Shen Le didn't seem to be the only one interested in the argument. The green space in the middle of the residential complex was bustling, with a large crowd gathered around to watch. They murmured among themselves and pointed.
Shen Le wasn't strong enough to push his way in, so he backed up a couple of steps and stood on the flowerbed, craning his neck to look:
His wife's face was bright red. Her hair, dyed with cheap chemicals and then permed, was now a wild mess, sticking up in clumps here and collapsing in others. She didn't care about fixing it at all. She just grabbed her husband and dragged him toward the complex's entrance with all her might:
"Let's go! We're getting a divorce!"
"Xiulan... Xiulan, don't be like this..."
The middle-aged man leaned backward, knees bent, feet planted firmly on the ground. He wouldn't lay a hand on his wife, but he wouldn't let her drag him out, either. He stood rooted in place, pleading over and over:
"I'll do anything you want. Whatever you think I'm doing wrong, I'll change! Just don't divorce me... How are we supposed to live if we get divorced?"
The onlookers whispered among themselves. Some said the wife was heartless, some said she didn't care about the children, and others said that being a simp didn't get you anywhere.
The wife ignored all of them. She stared fixedly at her husband, her face flushed and tears gathering at the corners of her eyes:
"You'll change?
When have you ever changed!
How many times have I told you to lift the toilet seat when you use the bathroom? Have you changed?
You never lift it! Every time you pee, you get drops on the seat, and every time, I have to wipe them up!"
"I do everything around the house, big and small. I ask you to buy some vegetables, and you can't even do that right. Either they're too expensive or they're not fresh!
The greens you bought today had rotten roots. How many times have I told you to check them?"
"You don't mop the floor, you don't wash the clothes. I ask you to wash a few dishes, and all you do is wash the dishes. You don't wash the pots or wipe down the stove..."
Shen Le stood in the middle of the crowd, utterly bewildered. That was it? That was enough to get a divorce?
They were all trivial things, tiny as a fingernail. If he didn't wash the pots along with the dishes, just tell him to go back and wash them. Was there really a need to rake him over the coals like this, even demand a divorce?
He'd heard that young couples could argue over whether to squeeze toothpaste from the end of the tube or the middle until they got divorced. He'd thought it was an exaggeration. He hadn't expected it to be true.
He couldn't understand it at all. He looked around. Several old men in the crowd looked indignant, while the older women and middle-aged women wore expressions of deep sympathy.
One old woman even turned to glare fiercely at the old man beside her:
"What are you looking at? You're exactly the same as him! If I weren't so easygoing, I'd have divorced you long ago!"
"Yes, yes, you're the best to me..."
In the middle of the crowd, the couple kept arguing—or rather, the wife kept up her one-sided accusations.
After a long while, a man and a woman wearing volunteer uniforms and carrying garbage bags finally squeezed through. They were clearly from the residents' committee.
"All right, all right, there's no need to crowd around and watch! And you two, stop arguing here. Whatever the problem is, go home and talk it out!"
The two of them were probably familiar with the couple. The man took hold of the husband, and the woman took hold of the wife. They pushed and coaxed them toward the entrance to the apartment building.
Shen Le stood where he was and had just breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the Lead Weight bouncing frantically, clearly urging him to follow.
He grabbed the Lead Weight, stuffed it into his backpack, and zipped it up. Inside, it charged back and forth, making the backpack bulge with each jab. It was just like a drill hidden in a bag, its tip soon poking through.
"You want me to keep watching? All right, all right..."
Shen Le wasn't on the residents' committee, wasn't their neighbor, and didn't know the couple. There was no way he'd be invited inside.
So he waited until they'd gone into the building and some time had passed before following them, trudging up the stairs at a leisurely pace. As he climbed floor after floor, the wife's sobs grew clearer and clearer:
"...I do everything at home. Cooking, cleaning, the kids' homework—I have to take care of it all..."
"...The whole family caught COVID before the Lunar New Year. All he did was lie there. I had a fever of 39.3 degrees and still had to get up to look after the old and the young..."
"...When I was giving birth to Linlin, I said I wanted a C-section. He couldn't even come up with the money for the surgery, and I was left in pain for a whole day and night..."
Through the thin wooden door, Shen Le couldn't hear the husband's voice. All he could hear was the wife's endless stream of grievances. After listening for a little while, his head began to throb.
If I remember right, your child is at least fifteen! Even if you're arguing and planning to get divorced, how far back do you have to dig up old grievances?
But the residents' committee workers inside, along with the neighbors who had come to mediate, were all very patient. Or maybe they were already used to this sort of thing.
After the wife had cried for a while, an old woman's voice spoke up, calm and unhurried, offering gentle advice:
"When you're married, you can't only look at the bad. You have to look at the good, too. At the very least, Xiao Zheng doesn't smoke or drink, doesn't play cards or mahjong, right? And he's never hit his wife..."
What? Not smoking, not drinking, not gambling, and not being abusive—that was basic decency, wasn't it?
Standing outside the door, Shen Le could only find it ridiculous. Since when had things like that counted as good qualities?
How useless did a person have to be for someone trying to make peace to call those things virtues?
The Lead Weight continued bouncing around inside the backpack, though less frantically now. Shen Le had no interest in listening to those old grievances. He went up another flight of stairs and crouched on the landing to comfort it:
"Stop fussing. Don't make a scene, either. What do you want me to do? You don't expect me to make them reconcile, do you? How am I supposed to do that? Just knock and walk in? I don't even know them!"
The Ink Line lengthened and shortened. The Lead Weight bounced from the bottom of the backpack to the zipper, then rolled from one corner of the bag to the other. Finally, the door opened, and the people who had come to mediate filed out and went downstairs.
Shen Le stood on the landing one floor up and listened. Soon, everyone else had left, and the hallway fell silent. But the quieter it got, the more violently the Lead Weight bounced, as if it were about to poke the backpack full of holes.
Completely at a loss, Shen Le slowly made his way downstairs. He was still more than a meter from the door when the Lead Weight suddenly burst impatiently out of the backpack—
Whoosh!
Thump!
Whoosh!
Thump!
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh! Thump, thump, thump, thump...
Shen Le gaped as the Lead Weight zipped all over the family's doorframe, up and down, left and right, in a completely random Brownian motion. Each dart and pause sent an Ink Line snapping into place, then it darted off again and stopped...
"Stop!"
He lunged forward and grabbed the Lead Weight, desperately dragging it back. In just that short while, it had snapped back and forth across the doorway seventeen or eighteen times, covering the entire wooden door with a crisscrossing mess of Ink Lines!