The Season of the Stranger (35 page)

“It is hardly a request,” the man said. “It is an exchange.”

“I am not angry,” Mr Girard said, “but it is only because I promised you that I would not be. I do not think we will gain much by further discussion.”

“I had hoped you would be more reasonable,” the man said. “I had hoped that you would agree quietly, and that we could close the matter immediately.”

“The matter is closed,” Mr Girard said.

“But there is no need for haste,” the man said. “I will remind you that Hsieh Ming-p'u is a man of influence, great influence, and that his influence will last until, and possibly after, the fall of the City. I will also remind you that someone, sooner or later, will be found who will do this small favor for him. If you choose to do it yourself your life will become much less complicated.”

“Ah, no,” Mr Girard said. “No. You are wrong.”

He looked in. Mr Girard was standing, looking down at the seated man. His lips were curved but he was not smiling. “I would be exchanging old complications for new, large for small, visible and external for invisible and internal, curable for incurable.” He leaned forward and stared strongly into the man's face. “To be in one room with Hsieh Ming-p'u is to breathe corruption. That is his secret: he conquers by first corrupting. And he has had you. But he will not have me.”

“You are insulting,” the man said.

“Do not make yourself ridiculous,” Mr Girard said. He was still leaning forward toward the man. “Listen and then go. There will be no letter. He may save his threats. He will not be long in this country. As a stranger in the country I am constrained to some politeness, but you may tell him for me that I await his departure impatiently. His departure from this country, and his departure from this world.”

The man stood up. “Your recklessness will do you great harm.” He sounded bitter and final.

“Leave,” Mr Girard said.

“I had heard that you were a pacifist,” the man said.

Mr Girard walked to the front door and opened it.

“It is a pity,” the man said. “Hsieh Ming-p'u had also decided to see that his daughter lacked nothing material.”

Mr Girard said something short and hard in English. Then he said softly in Chinese, “Do not come here again.” The man crossed the room and went out the door. Mr Girard stood looking after him. His hands were curved open and rigid and motionless at his sides.

Wen-li went around the corner of the house and in the door. Mr Girard was standing in front of the sofa with his hands now made into fists and digging at his thighs. His face was white and he had his teeth together and his lips open. The girl came out of the bedroom and ran across the living room to him and said, “Andrew, Andrew, I know him. I know who he is,” talking very excitedly, “the man at the restaurant that night, the night of the dead beggar, Andrew.”

“I remember,” Mr Girard said. “Now I remember. I hope I do not see him again.” His face was becoming red and brown again. He opened his hands and took a long breath and sat on the sofa. He let the breath out in one quick rush. The girl sat next to him and took his hand. Wen-li started to clear away the teacups and the small cakes.

“Wen-li,” Mr Girard said. He looked up. “Never leave home.”

He did not know what he should say.

“The world is full of bandits,” Mr Girard said. “And their banditry has nothing to do with that of your father and your father's father. Beside these, your father and your father's father were clean and honest nursemaids.”

His father was a barber and his father's father was a wagonmaker, but a long time ago his people were bandits in Mongolia, and he had told that to Mr Girard once.

“Now you have seen the kind of man that owns your country.”

He nodded.

“Next month we will see the new owners. We will see what they are like. I hope they will be better.”

He nodded again. Then he picked up the dishes and went out.

When he was through in the kitchen he went to sit on top of the hill, where he could see the railway line. He was restless. He did not know what was wrong and he wanted to sit and think. When he got to the top of the hill he saw a train coming from the north. There were only two cars and the locomotive. It was going very slowly. It passed by and went out of sight toward the City.

All this trouble meant more soldiers. He did not see why he had not given him the letter. It would be better to have the old man away, where he would not bother them. Let him bother someone else now. He had bothered them long enough. Let him bother the foreigners. He would go anyway, with a letter from someone else. And they would be left here with trouble. It was like having a ticket for a train and then burning the ticket just before you got on the train.

There would probably be soldiers at the house every day now. And if they went to the City they would have to watch for people following them. Kuo-fan enjoyed these troubles. But Kuo-fan did not have them.

They did not have food to worry about now, because the government was still sending it in spite of everything, but they had the fighting and the old man to worry about and that was enough. More than enough. Since he was born there had not been a year without soldiers and fighting near the City, and sometimes in the City. Thirtytwo years. Thirtytwo years of soldiers, soldiers with their boots and their rifles and their sneers. Soldiers strutting and sneering in their boots. Soldiers who if they had not become soldiers would have spent their lives pulling a wagon like a donkey but they had become soldiers and that was the end of it for them and now someone else could pull the wagon. And going to bed every night for thirtytwo years knowing that somewhere not too far from you there were strutting soldiers with rifles and that it would not matter to them if you woke up the next morning or not, so that finally you did not care and forgot about it. But once in a while you would remember and think thirtytwo years, a lifetime. My lifetime. And now they could have avoided one trouble but he, he chose not to, and for what reason? None, unless it was a foreign reason, that stood behind the pretty words. The fighting would come whether they said yes or no, but this other could have been avoided. He would have avoided it. But they did not ask him. It was not his decision to make.

From the south a train puffed up the track. Opposite him, across the fields, it stopped. Soldiers dropped off and he could hear their calls in the distance. They took guns and boxes from the train. They unloaded the train quickly. The train whistle blew and the train moved backward down the track toward the City and the soldiers put the guns and boxes on their backs and walked down a dirt road. When they came to the blockhouse the Japanese had built they stopped and put the boxes and guns on the ground. He could not hear them any longer. Some of the soldiers went into the blockhouse and the others carried the boxes in. When the boxes were all in the blockhouse the soldiers came back for the guns and then they all disappeared into the blockhouse.

It is none of my fault. But I wish that it would stop. There have been these troubles for a long time and none of it is my fault. It has never been my decision to make. Maybe he knows what he is doing but I wish that it would stop
.

He stood up and started down the hill to the kitchen. To the north he heard faint gunfire.

PART FOUR

23

The pause, the long cold watch between one life and another, the splitsecond of eternity between the wake and the delivery, ended on the fourth of March. Andrew Girard lived all that day in the sound of the baptismal dirge, the wet whisper of a new wind, the creak of running fresh woodsap, the quiet grinding snap of tired ice, the soft rub of a shoe on warming earth, the stretched flap of wings and the excited stirring cry of a bird. The grey was gone; sounds came to him through sunlight and heavy caressing air. Only off to the north, tracing the horizon, was there a line of defeated cloud.

The guns had been stuttering now for a week. Andrew Girard lived in their sound too that day, walking in the feel of trembling and looseness their rumble gave to the earth. They had stalked him, the guns, coming closer by night, and each morning he had lain waiting at the moment of waking, listening for the new stronger sound. The growling was a part of him on the fourth of March, a backdrop to the other sounds; hearing it, he found meaning in it, and hearing the others he found meaning in them, and for a harsh hot moment the sounds and the sunlight came together in him. Then he was sure, he knew that the attack would come in the night, that night, and while he thought it the growling grew louder. He had a flash of pity for what was dying and a flash of fear of what was being born, and he listened again, standing in the court under the weak new sun, and then he laughed at himself and went into the house.

After supper, in the quiet warmth, he told Li-ling what he had thought. She responded calmly. He was sure as they talked that this could no longer hurt her, that whatever happened she would remain whole and confident. She had never since he had known her been so completely controlled.

A student came later to tell them that an information center had been organized in the main dining hall, with a radio set and a telephone, and that something might happen in the night, and that they would be welcome at the dining hall.

“Where did the radio spring from?” Girard asked him.

He laughed. “It is newborn. The department of electrical engineering gave birth three days ago.”

They laughed together. Then in the laughter there was the sound of shivering glass and they stopped and listened and heard three heavy distant thuds, one after another, and the glass shivered after each of them.

“Mortars.”

“Yes,” the student said. “Heavy mortars, to the north and coming closer. The bigger guns have been silent since sunset.”

“We will come later.”

“All right,” he said. “See you later.”

They walked into the dining hall at eleven o'clock. Teacups littered the wooden tables and the air was hazy with smoke. No one looked up at them when they came in, but as they walked toward the radio set someone called Girard's name, and many looked up then and waved or spoke. Some of the men were strangers to him. He waved back and said hello. Li-ling went to talk to someone she knew. Mortars were still pounding in the north. He looked down at the radio set. The room was noisy. He leaned closer to the radio set and heard the low hum. The fat smooth-skinned boy sitting in front of it slipped the earphones off his head and offered them to him. He took them and put them on. He heard a voice, but there was too much static for him to understand the words. He gave him the earphones and looked questioning. “Communist headquarters in the field,” the man said. He pushed the earphones at Girard again. “Listen.” He turned a knob. A scream of sound shot through the earphones. Girard jerked them away from his head. “Sorry,” the radio man said. “Now listen.” He listened. It sounded like the same thing, but the voice was higher pitched. “Nationalist headquarters in the City,” the man said. He turned the knob again and a third voice came through. “Nationalist headquarters in Tsungchia-ts'un,” the man said. Tsungchia-ts'un was the village to the northeast, close across the railroad tracks.

“It looks and sounds like a good job,” Girard said.

The man nodded. “It is.” He took the earphones from Girard and held them where they could both see the engraved trade mark. “American,” the man said. He smiled at Girard.

The telephone rang behind Girard. He turned. A man picked up the receiver and listened and then said, “Nothing.” He replaced the receiver. “Dean Chou,” he said. “We give him the news and he diffuses it.”

Girard looked around the room again. There were about fifty people in it now, most of them talking and some of them smoking. A mortar shell thudded far off and the layer of cigarette smoke jumped slightly as the windows shivered and then it was smooth and moving lazily again. Above it two light bulbs illuminated the room. Girard sat down at the telephone table and lit a cigarette and pushed the package out to the middle of the table. “What has happened so far?”

The telephone man answered. “Not much at all.” He took a cigarette from the package. “The bigger guns stopped at sunset. Since then there has been only mortar fire.”

“All we learn from the radio,” the other one said, “is that platoons and companies have been sent here and there. But the placenames have no meaning for us. ‘Kuangtung Hill', for example. Which of the hills are they calling Kuangtung Hill?” He shook his head.

“Are they using the correct names for the towns?”

“I do not know,” he said. “They have not yet concerned themselves with the towns.” He smiled. “It is expected that they will before morning.”

The door opened. Smoke swirled. Three men walked in. Two of them were Wu and Cheng. Cheng saw him and called, “Ah, the foreign devil,” and came to the table and put his arm around Girard's shoulder. Wu came up behind him and took a cigarette. The third was at the other side of the room, shaking hands with someone.

“You should be asleep,” Wu said. “You have classes to teach tomorrow.”

“The classes will await me eagerly,” Girard said. “The term is three days old and I have yet to see a student officially.”

“Do not be offended by our absence,” Wu said. He sat down.

“I was unaware of it,” he said. “It was my own of which I spoke.”

Cheng sat down across from him.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That they will bypass us.”

He looked at the telephone man. The telephone man shook his head. “I have heard nothing.”

“Where did you hear that?” Girard said.

Cheng shrugged. “Around. People in the dormitory.”

Wu said, “We heard that a deal had been made.”

“A deal?”

“A bargain. Between the two armies. There will be no fighting.”