The Vagrants (10 page)

“Yes, I understand.”

“We do wish to help,” Mrs. Hua repeated, as if she were afraid that Teacher Gu would not believe her. “Don't think we are holding a grudge against Shan.”

Teacher Gu nodded. He had nothing to say to defend his daughter—Old Hua and his wife had been among the ones Shan had whipped and kicked in a public gathering in 1966. All the condemned ones on that day had been old people, widows of ex-property owners, frail grandparents whose grandchildren screamed with fear in the audience and then were silenced by their parents. Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu themselves were among the accused on the platform that day, but at least their daughter had the mercy to leave her parents to her companions for punishment. Teacher Gu did not know why the Huas were there—they were both from poor backgrounds, after all, but crazy as the young revolutionaries were, it seemed that being human was a sufficient reason for humiliation. On that day Teacher Gu lost any remaining hope for his daughter. She was not the only wild one there; one of her comrades, a girl a year younger than Shan, with baby fat still on her cheeks, beat an old woman's head with a nail-studded stick. The woman stumbled and fell down onto the stage with a thud. Teacher Gu remembered watching her thin silver hair become slowly stained red by the dark sticky blood; afterward Shan forced the audience to hail her comrade's feat.

“We know how you have felt all these years,” Mrs. Hua said.

Teacher Gu nodded. The Huas were among the few to accept Teacher Gu and his wife when, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Gus visited the people once beaten by Shan with presents and apologies on their daughter's behalf; many of the people, including Nini's parents, turned them away at the door.

“It wasn't your fault. She was still a child then.”

“A student's wrongdoing lies with the teacher's incapability,”
quoted Teacher Gu from ancient teaching.
“A child's fault is the father's fault.”

“Don't put this burden on yourself,” said Old Hua.

They were getting old, Mrs. Hua said, and they hoped to stay in Muddy River for the rest of their lives. They did not have legal residencies so they could not risk being called sympathizers, Mrs. Hua explained. “If we were younger, we would not hesitate to help you. We were always on the road then.”

“Yes.”

“And we were less afraid then.”

“Yes.”

“We will help you with anything else.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Do come back for a cup of tea whenever you feel like it,” Mrs. Hua said. Old Hua waited for his wife to finish the conversation, then pulled gently on Teacher Gu's arm. “Teacher Gu, this way, please.”

Teacher Gu nodded, trying to cover his disappointment. “Thank you, Mrs. Hua.”

“Bring Mrs. Gu over for a cup of tea when she feels like it,” Mrs. Hua said. She hesitated and added, “We've lost daughters too.”

FIVE

         
T
he stadium was half-full when the Red Star Elementary arrived. “Communism Is Good,” a song Tong remembered by heart, was broadcast through the loudspeakers, and he hummed along. The students were assigned seats in the front rows, and once they settled down, some children in Tong's class started to open the snacks their parents had packed into their school bags; others drank from their canteens. Tong, feeling solemn and important, did not make these childish mistakes.

The denunciation ceremony started at nine. A woman, in a brand-new blue woolen Mao jacket and wearing a red ribbon on her chest, came onto the stage and asked the audience to stand and join the Workers Choir to sing “Without the Communist Party We Don't Have a Life.” Tong sprang to his feet and looked up at the woman with admiration. When Tong had first arrived at Muddy River, before he had learned the streets of the city by heart, he used to sit in the yard with Ear in the morning and late afternoon and listen to the news announcer's voice from the loudspeakers. He had little understanding of the news she reported, but her voice, warm and comforting, reminded him of the loving hands of his grandmother from when she had put him to sleep.

It took several minutes for the grown-ups to get onto their feet, and even when the choir began singing, half the people were still talking and laughing. The woman signaled the audience to raise their voices, and Tong flushed and sang at the top of his lungs. The different sections of the stadium proceeded at different speeds, and when the choir and the accompanying music ended, it took another minute for the audience to reach the end of the song, each session taking its time to finish. There was some good-humored laughter here and there.

The first speaker was introduced, a party representative from the city government, and it took a few seconds for the grown-ups to quiet down. More speakers, from different work units and schools, went onto the stage and denounced the counterrevolutionary, their speeches all ending with slogans shouted into the microphone and repeated by the audience. The speech Tong admired most was presented by a fifth grader from his school, the captain of the school's Young Pioneers and the leading singer of the Muddy River Young Pioneers Choir. She recited harsh, condemning words in a melodious voice, and Tong knew that he would never sound as perfect as she did, nor would he have the right accent to gain him the honor of speaking in a solemn ceremony like this.

After a while, there was still no sign of the most exhilarating moment of the gathering—the denouncing of the counterrevolutionary in person, before she was escorted to the execution site. The criminal had to be transported from site to site, the woman explained, and then she called for more patriotic music.

The grown-ups started to wander around, talking and joking. Some women brought out knitting needles and balls of yarn. A teacher told the children to eat their snacks. A boy reported in a loud voice that his mother wanted him to pee at least once at the stadium, which led to several boys and girls raising their hands and making the same request. The teacher counted, and when she had gathered enough children, she led them single file to the back of the stadium.

Tong sat straight in his seat, the crackers his mother had packed for him untouched in his bag. He wished the woman announcer would come onstage and chastise the children and grown-ups who had turned the ceremony into a street fair, but he had learned, since his arrival in Muddy River, that the opinions of a child like him held no meaning in the world. Back in his grandparents’ village the peasants respected him because he had once been chosen by a famous fortune-teller as an apprentice. Tong had been two and a half then, before he could remember the story, and all he knew were the tales repeated by his grandparents and their neighbors: The old blind man, weakened by years of traveling from village to village and telling other people's fortunes, had foreseen his own death coming, and decided to choose a boy who would inherit his secret wisdom and knowledge of the world. He had walked across three mountains and combed through eighteen villages before finding Tong. Legend had it that when the old man came to the village, he studied the shape of the skulls of all the boys under age ten, disappointed each time until he reached Tong, the youngest in the line; the old man touched Tong's head and instantly shed tears of relief. In the next six months, the old man settled down in the village and came to Tong's bed every morning before sunrise, teaching Tong to chant, and to memorize rhymes and formulas that Tong would need for his fortune-telling career.

Tong no longer remembered his master. The old man had died shortly after Tong turned three, surprising the villagers, as the master fortune-teller failed to foretell his own death with accuracy. It was a pity that the blind man's wisdom was lost to the world; still, the short stint as the fortune-teller's apprentice marked Tong as a boy with a special status, revered by the villagers. But these stories meant little to Tong's parents and the townspeople. They did not look into Tong's eyes, which old people back in the village had always said were profoundly humane. An extraordinary boy, they had said of him, and Tong knew he was meant for a grand cause. But how could he convince Muddy River of his importance, when his existence was not much more noticeable than the existence of dogs and cats in the street?

A squad of policemen marched into the stadium and guarded both ends of every aisle. The announcer called for the audience to return to their seats. Her voice was muffled, as if she had caught a cold, and from the front row where Tong sat, he could see her knitted eyebrows. He wondered if she felt hurt as much as he did by people's lack of enthusiasm, but she did not see his upturned and concerned face when she announced the arrival of the counterrevolutionary.

Hushed talk rippled through the stadium when the counterrevolutionary was dragged onto the stage by two policemen dressed in well-ironed snow-white uniforms. Her arms were bound behind her back, and her weight was supported by the two men's hands, her feet barely touching the ground. For the first time since the beginning of the ceremony, the audience heaved a collective sigh. The woman's head drooped as if she were asleep. One of the two policemen pulled her head up by her hair, and Tong could see that her neck was wrapped in thick surgical tape, stained dark by blood. Her eyes, half-open, seemed to be looking at the children in the front rows without registering anything, and when the policeman let go of her hair, her head drooped again as if she were falling back into sleep.

The audience was called to its feet, and the shouting of slogans began. Tong shouted along with his classmates, but he felt cheated. The woman was not what he had expected: Her head was not shaved bald, as his parents had guessed it would be, nor did she look like the devil described to him by a classmate. From where he stood, he could see the top of her head, a bald patch in the middle, and her body, small in the prisoner's uniform that draped over her like a gray flour sack, did not make her look like a dangerous criminal.

After a few minutes the woman was escorted off the stage and disappeared with the two policemen to the back of the stadium. The slogan shouting trailed off until there was nothing for the audience to do but go home. Some grown-ups started to move toward the exits, but the security guards refused to let them pass. A fight or two broke out, attracting more security guards, and soon the woman announcer hurried back to the stage and signaled the audience to join the choir for a few more revolutionary songs. Already losing interest, most grown-ups just crowded toward the exits, the banners they had brought with them abandoned on the seats.

On the way back to school, Tong listened to the boys behind him talk about the event. One boy swore that the woman had threatened to come off the stage and attack him, if it were not for the two policemen holding her; another boy told a story that he had heard from his grandfather: Sometimes a woman is a snake in disguise—if she succeeds in locking your eyes with hers, at night she can slither into your dreams and eat your brain.

What nonsense, Tong thought, but his spirit was low and he did not want to contradict the childish notions of his peers.

NEITHER LITTLE FOURTH
nor Little Fifth was willing to take Nini's bad hand, so she had to let Little Fourth run free. Little Fifth tried to wiggle her hand out of Nini's grip too, and Nini said in a fierce tone that if she did not obey, a car would run over her, or someone would steal her and sell her to strangers and she would never see their parents again. Frightened, the girl started to cry, and Little Sixth, who had been happily babbling in a cotton sling on Nini's back a moment ago, watched her crying sister for a moment and then joined the howling.

For a moment, Nini thought of bringing all three sisters back home and locking them inside the house, as she often did when she went to the marketplace. She would go to the riverbank by herself. The young man Bashi, odd as his talk was, was an interesting person, and Nini was curious to find out if he had lied about the coal he would give her for free. But the girls would tell on her, and certainly her mother would send her to a corner to kneel through lunch. She should have hidden the tin of biscuits, Nini thought, and then remembered the barrette in her pocket. She hushed her sisters and displayed the blue plastic butterfly in the palm of her good hand. It took Nini five minutes of coaxing and threatening to persuade the older girls to agree to wait for their turns. Nini sat Little Sixth on the sidewalk and plaited her soft brown hair into a tiny braid on top of her head, and then clipped the barrette at the end. The braid wobbled, and Little Fourth and Little Fifth clapped with laughter. Nini smiled. At moments such as this, she liked her sisters.

When they reached the East Wind Stadium, all the entrances were closed; the only people walking around were the security guards in red armbands. “What are you doing here?” a guard shouted at Nini as they walked closer to the entrance. Little Fourth was no longer running, her hand nervously gripping Nini's sleeve.

Nini held Little Fourth closer and replied that they were coming for the denunciation ceremony.

“Which unit do you belong to?”

“Unit?” Nini said.

“Yes, which unit?” the man said with half a smile.

An older guard came closer and told his colleague not to tease the young girls, and the first man replied that he was not teasing but teaching them the most important lesson of life, which was to belong to a unit. The second guard ignored the young man and said to Nini, “Go home now. This is not a place for you to play around.”

Nini thought of explaining to the old man why she had to go to the denunciation ceremony with her sisters, but he was already waving his arms and shooing them away. Nini walked her sisters to the alley closest to the stadium, and told them to sit down at the corner. “Let's wait here.”

“Why?” Little Fourth asked.

“We're supposed to take a look at this daughter of the Gu family before she's executed,” Nini said. “If we don't see her, there'll be no dinner for us tonight.”

The two girls sat down immediately. A few minutes later, they started to play games with pebbles and twigs, chanting in whispers. Nini walked around in a circle, and soon Little Sixth fell asleep, her head heavy and warm on Nini's neck. Slogans, songs, and angry voices came from the loudspeakers in the stadium, but Nini could not tell what they were saying. She thought about Mrs. Gu, laying out pickled string beans and scrambled eggs and telling her to eat as much as she wanted, and Teacher Gu, handing her the paper frogs, his hands gentle yet not quite touching hers. They must have wished all along that Nini had never existed, since Nini's deformity was proof of their daughter's crime.

An ambulance and a police car drove down the main street and turned into the alley. The drivers turned off the sirens, but left the blue and red lights blinking. Little Fourth and Little Fifth stopped their game and asked, “What is it?”

Before Nini could reply, a policeman came out of the patrol car and yelled to the girls, “Where is your home? Go home now. Don't stay in the alley.”

Little Sixth was startled from her dozing and started to cry. Nini grabbed Little Fifth's hand and told Little Fourth to come with her. A few steps into the alley Nini saw one of the row houses without a fence. She pulled her sisters in and hid behind the fence of an adjoining house, and told them to keep quiet. Little Sixth was squirming on Nini's back. She put a finger into the baby's mouth and calmed her. The two younger girls wandered around the yard, checking the pile of firewood at a corner, crushing a few pieces of soft coal into powder.

Nini peeked out from behind the fence. A few people jumped out of an ambulance, all of them wearing white lab coats, white head covers and masks. One of them pulled a gurney out of the ambulance, and the two shorter ones—two women, Nini realized, as their hair crept out from underneath the head covers and reached their necks—pulled from the ambulance white and blue packages, tubes, and a strangely shaped lamp that connected to the inside of the ambulance with long metal arms. One of the women switched the lamp on and off for a test, and the four policemen, uncurious, patrolled nearby with black batons.