The Season of the Stranger (26 page)

On the night of the seventh day they took clean clothes and went to the house of a friend, and there they bathed in lapping friendly hot water, and afterward dressed and drank tea and walked home in a clean cold tranquillity. At home they said nothing, but went immediately to sleep, touching hands briefly across the open space between the two beds. The next morning Li-ling rose first, and made tea and gruel and heated the cakes. When Han-li awoke she took breakfast to her and kissed her on the forehead. Han-li smiled sleepily. “It is all right, then?”

“It is all right,” Li-ling said. “It has never been so all right.”

There were letters from Andrew, too, three of them. They came at four-day intervals and they all said the same thing. She read them and knew that she had not had to read them and that it had not been necessary for him to write them. Cheng had brought one of them, the last, and had taken her to tea. He had not known what to say and probably it was his shyness that drove him to ask her to the opera. He was happier when she had accepted but still silent, and then, not wanting to mention Andrew and knowing that he would have to if he stayed, he had paid for the tea and taken her home.

She had thought often about her father, who had called her whore; but she could not resent. She had been unable to resent since that day with him. Perhaps she was a whore, and if she were not then his saying she was could mean nothing. She had always thought of a whore as someone who added an element of evil to the sexual act, evil beyond the taking of money, which was like the butcher's or the wine-merchant's taking of money; something involving betrayal, perhaps; something to make distinctions among whore and mistress and concubine and wife. Now she found that whore was something which had ceased to signify, that the word was a weapon and not a description or a definition. Her father had used the weapon; but she could not resent. She knew that she would not see him again. She neither wanted to nor not wanted to; he was gone, she was gone; he had no need for a daughter nor she for a father, and now it would be a play, a domestic drama they had once acted in.

There remained Andrew, and her going back to him, but she could not worry. She knew that she would go back; she had always known that; she knew that it would be soon and that she needed no excuse, no pretext. But she needed something else, time, perhaps, or the ability to use it properly. Or perhaps she was not sure that Andrew, who had taken and been taken in violence, could take and be taken in calm. Or perhaps she needed help; perhaps the earth, which had healed her, must now direct her. She would know. A time would come and she would recognize the time and it would be done without forcing. She would know.

Thursday she napped after lunch. She awoke at five. She had rolled onto one arm and the arm was asleep. She rubbed it. In the mirror her eyes were clear. She straightened her gown and put on a pair of shoes and combed her hair. She was going for a walk. She had known even before she opened her eyes and perhaps before she was awake, perhaps before she had ever fallen asleep, that she would take a walk after the nap. If she approached the house from the kitchen side she might be able to see Wen-li without seeing Andrew.

She walked quickly. She went around in front of the library and took the road near the coal pits. From the road she could see the kitchen but not the house. If Andrew was in the house it was all right. If she found him in the kitchen she would have to talk to him. She did not want to talk to him. She was not angry or proud or frightened. She did not want to talk to him until she was ready to, and today she was not ready to.

She looked in the kitchen window. Wen-li was sitting with his back to her, reading a book. She had never seen him read before. Through the kitchen door she could see the house. The hasp on the front door was locked tight. She tapped on the window and lowered her head. She went to the side window and tapped on it. Wen-li came out and turned the corner. He had a poker in his hand. She laughed quietly at the look on his face.

“It would be you,” he said. “I thought it might be someone come to rob him.” The look of astonishment stayed on his face until he erased it with a strong happy grin. “Glad to see you.”

“Glad to see you, too,” she said. “He is not at home?”

“No. He was out when I returned from shopping. I do not know where he is.”

“It is all right,” she said. “I wanted to see you, not him.” He smiled again and rubbed his nose. He did not look at her. “Thank you.”

“Let's go into the kitchen.”

“All right.”

In the kitchen he made tea. She stood looking down at the book he had been reading.
One Thousand English Recipes
, a fat book, written in English. He saw her looking at it. He blushed.

“I did not mean it to rebuke you,” he said.

“How could you? You did not know I was coming.”

“Yes.”

“But I am ashamed anyway,” she said. “I forgot entirely about asking him. How did you manage it?”

“I asked him myself.” He handed her the teacup. “He was nice about it. He struck himself lightly on the head and wondered aloud why he had not thought of it before. He spends an hour a day with me now.”

“And how does it go?”

“Well. I knew all the foods before. Now I know words like mix, bake, serve hot, add slowly, and boiled. Everything in the book is boiled.”

She laughed. He went on: “He says that if we work all spring, by summer I will not need Chinese in the kitchen, and by next year I will be able to use English all the time. And I never reached middle school.”

“I will teach you poetry,” she said.

“Poetry. I do not know any poetry even in Chinese.” Then he looked carefully at her. “You will come back?”

“Of course,” she said. “But not yet.”

“Ah,” he said. “He would welcome your return.”

She blushed. “You should not tell me.”

He was laughing softly. “Nor should you show him that you know,” she said.

“I will not. I hope he does not find so much to do when you return that he stops my lessons.”

“I will not let him stop.”

He glanced up and out the window. “Look,” he said.

She looked. “What? I see nothing.”

“Look closely,” he said. “Do you see it?”

“Yes.” Drifting through the early dusk there had been a fine light spray of dust.

“A strange time of the year for it,” he said.

“I saw a bird today,” she said. “Or I think I did.”

“The first of February.” He shook his head. “New Year's not yet arrived and you see birds.”

“I must go,” she said. “I am going to the opera tonight.”

“When are you coming home?”

She smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

He patted her shoulder. “Good.”

“See you soon.”

“See you soon.”

He walked with her into the courtyard and she left him, taking the same road she had come by. It was cold in the early twilight. She moved her arms to keep warm. A light happy breeze brought tears to her eyes. When she reached the dormitory she was singing.

She went on being happy. Cheng was on time, and they took the seven o'clock bus to the City. Cheng seemed comic. He was trying to hint at the awkwardness he felt, to tell her that he was glad to be with her, just the two of them, and that he was not doing it for Andrew's sake but for his own. But he was afraid that she would take him too seriously and tell Andrew, so he backwatered and said none of this directly. Instead he talked about the opera and about how seldom he went out in the evening but how fine it was that she was with him this time. He would look quickly at her and then look away, his look moving jumpily from her to the No Smoking sign to the driver, then out the window and back to the No Smoking sign that no one paid attention to. She wanted to laugh or put her hand on his knee and tell him to be calm and that she liked him. But she was afraid that if she put her hand on his knee he would jump or say something he did not mean. He was older than most men at the university but he studied hard and he had never that she knew gone anywhere with any of the girls. So she asked him finally, when he had run out of words and was sitting there as though he would burst in the silence, what about this opera? and he said that it would be very good.

“From the Tang dynasty.” He was enthusiastic. He had bad teeth. He was goodlooking otherwise. If a dentist had seen to him early enough. And he knew about opera. She was amazed at the names and dates and actors he knew. He went on about the history of the opera they were going to see, telling her where and when and why it had been performed, which emperors had liked it and which had not. He stared intently at the back of the seat in front of them, his lips wet and moving rapidly, his hair bobbing irregularly with the motion of his head. He stopped to take a breath and she asked him:

“How do you come to know so much about all this?”

He looked ashamed for a moment and then smiled, keeping his lips pressed together. He shook his head. “I started out to study music,” he said. “For two years I was in the department of music.”

She showed her surprise. “Why did you change?”

He stopped smiling and shrugged. “What good would music have done me? I would have starved or at best been a teacher, and the present government would have hated me and no one knows about the next government. I would have been frustrated, unable to create, a complainer, useless to my people and to myself. This way I will be an English-speaking sanitation engineer, making a living and beloved by all governments. Also I was a Christian once. I might even be sent abroad.”

“But you regret changing.” She did not say it as a question and he did not try to answer it. She had never known that about his being a Christian. They sat quietly for a few minutes. The headlights of an automobile gleamed through the rear window of the bus. The automobile veered to pass them, but the road was too narrow. She would tease him.

“Where are we going for dinner?” He had said that it would be a surprise.

“I do not want to tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Tell me or I will turn around and go back on the next bus.”

He looked up quickly. “You will not,” he said. “I have paid your fare this far, and you will stay with me.”

She almost said something but she stopped to think instead. And then she knew that stopping to think would be bad because money would be the wrong subject to look thoughtful about with him, so she went on threatening him aloud, laughing sometimes and telling him that she would be poor company and would finish the evening hating him and would quarrel with him loudly during the opera, and all the time she was thinking that it would cost him two weeks of his life to take her out this once and how much richer she was than he, and suddenly it came to her that she was not rich at all, had nothing in fact but her clothes and Han-li and the collection of belongings she had left at Andrew's, and that she might go on like that, being poor, worrying about next week and the week after that, and here he was spending two weeks' living on her in one night and she would not know how to begin appreciating it because weeks had never before had to be measured that way for her.

So then she had to think of Andrew and what he had, and how he was getting along without so much that he must once have thought necessary. She was still not sure why. Once she said something about it and he just laughed and said that there were many people who wanted only a house and enough to eat and unlimited books and some music, and that he had it, and now that he had it and did not have to accept anyone else's idea of the way to live, he could take the time to find out for himself what kind of a life men ought to have, and perhaps if he worked hard enough and long enough and got to know enough people, perhaps then someday he would know, really know, know from the depths of him and through his own work, and not just because he had been told. She was not yet sure what he meant by all that, but she remembered the way he had said it.

The bus groaned and the driver turned and said, “Last stop,” and they got off. Cheng got off first and helped her down.

“This way,” he said, and they went to the corner and turned down the main street.

Somewhere long ago she had seen the same lights and the same people, and there had been a man with her then too. She had been on that street hundreds of times in her life, but tonight it was a dream for her, a new street in a city she had never seen, peopled with unknown beings. And because it was new she could have that feeling about it, the feeling that she had never been on it before in this universe but that once in another she had.

Then they passed the place where there should have been shining wet breasts and she remembered the night with Andrew and the dream fell away; but it was good even then, and for the rest of the walk she was warm and lost, the way she was after a dream when in the dream there had been a loveliness that she could not keep: sad because it was gone and stilly happy because she could have that kind of sadness.

An automobile went slowly by. They turned corners and she was looking down a long dark alleyway and at her left there was a lantern over a doorway. For a quick moment she heard her heartbeat, the emotion cutting into her before her mind had grasped and shaped the idea. When the idea was fixed and clear the emotion went away. They were at the door of the restaurant where everyone was from the northwest.

“Have you ever been here before?” Cheng asked her.

“No.”

He smiled and nodded happily. “I thought not. You will like it.” He held the door open for her.

They went in and the same people said hello and showed them to a room and the same kind of waiter put his hand on the stained curtain and asked them what they would have. While Cheng ordered she looked around for the picture she knew would be there. It was behind her. This time it was a lonely elephant standing on a mountainside. The elephant and the mountain were dimmed by fog and the elephant was facing away from her.