The Vagrants (27 page)

“Let other people be wronged—it has nothing to do with us. Remember Baba's story of the emperor? You have to harden your heart to grow up into a man, do you understand?”

Tong nodded, though he didn't know what to think of her words. She had never talked to him about such things, and she looked unfamiliar , almost intimidating. She watched him a moment longer and then smiled. “Look how serious you are,” she said. “You're a little boy and you shouldn't worry yourself with grown-ups’ business.”

Tong did not reply. His mother urged him to eat again. He shoveled the food into his mouth without tasting it. Then he heard a noise and ran to the gate, but it was only wind passing through the alley. He came back and asked his mother if they should go out and look for Ear.

She sighed and put on her coat. “Another boy that constantly asks for attention,” she said tiredly. “Why don't you wash and go to bed now? I'll go out and look for him.”

“Can I come with you?” Tong asked.

“No,” she said, and her voice, harsher than usual, stopped him from begging again.

Tong's mother walked to a friend's house two blocks away and knocked on the door. She was coming for a chat, she said, not wanting to stay cold in the windy night looking in vain for a missing dog. The friend—a fellow worker—invited her in and they talked over cups of hot tea about the plan for the next day: The friend's family would be having a picnic, it being their ritual to go to the mountain on the day of Ching Ming; Tong's mother said they had no plans, though watching the friend's children pack the food containers with excitement, she wished for Tong's sake that they did.

Elsewhere in the city, white flowers in nylon bags were carried from house to house. People opened their gates, finding themselves facing a doctor from a workers’ clinic, a clerk in the optical factory, a retired middle school teacher, a department store accountant, a pharmacist, and a few educated youths who had recently returned from the countryside. Some of the white flowers found their way into trash cans, toy boxes, and other corners where they soon would be forgotten; others, placed more carefully, sat in vigil and waited for the day to break.

That night Tong did not sleep well. He woke up several times and went out into the yard to check Ear's cardboard house, even though he knew Ear couldn't get through the locked gate. Ear must have got himself into some big trouble. Tong cried quietly to himself, and his mother woke up once and told him in a hushed voice that maybe Ear would be back in the morning. Tong sniffled; he knew she did not believe what she was saying. After a while, when he still could not stop crying, she held him close and rocked him before telling him that perhaps Ear would never come home again. Had something happened to him? Tong asked. She did not know, his mother replied, but it did not hurt to prepare for the worst.

THEY HAD NAMED HER PEONY
after the kerchief that had come with the bundle, a silk square with a single embroidered peony. The pink of the blossom and the green of the leaves had both faded, the white fabric taking on a yellow hue, and Mrs. Hua, her arms curled around the newborn, had wondered if the baby had come from an old family with status. All the same, a princess's body trapped in the fate of a handmaiden, Old Hua replied, bending down and telling Morning Glory, three and a half then, that heaven had answered her request and sent her a little sister.

The kerchief, Mrs. Hua said to Old Hua now, had they left it with Peony?

They must have, Old Hua replied; there was no reason they would not have. Peony had always known it to be special to her.

Mrs. Hua watched Old Hua work on the pickax, which had a loose head; Bashi had offered to buy them new tools, but Mrs. Hua, worrying that the boy would squander his savings before he knew it, had told him that they would rather use their own pickaxes and shovels, which their old hands had grown used to.

She wondered if Peony's mother had ever found her, Mrs. Hua said, a question she asked often of herself. Old Hua hammered on the pickax and replied that they did not even know if the mother was alive, or whether she ever meant to find Peony. It would be a pity if they had not found each other, Mrs. Hua said, and Old Hua hammered without saying anything.

The girl had taken to dreaming more than her adopted parents and elder sister, more than the younger girls who were added to the family one by one. She was the slowest to sort the rubbish but the first to suggest that a thrown-away wallet, once found in a garbage can, might contain enough money for the family to live happily and comfortably for the rest of their lives, and she was disappointed by the photographs in the wallet, cut so methodically that the fragments were beyond recognition. She wept after each baby found at the roadside, and she made a point to remember the names of the towns where her younger sisters were picked up, not concealing her hope of finding the birth parents, hers and Morning Glory's included.

That had not surprised Mrs. Hua and her husband, as they too had had dreams about Peony's return to her birth parents. The kerchief, an intentional loose end left by a mother in a helpless situation, would perhaps one day be sought out. What was the woman's story? Mrs. Hua wondered, more often than she thought about the mothers of the other girls. Heaven had placed Peony in their care and it would be up to heaven's will to take her back, the Huas believed, but in the end, they had to harden their hearts and let her be taken in, at thirteen and a half, as a child bride for a man ten years her senior. He was an only son, born to parents in their late forties when the hope for a child had almost run out. They would treat Peony as their own daughter, the couple promised, their apparent affection for the girl a relief for the Huas.

Mrs. Hua wondered if Peony's birth mother would have acknowledged and honored the marriage arrangement had she found the girl. Different scenes played out often in her imagination. Sometimes it was the boy and his parents who were greatly dismayed when Peony decided to leave them for a life she had always dreamed of going back to; at other times the mother was hurt when Peony turned her back as a punishment for the abandonment. Mrs. Hua talked about these worries now to her husband, and he stopped his hammering for a beat. Once a mother, always a mother, he said, his voice reproachful, but Mrs. Hua, knowing the same could be said of him as a father, only sighed in agreement. A child losing her parents became an orphan, a woman losing her husband a widow, but there was not a term for the lesser parents that those who had lost their children became. Once parents, they would remain parents for the rest of their lives.

Neither talked for a moment. Old Hua laid the pickax aside and began to work on the dulled edge of a shovel.

When Mrs. Hua broke the silence she said that they should go to the city square the next morning.

Old Hua looked up at her and did not reply.

She felt responsible for Teacher Gu, Mrs. Hua said. It had been on her mind since she had learned of Teacher Gu's illness. They should go there and apologize to Mrs. Gu.

Old Hua said that they were hired for a burial.

They could go early, before they went out to the burial, Mrs. Hua said. Bashi had come earlier in the evening and said that he had a bad cold, and asked the couple to bury his grandmother themselves. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua had pointed out the lie to the boy's face; he had paid them generously.

Old Hua nodded. So they would go, he said, as she had known that he would.

NINE

         
T
eacher Gu pretended to be asleep while his wife moved quietly in and out of the bedroom on the morning of Ching Ming. He ignored the small noises and tried to focus his memory on another morning, the distant day of his first honeymoon, when his wife had slipped away from the wedding bed and made tea for him. He had willed himself not to hear the small clicking of teacups and saucers, but when he had opened his eyes with feigned surprise at the tea, she had smiled and scolded him lovingly for his playacting. Didn't he know his quivering eyelashes had betrayed him, she said, and he said that he did not, because he had never had to feign sleep for anyone before.

“I'm going out for a few hours,” Mrs. Gu said to him, by the bedside. “Here's your breakfast, in the thermos. I'll be back soon.”

Teacher Gu did not answer. He willed her to disappear so he could go back to that other morning.

“If you need to use the chamber pot, I've put it here behind the chair.”

Teacher Gu thought about the things that he had not known on that newlywed morning, of the intimacies one would never wish to share with anyone but oneself, the vulnerability one was forced into in old age. He thought about secrets too, of sleeping in the same bed with one woman and dreaming about the other, of his wife hiding a social life from a sick husband half dying in the hospital. Such deceptions must take place under every roof, some more hurtful than others. His first wife must often have thought about other men during their honeymoon, thoughts without romantic desire but nameless strangers occupying her mind nonetheless; she had arranged the honeymoon in that specific sea resort so that, with a husband who served at the National Congress as a cover, she could work as a secret messenger for the underground Communist Party. These stories, hidden from him for the duration of their marriage, had been revealed after they signed their divorce papers. He had not doubted her love then, even after she showed him the divorce application, but now, thirty years and the death of a daughter later, he wondered if he had been too naïve to see the truth. Perhaps his first marriage had been based, from the very beginning, on the merit of his serving the government that she and her comrades were fighting to overthrow. He provided cover for her, and brought home government papers not meant for her to peruse; had she ever considered him an exit plan, in case her side failed to win?

Teacher Gu struggled out of bed. Mrs. Gu entered the bedroom, already dressed up to venture into the early April morning, a black mourning band on her arm. “Do you need something?” she said, coming over and helping him into his shoes. “I didn't hear what you said.”

“I said nothing,” he said. “You were hallucinating.”

“Are you all right? Do you need me to find someone to sit with you while I'm away?”

“What's the good in sitting with a half-dead man?”

“Let's not argue.”

“Listen, woman, I'm not arguing with you, or anyone. You have your business, and I have mine.” He pushed her hand away and limped into the front room. By the door he saw a photo of Shan, enlarged to the size of a poster and framed with black paper and white silk ribbon. “I see your comrades and you are making her into a puppet ,” Teacher Gu said. Before his wife answered, he shuffled to the old desk in the kitchen and sat down. He pushed away two glasses and a plate of leftover food.

“She is a martyr,” Mrs. Gu said.

“A martyr serves a cause as a puppet serves a show. If you look at history, as no one in this country does anymore, a martyr has always served the purpose of deception on a grand scale, be it a religion or an ideology,” Teacher Gu said, surprised by his own eloquent and patient voice. He had been conducting these dialogues in various imagined conversations with his first wife in the past few days. Mrs. Gu said something, but Teacher Gu did not catch her words. Already his mind was floating on to the other woman, who had—or had not, if he still had some remaining luck from a luckless life—intentionally deceived him for three years. He wanted to write a letter to her and request the truth.

Mrs. Gu left with the picture without a farewell. Teacher Gu thought for a moment and remembered he had been looking for his fountain pen. He tried the two drawers by the table, in which he was horrified to find all kinds of odds and ends, as if he had forgotten they had been there for years. After some fumbling, he realized that his wife must have moved his decades-old Parker pen someplace for safekeeping after he had fallen ill. Had she been expecting him to die, so that she would burn the pen with him? Or had she already sold the pen to the secondhand store for a few chickens? This new fear left Teacher Gu in a cold sweat. The pen had been a present from his college professor when Teacher Gu had established the first boys’ school in what was then one of the least educated provinces in the nation; the gold tip had worn out and been replaced twice, but the body of the pen—smooth, dark blue, and polished by years of gentle care—retained its aristocratic feel. Even Shan, in her most fervent years as a young revolutionary, denouncing anything Western as capitalist, had spared Teacher Gu the pen by pretending not to know its hiding place, sewn into the middle of a quilt by his wife.

Teacher Gu pushed himself against the table and stood up. There were not many places in the house for safekeeping, and he located the pen in the bedroom in a wooden box, where his wife kept a few of her jewels that had survived the Cultural Revolution as well as a snapshot of all three of them from when Shan had been a toddler. Teacher Gu squinted at the picture, taken by a friend who had come to visit them in the spring of 1954; Shan was staring at the camera while her parents were both watching her. The camera had been a novelty in Muddy River back then, and a group of children and a few adults had gathered and watched the black box hanging from their friend's neck. He snapped shots generously, of Teacher Gu's family as well as of the onlooking children, but this picture was the only one his friend mailed. Teacher Gu wondered what had happened to the other pictures; another letter he needed to write, he thought, before remembering that the friend had taken his own life, in 1957, as an anti-Communist intellectual.

Teacher Gu shuffled back to the front room. He took the pen out of the velvet box, unscrewed the cap carefully, and wiped off the dried ink on the gold tip with a small piece of silk he kept in the box for that purpose.

Greatly respected Comrade Cheng,
he started the letter, and then thought the opening ridiculous with its revolutionary ugliness, even though he had addressed her with this formality in his letters, once or twice a year, for the past thirty years. He ripped the page off the notebook and started again.
My once closest friend, colleague, and beloved wife,
he wrote with great effort. “My once closest friend, colleague, and beloved wife,” he read it out loud, and decided that it suited his mood.

Remember the umbrella that my father lent my mother at a street corner in Paris that started their lifelong love story? It was in the autumn of 1916, if you still remember. You said what a romance when I first told you the story; I am writing to let you know that the emblem of this great love no longer exists. The umbrella did not survive my daughter's death because her mother, my current wife, thought the daughter needed an umbrella in heaven. Were there a heaven above, I wonder if my parents are fighting with my daughter for possession of the umbrella. The grandparents had not met the granddaughter in life; in death I hope they do not have to spend a long time in the company of the girl. My parents, as you may remember, possessed the elegance and wisdom of the intellectuals of their generation; my daughter, however, was more a product of this revolutionary age than of her grandparents’ noble Manchu blood. She died of a poison that she had herself helped to concoct. Despite art and philosophy and your beloved mathematics and my faith in enlightenment, in the end, what marks our era—perhaps we could take the liberty to believe, for all we know, that this era may last for the next hundred years?—is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever.

Teacher Gu stopped writing and read the letter. His handwriting was a shaky old man's but there was no point in being ashamed at the loss of his capacity as a calligrapher. He folded the letter in the special way that young lovers had folded love notes forty years earlier and put it in an envelope. Only then did he realize he had forgotten to ask the question. He had wasted time and space in a uselessly moody letter. He opened his notebook.

Highly respected Comrade Cheng: Please tell me, in all honesty, if you were assigned to marry me by your party leaders for your Communist cause. I am getting closer to death each day and I prefer not to leave this world a deceived man.

Teacher Gu signed his name carefully and sealed the letter along with the first one without rereading either of them. He put the envelope into his pocket, pulled himself across the room, and stumbled into an old armchair. The writing had exhausted him; he closed his eyes, and returned to the argument he had carried on all night with his first wife, about whether Marxism was a form of spiritual opium, as Marx had once described other religions.

“Greatly respected citizens of Muddy River,” the voice from the loudspeaker said, interrupting Teacher Gu's eloquent argument. He recognized the voice as the star announcer, and thought that the woman sounded falsely grave for a holiday of ghosts. “Good morning, all comrades. This is a special broadcast on the current events in Muddy River,” the voice said. “As you may not know, there is great historical change happening in our nation's capital, where a stretch of wall, called the democratic wall, has been set up for people to express their ideas on where our country is going. It is a critical moment for our nation, yet news about the democratic wall did not reach us. We've been taught for years that in our Communist state we are the masters of our own country, and of our own fates. But is this ever true? Not long ago, Gu Shan, a daughter of Muddy River, was wrongfully sentenced to death. She was not a criminal; she was a woman who felt immense responsibility for our nation's future, who spoke out against a corrupt system with courage and insight, but what became of this heroine who acted ahead of her time?”

Teacher Gu's hands trembled as he tried to pull himself out of the armchair. The woman continued to talk, but he could no longer hear her. He struggled to open the notebook, his hand shaking so much that he tore several pages before finding an intact one. “I will beg you only for this one thing now,” wrote Teacher Gu to his first wife.

May I entrust myself to you when I can no longer trust my wife of thirty years? Only in our culture can a body be dug from its grave and put on display for other people's political ambitions. Could you please agree to oversee my cremation? Do not allow traces of me to be left to my current wife, or anyone, for that matter.

“Comrades with conscience!” the woman continued to speak over the loudspeaker. “Please come to the city square and speak up against our corrupt system. Please come to meet and support a heroic mother who is perpetuating the legend of her daughter.”

Stupid women, Teacher Gu said aloud. He put on a coat on top of his pajamas and got ready to go and post the letters.

THE YARD WAS QUIET
in an eerie way when Tong woke up before daybreak. He opened the gate, hoping to see an eager Ear waiting for him outside, but apart from a few early-rising men loading their bicycles with bamboo boxes of offerings for their outings, the alley was empty. Tong asked the men about Ear, but none of them had seen the dog.

Tong left the alley, and at the crossroad of two major streets, he caught the first sight of people walking toward the city square. They were silent, men with hats pulled low over their eyebrows, women with half of their faces wrapped in shawls. Tong stood by the roadside and watched the people pass, sometimes in twos but mostly single file, each keeping a distance from the person ahead of him. Tong recognized an uncle from his father's work unit and greeted him, but the man only nodded briefly and then walked faster, as though eager to get rid of Tong. The shops on the main street would be closed for the day, and there was nothing but the public event to attract people to the town center. Perhaps Ear, a gregarious dog that always enjoyed boisterous events, would be found there. Tong waited for a gap to join the procession.

The eastern sky lit up; another cloudless spring day. The main street was quiet in spite of the growing number of people coming in from side streets and alleys. No one talked, and crows and magpies croaked in the pale light, louder than usual. People nodded when they saw acquaintances, but most of the time they focused on the stretch of road in front of them. A few men loitered in front of the shop doors that lined both sides of the main street, their faces too covered by hats or high collars.