1980s - Chapter 6

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Spring returned like an apology.

The river softened; laundry snapped on lines again; frogs rehearsed their night songs before dusk. Zhao Rui found himself measuring the season by sound: hammering from the plant’s new workshop, the whistle of distant trains, Li Ming’s voice slipping through an open window when he argued with a motor that refused to behave.

They had been lucky. The inspection had ended without consequence; their names no longer wandered through committee reports. In the small, fragile way that survival allowed, they began to live.

It arrived folded twice, the characters on the envelope written in a hand that had once guided Li Ming’s own.

My son,
I have been granted leave from the cooperative for a month. The neighbors’ boy will mind the pigs. I wish to see how you live in the city. Do not prepare anything extravagant; I wish only to know that you are eating properly and not working yourself into the ground.
— Mother.

The postmark was two weeks old; the train would arrive in three days.

Li Ming stared at the letter until the edges curled under his fingers. “She hasn’t left the village in ten years. If she’s coming now…”

“She misses you,” Zhao Rui offered.

“She suspects,” Li Ming murmured. “Or worries. Which is nearly the same thing.”

He looked around the room that had, by careful habit, become theirs: two cups always paired on the shelf, a single lamp that traveled between their quarters, the faint double indentation on the narrow bed. “We’ll have to make this place look like mine again.”

Zhao Rui nodded. They had practiced erasing themselves before. But this time, erasure would have to withstand a mother’s eyes.

The factory’s latest order was for an irrigation pump designed to be sturdy, simple, and foolproof. It was none of those things. The prototype clanked, leaked, and whined like an offended cat.

Li Ming loved it immediately. “It’s honest,” he said, sleeves rolled to the elbow. “It shows its failures.”

Zhao Rui watched him from the doorway, tools laid out in neat patience. “You talk about machines the way some men talk about people.”

“They’re easier to fix,” Li Ming replied, not looking up. “They break for reasons, not moods.”

Later, he added quietly, “Maybe if I can make this one steady, it will convince her that I’m steady too.”

Zhao Rui understood. A working machine could be a shield — proof of usefulness, a story stronger than rumor.

They spent nights rebuilding it: new bearings scavenged from discarded motors, hoses patched with strips of rubber. Zhao Rui’s hands, steady from another lifetime of repairing weapons and scavenging tools, found old rhythm in tightening bolts. Li Ming adjusted valves by feel. Together they listened to the rhythm of failure slowly turn into hum.

By the second evening, the pump lifted a clean column of water. They watched it arc into the basin, droplets catching the light like notes of a song.

“She’ll see this first thing,” Li Ming said. “A machine that works. A son who builds. Maybe she won’t look beyond that.”

Zhao Rui smiled faintly. “Machines as camouflage.”

“Machines as truth,” Li Ming corrected. “If she believes this is my purpose, it’s not a lie.”

The day she arrived, the station smelled of coal dust and boiled eggs. Zhao Rui waited at a distance while Li Ming met the train. He watched mother and son find each other in the crowd: the brief pause before recognition, the sudden, fierce hug that erased a decade of distance.

Madam Li was small, sun-dark, with hands that carried the memory of earth. Her eyes missed nothing.

When she entered the room, Zhao Rui felt the air contract around her curiosity.

“So this is the famous comrade who helps you repair everything,” she said, smiling with the politeness of someone measuring kindness and threat in equal measure.

Zhao Rui bowed slightly. “Zhao Rui, from the depot.”

“Ah. The helpful neighbor.” She nodded once. “Good. A man is known by who he stands beside.”

The words hovered like a test. He didn’t fail it. “Your son stands beside everyone who needs him.”

She chuckled, half approval, half warning. “That is how trouble begins.”

They served noodles and tea. She asked questions about factory rations, about the rent, about the cost of rice. Zhao Rui answered easily, deflecting attention from the narrowness of their space. But every time she looked at the pair of cups on the shelf or the single lamp by the bed, he felt her mind adding sums.

That night she slept in Li Ming’s bed; Zhao Rui returned to his old room down the hall. The walls between them felt thinner than ever.

Morning brought inspection disguised as domesticity. Madam Li rearranged things, dusted corners, clicked her tongue at how city men “forgot to let rooms breathe.” She asked about Zhao Rui’s family and heard exactly what she expected — that they lived far away, that he had no wife, that the city was temporary. Each half-truth settled like another layer of paint.

Then she saw the pump.

“What’s this contraption?” she demanded.

Li Ming lit up, the way he always did near gears and wires. “Our design for the cooperative fields. It draws water uphill with minimal power.”

She crouched to inspect the joint he’d soldered. “You and your friend made this?”

“We did,” he said proudly. “He has clever hands.”

She straightened and looked at Zhao Rui again — properly this time. “Clever hands are wasted on a man with no home. You should marry, build something that doesn’t rust.”

Zhao Rui smiled politely. “Perhaps I’m already building something that lasts.”

She laughed, thinking he meant the machine. “Then may your bolts never loosen.”

Li Ming’s eyes met Zhao Rui’s for half a heartbeat. The laughter covered everything that passed between them.

Two days later, the pump failed during a public demonstration for the committee. Smoke coughed from the outlet; water sputtered. Spectators muttered. Li Ming’s supervisor frowned. Madam Li stood in the crowd, arms folded.

Zhao Rui stepped forward calmly. He crouched, twisted the valve that he knew had cracked — one of the recycled parts he hadn’t trusted. He loosened a screw, patched it with a rubber seal from his pocket, then struck the casing lightly with his palm.

The machine hiccupped and steadied. A thin stream became a strong flow; applause broke out.

Li Ming exhaled. “You saved us.”

“Machines listen when you talk kindly,” Zhao Rui murmured.

His mother approached after the crowd dispersed. “You two make a good team,” she said, half grudging, half proud. “If only men could be repaired as easily as their toys.”

Li Ming smiled. “Sometimes they can.”

That evening she cooked for them — real countryside food: pork stewed with pickled mustard greens, rice fragrant with lard and memory. She told stories of Li Ming as a boy who dismantled clocks to see time’s bones. Zhao Rui listened, filing away each detail as though it were evidence of how someone becomes the man he now knew.

On her last night, Madam Li sat outside under the lantern light. The pump rested beside her, gleaming faintly. Zhao Rui joined her with two cups of tea.

“He sleeps like a stone,” she said, nodding toward the window. “Always did after finishing something difficult.”

“He works hard.”

“Hard work doesn’t keep you warm forever.” Her gaze was steady. “You live close to my son.”

“We work together.”

“Work is one thing.” She looked at him — not accusingly, but with a weary kind of knowledge. “Men who share silence learn too much about each other’s hearts.”

Zhao Rui held her gaze. “Sometimes that’s the only thing we’re allowed to share.”

For a long moment she didn’t reply. Then she sighed, a sound of surrender rather than judgment. “The world is colder than when I was young. If you find warmth, keep it hidden and keep it alive. Just don’t let it burn the house.”

She stood, joints cracking softly, and added, “Fix that machine tomorrow. It should live as long as you both do.”

When she went inside, Zhao Rui sat alone until dawn, the tea gone cold, the words replaying in his head like a benediction.

Life settled again. The pump design was accepted by the committee; a modest award followed — shared officially by Li Ming and Zhao Rui. The plant received a commendation; Madam Li returned to her village, her farewell short but full of meaning.

She pressed a cloth pouch into Zhao Rui’s hand before boarding the train. “For your clever hands,” she said. Inside were sewing needles, thread, and a small carved button in the shape of a circle broken at the southeast — the same sign Zhao Rui had once drawn as a mark of safety. He looked up in surprise, but she was already climbing aboard.

Li Ming watched the train depart. “She knows,” he said simply.

“Yes,” Zhao Rui replied. “And she forgives.”

That summer, Li Ming began drafting a larger version of the pump, one that could irrigate whole terraces. Zhao Rui helped translate his calculations into blueprints, neat and disciplined.

Late one evening, Li Ming leaned over the drawing and said, “You realize this—” he tapped the plan “—is us.”

“How so?”

“It moves water uphill when everything says it should flow down. It doesn’t defy nature; it just learns where to push.”

Zhao Rui smiled. “Then we’d better make sure it doesn’t leak.”

“It won’t,” Li Ming said. “Not this time.”

They worked until the lamp flickered out, until even the frogs grew tired of singing. And somewhere between the rustle of paper and the scratch of pencils, Zhao Rui understood that what they were building was more than metal — it was the proof that love could be an invention too: quiet, practical, stubborn, endlessly repairable.

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