In the dark, p.25
In the Dark, page 25
I was silent for a long time, and then I said, ‘You hate me.’
She shook her head. ‘No, but I think that this is better.’
I looked her in the eyes and said, ‘I heard that you have been really ill.’
She avoided my gaze, and said lightly, ‘Yes, I was in hospital for a couple of weeks.’
I asked her what was wrong with her, and she said that she hadn’t really been ill, just overtired to the point where she hadn’t felt like getting out of bed, and if she did she felt dizzy. I said she had been overworking. She smiled bitterly. ‘Yes, I was tired, really, really tired. If there is nothing else … ?’ She was trying to get rid of me.
I didn’t leave. I said, ‘Is it normal for an employee to try and throw her boss out?’
She smiled again. It was an unhappy, cold smile. ‘Just go away. In future if you need to talk to me, do it at the office.’
I didn’t move, and trying to drag out the conversation I asked her, ‘Why didn’t you go back to Beijing?’
She said coldly, ‘Could I go back?’
‘Director Tie agreed, so who could stop you?’
‘Then let’s just say that I didn’t want to go.’
‘You made the right decision.’
She sighed and said with a bitter smile: ‘This isn’t about having made the right decision. I have no idea why I am even alive, so wherever I go it would be the same. At least here I have been able to make a contribution, people respect me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t leave. I am not staying for your sake, or for any other man, but for my own, OK? Do you think you can understand that?’
I looked at her helplessly. Her unfriendly arrogance made me feel cold and strange in a way I had never experienced before. In the past I had often hoped that she would change her ways, but now that she really had, I felt bereft, a pain deep in my heart. However, the real pain, the kind that etches into your bones, was still waiting for me.
The following day, when I went to report to Unit Director Luo, she told me that Huang Yiyi had not wanted to stay, but that Director Tie had ordered that under no circumstances whatsoever was she to be allowed to leave. Director Tie had agreed, so why didn’t he let her go? I thought it was very peculiar. Unit Director Luo said, ‘I have no idea how Director Tie found out, but apparently Huang Yiyi in the course of her work inadvertently became aware of something that headquarters has declared top secret, so if she leaves she would pose an enormous security threat. I’m afraid that she will just have to put up with having to stay.’ I asked what the top-secret information was, but Unit Director Luo said she didn’t know. ‘If even my security clearance isn’t high enough, it must be very important,’ she said crisply. ‘That’s why I always tell my cadres, “Don’t ask about the things you shouldn’t know about, because if you do know then you have to take responsibility for them.” Look at Huang Yiyi! I know she’s desperate to leave, but it’s her own fault for finding out whatever it is, and now she has to take responsibility for it.’
What could it be that she had found out? I wondered at the time if it was about Xiaoyu, and later on Director Tie confirmed it. According to our rules, Huang Yiyi would have to wait until Xiaoyu’s mission was completed before she could leave.
It was all my fault!
Huang Yiyi went on hunger strike and ended up making herself seriously ill. I understood why she had decided to stay, why she had taken over Chen’s old job – it was because she had no choice, and was trying to make the best of things. Her life was in ruins, but she couldn’t be bothered to talk to me, she couldn’t even be bothered to complain, and just warded me off with politely worded generalities. I guessed that she must hate me, hate me to the point where she was left helpless and mute, and so she had written me out of her life, not wanting to have anything to do with me ever again.
Sure enough, from that day onwards unless it was necessary for work, Huang Yiyi never said another word to me. I understood that this was her way of punishing me, and that it was my fate. Since it was my fate, I had to try and make it look as if I accepted it … Day after day, Huang Yiyi and I would meet on the road and walk past each other without a word, as if we had not seen each other.
This went on for nearly a year, and then suddenly one afternoon Huang Yiyi came to see me and asked for help from the Party with solving a problem. I asked her what the problem was, and she seemed to be sunk deep in silent thought. After a long pause she raised her head and said it was about Zhang Guoqing from the communications section. I was most puzzled; what on earth could have happened to Zhang Guoqing that he needed her to sort it out? She said: ‘Don’t you know that his wife and son have been sent back home as punishment?’ Of course I knew. I asked her what she wanted done about it. She said, ‘You promised me that if I cracked the cipher I could save someone.’
‘That’s right, you can bring Wang back to work. I’ve been wondering why you haven’t mentioned it recently.’
She sniffed. ‘When Director Tie forced me to stay, I didn’t want to live, and I really didn’t have the energy to think about anyone else. Besides which he’s gone back to his old home town to try and make things up with his wife. He’ll be watching her every mood day in and day out; he won’t love me any more.’
She was absolutely right; I had hurt her time and again. I wanted to apologize, but she cut me short. ‘It’s fine, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m here to tell you that I want to use my power not to help Comrade Wang but Zhang Guoqing. Please do your best to help Zhang Guoqing bring his wife and son back to Unit 701.’
I was confused. What was Zhang Guoqing to her?
Everyone in Unit 701 knew Zhang Guoqing. He used to work in the confidential documents division, and all secret and top-secret documents generated by Unit 701 passed through his hands. His wife was a nurse at our hospital, a woman from Jiaodong, very tall and strong, with a real temper. It was said that Zhang Guoqing was afraid of his wife, because if they started quarrelling she would pick up anything that came to hand and throw it at him. One time what came to hand was a scalpel, which flew like a sliver of silver to bury itself in Zhang Guoqing’s shoulder. I guess that was when the story about the domestic violence he suffered first started. But people said that she really loved her husband and that he didn’t have to lift a finger at home – she would even wash his feet and clip his nails for him. She was always talking about how wonderful Zhang Guoqing was, how much she loved him and couldn’t bear to be apart from him, to the point where she couldn’t sleep if he was away from home, and so on and so forth. The thing is that Zhang Guoqing was often away from home, because his work demanded that he travel regularly to headquarters. On one occasion three years earlier he was on his way back from headquarters – he always used to go to the office first on his return, to lock the confidential documents in his filing cabinet before he headed off home. But on this occasion the train had been delayed by many hours, so by the time he got to Unit 701 it was already well past midnight, and if he had gone to his office before going home it would have taken at least an hour. He just couldn’t bear the prospect, so he went straight home, not thinking that this would result in terrible consequences.
If the following day he had got up early and gone to work, nothing would have happened. But as he was about to get out of bed, his wife reminded him that today was a Sunday, meaning that he might as well sleep in a bit longer. Sleeping late was a bad idea. That bad idea caused all sorts of trouble! When he finally woke up it was past ten o’clock and the house was empty, both his wife and son having gone out. He knew why his wife wasn’t there: this was a Sunday and so all the wives living in the compound would have taken the bus provided by our unit to go to the nearest town to shop. They went once a week because that was their only chance, and if they didn’t go food, and indeed other necessities of life, would be a real problem the following week. Mostly the wives wouldn’t take their children, and in this case Zhang Guoqing was at home and could look after the boy. But perhaps because his wife wanted him to be able to sleep in peace and quiet, she took the child with her. The boy was only seven and had just started primary school, and in the past every time his father came back he had brought presents. This time his father had come back in the middle of the night, so he didn’t know what presents he had brought: therefore he decided to search his father’s briefcase. His mother had gone to the canteen to buy buns, his father was still asleep, there was no one else at home, and so he opened his father’s briefcase and immediately found his present: a paper bag of sweets and a box of biscuits. He twisted a sweet out of its wrapper and ate it while he carried on looking. He then flipped through a folder of confidential documents. The child was not at all interested in the contents of the documents, but he was attracted by the paper, so white, so shiny, he just had to feel it, and having felt it, so stiff and smooth, he knew it was the perfect stuff to make paper planes out of …
It was at that moment that Zhang Guoqing’s life started to go seriously wrong. His son noticed that there were loads of papers in the folder, bound into individual documents. Given that there were dozens of documents, would anyone notice if he took one? So he put one in his school bag. After breakfast his mother told him to come with her, and he thought that he could play with paper planes when they went out, so he went to pick up his school bag. His mother said, ‘You’re not going to school – we’re off to town to shop, so why have you got your school bag?’
He said, ‘I have some homework to do, so while you are shopping I will sit in the bus and do it.’ When his mother heard that she was pleased to see her son being so good.
Two hours later when Zhang Guoqing got up, he immediately noticed that his briefcase was standing open. He was a confidential documents courier, more than a decade of experience made him exceptionally sensitive to the material that he carried, and the moment he looked he realized at once: one document was missing! He was pretty sure that his seven-year-old son was responsible, so he rushed out to find him. He searched the compound and asked all the neighbours, but they had not seen hide nor hair of the child. Then someone suggested that he might have gone with his mother into town. That scared Zhang Guoqing practically witless, because if his son really had got hold of one of these documents, it was going to be crucial whether he had left the compound or not. In the end it was that point that condemned them all.
I will cut a long story short. When Zhang Guoqing met his wife and son coming back from town, the boy was clutching a paper plane made out of half a sheet of paper. Going by what the boy said later, because the sheets were so big (A3 size), he tore them in half so that each page could make two paper planes. When his mother went shopping he did not go with her but stayed at the bus station under the pretext of doing his homework. In fact he was playing with one of the other children from the compound. Since that document consisted of four pages, they had the wherewithal to make eight planes. And that’s what they did. As it happened, each of the two children had one paper plane left; as for the rest, some had got stuck on roofs, some had just disappeared into the crowds of people, some had been stolen by boys from the town. When we searched the bus station and surrounding area, we found four of the planes, which really is not at all bad. But we never found the other two, and that kind of loss was as serious as if they had been real aeroplanes. Every member in Unit 701 was deeply scared by this development, and it was discussed in the most alarming terms.
Punishment was unavoidable, and it had to be severe.
In the end Zhang Guoqing’s wife lost her job and had to take the boy back to their home town. There were two things that saved Zhang Guoqing. One was that he was a Party member, and there’s the saying, ‘Losing Party membership takes three years off’. That means that in return for being stripped of Party membership, you could avoid a prison sentence of three years or less. The other reason was that he was a confidential documents courier, with very high security clearance, and there was no way that he could be allowed to return to civilian life. Just because we wanted to fire him doesn’t mean that we could. So he kept his job, but had to leave the confidential documents division and go and work for the communications section. His rank within the Party was then reduced from level 21 right down to the very lowest grade: 24. There actually was no such thing as a level 24 cadre in the national Party structure, the lowest was actually 23: level 24 was a grade operated by work units themselves. The first year after applying for Party membership, or the first year after graduating from university, you’d be treated as a so-called level 24 cadre, kind of like getting you ready to be a Party member. If during that year you didn’t do anything wrong, you’d be formally enrolled.
Some people said that the punishment meted out to Zhang Guoqing’s wife was too heavy – and it was true, she was punished because he couldn’t be. She suffered for the sake of her husband and child; it was her duty, and she didn’t complain. She didn’t complain, and of course there was no way that the Party was going to revise the verdict, and no one was expecting Huang Yiyi to come out and ask for mercy on their behalf. I asked her why she wanted to do this and she said something vague about feeling sorry for them; that it was unfair that the lives of three people should be wrecked because a seven-year-old child did something wrong.
‘Comrade Wang doesn’t have a fun life either.’
I had been expecting her to ‘redeem’ Comrade Wang, because after all she was involved in what happened to him, and she had made me promise. Instead she took my pawn with her queen.
‘Well, if you would sort things out for both Comrade Wang and Zhang Guoqing, that would be wonderful.’
‘I meant to deal with Comrade Wang first.’
‘No. If we have to prioritize, then Zhang Guoqing comes first.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
Everyone would have understood it if she had wanted to save Comrade Wang, but it seemed completely inexplicable that she would go to all this effort for Zhang Guoqing. Since I didn’t know what was going on, I set out to make some basic inquiries, and thus discovered a new bombshell – she was having an affair with him! They had got together completely by chance and in a very simple way: one Sunday Zhang Guoqing had borrowed 20 yuan from other people, to which he added his own 5 yuan, and was on his way to the post office in the nearby town to send it to his wife and child who were suffering in the famine. He filled in the documentation and just as he was handing the money over at the counter, someone suddenly rushed forward, grabbed the money out of his hand, and ran off. Zhang Guoqing ran after him but didn’t catch him, so he squatted down in the road and burst into tears. He kept saying that it wasn’t money that had been stolen – it was the lives of his wife and child! And so on and so forth. Anyway, Huang Yiyi and Comrade Zha happened to be walking past the post office and bumped into him. Huang Yiyi saw him crying in the road like that and felt sorry for him, so she fished out all the money that she had on her and borrowed some from Comrade Zha to make up 25 yuan, which she then gave to Zhang Guoqing. She told him to hurry up and send it to his family. Zhang Guoqing was stunned when he saw the money in Huang Yiyi’s hands; this was after all the time of the three years of natural disaster when people were starving all over the country, and 25 yuan was enough to buy three or four hundred jin of rice. His wife and child would be able to eat for more than six months on that!
From that point onward, without saying a word, Zhang Guoqing was often to be found helping out Huang Yiyi: he’d be sweeping the floor, or washing it, or putting new paper in the windows, or cleaning her bathroom – in the end he also washed her clothes, including her underwear! Thanks to all this, the two of them gradually got closer and closer. So she was having an affair with him just as she had with Comrade Wang, but the difference was that this time most people didn’t know. This was because the pair of them lived in the same compound, so they would meet regularly anyway without attracting any attention. Comrade Wang on the other hand had worked in a different unit, so any relationship was easily detected. There was also another factor. Zhang Guoqing was generally agreed to be a good husband, not the kind of person you would believe this of, so anyone who discovered the affair would be sure that it was Huang Yiyi who had seduced him. But she was in a very different position now, whereby we could forgive any mistakes that she made, because she had done so well for us. So this particular piece of gossip hadn’t gone very far and neither Unit Director Luo nor myself was aware of it.
Having discovered this bombshell, I decided to deal with the situation in a completely different way from that with Comrade Wang. So rather than reporting to my superiors, I made an appointment to see Huang Yiyi. I needed to make her understand one thing: although at present very few people were aware of her relationship with Zhang Guoqing, if the Party acceded to her request to resolve the problem of his wife and son, the whole of Unit 701 would know about them and her reputation would be ruined.
‘Really,’ I reminded her, ‘you can’t carry on being single.’
‘Why not?’ she said in a half-teasing voice.
‘If you love Zhang Guoqing, this won’t help him.’
‘You mean I should make him get a divorce and then marry me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It wouldn’t work, and besides it’s impossible. I know him, he’d almost rather die than get a divorce. He couldn’t bear it.’
‘Leaving that on one side, you still shouldn’t do this for him.’
She asked why, and I told her that she was currently in a wonderful position: the Party had already put in motion steps to find her a husband, so if she made a fuss right now, people would gossip about her relationship with Zhang Guoqing, which would be very bad for her efforts to get married. I kept coming back to the same point: in my opinion she shouldn’t interfere in Zhang Guoqing’s affairs – not that she couldn’t, but that it would be a bad idea, because it was a genie she couldn’t put back in the bottle, and she would just get hurt. It was a fact, and she did think seriously about it. However, her final decision was very disappointing.
