The Vagrants (34 page)

Teacher Gu stopped writing when he heard someone walk into the yard through the unlocked gate. He looked out the window and saw his neighbors, the young revolutionary lunatic and her husband, coming to his door. The wife raised her voice and asked if there was anyone home. The door to the house was unlocked too, and for a moment, Teacher Gu wondered if he should move across the room quietly and bolt the door from the inside. But the distance to the door seemed a long, exhausting journey. He held his breath and closed his eyes, wishing that if he remained still long enough, they would vanish.

The couple waited for an answer and then the woman tried the door, which she pushed open with a creak. “Oh, you're at home,” the woman said with feigned surprise. “We heard some strange noise and thought we would come to check.”

Teacher Gu replied coldly that things were perfectly fine. Discreetly he moved a newspaper to cover his unfinished letter.

“Are you sure? I heard you had a stroke. We'll help you check,” the woman said, and signaled for her husband to come into the room from where he stood by the door, his two hands rubbing each other, as if he was embarrassed. “Is your wife home?” the woman asked.

“Why should I answer you?”

“I was just wondering. It's not a good thing for a wife to leave her husband home.”

“She's at work.”

“I know, but I'm talking in general. When you were in the hospital, I saw her leaving home after dark at least twice,” the woman said, and turned to her husband. “Why don't you check and see what that noise is? Maybe it's a litter of rats.”

The man stepped up unwillingly and looked around, avoiding Teacher Gu's eyes. The woman, however, did not conceal her interest as she walked around the room and checked all the corners. When she took the lid off a cooking pot and looked in, Teacher Gu lost his patience. He hit the floor with his cane. “You think we're too old to take care of a rat in our cooking pot and need you snakes for that?”

“Why, it's not good manners to talk to your neighbors this way,” the woman said, throwing the lid back on the pot. “We're here to help you before things get out of hand.”

“I don't need your help,” Teacher Gu said. He supported himself with one hand on the table and stood up, pointing to the door with the cane. “Now leave my house this very instant. You don't happen to have a search warrant, do you?”

The woman ignored his words and moved closer to the table. She lifted the newspaper, uncovered the half letter, and smiled. Before she had a chance to read a word, Teacher Gu hit the tabletop with his cane, an earsplitting crack. The cup of untouched tea jumped off the table and spilled onto the woman's pants; the saucer, falling onto the cement floor, did not break.

The husband pulled his wife back before she could react; her face remained pale when he assured Teacher Gu that they did not mean him any harm. The husband's voice, a polite and beautiful baritone, surprised Teacher Gu. The man was a worker of some sort, as he wore a pair of greasy overalls and a threadbare shirt. Teacher Gu realized that he had never heard the man speak before. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine a more educated mind for that voice.

The wife, her face regaining color, stepped from behind the man. “What do you think you are doing? This is a civilized society.”

The woman's voice was shrill. Teacher Gu could not help but feel sorry for the husband, whose beautiful voice—were it to have a life of its own—would probably be disappointed beyond words by the mismatch of the other voice, blade-thin and ugly.

“Don't think you can scare me with that Red Guard style of your daughter's,” the wife said. “Let me tell you, truth is not to be enforced by violence in our country.”

Teacher Gu pointed his cane at the woman's face, his whole body shaking. “Do not come and shit in my house,” he said slowly, trying to enunciate every word.

“What vulgarity for a schoolteacher,” the woman said. “The earlier you are fired, the better for the next generation.”

The husband pulled her back and moved between her and the shaking cane, apologizing for the misunderstanding. She pushed her husband aside and said there was no need to succumb to the rudeness of the old man. “Now I dare you to hit me. Hit me now, you counterrevolutionary fox! Hit me so we can put you under the guillotine of justice.”

Teacher Gu watched the woman, frothing with a hatred that he did not understand; she was his daughter's age, without much education perhaps, without a brain for sure. He let the cane fall to the floor and said to the husband, “Young man, I beg you—this request is between two men—and I beg you sincerely. Why don't you tell your wife that such behavior will only make her an ugly, unwanted woman in the end?”

The woman sneered. “What a rotten thought. Why should I be taught anything by my husband?” she said. “Women are the major pillars for our Communist mansion.”

Teacher Gu sat down and wrote in big strokes on a piece of paper, his handwriting crooked, with no beautiful calligraphy to speak of.
SHUT UP. GO AWAY.
He showed the paper to the couple. He had decided not to waste one more word on the woman.

“Who are you to order us around? Let me tell you, you and that wife of yours are like the crickets after the first frost. There's not much time left for you to hop.”

The man dragged his wife away, and when she resisted, he said in a low voice that she might as well shut up now. She raised her voice and questioned him. The man half dragged and half carried her out of the house. Through the open door, Teacher Gu heard her shouting and cursing at her husband's cowardice even in front of an old, useless man. Teacher Gu gathered all his energy to move across the room and close the door. When he returned to the table, his hands were shaking too hard to write. The visitors, even though farcically obvious in their intention to uncover some firsthand secrets, spelled danger; but while waiting for the noose to tighten around his neck, what could a man do except close his eyes and believe that the possibility of escaping one's fate lay not in the hands of others but in one's own will?

UNDER THE SHELTER
of a dark evening sky on the day after Ching Ming, ten houses were entered and searched. Arrests were made, and none of the suspects resisted. By nightfall the first victory against the anti-Communist disruption was reported in a classified telegraph to the provincial capital.

A high-ranking party official, flown in from the provincial capital to take charge, was met by the mayor and his staff. Han and his parents, once considered the most trustworthy assistants to the mayor, were excluded from the meeting. Special security teams, formed to ensure an impartial investigation and cleansing of Muddy River, and made up of police and workers from a city a hundred miles away, were transported into the city in ten covered army trucks. During the ride, a young man who had recently inherited his father's position in the police department, worked loose a knot in the tarp cover and peeked outside. The silver stars in the sky and the dark mountain, even from afar, made him shiver like a young dog. He had just turned twenty, and had never left his hometown. He imagined the stories he would tell, upon his return, to the young clerk at the front desk; she would call him a braggart, insisting she did not believe a single word, but her blushing smile would tell a different story, understood only by the two of them.

The people of Muddy River, despite speculation and uncertainty, trusted in the old saying that the law did not punish the masses for their wrongdoing. This belief allowed them to busy themselves with their nightly drinking, arguing, lovemaking—their grand dreams and petty desires all coming alive once again on a night like this, when wild peach and plum trees blossomed along the riverbank, their fragrance carried by the spring breeze through open windows and into people's houses.

A carpenter and his apprentice walked on the Cross-river Bridge in the direction of the mountain, the young man pushing a wheelbarrow with his tools and watching the red tip of a cigarette dangling from his master's mouth. The carpenter had bought the cigarettes with their last money, as he had sworn before coming to the city that he wanted to have a taste of cigarettes. There had been other promises, made to the carpenter's wife and the apprentice's parents, before they had left the mountain, but their hope of making a small fortune was defeated by the officials who hired them to make, among other things, three television stands without paying more than the minimum compensation. City dwellers, the carpenter said between puffs, were a bunch who'd had their hearts eaten out by wild dogs; he warned his apprentice not to make the same mistake again, but the young man, who had been puzzled by the television sets he had seen in the officials’ homes, imagined himself sitting in one of the armchairs he had helped to make and enjoying the beautiful women who appeared on the television screen at the push of a button.

A blind beggar sat in front of the Huas’ shack and ran a small piece of rosin along the length of the bow for his two-string fiddle. He had been on his way from one town to the other when he met Old Hua and his wife, who had invited him to stay at their place for the night and had treated him to a good meal. The beggar had not met the couple before, though it did not surprise him, after a round of drinking, that they began to tell stories about their lives on the road. People recognized their own kind, despite all possible disguises, and in the end, the three of them drank, laughed, and cried together. The couple asked the beggar to stop drifting and settle down with them, and it seemed natural for him to agree. But now that the magic of the rice liquor had waned, the blind man knew that he would leave first thing the next morning. He had never stayed with anyone in his life, and it was too late to change his fate. He tested the bow on the string, and the fiddle sighed and moaned.

The door opened, and the blind man stopped his bow and listened. The husband was snoring from inside the shack, and the wife closed the door as quietly as she had opened it and took a seat near the beggar.

“I'm waking you up,” the blind man said.

“Go on and play,” Mrs. Hua said.

The blind man had planned to sneak away without waking the couple up, but now with the wife sitting next to him, he owed her an explanation. “It was nice of you to invite me to stay,” he said. “I don't mean to be a man who changes his mind often, but I think I may have to decline your kindness.”

“You have to be back on the road. I don't blame you.”

“Once destined to be homeless, one finds it difficult to settle down.”

“I know. I wish we could go back on the road too,” Mrs. Hua said. “Now go on and play”

The blind man nodded, knowing that the couple would not take his departure as an offense. Slowly he drew the bow across the string and played an ancient song called “Leave-taking” for his day-old friendship.

ELEVEN

         
B
ashi was in love, and it perplexed him. The desire to be with Nini for every minute of his life seemed not to come from between his legs but from elsewhere in his body, for which he had no experience or explanation. He thought hard and the only similar experience had been when he was three, not too long after his mother had left him with his grandmother: Winter that year had been particularly harsh in Muddy River, and every morning they would wake up to frozen towels on the washstand, even though his grandmother had not spared one penny on coal. Every day they slipped into bed together straight after dinner, and often in the middle of the night Bashi would wake up with icy cold feet. He would whimper, and his grandmother, still dreaming, would grab his little feet and hold them against her bosom, not one layer of nightclothes in between. The soft warmth made Bashi shiver with inexplicable fear and excitement, and he would lie awake, wiggling one toe and then another, imagining the toes in their adventure until he fell asleep.

Bashi longed to be with Nini the way he had once yearned for his grandmother's bosom. Sometimes he worried that something was wrong with his male root, but it never failed to rise dutifully when he was thinking about Nini. The problem occurred when she was next to him, a tangible body, warm and soft. He could not desire her the way he wanted to. The prenuptial bridal check he had made, on a whim, haunted him; that glimpse into a secret pathway she had opened to him, with trust and ease and even playfulness, shamed him. Her thin hair, cut short carelessly by her mother, looked like a bird's nest. Her pointed chin, her bony arms, and her forever-chapped lips made him want to take her in his arms and rock her and croon to her. But even this desire made him nervous in front of her. What would she think of him, a man with more than one screw loose in his brain?

Nini, however, seemed unaware of his struggle. The morning after Ching Ming, she had come into the house as naturally as daylight. She had moved around as if she had grown up there. Bashi waited for her to bring up the topic of marriage again; he believed everything he had told her when he had conducted his bridal check, but he knew that marriage to a twelve-year-old was easier said than done. Nini, on the other hand, did not press him, as he had dreaded she might. She talked more, even a bit chatty; she jokingly criticized his messy bedroom, and before he had a chance to defend himself, she took it upon herself to put everything in order for him. She did not blink when she discovered his foul-smelling socks and underwear beneath the bed. He protested when she gathered the laundry to wash, but she refused to listen. If a man knew how to take care of himself, she said, what would he need a woman for?

Nini seemed not to understand her value, Bashi thought. She did not put on any of the airs that other women did when being courted—or perhaps she was just a golden-hearted girl. Overwhelmed by his good fortune, Bashi was eager to find a friend with whom he could share his love story, but there was no such person in his life. Through his mind ran all the people he knew—the Huas naturally came up first, as the more Bashi thought about it, the more he believed the Huas to be the only ones willing to offer the assistance that he and Nini needed. But suppose they were old-fashioned and didn't approve of a marriage arranged by the two young people themselves?

Bashi found Mrs. Hua in the street in the morning; the arrests, made the night before, had caused little ripple in the everyday life of Muddy River. “Was your marriage to Old Hua arranged by your parents or his parents?” Bashi asked.

The old woman did not stop sweeping. She was aware of being addressed, yet ever since her dream about the death of her youngest daughter, Bunny, she had found it hard to concentrate on a conversation. The blind fiddler, coming and then leaving with his heartbreaking tunes, had made her nostalgic for her days and nights on the road. She talked to her husband about giving up their home and going back to the vagrant life. They could visit their daughters, the married ones and the ones who'd been taken away from them, before they took their final exit from the world; he said nothing at the beginning, and when she asked again, he said that he imagined these visits would not do the daughters, or themselves, any good.

“Mrs. Hua?” Bashi touched her broomstick and she gazed at him. More than any other day he looked like someone she had known from a long time ago. She closed her eyes but could not locate the person in her memory.

“Did you have a matchmaker to talk to your parents and Old Hua's parents?”

This boy, who was serious and persistent at asking irrelevant questions, baffled her—who was the person returning to her in his body?

“Mrs. Hua?”

“I met him as a beggar,” she said.

“You mean, nobody went between your parents and his parents as a matchmaker?”

“No matchmaker would visit a couple of dead parents in their graves. My husband—he had been an orphan since before he could remember.”

Bashi was elated by Mrs. Hua's answer. He himself was an orphan, and Nini was nearly one. Of course they needed no blessings from their parents, alive or dead. “What do you think of Nini?”

Mrs. Hua looked at Bashi with an intensity that frightened him. He wondered if he had made a mistake bringing up the topic. Would the old woman become suspicious and turn him over to the police?

It was the boy flutist, Mrs. Hua thought. The boy who had once come and begged to become their son. Mrs. Hua looked up at the sky and counted. What year was that? The year that she and her husband had first thought of their deaths and the girls’ lives without them—1959 it was, when the famine had just begun, a hard blow for everyone but hardest for beggars. They had four daughters then, Morning Glory at thirteen, Peony at ten, Lotus at eight, and Hibiscus, seven. The flutist was not older than twelve himself, an orphan who went from village to village, as they themselves did, and begged with his flute.

“Do you play flute?” Mrs. Hua asked Bashi.

“Who is Flute? I don't know him. Does he know me?”

The boy twenty years earlier had talked in this glib way too, but the music he had played could make a stone weep, such was the sadness that his flute had carried; he could make a dead man laugh in his coffin too, when he was in the mood. The boy had made much older girls fall in love with him; even some married women, when their husbands were at the fair or in the field, stood in front of their doors and teased him with jokes usually meant only for married men and women, behind closed doors. Despite all the attention he got, the boy came and begged Mrs. Hua and her husband to adopt him; he would call them Baba and Mama and would support them with his flute, he promised, but her husband refused. With his flute and his sweet words, he would put all their daughters through hell, Old Hua said to Mrs. Hua afterward; she agreed but not without regret, and now the boy had come back to her in another incarnation, flute-less, yet she recognized him.

“What do you think of Nini, Mrs. Hua?”

“Why do you ask, Son?”

“What do you think of my marrying her?” said Bashi. “Mrs. Hua, don't look at me like I have two heads. You're scaring me.”

“Why do you want to marry Nini?”

“She'll be so much better off with me than with her own parents,” said Bashi. “And I'd be the happiest man in the world if I could spend my days with her.”

Mrs. Hua looked hard at Bashi. For a year after the flutist boy had left them, Lotus had been in a cheerless mood, unusual for an eight-year-old. Among the sisters, she had been the closest to the boy; she had learned to sing to his accompaniment, and he had joked that they would make the best beggar couple, with his flute and her voice. Mrs. Hua had wondered then whether they had made a mistake by refusing the boy, but Old Hua, upon hearing her doubt, shook his head. Lotus was the plainest of the four girls, and the boy, with a face too smart for his own good, would one day shatter her heart. Besides, Old Hua said, did they want their daughter to repeat their own fate, married to another beggar, without a roof over her head?

“I'm serious,” Bashi said. Mrs. Hua's silence made him nervous and eager to prove himself. “I'll treat her well.”

“I've seen you grow up these years, Bashi,” Mrs. Hua said. “I've known you enough not to suspect you as a bad person, but anyone else who hears you say this will think you crazy.”

“Why?”

“She's still a child.”

“But she'll grow up,” Bashi said. “I can wait.”

Indeed, why couldn't the boy have the right to think of marrying Nini? What if they had let the young flute player be part of the family—they might have more now to their names, a daughter and a son-in-law to see them off to the next world, music that added color to their dull lives, grandchildren to love.

“Who would marry her and treat her well if not for me? I love her,” Bashi said, and he stood up straighter as he made the bold claim. “She's never happy in her own house. Can you be my matchmaker? Can you talk to her family on our behalf? They can't get a better offer.”

“She's too young,” Mrs. Hua said.

“You married your daughters young to other families, didn't you?” Bashi said. “I can wait for her to grow up. I can pay for Nini to live with you. I just need to have their word that Nini will be mine.”

Mrs. Hua looked at Bashi. The wheel of life, with its ruthless revolving, could be merciful at times. The boy had come back to her, giving her a second chance, but what was the right thing, for any mother, any woman, to decide? “Let me talk to my husband,” she said. “Can you come to our place in the afternoon? We'll have an answer for you then.”

IT TOOK TONG
a long walk to gather his courage for school. He imagined his teacher asking for an explanation about the previous day. He would never get the red scarf now that he was a dishonest boy, pretending to be sick and skipping school. The teacher had once said that a small crack in the bottom of a ship would wreck it in the open sea, and Tong imagined himself a deteriorated soul heading toward a sinful life, and the thought made his eyes fill with tears. He would admit his wrongdoing first thing this morning, before the crack widened and made him into a young criminal.

The teacher, however, was in no mood to question Tong. Classes had been canceled from the first through the sixth grades. The principal had announced an emergency meeting for all teachers and staff, and the students were herded into the auditorium, watched by nobody. Soon the unsupervised auditorium exploded with noise. Boys from the upper grades ran wild along the aisles, and the younger boys, even though they dared not leave their seats, hurled paper planes at one another. Girls shrieked when they were bumped or hit by the boys, and some brought out colorful plastic strings to weave key rings in the shape of goldfish or parrots. No question was asked about why they were kept there, or how long it would go on; as far as the children could see, this day of happiness would last forever.

Tong sat among a few quieter classmates, boys and girls who could sit still in their seats for hours when required by their teachers. There was a war coming, the girl sitting next to Tong whispered to him. What war? Tong asked, and the girl did not answer, saying only that she had overheard her father say so to her mother. She was the kind of girl who blushed at every word she said, and Tong looked at her crimson face, finding it hard to believe her.

Half an hour later, the principal led the teachers into the auditorium. He blew his whistle with all his might, hurting everyone's eardrums. The students quickly returned to their seats, and the auditorium soon became quiet. The principal stood at the podium and, as usual, cleared his throat several times into the microphone, which cracked and magnified the sound, before beginning his speech.

“An outbreak of a counterrevolutionary epidemic has caught Muddy River unprepared,” he said. “I want you all to understand that the situation is urgent, and if we don't watch out for ourselves, we may be the next ones infected by this virulent disease.”

Some children shifted in their seats, a few coughing and others rubbing their noses.

“It is time that we cleanse our hearts and our souls with the harshest disinfectant,” the principal said, banging on the podium to emphasize each of his words, the children's hearts pounding along with his fist.

“You've all been born under the red flag of revolution and grown up in the honeypot the party has provided,” the principal continued. “Sometimes this privilege may be the exact reason that one forgets to appreciate one's happiness in this country. Now answer me, children, who has given you this happy life?”

It took a moment of hesitation before some upper-grade students answered, “The Communist Party.”

“I can't hear you,” the principal said. “Say your answer louder if you have confidence in it.”

A few teachers stood up and signaled to the auditorium, and more voices joined the chorus. It took several rounds for the principal to be satisfied with the roaring answer.
“Long live the greatest, the most glorious, and the ever-correct Chinese Communist Party,”
he said again with a thump-thump of his fist. “Do you all understand these words? What does this mean? It means our party has never been wrong and will never be wrong; it means that anything we do will not escape the scrutiny of the party. I know you've all been taught to respect your parents, but what are they compared to the party, our foremost parents? You are the party's children before you are the children of your parents. Everybody is equally loved by the party, but when someone makes a mistake, just as when a child makes a mistake, the party will not let a single wrongdoer slip by. No one will be spared; no crime will be tolerated.”