The Season of the Stranger (15 page)

Ma Chi-wei smiled. “Sometimes. And sometimes as a farmer and sometimes as a teacher.”

Girard nodded. “Did you live there before the war?”

“I was born in Shansi,” he said. “But I remember very little before the war.”

“You started young.”

“There was no choice.” He looked away from Girard. “I killed a man when I was thirteen. I do not believe that I will ever forgive them for that.”

The door opened and Ma Chi-wei made again the motion that for him must have accompanied the opening of any door; his head pivoted in an instant of what could have been fear and then he stared at the floor. “Wen-li,” Girard said, looking at Ma Chi-wei and wondering what had created in him this reflex of terror, a reflex that he might never come to discard. “What is it?”

“There is one here to see Ma Chi-wei.”

Still watching Ma Chi-wei, Girard said, “Let him come in.” Wen-li stepped out of the doorway and a student stood on the sill.

“Ma Chi-wei,” he said. “We are having a meeting.”

“The message has come?” Ma Chi-wei did not move. He asked the question with his mouth and throat and his body remained still, erect near the stove, the head tilted.

“No,” the man said. “There has been no message. But we would like you to speak.”

“I will come.”

“Come in,” Girard said. “Wait near the stove.” The man closed the door and went to the stove and squatted, holding his hands near the hot metal. Ma Chi-wei pulled his trouserleg up to the knee and touched the bandage.

“Thank you,” he said. “I will go now.”

“Do not thank me,” Girard said. “It has become a habit.” He smiled. Ma Chi-wei laughed and touched the man on the shoulder.

“Come,” he said. He turned and gave Girard his hand. “Until the march.”

“Until the march,” Girard said.

“Excuse me for interrupting you,” the student said.

“It was nothing,” Girard said. “Go to the meeting.” Ma Chi-wei released Girard's hand and walked to the door. The student straightened with a snapping sound in his knees. He looked down at them and followed Ma Chi-wei to the door.

Ma Chi-wei opened the door and went into the courtyard. “I will see you again,” the student said to Girard.

“See you again,” Girard said. The student stepped across the sill and closed the door quietly behind him.

Girard put the teapot on the small table and put one cup into the other next to the pot. He knelt at the stove and shook the ashes and clinkers into the pan beneath it. He took off the sweater and threw it on the bed in the other room and came out and squatted at the bookcase looking for anything that he had not already read. He reached for a paperbound pamphlet and saw the coaldust on his hands. He went into the bathroom and washed, being careful with the bandage.

When he opened the bathroom door and stepped into the living room he saw a girl step quickly past the tree in the court and come to the door. She knocked and he crossed the room and opened the door.

“The message has come,” she said. The high sun ricocheted from her thick-lensed glasses.

“Wang Chia-shao,” he said. “How are you. What message?”

“The message from the government,” she said.

“Ah. From the government. What do they say?”

“They say that if we march they will stop shipments of food to the universities.”

“Serious,” he said.

“Yes. Will you come to the meeting?”

“Wait,” he said. “I will put on a gown. Sit near the fire.”

He took his gown from the closet and put it on. He had trouble with the six cloth buttons. When he came out of the bedroom she was still standing at the door. He pushed it open for her.

“Will we call off the march?” she asked.

He walked behind her seeing her heavy unhesitating movements until they were out of the court and on the path. Her hair was black and straight and cut short. When they were on the path he walked beside her. He looked down at her grave square face.

“No,” he said. “Nothing will be called off.”

She smiled. “I am glad of that,” she said.

“So am I,” he said. He patted her shoulder.

10

“It had to be the coldest afternoon of the year,” he said.

No one heard him. Bunched and talking, they flapped arms and stamped feet. The blue gowns blocked sight of the road as far as the curve, and beyond the curve he knew there were more. Posters bobbed on wooden arms above the blue. Breath came whitely from cold lips and lay briefly cloudlike among the heads. The sky curved grey into the west, meeting the grey hills in a vague far track. There was no snow. It felt as though there would be by night. Now there were the dead sky and the unrelenting cold.

The two o'clock bus appeared and horned its way through the parting mass which drew immediately together on the cracked concrete when the bus had passed. The talk whispered into silence. Heads turned and posters were raised. The leaders, who had been sitting at the side of the road, stood and waved, brushing their gowns and then rubbing their cold buttocks. They filed to the head of the grouped crowd and raised their hands.

“We will start,” one of them said. “Remember, there is to be no destruction; no property damage; no mischief with the automobiles of foreigners; and no fighting if it can be helped.” He moved to the side and lifted from the ground a heavy roll of cloth. The leader of the left file held the end of the roll and passed the rest behind him, each man of the file grasping the top of the cloth as it ribboned by, until when the roll was gone there was a long scroll binding them on the left. “The scroll is a statement of our aims,” the leader said. “We will carry it with us into the City.” He looked at the quiet people and said, “March.”

They moved on the road, clumsily at first and confused; and then, ranks defined and intervals kept, they moved quickly for warmth, their hands in the enveloping sleeves. They left the university and on the main road crossed the town. The shopkeepers laughed and gestured and the dogs were excited, yapping and running in and out of the lines. The children took places at the end of the march and followed them through the town and out the far gate. They stayed with them for a few minutes and then left, running back to the gate and lining the wall inside, watching the procession out of sight.

The front ranks moved too quickly and there was a halt every few minutes for regrouping. When they had found a common pace and rhythm they started the songs. The man behind Girard was a baritone. Girard could not hear the man in front of him, who wore a gown too long for him, holding it off the ground as though he were about to curtsy. When they reached the first small roadside village the students were singing and the villagers left their knife-sharpening and potmaking and came to the low wall along the road, where they sat and watched with nothing in their faces. One of the dogs from the town had stayed with the march and his frantic barking motion had exhausted him. A man picked him up and held him on one shoulder and people laughed. The dog sat panting with his tongue shaking and the stump of his tail vibrating. When the man in front of Girard laughed he forgot about his gown and dropped it. He stumbled on the hanging cloth and fell and there was more laughing. It was warmer after the walking.

They passed frozen villages and crossed small bridges over knives of ice cutting through the brown dead earth. Against the farhanging sky were the lofty blurred mountains, and in the middle distance the paralyzed unpeopled fields. They passed three houses near a bridge and a woman opened the door of one of them and stood watching with a pig at her feet; they were motionless and alert and when the march was almost past her she turned and the pig turned lazily with her and she shut the door.

The road curved often, and coming around a curve they met a sleepy cold bicyclist, his hands numbing on the rubber guards, a dozen bottles in the crate lashed to the bars. An automobile crept cautiously by, chauffeur-driven, and the owner in a black fur hat and rimless spectacles glanced attentively through the rear window at them. Twice before they reached the highway they passed small groups of soldiers. The soldiers stood in the road as they came and when the parade was upon them they gave ground sullenly and stood in the ditch leaning on their rifles. The literate soldiers read the slogans and the banner and repeated the legends for their friends. They thought about them and laughed. Girard thought of Ma Chi-wei. One of the soldiers saw Girard and pointed and the others stopped their laughing and went up on their toes to see.

They had gone about twelve li and the singing had stopped. A line of trucks came from behind and honked them to the side of the road. The driver of the first one leaned out of his cab and asked what the parade was. They told him. He nodded and said that if anyone wanted a lift he could swing himself onto a truck. A leader thanked him and said that they would walk. The leader went back to the head of the line and the trucks started through. As they passed men swung aboard, yelling that they would meet the others at the Plaza.

They moved forward again when the trucks were gone. One of the men of the left file called to a leader and told him that the carrying of the banner was a cold task and should be transferred for a time to the right file. That way, he said, the first word of the legend would be at the front of the parade and it would be easier to read. They stopped and the left file walked around the front, still holding the banner, and aligned itself against the right file. The right file took the banner and the others went back to their positions. They marched again.

Near the highway they passed a group of men sitting around a cart. The men were smoking and spitting, and waved to them.

“Help us,” one of them said. “The cart is broken.”

The leaders stopped the march and went to see how they could help. They asked for six strong men. The rest of the marchers sat at the roadside. Girard walked to the cart and stood near the men. The six students lifted one side of the cart and held it off the ground while an old man went underneath with a piece of wire and a shaved peg. He drew the wheel hard to the axle and set the peg in the gap and asked for a hammer. One of his friends gave it to him. He drove the wedge in and dropped the hammer and wound the wire tightly around the hub of the wheel and then around a ringbolt in the axle. The students dropped the cart when he stood up. “Thank you,” he said.

“How will the wheel rotate if it is tied to the ringbolt?”

“The ringbolt is free to revolve,” he said.

“Where are you going?” one of his friends asked.

“To the City.”

“What for?”

“To demonstrate. For food and fair treatment. The posters explain what we want.”

“We cannot read,” the man said. He pulled on his cigarette. “You have chosen a bad day.”

“I know,” the student said. “Cold.”

“Cold,” the man said, “and a bad day in other ways. The stars. And the moon.” His trousers were torn and he had no socks. His hands swung, white, from the sleeves of his horsejacket.

The student blew his nose onto the road. “Perhaps we will succeed anyway.”

“I doubt it,” the man said. “You would have done well to wait two weeks.”

“It might have been too late in two weeks.”

“Nevertheless,” the man said. “Anyway I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” the student said.

“It is nothing,” the man said. He turned away and then looked back. “But you will not succeed.”

“Perhaps,” the student said. “See you again.”

“See you again,” the man said.

“See you again,” his friends said. The student waved to the marchers and went to the head of the line.

Girard was cold after the stop and when the dog put his forepaws on the student's head he did not laugh with the rest. He kept his hands as far into the sleeves as they would go. No one was trying to keep in step.

They reached the highway and turned left toward the City, thinning into three files and staying to the left of the road. Threewheelers and trucks went by and the threewheeler men and truck drivers leaned to the side and twisted their bodies reading the banner. They passed a restaurant and three waiters stood at the curb and read the banner and looked at them and shrugged and went inside. The sky was still grey.

They crossed the railroad tracks and made the final turn to the City gate. When they were close to it they looked up at its height as though they would have to scale it and then they marched parallel to it and turned into the first passageway. They went through the outer gate and the stone closed in around them; no one spoke or tried to sing. In the moist darkness the cold was worse. They came out into the field between the two gates. When they heard what they had been afraid of hearing they stopped. The inner gate pivoted noisily in front of them. Girard looked behind him. They moved closer to one another. The twelve-foot-high inner gate closed.

Girard said to the man next to him that they should go back outside the first gate. The man said nothing. Girard turned and then they heard again the massive terrible creaking and they all turned. They watched the first gate close behind them.

A soldier with a rifle left the high guardhouse and ran lightly along the wide top of the wall. Girard looked up at him and saw that there were others along the wall and that directly in front of him there were sandbags on the wall and that a machine gun barrel was resting on the sandbags. He could see the tops of brown helmets over the sandbags.

A man stepped out of the guardhouse and leaned over the stone railing. He was an officer with the blue and white sunburst on his cap. He wore the cap crushed and loose, the way the fourteen-year-old sentry had.

“Both gates are closed,” he said. No one moved. “And there are guns along the wall.”

“We are unarmed,” a student said. “We come to attend a peaceful meeting.” His voice rose anonymously from the crush. It was impossible to say who had spoken.