Nonetheless, at least my mistake wouldn’t protect that bastard of a pharmacist. The next day, like a lunatic, I grabbed hold of him and dragged him to the train station. Of course, in order to maintain the secrecy surrounding Abing’s suicide, we never stated clearly what his crime was, nor could we. Because of this, once at the station, he took on the airs of someone wrongly accused and asked why he was being forced to leave. How was I supposed to answer this fucker without giving away the real cause? Well, at first, I said nothing. Instead, I removed the pistol from the guard’s waist, cocked it and pointed the barrel in his face.

‘I’ll tell you this only once: if you dare utter another word, I’ll gun you down where you stand!’

Scared shitless, he remained silent for a moment, then turned and fled like the coward he was.

21

What happened next you’ll never guess.

A few days after that Shandong bastard left, I had returned home after a day’s work when Lin Xiaofang came round looking for me. When she saw me, she immediately fell to her knees and in a voice choked with tears told me something I couldn’t – no, dared not believe. This is what she told me: Abing had no awareness of sex. He believed – like a child believes – that all a man and a woman needed to do was to sleep in the same bed, embrace, kiss, and, voilà, he’d be a father. That was how his mother had explained it to him …

‘You know, he was incredibly filial. He wanted a child so badly – not so much for us, but so that his mother could be a grandmother. A year on and I was still not pregnant … he began to feel that it was my fault, that something was wrong with me. He’d get angry, fly into a rage. He wouldn’t sleep in the same bed as me; he kept saying we should divorce, that he should find a new wife. I was afraid he was going to get rid of me, and if he did, how could I stay here, at Unit 701? I kept thinking about how I could do right by Unit 701 and my dead brother, I kept thinking, I … I …’

Finally, she swore that once she knew she was pregnant, she hadn’t let that Shandong pharmacist touch her again.

I didn’t know why, but for some reason I believed her tears, I believed that what she said could be true; but I still felt no sympathy for her, there was no room in my heart for her sorrow. From beyond the wall I heard the frightened cry of a baby. Wearily and somewhat exasperatedly I stood up and in a cold and detached manner ordered her to leave my house.