The Vagrants (12 page)

“Not pretty, huh?” Kwen muttered. He had already put the body into two burlap sacks, and was working to bind the two sacks together with ropes.

“What did they do to her?” Bashi said.

“They probably took something from her before they shot her.”

“Something?”

“Organs. Kidneys maybe. Or other parts maybe. Old stories.”

“What are they for?”

“Haven't you heard of transplants?” Kwen said.

“No.”

“I thought you had some education,” Kwen said. “Who knows who has her body parts now? Sometimes it's not even for a transplant, but the doctors need to practice so that their skills remain sharp.”

“How do you know?”

“If you live to my age, there's nothing you don't know,” Kwen said.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-six.”

“But I bet there's one thing you don't know,” Bashi said. With the body secured in the sacks, he felt safe and in good humor again.

“That is?”

Bashi walked closer and whispered to Kwen: “Women.”

“How do you know I don't know women?” Kwen said, looking at Bashi with half a grin.

“You're an old bachelor, aren't you?”

“There are so many ways to know women,” Kwen said. “Marrying one is the worst among them.”

“Why?”

“Because you only get to know one woman.”

“Do you know a lot of women?”

“In a way, yes.”

“What way?”

Kwen smiled. “I heard people in town talking about you as a fool. You are too curious to be a fool.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are a man with a brain, and you have to use it.”

Bashi was confused. Other than his grandmother, he had never been close to a female. “Can you show me the way?” he asked.

“I can show you where the door is, but you have to get in and find the way by yourself,” Kwen said, and lit a cigarette. “Let me tell you a story. I heard it from older people when I was your age. Once upon a time, there was a woman whose husband liked to sleep with other women. The wife, of course, was not happy. ‘What makes you leave me and seek other women's bodies?’ she asked. Her husband said, ‘Look at your face—you're not a pretty one.’ The wife looked at her face in the mirror and then came up with a plan. Every evening, she cooked vegetable dishes and made them as fancy-looking as possible: radishes carved into peonies, peas linked into necklaces and bracelets as if they were made of pearls, bamboo shoots cut into the shape of curvy women.”

Bashi swallowed loudly without realizing it.

“At the beginning, the husband was impressed. ‘You've become a wonderful cook,’ he said to his wife, but after dinner he still went out to sleep with other women. After days of eating the vegetable dishes, the husband asked, ‘Where are the pork chops and beef stew you cook so well? Why are you not cooking them for me now?’ The wife smiled and said, ‘But, my master, they don't look pretty at all.’ The husband laughed and said, ‘Now I understand you.’ And from then on he never went out with another woman again.”

Bashi stared at Kwen when he stopped talking.

“The story is over,” Kwen said.

“What happened?”

“I just told you a story, and the story is over.”

“What happened to the man? Why did he stop going to the other women?”

“Because his wife taught him a lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“Use your head. Think about it.”

“I'm bad at riddles. You have to tell me the whole story,” Bashi said.

“Why do I have to?” Kwen said with a smile.

“Oh please,” Bashi said. “Do you want another pack of cigarettes? A bottle of rice liquor?”

“If you promise me one thing, I will tell you.”

“I promise.”

“Don't you want to know what the promise is?”

“As long as you don't want me to kill a person.”

“Why would I want you to kill a person?” Kwen asked. “If I want to, I can handle it much better than you.”

Bashi shivered, as Kwen looked at him and laughed. “Don't worry,” Kwen said. “Why would I want to kill someone? So this is what's going on: Her parents gave me the money for a coffin and for the burial. But what I think is a coffin won't make a difference to anyone, her or her parents or you or me, so I'm going to spare the trouble.”

“It's understandable.”

“But you have to promise me not to tell anyone. I don't want people to know this.”

“Of course not.”

Kwen looked at Bashi. “If I hear anything, I'll wring your neck, do you understand?”

“Hey, don't frighten me. I don't do well with bad jokes.”

Kwen picked up a branch thick as a man's arm and broke it in half with his hands. “I'm not joking with you,” he said, looking at Bashi severely.

“I swear—if I tell Kwen's secret to anyone, I will not have a good death,” Bashi said. “Now can you tell me the lesson?”

Kwen looked at Bashi for a long moment and said, “The lesson is this: A pretty face is nothing; for a real man, what matters is the meat part, and in that part all women are the same.”

“Which part is that?”

Kwen shook his head. “I thought you were a smart boy.”

“Then tell me,” Bashi said, slightly agitated.

“I've told you enough. The rest you have to figure out for yourself,” Kwen said, and went back to work on the sacks. When he had secured them together, he grabbed one end of the body and tested the weight.

“If you don't explain, I won't help you with the body anymore,” Bashi said.

“That suits me fine.”

“I'll die if you don't tell me.”

“Nobody dies from curiosity,” Kwen said with a smile.

“I'll stop being your friend then.”

“I had no idea we were friends,” Kwen said. “Now, why don't you go your way? I'll go mine.”

Bashi sighed, not ready to leave Kwen. “I was only kidding,” Bashi said, and when Kwen grabbed one end of the body, Bashi took the other end, and together they heaved the body onto their shoulders. It was heavier than Bashi thought, and a few steps later, he was panting and had to put the body down. Kwen let go of his end and the body hit the ground with a heavy thump. “What a straw boy,” Kwen said. “What would you do with a woman even if you had one?”

Bashi breathed hard and bent down to hurl the body onto his shoulder. Before Kwen caught up with him, he started to walk fast, and then stumbled across a tree stump and fell down with the body pressing on top of him.

Kwen roared with laughter. Bashi pushed the body hard to get free. “I thought she looked very tiny,” he said, and he massaged his chest, hit hard by the corpse. “But she must have weighed tons.”

“Don't you know that once dead, the body weighs a hundred times more?”

“How come?” Bashi asked.

Kwen shrugged. “Death's trick, I suppose.”

THE BANQUET ROOM
on the second floor of Three Joy was known to some as the place where the fates of many in Muddy River were determined , but for most people in town it was a room with double doors that were kept closed all the time; what was behind the heavy doors was beyond their meager salaries and imaginations. The ground floor, with ten wooden tables painted dark red and benches in matching color, was no more than a dingy diner. Food was ordered and paid for at a window where a moody female cashier would accept the cash and throw out the change along with a bamboo stick, which, oily to the touch, had an almost illegible number engraved on one side. Later the number would be called from an equally narrow window, where the platters were to be picked up by the customers right away, before they were chided for their tardiness. The dishes were greasy, heavily spiced, and overpriced, as was expected for restaurant food. Apart from salespeople on business trips whose meals would be reimbursed, around town only those who needed to put on an extravagant show—a wedding to impress the townspeople or a meal to dazzle some village relatives—would dine at Three Joy.

Kai arrived at the restaurant a little past twelve. The ground floor was empty but for two men with traveling cases set next to them on the floor. The men looked up at her from their cloud of cigarette smoke when she came in, one of them nodding as if he had recognized Kai. She stared at them, and only when the men exchanged a look between themselves did Kai realize that she had fixed her eyes on them for a moment too long. She turned toward the stairs and walked up to the banquet room. Would those men, when they arrived home, entertain their wives with the tale of an execution, Kai wondered; or, buried by other pointless memories accumulated on their trips, would the incident surface only when a cautionary tale was needed for a disobedient child? A death that happened to a stranger could be used for all sorts of purposes. Time and space would add and subtract until the death was turned into something else. A martyr's blood, Kai had once sung onstage, would nurture the azaleas blooming in the spring, their petals red as the color of the revolution; the lyrics and the music had filled her heart with a vast passion that made the earthly world she occupied seem small and temporary, but what could a fourteen-year-old have seen in death but an illusory exterior of grand beauty? Kai had envisioned a different scene at the ceremony her last encounter with Shan: A speech from Kai would only be a prelude to what Shan would have to say; together their words would awaken the audience and change the course of the day. But what was left of Shan after the murder of her spirit and before the execution of her body—soiled prison uniform and severed vocal cords, half-opened mouth and empty eyes, and a weightless body in a policeman's grip—had filled Kai with a sickness. The drafted speech, with its empty words, had been killed easily by the slogans that had overtaken the stadium.

A young man wearing the armband of a security guard pushed the double doors open for Kai when she approached the banquet room. The air, warm with the smells of fried food, hard liquor, and cigarette smoke, rushed at Kai's face. The mayor's wife and another official's wife greeted Kai and congratulated her on her excellent performance at the denunciation ceremony, and Kai had to demur, as modesty was expected under these circumstances, speaking of her inability to complete her task as well as she had hoped for. The conversation soon drifted to different topics. The mayor's wife, whose daughter-in-law was going into labor any day now, asked Kai about the injection she had gotten after the labor to stop her milk from coming. Han's parents, like all people of their social status, believed that breast-feeding was a backward way to raise a baby; Kai, unaware of the arrangement, had received the injection that later made her weep into Ming-Ming's bundle. No, Kai replied now, she found nothing uncomfortable in the treatment.

“Young women in your generation are so privileged,” said a middle-aged woman, joining the conversation. “We had never heard of dried-milk powder in our time.”

“Nor fresh
cow
milk,” Han's mother said. “I tell you—that suckling pig Han was enough to make me decide not to have another child after him.”

The women laughed, and one of them congratulated Kai on her good fortune of marrying the only son of Han's parents before another woman would have a chance. Kai listened with a trained smile, nodding and replying when it was expected. At the other end of the room, Han smiled at her before turning to crane his neck in a reverent manner at the mayor, who was speaking and gesturing to a small group of men next to him. The mayor's wife continued the discussion on childbirth, and Han's mother prompted Kai to visit the mayor's daughter-in-law. “Not that Kai has any better knowledge about childbirth than you and I, but she is of Susu's age, so they may have more to say to each other,” Han's mother said. She looked at Kai for a moment and then turned to the mayor's wife. “Besides, these young women are probably eager to be spared our old women's wisdom for a moment.”

Gu Shan could have easily been a daughter-in-law of these women, Kai thought, and tried her best to stay with the conversation. Perhaps some strangers’ painless decision had contributed as much to Kai's misplacement in life as had her own decision to marry into Han's family. If the judges had chosen Gu Shan instead of Kai as the winner in the singing and dancing contest in second grade, Shan might have been the one sent to the theater school in the provincial capital. It would have been different then, Shan growing into the leading actress's role while Kai herself remained an ordinary girl in Muddy River. Would she have met Jialin earlier then, before his illness even? The thought made Kai dizzy, and she tried to maintain a calm voice as she told the mayor's wife about the dish, three-cup chicken, that Han's mother had taught her to make. It was Han's favorite, his mother said to the mayor's wife, and Kai added that when she made it herself, it was far less successful, her comment winning approving smiles from the older women in the circle.

Before that day, Kai had not seen Gu Shan for years. They had been classmates in the first grade, but Kai could not recall how Shan looked at that age; rather, she remembered Shan's parents from around the time—Teacher Gu, who had been their teacher that year, and Mrs. Gu, whom Kai had seen only once at a school festival, when Mrs. Gu stood out among the many mothers. Kai remembered, even as a first grader, that she felt jealous of Shan not only because her father was their teacher but also because her mother was beautiful-she had worn a silk blouse on the day of the school festival, under her plain gray Mao jacket, the pomegranate red fabric escaping at the cuffs and the neckline. A plastic barrette, in a matching color, adorned her smooth black hair, grown a few centimeters longer than the allowed style for a married woman. It was Mrs. Gu's posture that Kai had tried to mimic when, at fourteen, she had played a young mother who had given up her newborn baby to save the child of a top Communist Party official; straight-backed, she had clutched the plastic doll to her breast while another doll, wrapped up in a blue print cloth, was thrown into the river onstage. The ballad that followed the drowning was Kai's favorite song from her acting career, a mother's lullaby to a child who would never wake up to all the sunrises of the world.

The last time Kai and Shan had seen each other was in the autumn of 1966. Shan was the leader of a local faction of Red Guards, and when Kai returned from the provincial capital to Muddy River with her touring Red Guard troupe, the two groups faced each other in a singing and dancing duel in the city square. The competition to become the most loyal followers of Chairman Mao, and the animosity stemming from that rivalry, seemed pointless now; but Kai remembered that autumn as the beginning of her adult life, and sometimes she imagined that Shan would share with her the same recollections, of the September sun shining into their eyes on the makeshift stage, the workers from a road crew hitting the ground with their shovels to accompany the beats of their singing, the old people and small children gathering to watch them with great interest, and a lanky boy, who looked not much older than Kai or Shan, standing apart from the crowd with half a smile, as if he alone remained unimpressed by the performances of both groups.