Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

loosely from her pert little breasts. Her long neck and décolletage left nothing to the imagination. For some mysterious reason, tears glistened in his eyes, producing a glazed effect. As he took in the nearly unobstructed view of her breasts, the sweet smell of milk permeated his soul, and he imagined he heard a call from the distant north — grassy steppes as far as the eye could see, a dense forest of melancholy birch, a little cabin deep in the woods, fir trees blanketed with snow and ice … lovely scenes moved past his eyes like a sequence of still images. And in the middle of each image stood the young Natasha, a bouquet of purple flowers cradled in her arms. Jintong covered his eyes with his hands and wept with joy, the tears coursing down through his fingers.
    All that night, Jintong hovered between sleep and wakefulness, as Natasha paced back and forth before him, the hem of her dress sweeping across the floor. In fluent Russian, he poured out his heart to her, but her expression went from happiness to anger, which took him from the heights of arousal to the depths of despair. And yet a single tantalizing smile pulled him right back up again.
    At daybreak, the boy in the lower bunk, a fellow by the name of Zhao Fengnian, who was the father of two boys, complained, “Shangguan Jintong, I know you speak wonderful Russian, but you’ve got to let others get some sleep.”
    Suffering from a splitting headache, after letting go of Natasha’s captivating image, Jintong apologized caustically to Zhao Fengnian, who noticed his ashen face and blistered lips. “Are you sick?”
    In agony, he shook his head, suddenly feeling as if his thoughts were like a car negotiating a slippery mountain slope, when it suddenly loses control and tumbles down the mountainside. At the grassy base of the mountain, where purple blossoms bloom all around, the beautiful Natasha scoops up the hem of her dress and runs silently toward him …
    He grabbed the bunk bed post and banged his head against it over and over.
    Zhao Fengnian summoned the political instructor, Xiao Jingang, the onetime member of an armed working brigade, a man with a true proletarian background. He’d once sworn that he’d put Teacher Huo before a firing squad for wearing short skirts, which he considered morally degenerate. His shadowy eyes, set in a face like hardened steel, threw an instant chill into Jintong’s roiling brain, and he felt as if he was being pulled up out of quicksand.
    “What’s going on with you, Shangguan Jintong?” Xiao Jingang asked sternly.
    “Xiao Jingang, you flat-faced oaf, mind your own business!” In order to allow the man’s sternness help him break free from Natasha’s grip, all he could think of was to make the man good and angry.
    Xiao smacked him on the side of the head. “You little fuckhead!” he swore. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? I won’t let some snot-nose darling of Huo Lina get away with that!”
    At breakfast, as he sat looking down at his bowl of corn porridge, Jintong’s stomach lurched, and he knew that his frightful aversion to all food except mother’s milk had taken hold again. So he picked up the bowl and, calling up the remnants of clear thought in his murky brain, forced himself to start drinking the porridge; but the moment the liquid came into view, a pair of living breasts seemed to rise out of the bowl, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor, the hot porridge splashing on his legs. He didn’t feel a thing.
    His frightened classmates immediately dragged him over to the clinic, where the school nurse cleaned his legs and rubbed ointment on the burns, then told his classmates to take him back to the dormitory.
    There he ripped up Natasha’s photograph and tossed the pieces into the river behind the school; he watched as Natasha, now in shreds, flowed downstream into a swirling eddy, where she came together again and, like a naked mermaid, floated on the surface, the wet locks of her hair draping over her hips.
    His classmates, who had followed him down to the river, watched as he spread his arms and dove into the water, after shouting something. Some of them ran down to the river’s edge, while others ran back to school for help. As he sank below the surface, Jintong saw Natasha swimming like a fish amid the waterweeds. He tried to call to her, but water rushed into his mouth and stifled his shout.
    The next time Jintong opened his eyes, he was lying on