The Season of the Stranger (24 page)

His eyes emptied, looking beyond her for a moment. “I do not know,” he said. “I seem to have absorbed it as a child. I grew up where it was written down and sometimes believed, and even existed occasionally.”

“Which is one difference between us. I grew up where it did not exist at all and had been written down only by foreigners.”

“And Sun Yat-sen.”

“Who got it from the foreigners.”

“All right,” he said. “The foreigners and the difference are all right.”

“Good.” It would be harder now because she was not so sure of the facts of what she wanted to say. Without losing him, she thought. She went on slowly. “Why is there the difference?”

“The societies. The societies in which we grew up.”

Looking hard at him she bent forward. She put one hand on the low table and leaned toward him. The tips of her fingers near the nails showed white. “Exactly,” she said. “Your ethics. Western ethics. I know something about western ethics. I am of the elite. I have had time to study it. And look what it has brought you. It took your world two thousand years to formulate socialism as a politics, even when Christ was a kind of socialist.”

“Ah, how you oversimplify,” he said. “Even if it were true there is no reason to believe that it will take so long here.”

She sighed. “You speak always as though we wanted the western ethics.” They were quiet; and then she said, “Do you see now? All our past greatness comes from what you would call crime, and it is all the greatness this country knows. Do you see how some of us can believe that we are as right as you believe you are? How we can believe that westerners are children and fools with dangerous mechanical toys but with the souls of old delicate women?”

“Yes,” he said. “But do you see that our rightness is better?”

“Ah,” she said, leaning forward again, feeling the anger start its slow heat, “you have missed it entirely. You talk now like the man from Honan who says that Honan ducks are better than Hopei ducks, or like the man from Hopei who argues the point with him. That is how you talk when you lose your intelligence.”

He reddened again. His voice was harder when he spoke and he did not look at her. “Then you defend a society whose greatness comes from murder and bribes?”

“No,” she said. “I think I want what you want. But my father is righter than I am. All I want to make you see is that my father is righter for himself than we are for ourselves. A man can free himself only to a small extent from his first thirty years and his last hundred ancestors.”

Now he looked up, flinging the words at her. “And you? You with the same hundred plus him? Are you lost with him?”

“Again you forget something,” she said, her voice bitter. “I am not a man. Fifty years ago I might have been drowned at birth, and if I had not been I might have wished later that I had.” Now she raised her voice again. “You want to give me equality, but this is one equality that you and the students and the government together with all your words and work could not give me, and they gave it to me, the ancestors, the last hundred and the hundred before that and back to the first, so that now no one can give it to me and no one can take it from me: universal female equality with every outlaw and peasant and slave that exists, equality to be equally unwanted, and you don't know about that one, you can't.”

She breathed heavily. “Or a reason,” she went on in the same warm bitter voice, “a reason to believe them when they come to tell me of a new world. Do you know who the Communists are among the students? They are the poor; and when they are not poor they are newly rich; and when they are neither they are women.”

“And still you justify your father.”

“Yes. And do not sneer as though it were a weakness in me. What I am does not change him. If I have the right to rebel, he has not.”

“So you will support him.”

“No. But I will not be righteous in condemning him.”

“I am happy that there is only one of you,” he said. “I do not think that the others will hesitate.”

“And you will not?”

“No.”

“Where now is the western ethics?”

“Your father has no place in it,” he snapped. “He has rejected it. Wholly.”

“He has never known it,” she said, with a weariness in her voice. “And even if he had, would you be justified in abandoning it?”

“Yes,” he said. “When it is necessary.”

“I see,” she said.

He stood up quickly and stared down at her. “What would you have me do?” he asked in a heavy angry voice. “Approve of him for the sake of a principle when the approval violates tens of other principles?”

“Principles,” she said. “Dogma.”
Without losing him
.

“No.”

“Do not underestimate him. Do not forget how to understand. Do not lose everything in your anger.”

“And do not worry,” he said. He snorted. “I hope you will not be crushed when something happens to him.”

When she heard it her body stiffened. Without looking up she said, “I do not think so.”

“I hope not,” he said. “You defend him loyally enough.”

“You have missed all that I said.”

“No,” he said. “But I have heard of too many men like him who were spared on much the same principle and who later made terrible trouble for many people.” He moved away from her. “It has happened in half the countries of the world. It happens even now.” He stood at the bookcase and ran his hand along the edge of a shelf. “And I do not want it to happen here,” he said softly.

“No,” she said, in a voice she had not heard before, “no. Not to you brave Chinese.”

He had not been looking at her, so that in the silence now he stood, his back to her, his hand motionless and gripping the shelf, he unable to see the hate and fear and shame on her face but feeling them across the room; until he turned slowly and saw them, as she saw the lines gather on his forehead and at his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth, the cold white furious lines. When he had turned he was silent a little longer, and then he said, “Yes,” and paused again until the room became unbearable. He said then, “I live here and I work here and I live and work in the language of the people. I have never been happy before and I am happy here, happy with my friends and my food and my clothes and the woman I live with. Or had you forgotten that?”

She was standing suddenly, facing him, feeling the hate jet like steam to her head, hating his face and his eyes and the white hard lines. “I had forgotten that about the woman you sleep with,” she said. “I had forgotten how that gave you the right to be Chinese.”

She saw the angry shock of comprehension on his face; she went on, shouting now, knowing that she must say it all while it roared in her wanting to be said, say it all before the tears came, “I had forgotten that. I remember now. I remember my function. I am proud and happy—”

“Stop,” he said. “Don't. I—”

“to have made you eligible to do what you will to my father—”

“Shut up, shut up,” he whispered furiously, and she felt the agony in him, “there—”

“to have been privileged to contribute to your political—”

“But to explain,” he shouted back.

“If your naturalization is complete,” she said, “I will go now.” She saw him breathe hard and the lines come back to his face, and she saw his hands fist at his sides, and she heard him say loudly and with his voice trembling, “All right. Don't bother. If the explanation doesn't interest you don't bother. If you are not willing …”

They stood, hot, reading briefly the hate in each other's eyes. She swept her gown from the arm of the chair and ran out of the house.

16

He had come again, the wild pursuing horseman, but so swiftly that there had been no time for dreaming; in a split screaming second the dream had been with her and then she was awake, biting the pillow, twisting, forcing the image from her mind. Next to her Han-li moved, and sat up and stretched, and then rubbed herself. She smiled at Li-ling. “Sleep well?”

“Yes. Beautifully.”

“Good. You looked tired last night.”

After breakfast Han-li walked with her to the busstop. Li-ling got into the bus and Han-li stood outside near the window. “When will you be out again?”

“I do not know,” Li-ling said. “Perhaps tonight, perhaps not for a few days.”

Han-li nodded. “It is boring here, but it must be equally bad in the City.” She waited until Li-ling had bought her ticket. Then she said, “I will see you when you come again.”

“All right,” Li-ling said. Then she remembered: “You have an examination today.”

“Yes. My luck. The last day of examinations, and I have two. One this morning and one this afternoon.”

“Do well.”

“I will try.” The bus started. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

As the bus moved Li-ling watched her walk back inside the gate, and then she settled herself. Ordinarily on the last day of examinations the bus would have been crowded with those who had already finished, those who were going south to Shanghai or west to T'aiyüan or Chungking or Ch'engtu; there would have been valises and bedrolls and duffel bags and paper-wrapped parcels in the aisles and on the racks. And today, this year, the bus was almost empty. There were two older men across from her, and in front of her were three faculty wives; among the half-dozen students only one looked as though he were going any distance, sitting expressionless, bulky; a bedroll was in the rack above his seat. From the way he sat and the emptiness of his face she guessed that he would be crossing the lines, making his way to the Communist armies, probably regretting that he had waited so long. His reception would be cooler now, now that the City had almost fallen, now that he had waited until most of the work was done. He might as well have stayed here and waited for the armies to come to him. He moved, and she watched him as he filled a pipe and held a match to it, puffing, unblinking, as though he was thinking
I have made my decision and now there is no room for fear or any other emotion
. Then he turned his head slightly and watched the houses and fields stream by. It was silly, her thinking that way. He was probably going to fly to Shanghai, and he might not even come back. A bad tendency, she thought. I am making heroes out of everyone.

Against the wall of a mud shack a farmer stood urinating. When the bus passed he looked up smiling, holding himself, steam rising in white curls from the ground in front of him. The first of many. The first of seven. We shall see. One. No, she thought again, no heroes. Heroism is the other side of cowardice, as love is of hate, and as love and hate grow together so may we worship cowardly heroes. A very high-sounding sentiment. I know so many heroes. Andrew. Ma Chi-wei. My father. Me. Only in Ma Chi-wei did I see no cowardice. Perhaps I did not know him well enough. Perhaps he was a fool and a coward. I doubt it, but perhaps he was. Whatever he was he is no more. Beyond troubles and beyond dreams.

But if the ancients were right? If Ma Chi-wei lives somewhere, playing the young dreamer in the high councils of the long-dead? But there are no descendants to worship him. Perhaps there is a special council for those who have no descendants, who lack even that. Or a compensation for their having to sit by while the others busy themselves answering prayers. Perhaps an extra pound of peanuts every week in token of his childlessness. Who volunteers to relieve him from the shame of extra peanuts, to fill his afterlife as no one filled his living life? I do. Hsieh Li-ling wishes to play daughter to Ma Chi-wei.

She looked around her again. This was no way to spend the day. Hsieh Li-ling does not wish to play daughter to anyone. There is another with his morning ceremony. Two. Five more. If Ma Chi-wei were my father I would be four or five years old, or less. Although there is truth in it. There is something very young in me which was fathered by Ma Chi-wei. Something restless, pushing me in new directions, beyond my old limits. I do not entirely like it. And mothered by Andrew? Yes. Mother Girard. Protect me. Mother, from the evils about me. But I cannot pray to Mother until she is dead. Protect me, then, Father, from the evils about me. Old Father Ma, aged twentyone, cast aside from you your peanuts and come to the aid of your only daughter. There is another at his morning prayers beside a tree: three. Perhaps a poem to my dear departed father. Father in spirit. Father Ma, father in spirit, bring of your wisdom to the daughter in need, and of your courage, and of your cowardice if you had any, because there will be cowardice in me so let it be your kind of cowardice. And properly arranged:

And there is the fourth of the matutinal urinators. More than halfway there.

And if there are no gods. If there are no gods I must accept Andrew's substitute. Succour me, brain, in my hour of need. Stand behind me and point the way, that I may not falter. Stand at my right hand and teach me to know devotion, and to merge with the stream, and to rectify terms. For if the terms be not rectified, then affairs are not completed. If affairs be not completed, then good form and music do not flourish. If good form and music do not flourish, then punishment is not effective. There is the fifth. We should be at the gate soon. If punishment be not effective, then the people are unable to place their hands and feet properly, or to pray respectfully, or to adore the correct father, or to make onion cakes, or to reject all peanuts. And to my cerebrum I leave my goods and chattels, including the lambskin-bound book of Confucius given me by my father (temporal) in the sixth year of my life.

Now have I appeased all gods, now am I safe from the wrath of man. Although I have not yet burned a bone. I must burn a bone before I see my father (temporal). There is the sixth, covering himself selfconsciously. And the City gate. There should be one more before we enter. Andrew has said it. All hail Andrew. On the morning trip to the City there will be seen invariably seven urinators. Yes. There against the City wall: the seventh. Enter now, leaving behind both gods and peanuts.