The Season of the Stranger (8 page)

The men stopped talking and one of them moved to the stairway and shouted the news to the second floor. There was silence immediately. Girard thought
I wonder when the generals upstairs will have another banquet
. The talk began again slowly and the fat man turned to them and started the farewells again. When they were through bowing they walked to the door. As Girard reached for the handle the door moved and he stepped back and held it open. A man and a woman came in and started toward the stairs. Girard looked at the lantern outside and then back at Li-ling. She had her hands in the sleeves of her gown and she was not looking at him. The man who had just come in was tipping his felt hat and the woman with him was nodding. Li-ling stood with her feet together and bobbed her head at them. All three turned to Girard at the same time. He bowed and started toward Li-ling for the introductions. The man looked at him and took the woman's arm and they went up the stairs behind the short fat receptionist.

Li-ling was outside under the lantern. He followed her and swung the door closed and stood feeling foolish and looking at the back of her head. “Who are they?” he asked.

“They are good friends of my father.”

He adjusted his fur hat. “I am sorry that you have never let me meet your father,” he said. When nothing happened he said, “Is this a thing of trouble?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “there is no trouble. But now that I have been seen in the City I think you should let me go home quickly.”

“It is early,” he said. “Not later than nine-thirty.”

“Nevertheless,” she said.

“All right. There is tomorrow. But I may not take you home?”

“No.”

“I do not even know where you live.”

“There is no need to.”

“And you will not tell me why?”

“No.” He knew why. Someday they would talk about it. Now he took her arm and they walked away from the lantern. When they reached the place of his fall he dropped her arm and crossed the alley. “Come here,” he said.

The old man was there. Girard touched him. There was no movement. Girard felt his neck again. “His body is cold,” he said. “He must be dead.” A breeze limped through the alley, drying Girard's lips. Squatting with his hand on the neck he could feel the warm full bulge of his own stomach and taste again the sweet grease of the meal. A muscle in his abdomen quivered once sharply and the memory of the hot grease receded as nausea came. He closed his mouth and swallowed, forcing his larynx to move and looking at the bald head, following the fold of the body to the feet, seeing in the lanternlight the ragged cloth hanging from the ankles and toes, the naked bonethin calf, the worn unpadded trousers frayed almost to the knee. The horsejacket too was torn (and lying on his side he was supported by the empty round belly pushing against the horsejacket, small and hard with the roundness of a tumor and not the swell of a pregnant woman or the layers of loose flesh of the old princes) and dirty, stained and smelling of the street and of the horses mules pigs chickens dogs and people who still living had left the smells in the street, the collar of it ripped away from the body and flapping uselessly against Girard's hand as he held the neck.

He swallowed again and turned the face toward the light. A frozen trickle of blood lay in the wrinkle from the mouth to the side of the chin. The eyes were open and dry and glassy. Girard bent the dead arm at the elbow and brought the hand up into the light. The fingers were rigid and cold, and between the thumb and the knuckle of the index finger there was pressed a torn triangle of colored paper.

Girard stood up and rubbed his hands against the cold cloth of his gown. “I gave him too much,” he said.

She came against him and shivered and squeezed the upper part of his arm with both her hands. When they left the alley she was still shivering.

6

The man at the student center woke him at seven. He thanked him and went to the faucet behind the building to wash. The water stung in the cold morning air and there were no towels. He went inside again and stood near the infant fire swabbing at his face with a handkerchief. When he was warmer he said goodbye and crossed the street to a teashop. The busstop was twenty yards from the teashop. He finished the tea and a small cake and bought a newspaper on the way out.

When he reached the house he asked Wen-li to make some breakfast, with coffee. He went inside and threw the newspaper on the sofa and washed again in warm water. He changed his clothes. When he came out of the bedroom breakfast was ready. He ate, and drank the coffee, and found his books and portfolio and walked to his nine o'clock class. When he saw the low series of wood and cement buildings (which had been designed by a foreigner and had the corridors to the south and the windows to the north so that the sun and not the wind was kept from the classrooms) he remembered that he was to see the dean. He said good morning to the half dozen already in the room, and picked up the poker and rattled the small stove. A puff ascended whitely, curling through the crack in the lid, and settled slowly on the blueblack metal in cold minute ashspots. He went to the corridor and shouted for the caretaker and told him that it was nine o'clock and there should have been a fire at eight and here they were without heat. The caretaker mumbled something he could not understand and brought the kindling and coal into the room. He cleaned the stove and started the fire. Girard thanked him. As the caretaker went out the students, now a dozen, came to the front of the room and stood waiting for the cold metal to produce warmth. “How is the heat in the dormitories now?” Girard asked.

One of the men laughed. “Warm water,” he said. “Warm water pumped through pipes. When it reaches the third story it freezes the pipes.”

When the bell boomed gloomily from the auditorium roof they walked back to their seats. He waited until they were quiet and then shut the door and stood leaning on the lectern toward them.

“All here?” he said, and then in English, “We are going to talk today about habituation.”

He talked about habituation. The girls stared gravely at his chin, scribbling sometimes in the notebooks or on the scraps of yellow and white paper in their laps. The men sprawled easily and looked at one another and at the women and sometimes at him. He walked across the front of the room as he talked. Twice he wrote on the blackboard and each time the girls copied what he had written. The thin handsome man who had learned English on the Malay peninsula and spoke it always as though he were condescending to use the language was looking at a newspaper; he leaned across the aisle and whispered, moving one hand jerkily in front of him, to Cheng. Cheng looked apologetically at Girard. Liu the first, behind the thin handsome man, was half standing reading the newspaper over the other's shoulder.

Girard continued talking and losing interest. Even the girls turned to look at the knot of men huddled whispering around the newspaper. Girard stopped. After five or ten seconds the men were quiet. They looked at him in surprise, as though he were sick or had seen something through the window and had been forced to stop because of that.

“What are you deciding back there?” he said. The man with the newspaper folded it and stuffed it into a pocket. Cheng spoke.

“We were deciding the routes by which the war would reach the City,” he said.

“Then you have heard the reports,” Girard said.

They nodded and Cheng smiled and said, “It is difficult to think about foreign literature now.”

“It must be,” Girard said. He looked at his watch. “We have used only twelve minutes of the period.” They watched his face carefully. Only Cheng settled smiling in his chair. Girard took an empty desk in the front row and spun it on one of its legs. He sat facing them and took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. “Those who wish to go may go. Those who wish to smoke and talk about the war may stay.” He threw the package to Cheng. “Pass them around.”

He did the same thing with the ten o'clock class and when the bell rang at eleven he was out of cigarettes. He stood up and stretched. They had talked about the war for two hours and no one knew too much about what was happening. Kuach'eng had fallen and that had left a line of thirty miles of railroad without a garrison and the war was proceeding in spear fashion down the rails and spreading like a muddy stream in a flat field into the small pockets and towns beside the track and the City was beginning to know now that it was next; that the railroad led to it and that its airports were large and valuable and that if it were not conquered (and how many times, they asked themselves, have the streaming pennons come, come from any point of the continent and sometimes from all points at once, and conquered; and in conquering how many times have the conquerors and their pennons ceased to exist and in conquering lost homeland, spirit, culture, all, while China and the City endured and grew with the heavy new life in them; and how many rude and unwritten languages have perished and melted and been remolded; how many of us can think back to greatgreatgrandfathers and further who rode once on the stocky ponies of Asia and came with the bows and silks and stirrups and songs of the mountains or the plains or the islands or even the jungle, who came to conquer and stayed to be conquered, who lost the centuries of their own past and then took from and added to the centuries of China's history; how many times?) it would be surrounded and suffocated, choked into the new pattern (this time to stay? they asked themselves); and calmly, low-voiced, they searched for answers.

He stood in the feeble sunlight and watched them talk in groups across the tan snowpatched campus. He looked at his watch again and decided to see Doctor Liao. He went home first and dropped his books and the portfolio and took another package of cigarettes. When he got to the doctor's house they said that the doctor had been called to the infirmary. He went back across the humped stone bridge and followed the path to the doctor's office.

The doctor called him in when he knocked. He sat waiting while the doctor inoculated a student. The label on the bottle said “Typho-Cholera.” When it was over the doctor said, “Let the arm remain bent for a few minutes,” and sent the student away. He swiveled in the mahogany chair and folded his hands on his lap, tilting backward on the upper part of the chair. “Well,” he said in English, “are we again friends?”

Girard smiled. “Of course. Would you speak English if we were not?”

“I'm sorry about yesterday.”

Girard opened his hands and let them drop to his thighs. “As much my fault as yours. You were entitled to a conclusion.”

“Sure,” the doctor said, “and the fact that I chose the wrong conclusion reflects on my judgment, not my affection.” He looked toward the window. “Do you know why I wanted to talk to you?”

“Something about her, I suppose,” Girard said. “The note from the dean probably means the same thing. He saw us romping on a hillside yesterday.”

“Romping,” the doctor said. “The faculty has discussed you in an unofficial meeting.”

“That was polite.”

“I objected, if you want to know,” the doctor said. “I told them they were being infantile, and that you should be heard.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I suppose they disagreed?”

The doctor sighed and adjusted his spectacles. “It was strange and discouraging,” he said. “They felt that it was important enough to discuss—”

“—but not sufficiently important to have me called in,” Girard finished.

“Yes.”

“Not too nice,” he said. “What did they have to say?”

“They were afraid. I don't know why they were afraid. They have known many such couples. And they wouldn't look at me, you know?” Girard nodded. “Someone thought that it was a case of bad timing. That the approach of the war somehow made it more complex and important. I couldn't see his point of view. But the others did, almost unanimously. I have the feeling,” the doctor said slowly, bringing his brows together, “that there is something I don't know; something that the rest of them do know. So I asked you to come here before you saw the dean. I think there is something in this which hasn't been explained. Maybe you know what it is and maybe you don't. If you don't, I think you should be careful.”

Girard frowned. “Maybe I should. Can't you tell me anything else?”

The doctor shook his head. “That's all I got out of it.”

“I'm afraid I can't enlighten you,” Girard said. He shook the doctor's hand and walked to the door and then turned and said, “Was there anything political?”

“You mean about the students and the faculty?”

“That, and the war.”

“No. Not while I was there.”

“Thanks,” Girard said. “I'll see him now.”

“Good luck,” the doctor said.

The dean's secretary was happy to see him. She took a cigarette and told him the dean was busy, but to sit and wait. He did. Officials ran briskly into the dean's office, waving papers, and shuffled out minutes later, sadness in their faces. The business manager, the registrar, the dean of women (he was a man, and he had a long white cobweb beard and a staff of three women but the tradition of male deans was intact) flowed in and out of the office. Girard tried to decipher the wall scroll and could not. He played with a Chinese typewriter in the corner. He gave the secretary another cigarette.

At five minutes after twelve the dean came out of his office, just clearing the door jamb. “Girard,” he said. The dean looked at him without curiosity and without blinking. “This place is too crowded. Come to lunch with me.”

“At your home?”

“Yes.”

“I would be happy to. Let me see my cook first and tell him.”

“Of course. Come in fifteen minutes.”

“Thank you,” Girard said. “I will.” He bowed shortly and left.

Wen-li was not at the house. Girard wrote a note for him, propping it against the grease-dish in the kitchen. He locked the kitchen door and walked toward the library. He was not sure that he had locked the house door and before he reached the library he decided to go back. When he turned he saw Wen-li bicycle up to the kitchen on the other road, the road from the small shops.