The Vagrants

TEN

Kai walked alone to the city square, a tired sadness taking hold. In the falling dusk the street was gray and empty. By now most people had returned home after their outing in the mountain, Ching Ming ending, like all holidays, a bit too soon.

An official at the courthouse had been assigned duty and was waiting for them when they had delivered, at midday, a copy of the petition with the transcribed signatures, requesting an investigation of Gu Shan's trial and the restoration of her posthumous reputation; the official, an acquaintance of Kai's, had pretended not to recognize her and, without further comment, had signed the official paperwork for receipt of the petition.

The enlarged picture of Gu Shan remained untouched on the pedestal of Chairman Mao's monument, the black mourning ribbons around the frame loose in the evening wind. The paper flowers gathered earlier in the day had been made into three wreaths, and in the dim light they bloomed like huge pale chrysanthemums. Underneath the wreaths was the white cloth that bore more than three hundred signatures, the four corners weighed down by rocks. Wild-flowers and new twigs of pine trees, brought back from the mountain by people Kai had or had not met in the rally earlier, had been left in bouquets on the cloth. Kai studied the improvised memorial to Gu Shan; no order had come from the government for a cleanup, which seemed another confirmation of their achievement.

Earlier that afternoon Kai had stopped by Jialin's shack. His friends had all been there, basking in the day's success. A woman introduced by Jialin as Dr. Fan thanked Kai for her beautiful speech; a middle-aged man nodded in agreement. The town's librarian turned out to be a friendly person despite her quietness, and she poured tea for Kai from a thermos she had brought to the shack. There were four men and four women other than Jialin and Kai; Mrs. Gu, who had gone home to take care of her husband, was the only one missing from the celebration. The group talked about their rally, and wondered how soon they would hear from the city government. They needed to be patient, Jialin reminded them, but his eyes betrayed irrepressible excitement. The British and American radio stations all predicted a drastic change in the central government, he said, and so did the broadcast from Hong Kong. Kai confirmed the news and revealed that Gu Shan's execution was being investigated in the provincial capital. Exhilarated, a woman embraced Kai and thanked her for being one of them. Perhaps she was among the ones who had suspected Kai earlier, Kai thought, but they received her as their friend and comrade now, and that was all that mattered.

Jialin turned on his shortwave radio and found a station that was playing a waltz, a chorus of accordions. The music filled the shack with a festive mood, and an engineer in his late fifties stepped into the middle of the shack and invited someone to dance. Three of the four women, an accountant, the schoolteacher, and Dr. Fan, pro tested in laughter. What was wrong with having a good dance? the engineer said, as if feeling offended. Kai thought of volunteering but before she stepped up, Jialin shook his head slightly at her. Kai turned and saw the librarian walk up to the middle of the shack, putting her hands in the hands of the blushing engineer. The man winked at Jialin and led the dance in the shack's limited space. Kai watched the librarian's face turn to a deep crimson, like a young girl in love for the first time.

Kai had not been able to talk to Jialin alone that afternoon. She wondered if he felt as grateful as she did for the distractions the rally had brought. Would they have made different decisions had there been a future they could look forward to? He tried to conceal his exhaustion as the afternoon progressed. If his illness saddened his friends as much as it did her, she could not tell.

A woman, her belly slightly protruding from under an old jacket, approached the square now. Kai nodded, but the woman, reading the signatures on the white cloth, took no notice. It was not too late to sign, Kai said, wondering if the woman, like so many others, had not been able to escape her husband's supervision for the rally in the morning. The woman turned to look at Kai, hatred in her eyes. “I wish a horrible death to every one of you,” she said, not hiding the venom in her words.

Kai watched the woman spit at the memorial before waddling away. It takes all sorts to make a world, dragons and phoenixes along with snakes and rats, she remembered her father saying, but how easily one could forget, after an afternoon with Jialin and his friends, that the world was still the same place of cold-heartedness and animosity, and that the small fire of friendship could do only so much to keep one warm and hopeful. She thought about her in-laws, who must be enraged by now. Her own mother, whom Kai had avoided thinking about in the past few hours, must have locked herself in her flat, bracing for her in-laws’ rage. Kai dared not even think of Han.

The flat was dark when Kai entered. Out of habit she called Ming-Ming's name, and the nanny quietly came out of the nursery, also unlit. Kai turned on the light and the nanny blinked, her eyes swollen with fresh tears. Where was Ming-Ming? Kai asked; the girl did not answer but looked in the direction of the bathroom with trepidation. A moment later, the door opened and out came Kai's mother, her face puffy and wet. Kai signaled for the nanny to leave them alone, and when the girl closed the door to the nursery, Kai's mother said, “Where have you been?”

“Where's Ming-Ming?”

“Your parents-in-law took him home with them. They left word to let the nanny go tomorrow morning.”

“Who did they leave the order with?”

Kai's mother looked at her for a long moment, her lips trembling. “Who did they leave the order with? Your own mother. Your mother had to stand here and beg your in-laws for forgiveness because you were out of your mind. Tell me, Kai, why did you do this to me? I'm an old widow and don't I deserve a moment of peace?”

Kai watched her mother crying. She realized that she had never, since her father's death, looked into her mother's eyes. With her tear-streaked face she looked more than ever like a stranger. “I'm just happy that your father's long gone so he didn't have to be humiliated as I was, being called all sort of names in my own daughter's home, in front of my grandchild and his nanny,” Kai's mother said between sobs.

“What else did they say?”

“What's the point of repeating their words to you? What's been said had better be buried with me.”

Even though Kai's mother had always been dominating at home, she was known to be easily intimidated by her superiors. One could not be expected to be repressed all the time, Kai's father had once said, in explanation to Kai of her mother's behavior; she needed to vent her anger, he had said, and it struck Kai now that her father had served as a receptacle for her mother's bitterness; that must have been what killed him. “Stand up for yourself,” said Kai now. “Ignore my in-laws.”

“How easy for you to say that. They left word that you and I would not be allowed to see Ming-Ming anymore. Tell me, how do you ignore that?”

Kai looked away from her mother. Under the newly finished television stand she saw something blue. She bent and picked it up. It was Ming-Ming's favorite rattle, in the shape of a whale. She wondered if the nanny knew he had lost it, or if he had put it there as one of his games of hide-and-seek. One time before she had found a small rubber ball in her boot, and for three days after that, she had found different toys there, and she had known then that it must be a purposeful action on his part. She wondered if he would soon settle for a grandparent's shoe for the game.

“Why did you do it? What is it that you want that you haven't got?”

This question had never been put to Kai before. She shook her head. It was not what she wanted that mattered, she said.

“What do we do now?” Kai's mother said. “Do we know how much trouble we're in?”

Kai was struck by her mother's including herself in her daughter's fate. She thought of comforting her mother, but she would not listen. “You've always been such a good child,” her mother wailed. “You've always followed your parents’ and your teachers’ instructions and never made a mistake.”

Again Kai told her mother not to worry, knowing her words were too vague to do any good. Such a trustworthy child, Kai's mother repeated as if in disbelief; people had always told her it was her fortune to have a daughter who would not step on the wrong side of the line and who had helped her siblings prosper.

Kai left her mother and walked to the nursery. When she pushed the door open, the nanny, who had been eavesdropping behind the door, stepped back, panic and shame on her face. Kai pretended that she had not noticed; she asked the girl if she was willing to take some extra money and leave for home the next morning.

The girl stared at Kai as if she did not understand Kai's question. Kai sighed and explained that it was best for the girl to go back to her own parents, at least for now. “Are you worrying that your parents will be angry at you? I can write them a letter and tell them that you did nothing wrong here,” Kai said.

“My parents—they don't read.”

“Can you explain to them? Tell them that we'll send someone to get you back as soon as we settle things here,” said Kai. She wondered how much the girl understood the situation, and if this lie would be enough to offer her and her parents some comfort and hope.

“Who will take care of Ming-Ming?” the girl asked.

“He's with his grandparents for now.”

“But someone has to take care of him,” the girl said. “Do they know what Ming-Ming wants when he cries?”

“He'll be all right.”

“But they have never taken care of him. They don't know him,” said the girl. “They were pushing him to drink milk when he'd just wet his diaper.”

Tap water was being run in the bathroom behind the half-closed door, but Kai could still hear her mother crying. “Ming-Ming will be just fine,” Kai said. “You don't have to worry about him.”

The girl looked down at her hands without replying. She must have hurt the girl's feelings somehow, Kai thought, but she was too tired to think about what she had said wrong. She counted out money equal to an extra month's pay and handed the bills to the girl.

The girl did not take the money. She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and brought out a small jade pendant. “Could you give this to Ming-Ming?” she said. “I don't have anything else to leave for him.”

“Is it something special?” Kai said. “Don't give it away to a small child so easily.”

The girl gripped the pendant and insisted that Ming-Ming would not sleep without touching it.

“He'll do without it,” Kai said. She put the money into the pocket of the girl's blouse, and thanked her and then apologized for the disruption. The girl begged again to leave the pendant with the baby so that he could have something by which to remember her.

Kai accepted it; the girl bowed to Kai, then wiped her tears. Ming-Ming was the first baby the girl had taken care of other than her siblings; Kai wondered if there would be other babies in the coming years, and if farewells would become easier once they were a regular part of the girl's life.

“And please tell his grandparents that Ming-Ming likes to have someone touch the back of his ears before he goes to sleep,” the girl said.

Kai looked down at the pendant, a carved jade piece in the shape of a fish. It was an inexpensive one, the carving rough and amateur, the kind that a peasant's family could afford for their daughter. Han's parents would not allow such a thing near Ming-Ming, but Kai thanked the girl and said that she would buy a silver chain for the pendant so Ming-Ming could wear it around his wrist. She was welcome to come back and visit them, Kai said, and promised that once things settled down, the girl would be rehired. Her lie was delivered and received without much faith on either side; after a moment, Kai had little left to say but to wish the girl good luck in her own life.

HAN RETURNED TO MUDDY RIVER on the night of Ching Ming, after he had phoned the mayor with news of the victory they had been waiting for. In Beijing, the situation in the central government had taken a drastic turn after a late-night meeting, with the democratic wall now defined as an anti-Communist movement; the man to whom they had provided the new kidneys was on his way to cleanse the provincial government of the supporters and sympathizers of the democratic wall, and rumors were that he would either become the leader of the province or be promoted and move to the central government in Beijing. Yet the mayor had sounded halfhearted in his praise of Han's work, and it was only when his own parents got on the phone that Han understood the reason for the mayor's lukewarm response. Did he know what his wife had been up to? Han's mother yelled at him over the telephone, and then without waiting for an answer, she ordered Han to come home straight away.

On the trip home, Han practiced his defense, saying that he had been away and he had no idea what Kai had been doing in the past weeks. In his imagined conversation, he begged his parents and the mayor to help Kai out, and by the time he reached the door of his flat, he believed in his fantasy. Despite the request of his parents for him to report to them first, Han went straight home. It was in the middle of the night when, discovering his own wife absent from their bed, he woke the nanny up. Mrs. Wu—Kai's mother—had come that night and had asked Kai to go back to her flat, the nanny said, frightened by Han's grip on her arm; his parents had brought the baby home with them. Han looked at the nanny hard, as if she were lying to him, and when he saw that the trembling girl in her night-clothes was about to cry, he told her that she had better have a good sleep, as he would get Ming-Ming back first thing in the morning. The girl mumbled and said that she was to leave for home in the morning, as his parents had fired her. What nonsense, Han told her; he and Kai would both come home with Ming-Ming the next morning.

Han thought of knocking on his mother-in-law's door, but in the end he went to his parents’ flat instead. His parents, both smoking in the living room, showed no sign of having slept. “That wife of yours,” Han's father said at the sight of Han. “She has spoiled our victory.”

Han looked at his parents’ expressionless faces. Despite the defense he had rehearsed, he began by saying that he was the one to blame, as he had not detected early enough what Kai had been doing. Now that all this had happened, could they think of a way to protect her before it was too late?

“Protect her? We need to think about protecting ourselves,” Han's mother said. “The only thing we can do now is to draw the line with her and pray.”

“But she's my wife,” Han said.

“She won't be after tomorrow,” Han's mother said. She motioned for Han's father to continue the conversation. He laid out the plan, obviously devised by Han's mother: Before daybreak, Han was to prepare a divorce application, and he would turn it in in the morning. “Start with the divorce application,” his father said. “Say that you and she disagree on the most fundamental problems of ideology— now use your brain to elaborate on this—and say that the knowledge of your wife's role in the antigovernment scheme was shocking— explain ‘shocking’ to mean that you had no previous information about it until being told by someone, not us, of course, but someone irrelevant, someone unimportant, that she was a leader at the rally— and that when you learned of this, it was too late to correct her wrongdoing. Also, write a sincere self-criticism. I mean flesh-and-bone sincere, blood-and-marrow sincere. Dig and dig into the real depths and open yourself to show you regret your lack of political alertness. Ask for punishment—now this is tricky—ask to be punished in a way that means really it was not your mistake except getting married to the wrong person—and then ask for an opportunity to make amends. You know what that means? Say you want to put your life in the hands of the party so you can demonstrate that your life is a worthy one.”

“What will happen to Kai?”

“What will happen to her is not our concern anymore,” Han's mother said. “Didn't you hear what your father said? Now is the time for you to act. If you miss this chance we'll all be dragged down by her foolishness.”

Could they at least reconsider their strategy? he begged his parents again; did they want their grandson to become a motherless orphan? Halfway into his argument Han began to cry.

Wordlessly, Han's mother brought him a towel. He buried his face in its wet warmth and wept. His parents watched him, patiently waiting for him to gather himself, and when he finally did, his mother reminded him to think about his parents’ careers and his own political future; her voice was unusually gentle and sympathetic, and Han could not help but think, for a brief moment, that he would have to give up his wife to earn tenderness from his own mother. There was Ming-Ming's future to take into consideration, she said, and asked him if he wanted his son to lose all privileges because of his mother's stupidity. Kai was not the only woman in the world, Han's mother said, and once this crisis passed, they would look for a better wife for him, more beautiful and obedient, kind as a stepmother. This talk went on for a while, and when Han cried again and said he could not let this happen to Kai, his father sighed and told his mother not to waste her words anymore. From a desk drawer he produced a draft of the divorce application they had written for him. Just sign the paper, his mother said to him, her voice still gentle and unfamiliar.

Han signed his name, his spirit crushed and his heart filled with a pain and sadness that he had not known could exist in life. His mother poured a cup of tea and left it by his side, and then retreated with his father to their bedroom to sleep before daybreak. Han sank into his parents’ sofa; a new television set, on its beautifully crafted stand, watched him like a dark, unblinking eye. Han had imagined years of happiness with three children, the youngest one a daughter as beautiful as Kai and spoiled by her big brothers. If he closed his eyes he could see them in ten years, a loving family sitting at the dinner table on a New Year's Eve, the steam from the fish and chicken and pork making their mouths wet with appetite; when the firecrackers began to pop outside their window, announcing the approach of midnight, he would walk his wife and children, all bundled up in brand-new down coats, to the city square, where his sons would launch their fireworks with boyish bravado and his daughter would scream with joy, her upturned face cupped in her mother's hands.

WHAT ON EARTH did she want? Han asked Kai later, in her mother's flat. His parents had forbidden him to see his wife, but he had threatened to withdraw his divorce application, and in the end, they had agreed that he could talk to her once. When Kai's mother had opened the door for him at dawn, he saw that she too had had a sleepless night, her eyes red and puffy.

“Please save her,” Kai's mother had said before she showed him to Kai's room. “Kai is a headstrong person. If something ever happens to her, you'll be the only one she can rely on.”

Han dared not meet the old woman's eyes.

“You have to help her,” she said. “Tell your parents that I will crawl to their door and beg for their mercy if that is what they want me to do.”

Han tried to comfort Kai's mother, but half a sentence later he choked on his own tears. The old woman handed him a handkerchief, and then turned away to wipe her eyes. They had been close ever since Han had come to her six years earlier, asking her to teach him to cook Kai's favorite dishes; together they had kept this secret from Han's parents.

Kai was in her sister's bedroom, where an extra bed had always been kept for Kai, even though she had already married Han when he arranged for the family to move into the new flat. When Kai and her mother had returned earlier that evening, they had found a note left by Lin, Kai's little sister. She was to spend a few days at her best friend's home, Lin wrote, and in the note she called Kai the last person she wanted to see now. Lin, at twenty-one, had just begun to enjoy being courted by the most suitable young men in town. Earlier in her life, she had taken up, from her mother, the shame of living in the alley, and made it a source of her own unhappiness. She was sixteen when Kai married Han, and at the time, Kai could see that the move made Lin blossom with confidence and joy.

Kai did not seem surprised when Han came in. She asked if he had seen Ming-Ming in his parents’ house.

“Ming-Ming is well,” Han said. He moved the only chair in the room next to where Kai was sitting, an arm's length between them. “He has grown a lot since I last saw him.”

“That's a child's job,” Kai said. “Growing. Isn't it?”

“He's a good baby,” Han said, and before he knew it, tears fell onto his lap and darkened his gray trousers.

When Han told her about the crackdown in Beijing, the news came more as a disappointment than a shock; Kai wondered if Jialin had heard similar reports on his transistor radio. She wished they were with each other tonight. She smiled when Han asked her what it was she had wanted that they didn't have. She had done what her conscience demanded, Kai said.

“What about Ming-Ming?” Han asked. “Has he ever been on your conscience?”

Not all women were meant to be good mothers, Kai said, and she apologized for the first time that day.

When Han sobbed, it was as though he were a small child again. He was, before anything else, his mother's son; despite her lack of feminine gentleness, his mother had always considered him the center of her life and had never failed to let him know that all she had achieved in her career had been done for him. Han had not known that a mother could discard her son so easily; such cruelty, beyond his understanding, crushed his universe. He thought of begging Kai, for the sake of his son and himself, but even before he opened his mouth he could see through his tears that, before she stood up and left, she was looking at him with pity and disgust. He cried, for his son and for himself, until his head dropped in exhaustion. In a half dream he remembered a spring day not long ago when he had become the first person in Muddy River to own a camera imported from Germany. He had been dating Kai for two months then, and he remembered looking through the viewfinder at her before he clicked the shutter.

A while later, Kai's mother entered with a look of panic and despair, and Han quickly wiped the corner of his mouth, his head aching dully. The police had just come and taken Kai away, she told Han. Please, could he help Kai, because he was the only one, now, who could save her.

RUMORS AND SPECULATION, born out of insufficient information and vivid imaginations, took hold in Muddy River on the morning after Ching Ming. People woke up to the seven o'clock news, read not by Kai but by a male colleague of hers. Two retired engineers, who took morning walks together, contemplated what could have happened. It might come down to a political earthquake now, they said to each other. Those who won the game would become kings, they said, citing the old saying, but neither ventured a guess about who would be the winners. The men had both escaped unscathed the various revolutions in their lifetimes. They had known each other for three years now, since meeting in the hospital morgue, two new widowers; in the twilight of their lives they found one another irreplaceable. They had discussed the situation on their daily walks in the past two weeks, each trusting the other as the only one with whom such sensitive matters could be voiced. Neither of them had any expectations, nor did they take a stand—at their age they considered the only role left for them to be theater spectators, and they took their seats and coolly watched from a distance. For every poor soul who was dragged down by this, the two wise men contemplated, there would be another one up for a promotion. A balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you'd have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.

Elsewhere, a woman commented to her husband at the breakfast table that the female announcer was in trouble. One could not tell merely from a changed schedule of her broadcast shifts, the husband argued, but the wife insisted that she herself had been the farsighted one; if not for her, he would have let himself be summoned by the woman's speech to the city square like a fool. The husband ate his dinner in silence, but this gesture was not enough to placate his wife, who, along with several of her close friends, despised the woman reading the news in her beautiful voice to their husbands, making them deaf to their wives’ domestic nagging. “I tell you,” she said now, her voice drowning out the announcer's report on the recordhigh revenue of the city of Muddy River for the first quarter. “I tell you, that woman is a nightmare for any man.”

In the emergency room of the city hospital, where no one was dying or being rushed in to die, a boy lay in the recovery room and his mother dozed by the bedside. The boy had taken part in a gang fight the night before and had his scalp cracked open by a brick. The doctor who had given him twenty-five stitches was off duty now, and her colleagues, two women who had both been at the rally the day before, stood by the window of the recovery room without talking. If it came to a crackdown, the one who had signed the petition thought to herself, she would divorce her husband so his promotion to head of hematology would not be affected; the other woman, more positive due to her optimistic nature in general as well as her decision not to sign the petition, believed that nothing serious would happen, because the law never punished the masses for going astray. No discussion occurred between the two colleagues, yet when they parted for their morning duties, one comforted the other with a pat on the shoulder, and all was understood.

Jialin leaned on his pillow. When his mother entered the shack with a late breakfast he did not move. She had forgotten the kettle of boiled water for the heater, but he did not ask. The night before, his three brothers had come home with blood on their hands and shirts. They had, in a gang fight, smashed a boy's head and, for the first time in their lives, understood the taste of fear. All night they couldn't sleep, taking turns looking out the gate for possible enemies coming with bats and bricks, or worse, policemen with handcuffs. Jialin's youngest brother, who had never talked much to him, came into the shack before daybreak, asking Jialin to take care of their parents if it reached a point where the three of them had to flee for a few years.

Jialin had thought the boy's dramatic behavior laughable but had not said so. Before the boy had entered, Jialin, with his transistor radio tuned to the Hong Kong station, had heard the news that in Beijing the secret police had started to carry out arrests.

“I heard people talk about yesterday's event in the marketplace,” Jialin's mother said, and put the food on the makeshift table made of an old tree stump.

“What did they say?”

“They said the government wouldn't let anyone get off so easily.”

Jialin did not move. “What else did they say?”

“They said the woman announcer is married to an important figure so there's no need for her to worry,” Jialin's mother said, and then glanced at him. “You were with them, weren't you?”

Jialin had always told his family that his friends came to read books with him, but he knew that his mother could easily have guessed the connection. “Other things? What else did people say?”

“They said she must be using the rally to become famous,” Jialin's mother said. “But I don't understand. She's already famous. Why did she need to become more famous?”

“Don't listen to rumors,” said Jialin. “People think they know more than they do.”

“So were you one of them?”

“Yes.”

Jialin's mother did not speak, and after a while, he looked at her and saw her quietly wiping her eyes.

“Mama, don't worry,” he said. “Nothing has happened, and people are just indulging their imaginations.”

“There must not be a heaven above us,” Jialin's mother said, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her blouse. “Or else, why were you given a brain only to get sick, while your brothers are healthy and strong but empty-headed?”

“They'll learn their lesson.”

“How about you? I can't afford to lose you,” Jialin's mother said, and tears dampened the front of her blouse.

Jialin smiled. It was no secret that he would die soon. What mattered to him was how he left this world. His mother wanted him to die in her arms; she wanted him to belong to her, and her only.

“Do you think there'll be trouble? People say different things and I don't know whom I should believe.”

“Listen to nothing and believe no one,” Jialin said.

“What will happen to you?”

Jialin shook his head. Perhaps it was only a matter of days, or hours, before someone would come into his shack and break his mother's heart, but he did not want to share this knowledge with her. “Think about it, Mama, I wasn't meant to live forever.”

Jialin's mother turned her head away.

“There's nothing to be sad about,” Jialin said. “Thirty years from now—no, let's hope it's not that long. Ten years, or five years, from now, they will come to your door and say to you that your son Jialin was a hero, a pioneer, a man of foresight and courage.”

“I would rather you were as unambitious as your brothers.”

“They'll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?”

“I would rather you had never touched a book in your life. I wish I had never stolen a book for you.”

“That's a stupid way of thinking, Mama,” Jialin said, shocked by his own vehemence. After a bout of coughing, he said in a gentle voice, “What else can I leave for you, Mama? I can't give you grandchildren.”

Jialin's mother left the shack without answering; on the way out she bumped into the door frame. He listened to her broken sobs disappear into the depths of the house and had to force his heart to remain hard, untouched by his mother's tears.

THE TEACHER'S HEART WAS restless on the Monday after Ching Ming. She gave the class an assignment of copying the textbook, and sat for a while at her desk, then went to the hallway to talk to another teacher. The children, still excited, could not keep quiet. Boys exchanged tales of ghosts and wild animals they had spotted on the mountain; girls showed off souvenirs offered by nature-bookmarks made by pressing new leaves and wildflowers between the pages of a book, feathers of bright colors, bracelets made from linked dry berries. Only when the classroom became boisterous did the teacher come in and bang on the wooden blackboard with a ruler. They were to copy every lesson in the textbook three times instead of one, the teacher announced, and they would not be allowed to go home for lunch before finishing the work.

The children, terrified by the prospect of being kept behind for the midday break, stopped wiggling on their benches and started to write, their pencils scratching on the paper like a thousand munching silkworms. Tong counted the few blank pages in his exercise book—he did not have enough pages for the assignment, but even if he had the space to copy all the words in the world, his heart was not in it today. Ear had not come home for another night, and Tong's hopes were dimming.

Dogs got stolen and eaten all the time, his father had said the night before, and there was no reason to cry over it; the world would become a crowded place if dogs, or, for that matter, little children, did not disappear. Tong's mother had held his hand while his father ran on with his drunken philosophy about stolen children and butchered dogs. However, when Tong's father fell into a stupor, she herself repeated the same message. Once the mating season started, she said, they could find him a new puppy; she suggested that he name the new puppy Ear, too, if that would make him feel better.

The idea of replacement puzzled and disappointed Tong, but it seemed natural for the grown-ups to think that way. Even Old Hua had said the same thing, as if there were endless duplicates or substitutes for anything, a jacket, a dog, or a boy.

Tong's eyes stung. It would be a shame to cry in class, and he sniffled and tried to hold back his tears. After a while, his chest hurt. He had cried the night before, quietly, for a long time, and then had felt embarrassed by his tears; he had wondered what the people back in his grandparents’ village would think of him if they knew he was softhearted. Perhaps losing Ear, like taming Kwen's black dog and uncovering nature's secrets from the weather forecast, was another test for him to prove himself, but even this thought could not relieve the weight on his chest.

At the break, Tong rushed to the hallway and squatted in a corner. It did not make him feel any better when the long-held-back tears fell onto the cement floor. When an upper-grade teacher discovered Tong and asked him what was wrong, he could not say a word, his body shaking with the effort not to wail. It must be some sort of stomachache, the teacher wondered aloud; she asked Tong if he could walk home all by himself, or if he needed a ride to the hospital. He nodded and then shook his head, confusing the teacher, so she decided to find the school janitor to send the boy to a clinic. It took her a while to locate the janitor, who was dozing behind a pile of firewood in the school basement. He seemed upset when he was shaken awake, and when he followed the teacher to the hallway, the sick boy had disappeared, leaving behind a small puddle of tears on the floor. The janitor grumbled and wiped the tears with the soles of his shoes, eliminating the only proof that the teacher had not told a lie to disturb his morning nap.

Tong wandered around town. There was no use combing through the streets and alleys yet again, as he understood his parents’ and Old Hua's conclusion that if Ear had not come home by now, he had very possibly landed on someone's dinner table. Still, walking under the clear morning sky, away from the classroom with its low ceiling and small, soot-covered windows, he felt a tiny hope rise again. He went from block to block, trying not to make eye contact with the grown-ups, who, like his teacher, seemed in no mood to catch him playing truant. Housewives and workers leaving the night shift talked in twos and threes in the street; a few shop-owners came from behind their high counters and stood in front of the doors, exchanging talk and looking at every passerby for possible business.

“Why are you not in school now?” yelled an old man as Tong entered an alley. The man was wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and a cotton-lined hat, even though spring was in full bloom. He propped himself up with one hand on a wooden cane, and the other hand, holding an envelope, was on a wooden fence for extra support. “I'm asking you. It's ten o'clock on Monday morning and what are you doing here in the alley?”

Tong inched back. If he started to run, he could easily leave the growling man behind, but growing up in the countryside, where old people were respected as kings, he did not have it in his nature to ignore questions put to him by an old man.

“Which school do you go to?”

“Red Star,” Tong replied, the truth slipping out before he could think of a lie.

“Then what is the reason for you to be in my alley and not in school?”

“I don't know,” replied Tong.

“Is that the answer you give to your teacher? Listen, I'm a schoolteacher. Two weeks ago I had boys like you in my class, and I know all your tricks. Now, one more time, what makes you think you can play truant today?”

“Our teacher said we had to copy the whole textbook before lunch,” Tong said in a low voice. “I don't have enough pages left in my exercise book.”

“What kind of teaching is that!” the old man grunted. “You may as well stay away from such a useless place.”

Tong wondered if he should leave the old man who claimed to be a schoolteacher but talked like a grumpy old illiterate. “You want to run away from me now?” the old man said. “You think I'm talking nonsense? Let me tell you: You could learn all the characters in the dictionary, and write the most spectacular articles in the world. You could be more learned than Confucius—do you know who Confucius was? Well, how could one expect you to learn anything from school these days? In any case, you could be as knowledgeable as a scholar, but still you could be more ignorant than an illiterate peasant or a beggar. Do you understand?”

Tong shook his head.

“What I'm saying is this”—the old man hit his cane on the ground—”you don't get real intelligence and wisdom from textbooks. As far as I can tell, you may as well run away from your stupid teacher who stuffs your brain with nothing but lard.”

Tong smiled in spite of himself.

“Now, if you want to be a good and useful human being, help me get this letter to the mailbox.”

Tong accepted the letter from the old man and was surprised by its weight. He glanced at the envelope, which bore several stamps. “No peeking!” the old man shouted, and then changed his mind and asked Tong to hand the letter back.

“I can help you, Grandpa. There's a mailbox there.”

“I know it perfectly well. Call me Teacher Gu. I'm no one's grandpa.”

Tong returned the letter to Teacher Gu, who patted it and then put it in his coat pocket. Tong held the old man's free arm with both hands. “I'll help you to walk,” he said.

“Thank you, but no, I can walk perfectly well,” Teacher Gu said, and he pushed Tong aside and let his cane lead him forward.

Tong followed Teacher Gu, for fear the old man's cane would catch in the gutter. Teacher Gu, however, stumbled forward without paying attention to Tong, as if all of a sudden the boy had ceased to exist for him. When they approached the mailbox, Teacher Gu studied the collection schedule, in small print, on the side. “What time does it say?” he said after a long moment of frowning.

Tong read to Teacher Gu, who looked at his watch. “Twenty past ten,” he mumbled aloud. “Let's wait then.”

Tong thought it strange that someone wanted to wait for the postman. Wasn't that the reason that a mailbox was installed in the first place, so that people could just drop their letters in and not have to wait?

“Why are you standing here?” Teacher Gu said after a while. “Were you sent by someone to spy on me?”

He thought he had been asked to wait, Tong explained, but Teacher Gu acted as if he had forgotten his own words. He checked the street and then tapped a finger on his watch for Tong to see. “Whoever is responsible for this mailbox is late,” he said. “Don't ever believe in what's written down.”

NEVER BEFORE had the midday break seemed so long. Teacher Gu drummed on the table with his fingers and waited for his wife to finish her lunch and go back to her bank teller's window. Near the end of the previous week, his school had sent a request for his early retirement, due to health reasons, and seeing that he was qualified for three-quarters of his pension, Teacher Gu had signed the paper without a moment's hesitation, or consultation with his wife. There were plenty of educated youths returning from the countryside; he might as well leave his position, no longer fulfilling to him anyway, to a young man for whom the dream of a family would make the long hours among noisy, pestering children endurable.

“You don't have to sit here and wait for me,” Mrs. Gu said. “Or do you need more rice?”

“I'm fine as I am.”

Mrs. Gu finished her lunch. When she cleaned up the table and washed the dishes, she poured a cup of tea and left it by his drumming hand. “Do you want to take a nap?” she asked.

“Don't you need to go to work now?”

“Yes.”

“Then go. I can take care of myself perfectly well.”

Mrs. Gu, to his disappointment, took a seat at the table. “Do you think we need to hire a girl from the mountain to help with the housework?”

“Are we rich people?”

“Or perhaps Nini? I've been thinking—you need a companion. You may need help too,” said Mrs. Gu. “Nini would be a good person in many ways.”

“I thought you hated her.”

Mrs. Gu looked away from his stare. “I know I've been unfair to her,” she said.

“She'd better learn to live with that then,” said Teacher Gu. “You won't be the last person to treat her unfairly.”

“But we could make it up to her,” said Mrs. Gu. “And her family too. I saw in the street that her mother was expecting again. They will need some extra money.”

Teacher Gu thought about how his wife had been brainwashed by her young comrades. Her desire to do good and right things disgusted him. “Don't we have enough spying eyes?” he said. “No, I would rather be left alone.”

“What if something happens to me?” Mrs. Gu looked at him and then shook her head. “I'll go to work now.”

“Yes. It's good not to ask questions we don't have to answer now,” Teacher Gu said to his wife's back, and when she closed the door behind her, he retrieved his fountain pen from the drawer and found the page in the notebook that contained another halfway-composed letter to his first wife. He reread it, but hard as he tried, he could not resume the thought that had been interrupted when his wife came home for lunch. He ripped the page off and put it in an envelope that already contained three similarly unfinished letters. Let her decide how she wanted to sort these out. On a new page he began writing:

Recently, I have been going over the Buddhist scriptures. No, they are not in front of my eyes—the scriptures my grandfather left me, as you may imagine, did not survive the revolutionary fire, started by none other than my own daughter. The scriptures I have been reading, however, are written in my mind. I am sure that this is of little interest to you with your Communist atheism, but do imagine with me, for one moment, the Buddha sitting under the holy tree and speaking once and again to his disciples. He who was said to be the wisest among the wise, he who was said to have vast and endless love for the world—who was he but an old man with blind hope, talking tirelessly to a world that would never understand him? We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.

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.