stop her tears.

She was ill for a few weeks. She felt aged, in deep lassitude and numb despair, and regretted not marrying Mai Dong before he left for the front. Her limbs were weary, as though separated from herself. Despite her comrades' protests, she dropped out of the volleyball team, saying she was too sick to play. She spent more time alone, as though all at once she belonged to an older generation; she cared less about her looks and clothes.

By now she was almost twenty-six, on the verge of becoming an old maid, whose standard age was twenty-seven to most people's minds. The hospital had three old maids; Ma

She wasn't very attractive, but she was slim and tall and looked natural; besides, she had a pleasant voice. In normal circumstances she wouldn't have had difficulty in finding a boyfriend, but the hospital always kept over a hundred women nurses, most of whom were around twenty, healthy and normal, so young officers could easily find girlfriends among them. As a result, few men were interested in Ma

2

In the mid-i960s the hospital had only four medical school graduates on its staff. Lin Kong was one of them. The rest of the seventy doctors had been trained by the army itself through short-term courses and experience on battlefields. In addition to his diploma, Lin carried on each shoulder one bar and three stars, having the rank of captain and a monthly salary of ninety-four yuan. Understandably some nurses found him attractive, especially those new arrivals who didn't know he kept a family in the countryside. To their disappointment, they would find out later that he was already married. Word had gone about that his wife was eight years older than he and had been taken into his family as a child bride when he was just seven. It was said that she had been his na

From their days in the nursing school, friendship had developed between Lin and Ma

When Ma

She was grateful for his kind words. She was certain that unlike others, he would not gossip about her misfortune behind her back.

One day in the summer, she stopped by his dormitory to deliver the journal Studies in Military Medical Science and some pills for his arthritis. Lin was alone in the bedroom he shared with two other doctors. Ma

By contrast, Lin's two roommates, as though illiterate, owned no books. On one of their bedside desks, a brass artillery shell, a foot in length and four inches in diameter, stood beside a lamp, which was made of conch shells glued together. Yet they both had flowered quilts and pillows, whereas Lin's bedding was in plain white and green – a standard army set. His mosquito net was yellowish, its bottom edge frayed. It reminded Ma

To her surprise, Lin bent down and pulled a washbasin out from under his roommate Ming Chen's bed, saying, "We have some fruit here. " In the basin were about twenty brown apple-pears, which the three doctors had bought together the day before.

"Oh, don't treat me like a guest," she said.

"No. You're lucky today. If you come tomorrow, they'll all be gone." He picked up a large pear and with his foot pushed the basin back under the bed. The metallic rasp on the cement floor grated on her a little. "I'll be back in a second," he said and went out to wash the pear.

She picked up a book from his bed, which was written by Stalin, entitled The Problems of Leninism. Opening it, she found a woodcut bookplate on its inside front cover. At the bottom of the plate was a foreign word, EX-LIBRIS, above which was an engraving of a thatched cottage, partly surrounded by a railing and shaded by two trees with luxuriant crowns, five birds soaring in the distance by the peak of a hill, and the setting sun casting down its last rays. For a moment Ma

When Lin came back she asked him, "What does this mean?" She pointed at the foreign word.

"It's Latin, meaning 'from my collection.''' He handed her the pear. She noticed he had long-boned hands, the fingers lean and apparently dexterous. He should be a surgeon instead of a physician, she thought.