The Season of the Stranger (11 page)

“No,” Girard said, hunching toward him. He flattened his hands on the table. “If you want to divide men into idealists and realists I will tell you this: A man must be an idealist who believes in the myriad myths which restrict us: myths of difference in kind, and myths of false difference in degree. Only a man of imagination, a man capable of dreams, could believe in those myths. Men are idealists and impractical when they believe in what can be proved false; they are honest and real when they recognize nature and do not attempt to disguise it.”

“Possibly,” the old man said. “We are in a kind of metaphysics now that I do not enjoy.” He turned in his chair and called the proprietor. “More tea,” he said. “Hot. And two or three bowls of peanuts.”

“You eat many peanuts,” Girard said. “Do they help your stomach?”

“Yes. My ailment is of that kind.” They sat without speaking until the tea and peanuts were on the table. When the proprietor left the old man started again.

“Have you considered children? I understand that there is the possibility of bringing out the worst traits in each race.”

Girard set his teacup on the table and breathed deeply, sitting back against the wall. He offered the old man a cigarette and when he refused lit one for himself. “Listen,” he said, “and listen well. Up to this point no one has mentioned either marriage or children. You have imagined something. It does not exist outside of your imagination, and now you are trying to make it exist in order to avenge yourself upon it. There is no reason,” he said slowly and emphatically, “to be speaking of marriage.”

“Ah,” the old man said. He laughed. “We have proved my point. The difference between the minds.” He tapped the table. His finger was bony and the fingernail was almost an inch long. The fingernail of the small finger was almost two inches long. “To me there is reason to speak of marriage. To me there is reason to speak of the entire relationship.”

“Why to you?”

“Because to me and to most of my friends the attention you have given my daughter amounts to a courtship.”

“Foolish,” Girard said. “Foolish. Your old customs.”

The old man put both hands on the table. “Not foolish. Not to the Chinese.”

“Then the students and the artists and the writers are the foolish ones, is that it? Or perhaps they are not Chinese?”

“Both,” the old man said. “Not Chinese, and foolish therefor.”

“Then why did you send your daughter to them?”

He snapped his teeth together and looked away from Girard. “I thought she would study the classics,” he said. “I thought she would help me.”

“Help you with what? To restore the human nature of three thousand years ago? Except for a hard immutable core human nature changes every day. Look around you. It is changing faster in our time. You want the impossible.”

“It may be impossible. But I have nothing else to fight for. And you must know that ten years ago, not three thousand but ten, to see a woman three times was to announce intentions.” His lower lip shook. “I cannot tolerate promiscuity,” he said. “Remember. I cannot tolerate it.”

Girard watched his yellowed dull eyes. The old man picked up his teacup. Girard said, “Then you wish to force me to marry her?”

The old man replaced the teacup and sighed, puffing the breath through dry rough cheeks. “I have not been very subtle,” he said, “but it seems that I must be even more direct.” In the pause they watched each other like Japanese wrestlers. “Your intellectual evasions do not interest me. I have no wish to argue. There is no need to argue.” His voice rose again on the word need. “Simply understand this: I refuse to allow you to see my daughter again. Refuse. Refuse.”

“And if, in spite of this mild disapproval, I see her?”

“I cannot threaten you now,” the old man said. “You have a nationality which is difficult to deal with.” His eyes swung quickly in their sockets. “Look around you.” Girard did. “It is an assorted company,” the old man said. “They work for me. All of them.”

Girard had forgotten about the others in the room. Some of them glanced up from their dice and cups. They were not boisterous. They looked to Girard as though there were nothing of fear or pity in any of them. There were no women in the room.

“This is too much fuss,” he said. “The problem is not one of boy and girl. Perhaps if you explained it further I would understand.”

“It is not too much fuss,” the old man said. “To avoid pollution is the duty of a family-proud individual.”

“Pollution,” Girard said. “Then you would prefer to have her marry a fat and syphilitic pockmarked tax commissioner. You would prefer to see her perhaps with a man who had three concubines and used her as housemaid. You would prefer that?”

“Yes. I would prefer that. Her children would be sons of the land that fathered me. Syphilitic they might be; but bastards and unfilial they would not be.”

“And if I see her?”

The old man closed his eyes again. “I will tell you. You asked if there might be something else. There is something else.” He ate peanuts. “You were intelligent enough to sense that; perhaps you will be intelligent enough to cease meddling.”

“What is it?” Girard asked. “Something involving money, perhaps.”

“Yes. There is no need to be above the thought. It involves money and prestige. It involves what the people of the street like to call face. It involves all that I have built for myself since the revolution.

“I am in the government. You know that. My work requires loyalty. It requires silence. It requires devotion. It hardly requires the distractions imposed by adolescent theorizing. Thanks to you, my daughter has come to question me. Publicly. She criticizes. She embarrasses me. Ten words to the wrong person and I would be asked, politely but firmly, to explain her.

“And in addition there is the bad, very bad, publicity you would bring me. Hsieh, they would say, Hsieh, friend of the republic. Hsieh who gives his only living daughter to the first barbarian that asks for her. More than that: Hsieh's daughter has married a professor.” He spat the word. “She has become a thinker. She marches in parades. Perhaps Hsieh is not as devoted as we had thought to his and our ideals.

“Now do you see?” He was trembling, sitting erect with his fingers folded and the nails lying along his wrists.

“Yes, I see,” Girard said. “I see very clearly. Your old fashioned indifference to the fate of a womanchild is overcome by your grasp. Perhaps you will be president of the republic if you do not die first. Perhaps you will marry your own daughter, thus keeping the blood pure.”

The yellowgrey left the old face and red came into it. He sat with his front teeth together, his mouth half open, glaring at nothing and breathing noisily. He was squeezing his teacup in both hands. When he was in control of himself he spat at Girard's feet at the side of the table. “I could have you killed,” he said rapidly. “Now. But I will not.” Girard knew suddenly that it was true. When the old man said it to him he could feel sweat come. The old man smiled, ugly, insectlike. “Perhaps I will, someday.” The red was draining from the old man's face. He reached again into the bowl of nuts. He was still smiling, his face set in lines and wrinkles of genial dominating hate. “Let me tell you who I am. Let me tell you why I am that man. Let me frighten you further.” Girard lit another cigarette with the orange end of the first. His wet hands stained the paper.

“I started a long time ago,” the old man said, munching as he spoke, with minute bubbles of saliva in the corners of his mouth. “I was an official of the examination board of the empress. I was the youngest to have held the position since the founding of the dynasty. I was handsome. I was favored. The empress herself had given me audience. I saw before me fifty years of work and luxury, promotions and titles. I was pleased with myself and with my life.

“And with the revolution all that fled.” The room was smoky. Girard's eyes hurt. The old man spoke without seeing him. The noises of the teashop were softened murmurings and the muffled contacts of porcelain and wood. “And from the revolution I fled. I isolated myself at home, receiving no visitors, reading and eating and sleeping and dreaming. So great was my prestige that I was not bothered. My concubines went unmolested through the streets; my servants were welcomed at the marketplace. Soon, soon, I thought, this coarseness, this earnest vulgarity, this evil growth on the face of society, will die.

“I waited tranquilly, and it did die. Yüan Shih-k'ai came to power, compromising at first with the westernized hotheads, appropriating meanwhile the army and the taxes, the strength and the revenue. He remembered me from the dynastic days, and sent for me. I shall not forget that morning: I left the house by open sedan, and my servants took the long route to the palace; the crowds at first were curious and shouted insults at my queue, and then they became silent, and as we drew nearer the palace they were beginning to bow.” He took a bad peanut from his mouth, looked at it, and threw it to the floor.

“I worked with Yüan Shih-k'ai. I convinced him, if he needed persuading, that the country would die without an emperor. He liked me. I worked my way into the heart of the country's direction. I became more wealthy. I left my home without fear and without bitterness. I entertained. They came asking boons, and I was generous. And again I could see the future, unfolding like the paper flowers in water jars, brightly colored, luxurious, with growth and work. I could almost see the revivification of the house of Ch'ing and the strength of the northeast. I could almost see myself leading this revival; emperors have died before and emperors have been replaced before.

“And when Yüan, too, died, having failed, leaving the country with no leader, I used the power and wealth which had come to me. I worked with anyone and everyone and shifted my allegiance four times, but always with the object in mind: the rehabilitation of my country. And with Chang Tso-lin came vigor and cunning, the energy and subtlety of the northeast, which had managed successfully the threats of the west and of Russia and Japan. I worked with him near the end; and when he was blown to death, blasted through the walls of his private railway car, my last great hope exploded with him.

“I retired again with my money and my concubines. Each day I wore a different costume, and all of them were imperial. I lived with my books and my language, now dead; and knowing that for me there could never be the future the past had promised, I lived in that past.

“And when the republican troops swept north across rivers and valleys and ranges I barred my door and kept life away, and for a time life stayed away. But the men who came north with the armies knew nothing of our culture, of our minds. They descended like vultures and sought carrion, with the instincts of hunger and acquisition supreme. They came, and they looted and killed; they created nothing, destroyed everything.” His body had shrunk, drawn back on his chair. He stared ahead of him, at nothing, his face the face of a man remembering death. He twisted his sleeve with a dreaming hand.

“They came to me, too. They came at night, with clouds, and with their low boots and filthspattered uniforms, with their smells and rotting teeth, with their hunger and their diseases. They shot the lock from the street door and battered the inner doors to splinters, doors three hundred years old. They began with the first pavilion, taking what they could and breaking what they left. They streamed across the courtyard and assaulted the second pavilion; when they had demolished the door they rushed in and found me standing calmly with contempt in my face and in the lines of my body, standing with the women behind me. And for a moment even they, even the beasts of the animal south, were halted. They stared in wonder and awe at me and at the women, and at the delicately carved chests and the mosaic tables; and when they comprehended the wealth it was too much for them and they came crouching toward us. Their leader was gross and muddy with no cap and with a fringe of untouched beard on his cheeks. His eyes were small, almost hidden, and he stood tense with the tongue lying in one corner of his open mouth. He touched my first concubine, pregnant even then. I sprang like a tiger of his own southern jungle and killed him with one thrust of a dagger that had killed princes. And then three of them were on me, with the smell of breath and of the offal in which they lived almost enough by itself to kill.

“When I came to life again, naked, my treasures were gone, my past was gone; my women, even the aged cook, had been defiled again and again; and they had not been content with that. I remember the pain, the stinging convulsing pain, as I struggled to sit, and the unaccountable blood pooled and smeared at my legs, and then the knowledge, striking with the force of an executioner's sword, that they had destroyed my manhood also; they had taken even that, and left me naked and cropped.

“There was no past now; and perhaps if they had left me a comfortable present I would have accepted it. But they had left me nothing, and I could not live with nothing. Tens of times each day after that I battled, and tens of times each day I decided to live. They had taken from me one future; but there was another, not the future of my boyhood, but still a future. And then I knew that I wanted it, that I would do anything to have it.

“My first concubine gave birth. I wanted a man, a man I could teach, who would someday do in the world I wanted the deeds I wanted done. It was a daughter, the first of my children I had ever cared about, the last I would ever have. I would have loved a man as I loved the empress, and expected as much of him; but I loved the daughter as I had loved my past, and expected only that she would be as beautiful.

“I worked again. I had time for nothing but work. I left my shattered home at night; I used my remaining money darkly and carefully; I hired killers, scum; in two years I controlled the opium of the City. And then I went to the rabble government I despised and I offered them what I had in return for what I wanted. They needed me, they knew they needed me. They gave me the position and the power, and I used it; I sold and confiscated, sold and confiscated, sold and confiscated. The same marked bundles of opium went through my hands three times in a week.