LITMIR.BIZ

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the calendar on my wall, and every morning I mark a day off, knowing it is one day closer to our reunion.”

      I was the only one, by the fourth week, not to have received a letter. “Are you sure you don’t want to write to your parents again?” asked Nan, who stood next to me in line for the formation drill and slept in the bunk bed above me. “Your last letter might have got lost, and they might not have the address to write to you.”

      I shook my head. I had sent a postcard to my parents the first week, saying nothing but that I had arrived safely. My father was not the type to write a letter, and secretly I was relieved that my father was not like Ping’s, who would continue sending letters filled with unabashed words of love, which Ping never hesitated to share. My mother might write me, on a whim, a letter filled with quotations from ancient poems, but then again, she might have decided to cut me out of all communications.

      At the end of the week I was summoned to Lieutenant Wei’s room. It was a Sunday, and we had the morning off from drills. She motioned for me to take the only chair, and I moved it away from her before sitting down in the middle of the room. There was a single bed on my left, with an army-issue quilt, blanket, and sheet. There was no pillow on her bed, and I wondered if she wrapped up some old clothes as we did at night, or if she had a pillow hiding in her closet. On the wall next to the bed were a few framed photographs. A black-and-white one stood out. A young girl, thirteen or fourteen, looked away with a smile, as if she had been teasing the photographer. “That was taken the summer before I enlisted,” Lieutenant Wei said as she studied me. “Have you been out to town yet?”

      “No, Lieutenant,” I said. She only had to check her chart to know that I had never requested one of the two-hour permits to visit town on Sundays.

      “Why? The town is too small for someone from Beijing to visit?”

      I thought about the question, which, like all questions put to us by an officer, could have many traps. There was no particular reason, I said. I could have said that I wanted to give the opportunity to the other girls, who were more eager to have the two hours of freedom, but that would have led to more questioning. I had learned, in the past few weeks, that an officer’s friendliness was not to be trusted. Lan, a girl whose hometown was in the same province as Lieutenant Wei’s hometown, once had an amicable chat with Lieutenant Wei at a drill break, but five minutes later, when Lan made the mistake of turning right when the rest of us turned left, Lieutenant Wei ordered her to leave the formation and do a hundred turn-lefts. Even worse, Lan was to give herself the drill command, and by the time she reached thirty, her voice was choked by her tears. Lieutenant Wei, while the rest of us watched with anxiety, told Lan that if she did not make the command clear and loud to all who were witnessing her punishment, it would not count. Similar incidents had happened to others: A girl was ordered to stand in the middle of the mess hall during a meal after she had laughed at a joke told quietly to her by a squad mate; another girl was asked to read a self-criticism in front of the company because she had claimed the food from the mess hall was better suited for feeding pigs than human beings. These punishments were measured out not only by Lieutenant Wei and the other junior officers, but also by Major Tang, the commander of our company, who, as the only male officer, liked to storm through the barracks for unannounced inspections.

      When I did not reply, Lieutenant Wei changed the topic and said that she had heard that I hadn’t yet received a letter from home. I wondered who had reported this to her, but perhaps this was how the army worked, details about our lives recorded by informants among us. My parents are not the type to write letters, I said.

      “Is that a problem for you?”

      “A problem, Lieutenant?”

      “Would you like to phone them?” Lieutenant Wei said. “I could arrange for you to make a phone call to your parents if you wish.”

      My parents did not own a telephone. The nearest public telephone was a few blocks from our building, guarded by a brusque middle-aged woman. A message would be taken but would not be delivered until the end of the day; she was paid as a government worker, her salary at a set level, so she rarely inconvenienced herself to deliver even the most urgent messages. Once in a while when the residents filed complaints, she would for a week or two put the callers on hold and send her teenage son around the neighborhood. “A phone call for number 205,” he would call out in front of a building, his voice no longer a child’s but not yet a grown man’s. He was said to be slow, so no school would admit him, and he spent his days, if not as a companion to his mother, then running around the neighborhood and intimidating young children with incoherent ghost stories. My mother would never respond to such a boy calling our flat number in that manner, nor would she be willing to make a trip to the phone booth to call me back.

      I told Lieutenant Wei that there was no need to make a call, as my parents did not have a telephone at their place.

      “And a neighbor? A friend living nearby?” Lieutenant Wei said. “Anyone who could receive a phone call on their behalf so they know you are well?”

      The only telephone number I knew—though I had never used it—was Professor Shan’s. It was written on a slip of paper, in her neat handwriting, and taped on the red telephone next to her single bed. I had studied the number many times while she was reading a long passage, and after a while I could not get it out of my mind.

      There is no one I could call, I said when Lieutenant Wei pressed me again. She studied my face as if trying to decide if I was lying out of defiance. She retrieved a file folder from a drawer, and pages rustled under her impatient fingers. I looked out the window at the evergreen trees, wishing to be one of them. I loved trees more than I loved people; I still do. Few creatures are crueler than human beings, Professor Shan had said once; we had been standing side by side next to her fifth-floor window, looking down at people busy with their late-afternoon lives. I can guarantee you, Professor Shan said, pointing to the weeping willows by the roadside, every one of those trees is more worthwhile than the people you’ll get to know in life; isn’t it a good thing that once you are bored by people you still have trees to watch?

      “Your father’s work unit? Can you call him there?” Lieutenant Wei said. “But of course we’ll have to arrange for you to call during the weekdays to catch him at work.”

      She was reading my registration form, where I had put down “service” for my father’s occupation, along with the name of the department store where he worked night shifts. I wondered if she was calculating my parents’ ages, as the registration form asked for their birth information, too.

      There was no need to call him, I replied. My parents were not the type who would begrudge the army for not giving them sufficient information about my well-being.

      Lieutenant Wei seemed not to notice the hostility of my words. “Your mother—what kind of illness does she have?”

      When I had entered elementary school I had been instructed by my father to put down “retired early from illness” for my mother’s occupation. What kind of illness? the teachers would ask. What did she do before she became ill? At first I did not know how to answer, but by middle school I became an expert in dealing with people’s curiosity—she was a bookkeeper, I would say, the most tedious and lonely job I could come up with for her; lupus was what had been troubling her, I would explain, the name of the disease learned in fifth grade when a classmate’s mother had died from it. I thought about what kind of tale would stop Lieutenant Wei from pursuing the topic. In the end I said that I did not know what had caused her disability.

      The earliest I could remember people commenting on her illness was when I was four. I was standing in a long line waiting for our monthly egg ration when my father crossed the street to buy rice. What kind of parents would leave a child that small to hold a place in line? asked someone who must have been new to the neighborhood, and a woman, not far behind me, replied that my mother was a mental case. Nymphomania was the word Professor Shan had used, and it was from her that I had learned the story of my parents’ marriage: At nineteen, my mother had fallen in love with a married man who had recently moved into the neighborhood, and when the man claimed that he had nothing to do with her fantasy, she ran into

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