I Did Not Kill My Husband by Liu Zhenyun

Author:Liu Zhenyun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

4

Li Xuelian’s large compound included a three-room house with a tile roof to the north, a kitchen to the east, and two cow pens to the west. The house had been built twenty-two years earlier, when she and Qin Yuhe had been married six years and their son was five. She raised cows and three old sows to make it possible to knock down a thatched cottage and build their three-room house. Half of the money for wood and bricks came from the sale of calves and piglets; the other half came from her husband’s overtime earnings as a truck driver for the fertilizer plant, nighttime work that left him bleary-eyed. He regularly dozed off at the wheel late at night, and one night ran into a roadside scholar tree. Repairs to the truck cost two thousand yuan, so he had to start over. He and Xuelian argued a lot, but never enough to cause a rupture in their marriage. But then, a year after the house was completed, Qin Yuhe changed, and Xuelian began to regret her decision to talk to him about a sham divorce when she discovered she was pregnant again. They spent as much time apart as they did together, and what began as a sham became a reality. Arguments gave way to court proceedings, which continued for twenty years, until their hair had nearly turned white, and still no resolution in sight. What she regretted most was that the sham divorce had been her lousy brainstorm, and had been for the benefit of the daughter she would give birth to, and with whom she would later have an unexpected falling out.

Twenty-two years of being buffeted by wind and rain had taken their toll on the house. The northern wall had collapsed under the onslaught of summer and autumn rains, bricks on the other three sides had fallen off and crumbled into dust at an alarming rate. Large sections of the interior wall plaster were disintegrating, and the roof had sprung leaks ten years before. Anyone else during those twenty years of protest would not have cared about house repairs. For the first ten years, she too had neglected house repairs and housekeeping, and the place had turned into a sty. She’d also neglected her own appearance, seldom changing out of dirty clothes and letting her hair start to look like a rat’s nest. Out on the street, from a distance she looked like a beggar, or the apt picture of a protester. After ten years, her protests had become routine, and she’d gotten used to it. She’d gotten used not to all the annual travel, but to when it was disrupted on the rare occasion when she was ill and confined to her bed at home. When she could not carry out her protest, she did not know what to do with herself. It had evolved into such a habitual event that it became the essence of her daily life, and that was the stimulus for her to start taking care of herself and her house.

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