Waiting by Ha Jin

Author:Ha Jin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Physicians, Psychological fiction, Married people, Asia, General, Literary, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), China, Fiction, Love stories, History
ISBN: 9780375706417
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2000-09-18T10:00:00+00:00

7

The following spring Lin fell ill. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and he was quarantined in the hospital. Every afternoon, at about two, his face would glow with pink patches and his temperature would go up. He often trembled during the day, weak in the limbs. When coughing, he sometimes brought up phlegm with traces of blood in it. At night, sweat often soaked his underclothes. Because he had lost over twenty pounds, his Adam’s apple stuck out and his cheekbones became prominent. He could not return to his home village that summer.

Since Shuyu was illiterate, he wrote to his brother-in-law Bensheng, saying he would not be coming home, having too much work to do in the hospital. He didn’t tell him the truth for fear of making his wife worry.

The Department of Infectious Diseases was at the northeastern corner of the hospital, behind a tall cypress hedge. It occupied two brick buildings, one of which was mainly for tuberculous patients and the other for those suffering from hepatitis. In the space between the two buildings stood a brick house with a massive chimney. That was the kitchen. The quarantined patients ate better food than those in the regular wards.

Manna often came to see Lin in the evening. Because Lin was a doctor, the nurses in charge of the tuberculosis building didn’t prevent him from going out. Lin and Manna would stroll around the sports ground, along a section of the brick wall that encircled the hospital, and sometimes by the guinea pigs’ house, the wire-fenced kennels, the tofu mill, and the vegetable fields that were irrigated in the evening by water pumped out from a deep well. Ever since he got sick, she had been more considerate and spent more time with him, though she was unhappy at heart because he couldn’t go home to divorce his wife this year. Meanwhile, most of the hospital leaders pretended they hadn’t seen Lin and Manna walking together in the evenings; as long as the two of them didn’t break the rules—staying within the compound and not making love—the leaders would leave them alone.

In early September the patient who had shared Lin’s room left, and another patient, who had been transferred from another hospital, moved in. Lin liked the new arrival a lot. He was an officer in a border division, of medium height and with the build of a weight lifter. According to the gossip among the nurses, this man was known as a Tiger General despite his lower rank of battalion commander. It was said that he had once made his troops run seven miles in an hour with their full equipment—as a result, a dozen soldiers had fainted from dehydration and been hospitalized. For some years he had held the divisional championships in both bayonet charge and machine-gun marksmanship. Then he contracted tuberculosis; his right lung had a hole the size of a peanut kernel, which had almost healed when he came to share the room with Lin. On the very first day he said to Lin, “Heaven knows why I landed here, a total wreck, no use to anybody.

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