Chen Yang bought some pastries at the department store and, carrying them, rode his bicycle to Jinling Hospital following the address he had noted when they parted yesterday.
Hospitals back then were not as large or as developed as they would be in later times, with inpatient departments neatly categorized.
At that time, Jinling Hospital’s entire inpatient department was housed in a single building. When Chen Yang inquired about the hero who had apprehended the robber and was brought in by the public security comrades yesterday, he immediately got Lei Baoguo’s room number from a nurse.
As Chen Yang, carrying his items, hurried over, a man and a woman were just slamming the door open and nearly ran into him as he was about to enter.
“What’s wrong with you, not watching where you’re going?”
“Little fellow, so tall and burly, yet acting like a dumb goose.”
Before Chen Yang could get angry, a woman with a voluminous wavy hairdo glared at him unpleasantly, followed by a stream of elegant Jinling dialect.
“The pot calling the kettle black.”
“You nearly crashed into me without looking, and now you’re getting aggressive.”
Chen Yang hadn’t intended to say anything, but this woman was becoming insolent. He wouldn’t indulge such ill-bred people.
“Shufang, why argue with some suspect-like kid? The important matter is settled, let’s quickly leave this unlucky place.”
The man with a sharp mouth and a gaunt face beside the woman tugged her arm, showing undisguised disdain for the hospital.
The nurse, who had initially intended to mediate, simply couldn’t be bothered anymore. If not for her uniform, she would have loved to retort.
They had slammed the door, nearly hitting someone, and then started cursing. The man had even cursed the hospital. These two truly were a match made in heaven.
“Good riddance. I wish you both a long life and never to stay in a hospital again. Do you really think hospitals take in any trash?”
Chen Yang snorted coldly. He didn’t provoke others, and he wouldn’t let others bully him.
He wouldn’t tolerate being cursed at without cause.
The woman still wanted to curse further, but as Chen Yang glared fiercely at the man beside her, he was so frightened that he immediately dragged her away.
Chen Yang, standing at 1.8 meters tall, coupled with the muscles he’d developed from selling fish these past few days, meant that the man, who was less than 1.7 meters tall, wouldn’t even be a match for Chen Yang alone if things escalated.
“Brother Lei, how is the wound being treated?”
The room was a three-bed ward, and the two patients in the adjacent beds were asleep.
Lei Baoguo sat propped up by pillows on the hospital bed. His right leg was completely wrapped in white gauze. The wound was clearly quite deep, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been bandaged so thoroughly.
“Young brother, you actually came to see me.”
Seeing Chen Yang, Lei Baoguo finally came to his senses, forcing a smile that looked worse than crying.
“Brother Lei, what happened?”
Casually placing the pastries on the cabinet beside the bed, Chen Yang walked up to Lei Baoguo.
Lei Baoguo had been happily talking about meeting his girlfriend when they parted on the train yesterday. Why did he look so dejected now?
“It’s nothing, it’s embarrassing to talk about.”
Lei Baoguo sighed.
“Brother Lei, are you not treating me as a brother? Aren’t we comrades who fought side-by-side? If you have anything on your mind, just say it. If I can help, I, Chen Yang, will do my best.”
“Even if I can’t help, just saying it and having someone to share the burden or offer advice is better than keeping it bottled up inside.”
Chen Yang could tell that Lei Baoguo was unhappy. His current state was a world apart from yesterday.
Hearing Chen Yang’s words, the man, whose eyes hadn’t reddened even when stabbed, now had tears welling up.
“Brother.”
Lei Baoguo exhaled heavily.
“I’ve lost all face today, so there’s no need to be ashamed.”
“The woman you bumped into just now was a woman my family introduced to me. I’ve already paid the betrothal gifts, so we were technically engaged. I don’t mind you laughing, but this woman is now with another man, and she came today to break up with me.”
Lei Baoguo uttered these words through gritted teeth. In those days, with conservative thinking, being brought by one’s fiancée to a man’s place to break up was indeed embarrassing.
The crucial point was that this woman, when receiving their family’s betrothal deposit, had repeatedly said she would wait for him to return from the military.
Now, he had given up a valuable opportunity to become a volunteer soldier and had returned.
Yet, she had come with another man without a word to break up with him. How could Lei Baoguo accept this?
He had still written to Zhao Shufang a month ago. If she had found someone else, why didn’t she tell him!
To return and marry her, he had even rejected the earnest persuasion of the political instructor. He was a first-class soldier in his company.
Otherwise, the political instructor wouldn’t have allocated the precious opportunity to become a volunteer soldier to him. Becoming a volunteer soldier meant becoming a non-commissioned officer, receiving a national salary, which was no less than that of a factory worker.
For this woman, he had given up all of that. But upon his return, she brought another man to break up with him. No one could accept this.
“This woman is too much of a scumbag.”
“She was engaged and still messing around with another man. If there were no betrothal gifts and no engagement, it would be one thing, people can be in relationships freely. But to do this after being engaged, she’s utterly shameless.”
Upon hearing this, Chen Yang became furious.
Lei Baoguo, apart from anything else, was not inferior in appearance to that sharp-mouthed, gaunt man, let alone in character.
Chen Yang couldn’t understand it; had that woman been kicked in the head by a donkey?
“Forget it, let’s not mention that woman. I’ll just consider myself blind.”
“If it weren’t for my parents’ feelings, even with one leg less, I would have beaten the heads of this pair of dogs and bitches. My parents saved half their lives’ earnings, and this woman squandered it all.”
Lei Baoguo’s hands clenched the bedsheet tightly. His family was of humble peasant stock.
When they introduced Zhao Shufang, a city girl, to him, in order to secure the marriage, his parents had taken their lifetime savings as the betrothal gifts for her.
Now, it was all squandered by this woman. She had even said she would prepare the “three revolutions and one sound” in advance and wait for him to return from his service to get married.
He had truly been blind.
If his parents didn’t have only him as a son and his younger sister was still young, Lei Baoguo would have wanted to kill this pair of dogs and bitches, exchanging their lives for his.
That was his parents’ hard-earned money from a lifetime of labor, and it was all swindled away. And Zhao Shufang, that bitch, had the audacity to come tell him directly.
She, Zhao Shufang, would never marry a country bumpkin in her life. Even about the betrothal gifts from his parents,
She brazenly said that his parents had begged to give them to her. She had been his girlfriend for two years, writing him letters tirelessly, and this was her compensation.
How could that bitch woman say such a thing!
From beginning to end, she had never intended to marry him; she just wanted to trick them out of their betrothal gifts.
How laughable, how utterly laughable. How foolish was Lei Baoguo, to have not seen through this woman’s true nature for two years and to have wasted the opportunity to become a volunteer soldier that the political instructor had fought for him.