The Vagrants

SIX

Mrs. Gu did not reply when Teacher Gu told her that lunch was ready. He had found her sitting still in a chair when he returned from his visit to Old Kwen, and ever since then she had been a statue. He tried to make small noises with every little chore that he could invent for himself. When he ran out of things to do, he sat down and forced himself to take a short nap. He was awakened by people returning from the denunciation ceremony men talking and locking their bicycles, women calling their children for lunch. He got up and started noisily cutting, boiling, frying things to prepare lunch. He tried not to think about what had happened outside his home—the only way to live on, he had known for most of his adulthood, was to focus on the small patch of life in front of one's eyes.

Teacher Gu sat down at the table with a full bowl of rice and reminded his wife again to eat at least a little. She replied that she had no appetite.

“One has to be responsible for one's body,” Teacher Gu said. He had always insisted on the importance of eating regular and nutritious meals for a healthy body and mind. If there was one thing he prided himself on, it was that he never gave in to difficulties to the point where he ignored his duty to his body. Life was unpredictable, he had taught his wife and daughter, and eating and sleeping were among the few things one could rely on to outwit life and its capriciousness . Teacher Gu chewed and swallowed carefully. He might not have added enough water, and the grains of rice were dry and hard to eat. The fibers from the cabbage hurt his already loosened teeth, but he chewed on, trying to set a good example for his wife, as he had always done.

When he finished the meal, he walked over to her. She did not move and after a moment of hesitation, he put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and he withdrew his hand. It could have been worse, he said; they should look at the positive side.

“Worse than what?” she said.

He did not answer. After a while, he said, “The Huas cannot do it. I've asked a janitor from the electric plant to help.”

“Where will she be?” Mrs. Gu asked.

“He'll find a spot. I asked him not to mark it.”

Mrs. Gu stood up. “I need to go and find her,” she said.

“I thought we had agreed,” Teacher Gu said. Together they had made the decision, he suggesting and she consenting, that they would not bury her themselves. They were too old for the task, their hearts easily breakable.

She had changed her mind, Mrs. Gu said, and she looked for her coat; she could not let a stranger send off her daughter.

“It's too late,” Teacher Gu said. “It's over now.”

“I want to see her one last time.”

Teacher Gu did not speak. For the past ten years, he had visited Shan only twice, at the beginning of her sentence and right before the retrial. The first time he had gone with his wife, and they had both been hopeful despite the fact that Shan had been given a ten-year sentence. Shan was eighteen then, still a child. Ten years were not hard to go through, he said to his wife and daughter, just a small fraction of one's long life. Things could be worse, he told them.

Shan was sneering the entire time that he spoke. Afterward she said, “Baba, doesn't it make you tired to talk about things you yourself don't even believe in?”

“I believe in good patience,” replied Teacher Gu. It did not surprise him that his daughter behaved this way toward him. The arrest had come as a shock for Teacher Gu and his wife; they had thought of their daughter as a revolutionary youth. Only later did they learn that Shan had written a letter to her boyfriend and expressed doubts about Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution. Teacher Gu and his wife had not known she had a boyfriend. He would have warned Shan had he been told about the man; he would have said—once and again, even if she did not listen—that betrayals often came from the most intimate and beloved people in one's life. He would have demanded that she bring the boyfriend to meet them. But would they have been able to make a difference? The boyfriend turned the letter in to the city Revolution Committee. Shan got a ten-year sentence and her boyfriend was awarded the privilege of joining the army, even though his background—a family of capitalists and counterrevolutionaries—had not been good enough for him to enlist.

People were the most dangerous animals in the world, Teacher Gu thought of telling his daughter during that visit ten years ago; stay small and unimportant, like a grain of dust, he thought of advising her, but before he had the chance, his daughter refused to stay in the room and signaled for the guards to take her away.

Teacher Gu had not visited his daughter after that. His wife had gone but only once or twice a year. She had worried that too many visits would harm Shan's record and add more time to her term. They rarely talked about their daughter, each in secret hoping that ten years would somehow pass without any incidents. What came at the end of the term, however, was a notice saying that Shan would receive a retrial—she had been unrepentant in prison and had written, year after year, letters of appeal for herself, and personal journals that contained the most evil slanders of Communism.

At the weekly meeting at his school, the party secretary asked Teacher Gu to share his thoughts on his daughter's upcoming retrial. He had nothing to say, Teacher Gu answered, and all the party members shook their heads at him in disappointment. “Let me tell you what I think, since you have nothing to say,” said the party secretary. “Last time your daughter was sentenced for her slander of our Communist cause. She was young and educable then, and was given this chance to correct her wrong notion. But what happened? She didn't take the opportunity. She not only refused to reclaim her love and trust for our party and our Communist cause, she also argued against us from the most counterrevolutionary point of view. That,” the secretary said, his index and middle fingers pointing at Teacher Gu, “will never be tolerated.”

Teacher Gu did not tell his wife about the meeting. Such a meeting must have taken place in her work unit too, and a similar message conveyed. He heard her weeping sometimes at night. When he tried to comfort her, she acted cheerful and said that they should not worry too much. Shan was still a young woman, she said, and she had already spent ten years in prison; the judge would be lenient and the retrial would be only a form of warning.

Teacher Gu did not say anything to encourage his wife's blind confidence. A few days later he went to the prison for a visit. The guards were rude to him, but he had become used to people's abuse over the years and thought nothing in particular about their behavior. What shocked him was Shan's condition—she was not the defiant, lively girl he had known ten years earlier. Her prison uniform, gray and torn, smelled of filth; her short hair, filthy too, had thinned and there was a big bald patch in the middle of her scalp; her skin was so pale it was almost transparent, and her eyes were wide and dreamy. She recognized him immediately, but it seemed that what had happened ten years earlier was all gone from her memory. She started talking when she sat down. She told him that she had written letters to Chairman Mao and he had replied, apologizing for the wrong decision and promising a release. It had been two years since Chairman Mao had passed away, but Teacher Gu, sitting in a cold sweat, did not point that out to Shan. She talked fast, about all the things she planned to do after her release. In her mind, she had a fiancé waiting for her outside the prison walls, and the first thing they would do was go to city hall to apply for a marriage license. Teacher Gu did not protest when, at the end of the visiting period, two guards grabbed Shan's arms roughly and forced her out of the room. She was still talking, but he did not hear her. He stared at her uniform pants, stained with dark menstrual blood. Death was far from the worst that could happen to a human being. Something bigger than fear crept over him; he wished he could finish his daughter's life for her.

Teacher Gu did not know how long his daughter had been mad, nor did he know if his wife was aware of this fact. Perhaps she had been keeping it from him for years. In turn he lied about a note from the prison informing them that Shan's visiting rights had been stripped away because of disobedience. His wife sighed but did not question further, which made him wonder if she accepted the order willingly for his sake. The death sentence came to him as a relief; perhaps it was for his wife too, but he had no way of knowing. With the failure of the appeal, Mrs. Gu started to talk about seeing Shan one last time, but her request for a visit was turned down, no reason given.

Mrs. Gu put on her coat. Women were like children, Teacher Gu thought, the way they tenaciously held on to things that had little meaning. When he begged her to stay, she raised her voice and asked why he did not let her see their daughter.

“Seeing is not as good as staying blind,” Teacher Gu said, quoting an ancient poem.

“We've been blind all our lives,” said Mrs. Gu. “Why don't you want to open your eyes and see the facts?”

In her eyes he recognized the same defiance that he had once seen in Shan's eyes. “The dead have gone. Let's forget about all of it,” he said.

“How can you forget so easily?”

“It's a necessity,” he said. “A necessity is never easy but we must accept it.”

“You've always wanted us to accept everything without questioning,” his wife said. “Why do we have to live without backbones?”

Teacher Gu averted his eyes. He had no answer for his wife, and he wished she would let it go without prolonging this suffering for both of them. Before he could say something, he felt a sudden dead-ness in the left side of his body and he had to kneel down. He looked up at his wife for help but his eyes could no longer see. She rushed to support him but he was too heavy for her; she let him lie down slowly and he felt the coldness of the cement floor seeping through his clothes and numbing his whole body. “Don't go,” he begged, longing for a fire, for her warm and soft body. For a moment he was confused and thought he saw his first wife's face, still as young and beautiful as thirty years ago. “Don't leave me,” he said. “Don't make me lose you again.”

THE WOMAN'S BODY was lying facedown on the crystallized snow, her arms wrenched and bound behind her back in an intricate way. Her head, unlike what Bashi had imagined, was in one complete piece. He stopped a few steps away and looked at the bloodstains on her prisoner's uniform. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“Why, are you afraid now?” Kwen said, and bent down to study the body. “I didn't pay you to tag along.”

“Afraid? No, no. Just making sure she has no chance.” “No chance at all,” Kwen said, kicking one leg of the body and then the other. He squatted down next to the body and pointed to the woman's back. “Look here. They bound her arms this way so her left middle finger was pointing right at where her heart was.”

“Why the heart?”

“So that the executioner knew where to aim his gun.”

On the walk across the frozen river to the island, Bashi had conjured a vivid story about a blown-away head, a bloody brain blooming on the snow like spilled paint. He had imagined telling the tale to the townspeople who stood around him in awe. He went closer now and squatted beside Kwen. The bloodstain on her back was about the size of a bowl, and it amazed Bashi that such a little wound could finish a life. The woman's face was half-hidden in the snow, impossible for one to make out her features. Bashi touched her scalp; it was cold, but the hair, soft and thin, felt strangely alive.

“Let's get down to work,” Kwen said. He cut the bonds with a knife, but the woman's arms stayed where they were behind her back. Kwen shrugged. He took out a used towel from his coat pocket, wrapped it around the woman's head twice, and tied it with a knot on the back of her head.

“What's that for?” Bashi asked.

“So we don't have to see her eyes.”

“Why?”

“That's where her ghost looks out, to see anybody responsible for her death. Once the ghost sees you, she'll never let you go,” Kwen said. “Especially a young female ghost. It'll come and suck you dry.”

“Superstition,” Bashi said. “I would rather have someone to suck me dry.”

Kwen snorted a half laugh. “I've eaten more grains of salt than you've eaten rice. It's up to you whether you believe me, but don't cry for help when you need me.”

“What are you afraid of? We're only helping her,” Bashi said. He pointed to the middle part of the body. “What's that? Did she get another shot there?”

The two men came closer to examine the body's lower back, where the uniform had been soaked in blood that already was dry and dark brown. Unable to lift the clothes by layers, Kwen tore hard at the fabric and tried to separate the clothes from the body.

“Be careful,” Bashi said.

“Of what? She won't feel a thing now.”

Bashi did not reply. When Kwen ripped the clothes off the body, they both looked at the exposed middle part of the woman, the bloody and gaping flesh opening like a mouth with an eerie smile. Bashi felt warm liquid rise in his throat and threw up by a bush. He grabbed a handful of snow and wiped his face, its coldness refreshing, reassuring.

“Not pretty, huh?” Kwen muttered. He had already put the body into two burlap sacks, and was working to bind the two sacks together with ropes.

“What did they do to her?” Bashi said.

“They probably took something from her before they shot her.”

“Something?”

“Organs. Kidneys maybe. Or other parts maybe. Old stories.”

“What are they for?”

“Haven't you heard of transplants?” Kwen said.

“No.”

“I thought you had some education,” Kwen said. “Who knows who has her body parts now? Sometimes it's not even for a transplant, but the doctors need to practice so that their skills remain sharp.”

“How do you know?”

“If you live to my age, there's nothing you don't know,” Kwen said.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-six.”

“But I bet there's one thing you don't know,” Bashi said. With the body secured in the sacks, he felt safe and in good humor again.

“That is?”

Bashi walked closer and whispered to Kwen: “Women.”

“How do you know I don't know women?” Kwen said, looking at Bashi with half a grin.

“You're an old bachelor, aren't you?”

“There are so many ways to know women,” Kwen said. “Marrying one is the worst among them.”

“Why?”

“Because you only get to know one woman.”

“Do you know a lot of women?”

“In a way, yes.”

“What way?”

Kwen smiled. “I heard people in town talking about you as a fool. You are too curious to be a fool.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are a man with a brain, and you have to use it.”

Bashi was confused. Other than his grandmother, he had never been close to a female. “Can you show me the way?” he asked.

“I can show you where the door is, but you have to get in and find the way by yourself,” Kwen said, and lit a cigarette. “Let me tell you a story. I heard it from older people when I was your age. Once upon a time, there was a woman whose husband liked to sleep with other women. The wife, of course, was not happy. ‘What makes you leave me and seek other women's bodies?’ she asked. Her husband said, ‘Look at your face—you're not a pretty one.’ The wife looked at her face in the mirror and then came up with a plan. Every evening, she cooked vegetable dishes and made them as fancy-looking as possible: radishes carved into peonies, peas linked into necklaces and bracelets as if they were made of pearls, bamboo shoots cut into the shape of curvy women.”

Bashi swallowed loudly without realizing it.

“At the beginning, the husband was impressed. ‘You've become a wonderful cook,’ he said to his wife, but after dinner he still went out to sleep with other women. After days of eating the vegetable dishes, the husband asked, ‘Where are the pork chops and beef stew you cook so well? Why are you not cooking them for me now?’ The wife smiled and said, ‘But, my master, they don't look pretty at all.’ The husband laughed and said, ‘Now I understand you.’ And from then on he never went out with another woman again.”

Bashi stared at Kwen when he stopped talking.

“The story is over,” Kwen said.

“What happened?”

“I just told you a story, and the story is over.”

“What happened to the man? Why did he stop going to the other women?”

“Because his wife taught him a lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“Use your head. Think about it.”

“I'm bad at riddles. You have to tell me the whole story,” Bashi said.

“Why do I have to?” Kwen said with a smile.

“Oh please,” Bashi said. “Do you want another pack of cigarettes? A bottle of rice liquor?”

“If you promise me one thing, I will tell you.”

“I promise.”

“Don't you want to know what the promise is?”

“As long as you don't want me to kill a person.”

“Why would I want you to kill a person?” Kwen asked. “If I want to, I can handle it much better than you.”

Bashi shivered, as Kwen looked at him and laughed. “Don't worry,” Kwen said. “Why would I want to kill someone? So this is what's going on: Her parents gave me the money for a coffin and for the burial. But what I think is a coffin won't make a difference to anyone, her or her parents or you or me, so I'm going to spare the trouble.”

“It's understandable.”

“But you have to promise me not to tell anyone. I don't want people to know this.”

“Of course not.”

Kwen looked at Bashi. “If I hear anything, I'll wring your neck, do you understand?”

“Hey, don't frighten me. I don't do well with bad jokes.”

Kwen picked up a branch thick as a man's arm and broke it in half with his hands. “I'm not joking with you,” he said, looking at Bashi severely.

“I swear—if I tell Kwen's secret to anyone, I will not have a good death,” Bashi said. “Now can you tell me the lesson?”

Kwen looked at Bashi for a long moment and said, “The lesson is this: A pretty face is nothing; for a real man, what matters is the meat part, and in that part all women are the same.”

“Which part is that?”

Kwen shook his head. “I thought you were a smart boy.”

“Then tell me,” Bashi said, slightly agitated.

“I've told you enough. The rest you have to figure out for yourself,” Kwen said, and went back to work on the sacks. When he had secured them together, he grabbed one end of the body and tested the weight.

“If you don't explain, I won't help you with the body anymore,” Bashi said.

“That suits me fine.”

“I'll die if you don't tell me.”

“Nobody dies from curiosity,” Kwen said with a smile.

“I'll stop being your friend then.”

“I had no idea we were friends,” Kwen said. “Now, why don't you go your way? I'll go mine.”

Bashi sighed, not ready to leave Kwen. “I was only kidding,” Bashi said, and when Kwen grabbed one end of the body, Bashi took the other end, and together they heaved the body onto their shoulders. It was heavier than Bashi thought, and a few steps later, he was panting and had to put the body down. Kwen let go of his end and the body hit the ground with a heavy thump. “What a straw boy,” Kwen said. “What would you do with a woman even if you had one?”

Bashi breathed hard and bent down to hurl the body onto his shoulder. Before Kwen caught up with him, he started to walk fast, and then stumbled across a tree stump and fell down with the body pressing on top of him.

Kwen roared with laughter. Bashi pushed the body hard to get free. “I thought she looked very tiny,” he said, and he massaged his chest, hit hard by the corpse. “But she must have weighed tons.”

“Don't you know that once dead, the body weighs a hundred times more?”

“How come?” Bashi asked.

Kwen shrugged. “Death's trick, I suppose.”

THE BANQUET ROOM on the second floor of Three Joy was known to some as the place where the fates of many in Muddy River were determined , but for most people in town it was a room with double doors that were kept closed all the time; what was behind the heavy doors was beyond their meager salaries and imaginations. The ground floor, with ten wooden tables painted dark red and benches in matching color, was no more than a dingy diner. Food was ordered and paid for at a window where a moody female cashier would accept the cash and throw out the change along with a bamboo stick, which, oily to the touch, had an almost illegible number engraved on one side. Later the number would be called from an equally narrow window, where the platters were to be picked up by the customers right away, before they were chided for their tardiness. The dishes were greasy, heavily spiced, and overpriced, as was expected for restaurant food. Apart from salespeople on business trips whose meals would be reimbursed, around town only those who needed to put on an extravagant show—a wedding to impress the townspeople or a meal to dazzle some village relatives—would dine at Three Joy.

Kai arrived at the restaurant a little past twelve. The ground floor was empty but for two men with traveling cases set next to them on the floor. The men looked up at her from their cloud of cigarette smoke when she came in, one of them nodding as if he had recognized Kai. She stared at them, and only when the men exchanged a look between themselves did Kai realize that she had fixed her eyes on them for a moment too long. She turned toward the stairs and walked up to the banquet room. Would those men, when they arrived home, entertain their wives with the tale of an execution, Kai wondered; or, buried by other pointless memories accumulated on their trips, would the incident surface only when a cautionary tale was needed for a disobedient child? A death that happened to a stranger could be used for all sorts of purposes. Time and space would add and subtract until the death was turned into something else. A martyr's blood, Kai had once sung onstage, would nurture the azaleas blooming in the spring, their petals red as the color of the revolution; the lyrics and the music had filled her heart with a vast passion that made the earthly world she occupied seem small and temporary, but what could a fourteen-year-old have seen in death but an illusory exterior of grand beauty? Kai had envisioned a different scene at the ceremony her last encounter with Shan: A speech from Kai would only be a prelude to what Shan would have to say; together their words would awaken the audience and change the course of the day. But what was left of Shan after the murder of her spirit and before the execution of her body—soiled prison uniform and severed vocal cords, half-opened mouth and empty eyes, and a weightless body in a policeman's grip—had filled Kai with a sickness. The drafted speech, with its empty words, had been killed easily by the slogans that had overtaken the stadium.

A young man wearing the armband of a security guard pushed the double doors open for Kai when she approached the banquet room. The air, warm with the smells of fried food, hard liquor, and cigarette smoke, rushed at Kai's face. The mayor's wife and another official's wife greeted Kai and congratulated her on her excellent performance at the denunciation ceremony, and Kai had to demur, as modesty was expected under these circumstances, speaking of her inability to complete her task as well as she had hoped for. The conversation soon drifted to different topics. The mayor's wife, whose daughter-in-law was going into labor any day now, asked Kai about the injection she had gotten after the labor to stop her milk from coming. Han's parents, like all people of their social status, believed that breast-feeding was a backward way to raise a baby; Kai, unaware of the arrangement, had received the injection that later made her weep into Ming-Ming's bundle. No, Kai replied now, she found nothing uncomfortable in the treatment.

“Young women in your generation are so privileged,” said a middle-aged woman, joining the conversation. “We had never heard of dried-milk powder in our time.”

“Nor fresh cow milk,” Han's mother said. “I tell you—that suckling pig Han was enough to make me decide not to have another child after him.”

The women laughed, and one of them congratulated Kai on her good fortune of marrying the only son of Han's parents before another woman would have a chance. Kai listened with a trained smile, nodding and replying when it was expected. At the other end of the room, Han smiled at her before turning to crane his neck in a reverent manner at the mayor, who was speaking and gesturing to a small group of men next to him. The mayor's wife continued the discussion on childbirth, and Han's mother prompted Kai to visit the mayor's daughter-in-law. “Not that Kai has any better knowledge about childbirth than you and I, but she is of Susu's age, so they may have more to say to each other,” Han's mother said. She looked at Kai for a moment and then turned to the mayor's wife. “Besides, these young women are probably eager to be spared our old women's wisdom for a moment.”

Gu Shan could have easily been a daughter-in-law of these women, Kai thought, and tried her best to stay with the conversation. Perhaps some strangers’ painless decision had contributed as much to Kai's misplacement in life as had her own decision to marry into Han's family. If the judges had chosen Gu Shan instead of Kai as the winner in the singing and dancing contest in second grade, Shan might have been the one sent to the theater school in the provincial capital. It would have been different then, Shan growing into the leading actress's role while Kai herself remained an ordinary girl in Muddy River. Would she have met Jialin earlier then, before his illness even? The thought made Kai dizzy, and she tried to maintain a calm voice as she told the mayor's wife about the dish, three-cup chicken, that Han's mother had taught her to make. It was Han's favorite, his mother said to the mayor's wife, and Kai added that when she made it herself, it was far less successful, her comment winning approving smiles from the older women in the circle.

Before that day, Kai had not seen Gu Shan for years. They had been classmates in the first grade, but Kai could not recall how Shan looked at that age; rather, she remembered Shan's parents from around the time—Teacher Gu, who had been their teacher that year, and Mrs. Gu, whom Kai had seen only once at a school festival, when Mrs. Gu stood out among the many mothers. Kai remembered, even as a first grader, that she felt jealous of Shan not only because her father was their teacher but also because her mother was beautiful-she had worn a silk blouse on the day of the school festival, under her plain gray Mao jacket, the pomegranate red fabric escaping at the cuffs and the neckline. A plastic barrette, in a matching color, adorned her smooth black hair, grown a few centimeters longer than the allowed style for a married woman. It was Mrs. Gu's posture that Kai had tried to mimic when, at fourteen, she had played a young mother who had given up her newborn baby to save the child of a top Communist Party official; straight-backed, she had clutched the plastic doll to her breast while another doll, wrapped up in a blue print cloth, was thrown into the river onstage. The ballad that followed the drowning was Kai's favorite song from her acting career, a mother's lullaby to a child who would never wake up to all the sunrises of the world.

The last time Kai and Shan had seen each other was in the autumn of 1966. Shan was the leader of a local faction of Red Guards, and when Kai returned from the provincial capital to Muddy River with her touring Red Guard troupe, the two groups faced each other in a singing and dancing duel in the city square. The competition to become the most loyal followers of Chairman Mao, and the animosity stemming from that rivalry, seemed pointless now; but Kai remembered that autumn as the beginning of her adult life, and sometimes she imagined that Shan would share with her the same recollections, of the September sun shining into their eyes on the makeshift stage, the workers from a road crew hitting the ground with their shovels to accompany the beats of their singing, the old people and small children gathering to watch them with great interest, and a lanky boy, who looked not much older than Kai or Shan, standing apart from the crowd with half a smile, as if he alone remained unimpressed by the performances of both groups.

The boy, with a grandfather and two uncles serving in the Nationalist army and fighting against Communism in the civil war, was an outcast from all the Red Guards’ factions in town. Two years after that, news came from Muddy River that Shan was imprisoned as an anti-Cultural Revolution criminal. The lanky young man, Shan's boyfriend then, had turned her letters in to the government in exchange for the opportunity to enlist. Had she remained in Muddy River, Kai thought now, would she have fallen for that deceitful smile? The mayor called for the guests to sit down now at the two tables, where bowls of soup and platters of food were waiting, steaming hot. A show of humbleness and reverence began, as people gently pushed each other around the table, declining the most privileged seats close to the mayor and his wife; only once the act was fully played out did the mayor announce that he would take the liberty of assigning seats for the sake of everyone's grumbling stomach. The guests sat down and began to enjoy the midday banquet.

NINI DID NOT GO HOME after visiting the marketplace in the afternoon. Instead, she limped across the town, her basket, half-filled with withered vegetable leaves, on her shoulder, until she reached the riverbank. The sun had left the heaviest clouds behind and was now midway in the western sky, a pale and cold disk. She had not spotted Bashi on the way back from the stadium, nor in the marketplace, where she remembered sometimes seeing him. She wondered if he was still waiting for her by the willow tree—Bashi seemed to be the kind of person who would stand there and wait—and she decided to go and look for him. Her sisters would certainly wake up from their naps by the time she made it back home, but she had padlocked the door from the outside. The only window was double-sealed. They could cry as much as they wanted; she did not mind as long as she didn't hear them.

Walking upstream along the river, Nini thought about her future. Her mother referred to all her daughters as debt collectors. She couldn't wait to marry every one of them off, she often said. They'd better learn to behave so that when they went off to their husbands’ houses, their mothers-in-law wouldn't whip the rascal souls out of their bodies. Her mother made it clear that if the girls offended their in-laws, they'd better brace themselves for their punishment and never expect their parents to help them. But these warnings were never meant for Nini. It was accepted that Nini, the meanest debt collector of the six girls, would remain a burden for her parents; no one would ever come to Nini with a marriage offer. If only they could have a son, and a daughter-in-law to see them off to the next world, Nini's mother said, and Nini understood that her mother was more interested in having one daughter-in-law than six daughters. Without a son, Nini, the unmarriageable daughter, would have to tend to her parents for as long as they lived.

Until that very morning, Nini had wished to become the Gus’ daughter. She had loved Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu, their voices gentle when they said her name, their quiet household abundant with hot meals. The wish had become a dream that sometimes lasted for hours or days, in which Nini pictured herself living with the Gus. Misunderstandings would occur between her and her new parents— a smashed china bowl that had slipped from her bad hand, a misplaced wallet Teacher Gu could not find, or an overcooked dinner that Nini had forgotten to tend to. But they would never speak a harsh word or cast a look of suspicion at her; they knew she was innocent, they knew she always tried her best, but the mere thought of disappointing Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu drove Nini to tears. She would pinch herself or bite herself on the useless part of her body when they were not looking at her, but sooner or later they would discover the marks and bruises on her body, and this would hurt their hearts more than it had hurt her body. Mrs. Gu would beg Nini not to do it again. Teacher Gu would sigh and rub his hands in helplessness. Nini would push them away and pinch and bite herself harder because she was not worthy of their love. Didn't they know that she was so ugly she would rather die, she would scream at them; then she would hurt herself more, because she deserved such punishment for screaming at the two dearest people in her life.

The moment would come when, in gentle yet firm words, Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu would forbid her to hurt herself again. She was not ugly at all, they would tell her, embracing her when she did not resist. They loved her, they would say, and in their eyes she was as precious as a jewel. She would not believe their words, but they would tell her again and again, until she softened and cried. Nini had learned to make her stories longer each time until she could not stand the wait for the final moment when her loneliness and hunger were soothed by the two people who cherished her as dearly as their own lives. When the moment came—it could arrive anytime, on the way to the marketplace or the train station, or when she was patting the baby to sleep or cooking supper—Nini held her breath until she was on the edge of suffocation. Her heart would pump hard afterward, and her limbs would remain weak with a pleasant numbness.

Then, inevitably, a guard in a red armband shouting into her face, a slap on her shoulder from her mother, or a curse from one of her sisters awoke Nini from her dream. It was then that Nini would dream other dreams, conjuring other worlds that would make her the Gus’ daughter. Sometimes her parents had died, and she was on the verge of being sent to an orphanage with her sisters, when Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu ran to her rescue. Other times Nini's parents kicked her out of the house, and the Gus, hearing a knock at their door, would come and pull her from the dark and cold street into their warm house; they had been waiting for the moment as long as she had, they told her, saying that all would be well. In one dream Nini's mother beat her to unconsciousness and she woke up to find herself in Mrs. Gu's arms, the woman's eyes full of thankful tears because Nini had not died.

What would she live for, now that she knew Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu had never been the gentle parents she dreamed about? In her dreams they would never turn their backs on her.

“Now, now. Why are you so sad? Are you missing me already?”

Nini looked up and saw Bashi, spinning a sheepskin hat in his hand like a magician, his forehead shining with sweat. She took a deep breath and looked around. She was halfway to the birch woods; the snow was dirty on the frozen river. She licked the inside of her mouth and tasted blood from having bitten herself so hard. “Why are you here?” she asked, sniffling.

“I've been waiting for you, remember? Since this morning.” Bashi made an exaggerated gesture of pointing twice to his wrist, though he did not wear a watch. “But you didn't come.”

“My mother sent me to the denunciation ceremony.”

“Did you see the woman?”

“No.”

“Of course not, because you don't belong to any work unit,” Bashi said. He walked closer and put his hat on Nini's head. It was too big for her. He adjusted the hat but it still sat low on her eyebrows. “You look like a girl soldier in a movie,” said Bashi.

“Which movie?”

“I don't know. Every movie has a girl soldier. The Guerillas, The Tale of a Red Heart, The Pioneers. Have you seen them?”

Nini shook her head.

Bashi clicked his tongue and made a sound of being surprised. “One of these days I'll take you to a movie.”

Nini had never been to a movie theater. Once in a while, her parents would go to see a film with their work units; her two sisters went with their school too. In the summer, a white screen would be set up in an open field by the Muddy River, and every other week a film would be shown, but Nini was always the one left with the baby at home. They would stay in the yard as long as they could, listening to the faint music coming from the river, until swarms of mosquitoes came and buzzed around them.

Bashi watched Nini closely. “Why, you don't want to see a movie with me?”

“But you'll still give me the coal even if you take me to a movie?” Nini asked.

“Coal? Yes, anytime,” Bashi said, and circled an arm around Nini's shoulder. Taken aback, she struggled slightly, and Bashi let her go with a chortle. “Why don't we find a log and sit down,” Bashi said, directing Nini upstream. She tried to catch up with his long stride; when Bashi realized this, he slowed down.

“Do you know who I saw today?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to know?”

Nini hesitated and said yes.

“I saw the counterrevolutionary.”

Nini stopped. “Where is she?”

“Dead now.”

“Did you see her alive?”

“I wish I had. No, she was dead already,” Bashi said, and twisted Nini's left arm gently behind her back. “They bound her arms this way, so her middle finger was pointing at her heart. And bang,” he said, pushing his index finger into Nini's back.

Nini shuddered. She withdrew her arm, and hid her bad hand in her sleeve. “Where is she now?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I want to see her.”

“Everybody wants to see her. But believe me, there's nothing to see. She is as dead as a log. Heavier than a log, in fact. Do you know how I got to know this?”

“No.”

“Because I just helped this man move her body off the island. Oh, she's heavy, believe me.”

“Is she with the man?”

“He's digging a grave for her.”

“Where are they?”

“On the other side of the woods. It's quite a task to dig a hole now. They shouldn't really execute someone in this cold season. Summer would be much easier for everyone. I told the man not to waste his time. Old Hua and his wife would never dig a hole in the winter. But the man said he would take care of it and told me to go home first. Of course I didn't want to stay with the poor man and watch him work. Maybe we could go there tomorrow morning and see if he's got a hole the size of a bowl by then.”

“Can we go there now?”

“Why?”

“I want to see her.”

“But there's nothing to see. She's in a couple of sacks now.”

Nini looked upstream. The fire in their stove would be dead by the time she returned home. It would take her another fifteen minutes to start the fire, and dinner would be late. Her mother would knock her on the head with her hard knuckles. Bashi might change his mind and never give her the coal again. Still, she pushed away Bashi's hand and started to walk toward the woods.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I want to see the body.”

“Don't leave me here. I'm going with you,” Bashi said, putting his hand back on Nini's shoulder. “The man who's burying her, you know, he is not easy to talk to, but he's a friend of mine. Ask him anything and he'll do it for you.”

“Why?” Nini asked.

“Silly, because you're my friend, no?”

THE WIND PICKED UP after sunset, and Bashi realized that he had left his hat on Nini's head. He chuckled when he thought about her serious little face. She rarely smiled, but her eyes, even the bad one with a droop, would become larger with attention when he was talking to her. He didn't know how much she understood of the rules between boys and girls, or how much she had heard about his reputation, but she had not said anything when he put a hand on her shoulder.

Before they parted, Bashi had asked Nini to come out again the next day, and she had neither agreed nor refused. The old bastard Kwen must have frightened her out of her poor soul, Bashi thought. He picked up a rock from the ground. It was suppertime now, the street deserted except for the leftover announcements, swept up and swirling about in the wind. Bashi looked around, and when he saw nobody in sight, he aimed the rock at the nearest streetlamp. It took him three tries to break the bulb.

Kwen had not behaved like a friend at all when Bashi and Nini had found him. It had taken them a while, and only when he saw a trail left by the body on the dead leaves did Bashi realize that Kwen had moved it farther, into another patch of woods. Kwen was half rolling, half carrying a big boulder toward the body, which was already partly covered by stones of different sizes. It was unrealistic of the parents to expect him to bury her underground in this weather, Kwen said when they approached him.

“As if I hadn't told you,” Bashi observed.

“Could you shut up just for once?” Kwen said.

That was not a way to speak to a friend, especially in front of his new companion, but Bashi tried not to protest. “If you're worried about wild dogs, you could cover the body with some heavy branches. Old Hua does that,” Bashi said. “You don't need to move all those stones.”

“I thought you were a smart man, and knew not to interfere with other people's business.”

“Just a friendly suggestion,” said Bashi.

Kwen looked at Bashi sharply. “I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me alone.”

“Don't worry. Your secret sits well with me,” said Bashi, running his finger along his mouth and making a zipping sound. He walked closer to Kwen. “But my friend there, she wants to have a look at the body.”

“Why?”

“Who doesn't want to see?”

Kwen shook his head and said it was not possible.

“Come on,” Bashi said, patting Kwen on the shoulder as he had seen men do to each other. “The girl only wants a quick look. It won't hurt anyone. I'll move the stones and I'll put them back. You can stand here and supervise us. It won't take more than a minute.”

Kwen brushed Bashi's hand away. Bashi made a face at Nini, hoping she would understand that brusqueness was normal between men. Wouldn't he want to help a friend to impress his girl? Bashi said in a low voice; she's just a girl to whom nobody paid any attention, and why not make her happy for a day Bashi whispered. Kwen shook his head, and when Bashi pressed again and insisted that he himself would open the sack for the girl, Kwen looked at Bashi with cold eyes. “You'd better leave before my patience runs out.”

“What's the matter with you?” Bashi said. “It's only a counter revolutionary's body, not your mother's.”

With a curse Kwen told Bashi to shut up. Bashi was shocked. He had thought that Kwen was fond of him; only an hour earlier Kwen had been the storyteller. Nini stared at them, and it hurt Bashi to see her unblinking eyes stay on his own face, hot and probably red as a beet now. “Fuck you,“ Bashi said to Kwen. “Fuck your sisters and your mother and your aunts and grandmas and all your dead female ancestors in their tombs.”

Before Bashi had time to react, Kwen held a long knife to his throat, the sharp blade pressed into his skin. In a cold voice Kwen told Bashi to get down on his knees.

For the next five minutes, Bashi did everything Kwen ordered him to do. He called himself all sorts of names, slapping his own face and begging for forgiveness. Kwen looked down at him with a smile. “You're a useless man, Bashi, do you know that?”

“Yes, of course,” Bashi said. It was then that Bashi noticed the suspicious stain on Kwen's crotch, near his fly, light gray on the dark corduroy overalls. Bashi moved closer, as if he wanted to let his head touch Kwen's feet, and stole another glance. Kwen could have given Bashi a thousand other explanations for the stain, but Bashi would never believe him.

It was dark when Bashi and Nini got back to town. She looked nervous, and did not reply when he suggested a meeting the next day. She was late, she said, and quickened her pace with a desperate effort; her parents might not be happy, he thought, but he decided not to ask her about the punishment she was to receive. He had enough to worry about, and would prefer not to take on her misery.

A block away, Bashi broke another bulb. He kicked the half bulb into the ditch. “You corpse rapist!” Heaven knows what else such a man could do, Bashi thought; the townspeople needed someone to watch out for them. He decided to go back and find out why Kwen had been so stubbornly guarding the body from them, but before that, he had to know Kwen's whereabouts. Think as a good detective, Bashi urged himself. He moved quietly toward Kwen's shack, and approached it facing the wind so the dog would not catch his scent. About sixty feet away, he hurled a rock in the direction of the shack. The black dog started to bark and jump at the invisible enemy. Bashi turned into a side alley quickly and heard Kwen shouting from inside the shack. After a few minutes, Kwen came out of the shack and headed to the electric plant for his night shift. All safe for him to explore, Bashi thought. Who would have imagined that he, Bashi, the man whom everybody called an idiot, would be the one to work for the town's safety on this dark night? He rubbed his ears roughly with his hands; he wished he had not forgotten to retrieve his hat from Nini.

Stumbling in the darkness, Bashi had a hard time finding the spot. He made a mental note to buy some appropriate tools the next day, a good knife, a long and slim flashlight that he had seen a safety guard carry, a compact notebook and a pen of matching color, a pair of gloves, a magnifying glass, and some other things he imagined a detective needed. It was too late to make the purchase now, but at least the moonlight on the snow and a few weak stars made the search less difficult. Bashi fumbled in his pocket and found half a matchbook. He lit a match to make sure he was in the right place, and then started to work in the near darkness. The boulders were heavy, and he had to take a break from time to time. At least he had to give that bastard Kwen credit for being a strong man despite his age.

Bashi cleaned off all the boulders and then tried to untie the strings holding the sacks, but his fingers, too tired, could not finish the task. He bent down and broke the strings between his teeth. When he peeled the burlap sack away, his hand touched something hard and cold, not the ripped prisoner's uniform he had seen earlier but the woman's frozen body. Bashi gave a little startled cry, and then laughed at himself. “You'd better get used to this from now on,” he said in a hushed voice to himself.

The body, entirely uncovered now, looked eerie in the dim light. Kwen's old towel was still around the woman's head, and Bashi thought he'd better leave it there. “Sorry, miss, I don't mean to disturb you twice,” he said. “I'm just doing my job. For your good too.”

He lit another match and bent down to check the body, and it took him a long moment to register what he saw. His hand shook hard and the match dropped onto the snow, hissing for a moment before going out. Bashi sat down and panted, his legs too weak to support the weight of his knowledge. After a while, he lit another match and checked again. He was not mistaken: The woman's breasts were cut off, and her upper body, with the initial wound from the transplant operation and the massive cuts Kwen had made, was a mess of exposed flesh, dark red and gray and white. The same mess extended down to between her legs.

The match burned Bashi's finger and he flipped it away. He half squatted beside the body for a moment and started to gag. It had been a long day and he had nothing left to throw up. Still, he coughed and retched until his face was smeared with tears and bile dribbled down his chin. After a while, he calmed down and grabbed some snow to clean up his face. He wrapped the body up in the burlap sacks and tried to put back the boulders, but his arms and legs were shaking too hard. He spread dead tree branches and dry grass on top of the body, and when he felt sure the body was concealed well enough, he sat down and panted again, then cried.

The walk back home was exhausting. A few blocks away from his house, Bashi saw the dog, Ear, run by. He shouted at it and tried to muster his last energy to kick it. The dog yelped and ran away, dropping something by the roadside.

Bashi picked it up. It was a woman's shoe, the sole worn through with a hole. Bashi aimed it at a garbage can, but missed. “The world is becoming a hell of a place,” he said to no one in particular.

THE WIND HOWLED all evening, shaking windows, seizing loose tiles from roofs and hurling them across the empty yards and alleys. Kwen's black dog, tied to his post, whined and shivered, but his suffering meant little to the world, let alone to his master, who dozed off in the small cubelike janitor's shack, an empty flask on the floor next to his feet.

Elsewhere Mrs. Hua sipped from a chipped cup the rice liquor that her husband had poured for her earlier to numb the throbbing pain in her palm, and listened to the whistling of the wind through the woods. Old Hua and Mrs. Hua had sorted bottles and paper all afternoon and evening, and it was at the very end, when she was lost in her reverie, that she punched her palm with half of a broken bottle. There was not much bleeding, her aged body having little to offer now. Her husband washed it with saltwater and then poured a cup of rice liquor for her. They did not touch alcohol often, but a bottle had always been around, kept with the iodine and the rags they cleaned and boiled; it was the best medicine they could get, and once when Old Hua had had to remove gangrene from his leg by himself, he had downed half a bottle and later poured the other half onto the cut.

How was her hand? Old Hua asked, sitting down in his chair. Unless it was necessary they did not light the kerosene lamp, and she replied in the darkness that there was little to worry about. He nodded and did not talk for a while, and she felt the hard liquor slowly warming her body. Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said, the name of their first daughter; did he want to talk about Morning Glory? The baby had been found on a summer dawn when morning glories, pink and blue and white and purple, had taken over the wilderness outside the mountain village where the Huas had passed through as beggars. The dew had soaked the rags that were bundling the little creature, her bluish gray face cold to the touch. For a moment Mrs. Hua thought it was another baby who had died before having ever enjoyed a day of her life, but her husband was the one to notice the small lips sucking.

Old Hua lit the tobacco pipe now and inhaled. The amber-colored tip flickered, the only light in the room. What's there to talk about? he asked, more out of resignation than rebuttal. Earlier that afternoon she had told Old Hua, while they were sorting, that it was time they began to tell themselves the stories of the seven daughters, before old age wiped out their memories. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua could read or write, and already Mrs. Hua had been frustrated when one girl's face was overlapped by another's in her dreams.

They could start with Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said now, but she was momentarily confused. Where would they begin? When they had picked the bundle up from the grass, or when she had been sneaked out of the village before daybreak by her helpless mother? Mrs. Hua and her husband had looked for anything left by the parents—a name, a birthday, or a message they could later find people to read for them—but the rags that swaddled the baby, ripped from old sheets and worn-out undershirts, had said enough about the reason she had been discarded.

She was the prettiest, Old Hua said. He was as biased as a father could be, Mrs. Hua thought, but did not point it out to him. Morning Glory had been seventeen when Mr. and Mrs. Hua were forced to give up the girls. Seventeen was old enough for a girl to become a wife; still, when they found a family who was willing to take Morning Glory in as a child bride for one of their grown-up sons, they made the family swear to wait until Morning Glory turned eighteen before they would let the husband touch her. Mrs. Hua wondered aloud how well the other parents had kept their promises; they had had daughters themselves, she said, and as parents of girls they must have understood.

Old Hua nodded. He could have said that it made no difference now, and she was glad that he only smoked silently and listened.

“She liked to drink vinegar,” Mrs. Hua said.

Old Hua shook his head as if he did not trust her memory, but she knew she was not wrong about that. Once, when a younger girl had tipped over the vinegar bottle, Morning Glory had cried; she was seven or eight then, old enough not to shed tears over this, and Mrs. Hua remembered later catching the girl munching on clover stems for the tart juice and thinking that it must be one of those things that only her birth parents would have understood. Mrs. Hua wondered if Morning Glory would crave something odd in her pregnancies. Mrs. Hua had never been able to bear a baby herself, and she was always curious about the stories she heard of a pregnant woman's wants.

“How old is Morning Glory?” Mrs. Hua asked suddenly.

Old Hua thought for a moment and replied that she must be forty-one or forty-two now.

Mrs. Hua counted the years, but the liquor made it hard to keep the numbers straight. Middle-aged, she thought, with a litter of children of her own by now. Mrs. Hua wondered what Morning Glory would be like as a mother. She had been gentle with stray cats and wounded birds, and Mrs. Hua remembered her husband had once said that of the seven girls Morning Glory was the one to have the most of a Buddha's heart; a hard thing for a girl to live with, Mrs. Hua remembered herself replying then, but perhaps a full house of children to feed and many in-laws to please had long ago hardened that heart into a rock.

Night fell, and Mrs. Hua poured a cup of liquor for her husband and another cup for herself. The liquor was the best medicine, if only they could afford it, Old Hua said. But it did little to heal the wound left when their daughters were taken away, Mrs. Hua thought, and before she knew it, she felt her face wet with tears. Was she all right? Old Hua asked when he heard her sniffling, and she replied that it was the trick of the liquor and the wind howling outside.

Disturbed too were other souls. A female prison guard, off duty for the next two days, claiming she had a minor cold, woke up from a fitful dream and gasped for air; her husband, half-asleep, asked her if she felt unwell. A ridiculous nightmare, she answered, knowing enough not to tell him that she had fainted at work earlier that morning, when the warden had ordered that Gu Shan's vocal cords be severed so that she could not shout counterrevolutionary slogans at the last minute. The woman had been among the four guards assigned to pin the prisoner down for the procedure, but it had not gone as smoothly as promised by the warden and the doctor; the prisoner had struggled with a vehemence that one would not have imagined could come from her skinny body, and the female guard, whose nerve was usually up to her work, had fallen backward and bumped her head hard on the floor before the doctor finally finished the operation.

Unable to sleep, in another house, was an old orderly for the police station. I tell you, he said to his wife, who answered that she did not want to be reminded for another time about the bucket of blood he had washed off the police jeep that had transferred the prisoner. But it was unusual, he said; I tell you, it was a horrible thing, to clean up so much blood. What did they do to her? Why couldn't they wait until they got her onto the island to finish her off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realized that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.

She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time—so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite high school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters—they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.

In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs. Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize.