The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin

Author:Ha Jin [Jin, Ha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2023-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

In spite of a good night’s sleep, Mao was in a foul mood the next morning that was caused by the stymied negotiation over the revocation of the old treaty. That had been the main purpose of his visit, but it had gotten laid aside at the very first meeting. What an imbroglio he was in now. He regretted having agreed to not revise the treaty right away. He should have begged to differ at the meeting, emphasizing that both sides should agree to disagree for now. Now, without any development in this respect, he might have to face criticism in China once he was back. The more he mulled over this frustration, the angrier he became. He told Li Jiaji, a staffer on his retinue, to remove the spongy mattress, saying it tended to give him a crick in the neck and make him insomniac as he was unused to this kind of comfortable bed. He wanted real wood boards, like the bed he had back home. Jiaji didn’t know where to get wood boards, so he asked Yomei to explain the matter to Ivan Kovalev, the Russian official in charge of Mao’s daily life here, to see if they could replace the mattress with wood boards. Yomei believed it would be inappropriate to make a big fuss over such a trifle. Instead, she measured the bed lengthways and crossways and then reported Mao’s demand to Ambassador Wang, who sent a junior diplomat to a furniture store downtown with Yomei’s measurements and bought some boards. The mattress was replaced that very evening, and Mao was satisfied with the new hard bed. The Russian servants later told Yomei that Mao was a genuine revolutionary, still living like a guerrilla in the wilderness.

Mao expected that Stalin would meet with him again to discuss the unfinished business, but there was no word from the Kremlin. Now he understood why he’d been put up at such a faraway place—Stalin must have meant to keep some distance from him and also to show that he was not a major guest here. So Mao was galled, though he knew that Stalin must be busy these days with so many delegates from other Eastern Bloc countries coming to celebrate his seventieth birthday. Nonetheless, Mao came up with a more bizarre demand—he wanted to have the toilet altered, claiming that sitting on the nice toilet would make his bowels seize. He needed the more primitive type he had back home—a small, rectangular porcelain bowl set in the floor of the bathroom so that he could squat over it. Yomei tittered on hearing such a demand and said, “My, this one is like a nail in my head that I don’t know how to pull out.” After considering Mao’s new demand a moment, she reported it to Ambassador Wang, who sighed on the phone, apparently at a loss what to do. “My heavens, where could I find a mason who can change the toilet for him?” he wondered aloud.

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