Читать книгу The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories - Shouhua Qi - Страница 20

Ku Ling

She didn’t know how he had fallen in love with her.

What he liked the most was to nestle in her arms and put his face to her chest to listen to her heart beat.

“Put his ear to his heart/Listen to the sound of its beat” is a line from a poem she wrote her first year in college. She had felt her heart beat faster than normal ever since she was small. Sometimes, while doing any physically intense activity, she would feel her heart all but bursting out of her mouth. As she grew up, whenever she had to walk up to the second floor, she would hear her heart beat so hard. It hurt badly.

When it hurt badly, she would feel her chest inside which the heart was beating intensely, and ask her parents. Her father would lower his head and sigh and her mother would sob with tears all over her face.

When she knew she was afflicted with congenital heart disease, she cried, too; tears gushing down her face. Gradually, however, she became stronger and was not afraid of the hospital bed, intravenous bottle hanging high, and the nurses’ white masks any more. Sometimes she could calmly gaze at the signals of her own heartbeat on the monitor dancing up and down and wonder when they would fall into a deadly horizontal line.

Perhaps God didn’t mean to take her back yet. In the year she turned 30, a heart donor for her was finally available. The day before the surgery she cried the whole night, her tears soaking the white pillow and sheet. She cried for finally having another shot at life and she cried for the donor who lost her own to save hers.

All she knew was that it was a married woman her age who had died in a car accident. Since she had no way of expressing her gratitude to the donor, she kept the clipping of the newspaper story of her heart transplant, which carried their pictures side by side.

Then he appeared. The first time he paced into the patient’s room hesitantly, she thought he was a reporter. Soon he became a regular visitor. Bored by long days of inactivity while recuperating from the surgery, she would often sit in her sickbed and comb and do her makeup with anxious expectancy. The joy of first love washed over her in waves. After all, thanks to her fragile heart, she hadn’t even kissed once.

Now she could kiss to her heart’s content. Another’s heart beat in her chest with a healthy rhythm. Her heartbeat was not hurried, but very calm now. She could now put her heart at ease, hold tight in her arms the half-kneeling man, and say “yes” to his proposal.

Still, she didn’t know why someone would come and love her, an imperfect, handicapped her, still fragile, with permanent scars on her chest. . . . Yet he didn’t seem to mind at all. And he loved her with such passion. Every time she asked him, he would reply only with a smile. Perhaps he had been through a lot and had thus become reticent. She knew that he was married once but became single again.

She didn’t know there was a small box hidden at the bottom of his dresser. One day, accidentally, she found the box, opened it out of curiosity, and saw his old wedding picture: The happy bride with a sweet smile on her face looked so familiar, like. . . . then she was stunned. She hurried to find the newspaper clipping. She didn’t need to compare to know that his bride and her heart donor were the same woman.

That heart was beating hard in her chest. It hurt so.

( n.d.)