Free Serve the People! by Yan Lianke, Julia Lovell Page A

reassure them, as they glanced in through the gate, that all was exactly as it ever had been: that Liu Lian was still the Division Commander's wife, and Wu Dawang the Division Commander's General Orderly. Only our chief protagonists could know of the great, underlying change that had taken place behind this facade.

    Before, he'd always needed to watch the time as he worked in the garden, returning to the kitchen to have meals ready exactly on time. Now, however, he dawdled outside as he pleased. When mealtimes approached, Liu Lian would beckon him in from the doorway not to cook for her, but to keep her company while she cooked; another symptom of the revolutionary goings-on inside Compound Number One. The first meal she'd ever cooked him was breakfast, which she brought to his bedside just as he'd brought her the bowl of egg-drop soup that first, fateful morning. Waking from the deep slumber that follows a night of passion, he'd found the sun streaming in through the curtains and Liu Lian gone. Pulling himself up with a start, he found her sitting next to him on the edge of the bed, gazing at him as he slept.
    `Heavens,' he began to apologize, `I haven't gotyour breakfast ready.' She stroked his cheek, her face breaking into a sweet smile, as if his return to consciousness had instantly driven away melancholy.

    `It's my turn to Serve the People,' she said. Lifting up the bowl of egg soup she had prepared, she fed it to him, mouthful by mouthful. She took the last few drops into her own mouth, then gently released them into his, with a touch of her lips. In thanks for this bowl of soup and for the gift of a love whose depths he'd not yet fathomed, he then slowly undressed her until she stood like a jade pillar naked before the bed. Although they'd lived for days as husband and wife, although they'd made love more times than he could remember, this was the first time he'd admired, with such lingering calm, the whole of her-her marvellous, nude form, illuminated by the single, oblique strip of sunlight that a crack in the curtains had let in. He considered her hair, her pink and white complexion, her body, as flawlessly fair as the moon and stars and unblemished by a single mole or imperfection, her breasts, still as gravity-defying as a twenty-year-old's. Her stomach had not a single line across it, not a whisper of a crease or mark or blotch. A hand skimming over the silky skin under her breasts-as white as if it'd been dusted with crushed Osmanthus petals might have imagined it was touching a moonbeam.

    There she stood, in that shaft of sunlight, her face communicating a slight bashfulness, permitting his caresses as though she were a living statue tolerating the final refinements of her sculptor. Her hands, which she'd been running through his hair, weakened, and then her legs. A feeling of light-headedness was spreading through her body, quickening the tremble that had taken hold of her limbs. And yet his hands and eyes continued their work, moving slowly down from her breasts. Tears of ecstasy clung to the tips of her lower eyelashes, and swayed as if about to fall, until she burst into urgent sobs.
    `What's wrong?' he asked.
    'I feel terribly dizzy,' she replied.
    'You'd better get dressed,' he said, alarmed. 'I'll phone the Division hospital.'
    'No, there's no need for that. Just carry me to the bed and go on kissing me, touching me whereveryou want. Forget I'm the Division Commander's wifefor the time being I'm your wife and you can have free run of me.'
    He lifted her weak, limp form onto the bed, as one would put a baby down to sleep, then began kissing her with a crazed intensity, every tiny part of her, from her hair, forehead and nose downward -now delicately, like a dragonfly skimming the surface of a lake, now insistently, forgetting everything but a feverish desire to consume her with his lips. If he lingered too long on a particular spot, her hands would eventually caress his head with a gentle reminder,