The Vagrants (16 page)

The street was the same one as the day before, but people on the way to their work units would not look at Bashi and understand his loss. He walked south to the riverbank and, from there, along the river to the west. When he was out of sight of the townspeople, he sat down on a boulder and wept.

“What are you crying here for, first thing in the morning?” asked someone, kicking his foot lightly.

Bashi wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was Kwen, a heavy cotton coat on his shoulders and a bag of breakfast in his hand. He must be coming back from the night shift. “Leave me alone,” Bashi said.

“That's not the right way to answer a friendly greeting. Would you care for a piece of pig-head meat?”

Bashi shook his head. “My grandma died,” he said, despite his determination to keep Kwen an enemy.

“When?”

“Last night. This morning. I don't know. She just died.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kwen said. “But how old was she?”

“Eighty-one.”

“Enough to call it a joyful departure,” Kwen said. “There's no need for the tears. Be happy for her.”

Bashi's eyes reddened. These were the first words of condolence he'd heard, and he almost felt he had to forgive Kwen. “I'm wondering what kind of funeral would honor her life. She's been father and mother and grandmother to me,” Bashi said. The thought of being an orphan made him feel small again, as he had felt on the day his mother deposited him, years earlier, with his grandmother. He tried to cough into his palm but it came out as sobbing.

“Hey, we know you're sad, but if you want to do her a favor, don't waste your time on tears now.”

“What can I do? I've never taken care of a dead person,” he said.

Kwen looked up at the sky. The wind from the night before had died out, and the weather forecast predicted a warm front. The sun, halfway beyond the mountain, promised a good early spring day. “It will thaw in two weeks,” Kwen said. “I would find a place to keep her before thawing. Go to the city hospital and rent her some space.”

“Why didn't the family yesterday rent from the hospital?” Bashi asked, but once the question came out, he regretted it.

“The morgue only accepts bodies from natural deaths.”

“What's a natural death?”

“Like the one with your grandmother.”

The image of the woman's body came back to Bashi. He breathed hard, trying to control a bout of nausea. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I'm going there now.”

“But you're walking in the wrong direction,” Kwen said.

Bashi looked at the road, leading west into the mountain where the woman's body lay butchered under a bush. He wondered if Kwen had seen through him. He wanted to report the news to Old Hua and his wife first, Bashi said, as they were old friends of his grandmother's.

Kwen studied Bashi, and he felt his scalp tighten under the man's gaze. “So I'm going,” Bashi said, raising a hand hesitantly.

Kwen lit a cigarette. “You know I don't like anyone to be naughty around me?”

“Why would I want to? I have my own grandmother to take care of.”

Kwen nodded. “Just a reminder.”

Bashi promised that he would behave and left in haste. He should have returned the boulders to their place the night before. A good detective did not leave any traces of his investigation around. He wondered if it was too late for him to correct his mistake.

The Huas’ cabin was padlocked. Bashi picked up a small piece of coal and wrote big scrawling characters on the door:
My grandma is dead—Bashi.
He looked at the characters and then wiped out the word
dead
and wrote
gone.
There was no need to disturb two old people with the harshness of reality, Bashi thought, and then it occurred to him that the Huas might not be able to read.

The visit to the morgue was disappointing, one more sign that this world was becoming as bad as it could get. The woman at the front desk threw a pad across the table, before Bashi could explain things to her. When he opened his mouth, she pointed to the papers. “Fill them out before you open your mouth.”

It took Bashi some time to work out how to answer the questions. He had forgotten to bring the household register card; the woman wouldn't be too happy about it, but she would certainly understand negligence from a bereft grandson. Perhaps people would regard him differently now that his grandmother was dead; perhaps they would forgive him and love him because he was an orphan. He dipped the pen into the ink bottle and said to the woman as he wrote, “You know, she is the only one I have and I'm her only one too.”

The woman raised an eyebrow and glanced at Bashi without replying. Perhaps she did not know who he was. “My grandma, she left me today,” he explained. “I don't have parents. I never did, as long as I can remember.”

“Did I say not to open your mouth before finishing the forms?”

“Yes, but I'm just being friendly,” Bashi said. “You don't have many people to talk with you here, do you?”

The woman sighed and put a magazine up in front of her eyes. He looked at the magazine cover;
Popular Movies,
the title said, and a young couple leaned onto a tree and looked out at Bashi with blissful anticipation. Bashi made a face at the couple before going back to work on the forms. The last paper was a permission sheet for cremation. Bashi read through it twice before he could understand it. “Comrade,” he said in a hoarse, low voice, intending to earn the sympathy that he fully deserved.

“Done?”

“I have a question. My grandmother—she was eighty-one and she raised me from very young—she already had a casket made. She didn't like the idea of being burned,” Bashi said. “I don't know about you but I myself would rather not be burned, alive or dead.”

The woman stared at Bashi for a long moment and grabbed the registration from his hand. “Why are you wasting my time then?” she said. She ripped the sheets off, squeezed them into a ball, and targeted the wastebasket by the entrance. She missed, and Bashi walked over to pick the ball up. “I don't get it, comrade,” he said, trying to sound humble. “You asked me to fill out the forms and open my mouth afterward, and I did as you told me.” Most women were ill-tempered at work, according to Bashi's observation; at home they served their grumpy husbands, so women had to show, at work, that they were fully in control. Bashi was willing to humor this one despite her looks—she was no longer young, and the dark bags underneath her eyes made her look like a panda.

The woman pointed to a poster on the wall. “Read it,” she said and went back to the magazine.

“Of course, comrade, anything you say,” said Bashi. He read the poster: The city government, in accordance with the new provincial policy to transform the old, outdated custom of underground burying, which took up too much land that could otherwise be used to grow food for the ever-growing population, had decided to make cremation the only legal form of undertaking; the effective date was two and a half months away.

“It seems we still have some time till the policy becomes effective,” Bashi said to the woman. “Enough time to bury a little old woman, isn't it?”

“That's your business,” the woman said behind the magazine. “Not ours.”

“But can I rent some space in your freezer, until the ground starts to thaw?”

“We only take in bodies for cremation.”

“But the regulation says—”

“Forget the regulation. We don't have enough space here for everyone, and our policy now is to take bodies that are for cremation only,” said the woman. She left the front desk and entered an inner office.

Bashi left the morgue with a less heavy heart. His grandmother, a wise woman, had chosen the right time to die. Two more months of living would have sent her into an oven; just like she had always said—heaven assigned punishment to any form of greed. The death of his grandmother, instead of being a tragedy had become something worth celebrating. One must always look on the good side of things, Bashi reminded himself. His usual energy was restored. The sunshine was warm on his face, a cheerful spring morning.

“Bashi,” said a small voice, coming from a side alley. Bashi turned and saw Nini, bareheaded, with his hat in her good hand, standing in the shadow of the alley wall. She did not look as ugly as he remembered.

“Nini!” Bashi said, happy to see a friendly face. “What are you doing here?”

“I've been looking for you. I didn't see you this morning,” Nini said. “You said yesterday you would give me coal if I talked to you.”

Bashi knocked on his head harder than he'd meant to and winced. “Of course, it's my mistake,” he said, and walked over. “But it was only because I was running an important errand this morning. Do you want to hear about it?”

Nini opened her eyes wide, and for the first time Bashi noticed her lovely, dense eyelashes and dark brown irises. He blew at her eyelashes and she winked. He laughed and then rubbed his eyes hard to look sad. “My grandma died last night,” he said.

Nini gasped.

“Yes, my grandma who brought me up alone and loved no one but me,” said Bashi.

“How did it happen?”

“I don't know. She died in her sleep.”

“Then why are you sad?” Nini said. “You should be happy. I've heard people say if a woman dies in her sleep, it means she's been rewarded for her good deeds.”

“Happy I am!” Bashi said. “But the thing is, nobody is willing to help me with her burial.”

“Where is she now?” Nini asked. “Did you clean and change her? You don't want her to leave unwashed and in old clothes.”

“How do I know these things?” Bashi said. “Nobody has died before. You know a lot. Do you want to come and help me?”

Nini hesitated. “I need to go to the marketplace.”

“We have enough vegetables to feed you and all your fairy sisters. Coal too. You can get as much as you want. Just come and help a good old woman,” Bashi said. “Come on, don't make a friend wait.”

A FEW STEPS BEHIND BASHI,
Nini counted the lampposts. It was his idea not to walk side by side, so that people would not suspect anything. From the marketplace they turned north and followed the road halfway up the northern mountain. Here the blocks were built in the same fashion as in the valley, but Bashi's house was unusually large. He looked around the alley, which was empty, before unlocking the gate and motioning to Nini to enter. She looked at the mansion in front of her, impressed. The yard was twice the usual size, with a wooden storage cabin as big as the front room of her family's home and with a high brick wall to separate it from the neighbors’ yards. His father had been a war hero, Bashi explained, so they were granted more space for their house; however, he added, the construction team hadn't bothered to make it presentable, building a two-room house like every other house on the street, only twice as big.

“You must need a lot of coal to keep this house warm,” Nini said when she entered the front room. It was divided by a high shelf into a kitchen—with a sink and a water tap, a stove for cooking, and several cabinets with painted flowers—and a living room, which had its own stove for heating. The wall of the living room was covered with posters showing scenes of heroes and heroines from revolutionary movies and operas. Nini touched the table in the middle of the living room, heavy-looking with old-fashioned carvings on its four sides. Two armchairs, dark red, with intricate patterns carved on their backs, showcased soft, inviting cushions. “Where is your mother?” Nini said.

“Heaven knows. She remarried and left me here.”

Stupid woman, Nini thought. No one would ever make her give up this luxury. Before she voiced her opinion, she heard some familiar rustling. “Mice,” she said, and squatted down to look for the source of the noise. Her own house was infested with mice, their nibbling keeping her awake at night. They ripped old clothes and, sometimes, new sheets of cardboard that her family used to fold into matchboxes. Except for the baby, every one of the girls in her family was trained to hunt down the mice and put them to death with a single twist of the neck.

“Don't worry, I've got my cure,” Bashi said. He went into the kitchen and, a minute later, came back with a box wrapped in fine red satin. Inside were a few dry roots, wrinkled and earth-colored. “Ginseng roots,” Bashi said, and handed the box to Nini.

She touched the red satin with her finger. She did not know how much money the ginseng roots cost; the box itself was expensive-looking and finer than anything her family owned.

“My grandpa was a ginseng picker, and my grandma loved ginseng roots. The best medicine in the world,” Bashi said. “But of course they don't make you live forever.”

“Where is she now?”

Bashi gestured at the bedroom. “We'll get to it in a minute, but let's take care of the mice first.” He broke a small branch from one of the roots and put it by Nini's mouth. “Do you want to taste? Sweet as honey.”

Nini opened her mouth but Bashi took the ginseng root away before she had a bite. “Ha, I'm kidding you, silly girl. Only people older than seventy can eat ginseng. Too much fire in it. It'll make your nose bleed and your skin and flesh burn and rot.”

Nini shut her mouth tight, a little angry. She did not know why she had agreed to help Bashi. She thought of leaving him with his grandmother and returning to her own life, finding a few deserted cabbage leaves and then going home, watching her little sisters play with the baby, telling them horrible stories if they made Little Sixth cry, threatening to feed them ginseng roots if they dared to complain. But Nini found it hard to move her legs. Bashi had promised many things, coal to take home, vegetables too. Friendship, and something else that Nini could not put into words.

Bashi found a jar of honey and dipped the ginseng root into it. When he got the root out, it looked dewy and delicious. Nini had eaten honey only once, in Teacher Gu's house. Her stomach grumbled.

“Here,” Bashi said, pushing a spoon and the jar into Nini's hands. “Eat the whole jar if you like. I don't care for honey myself.” He wiped the ginseng root clean of the dripping honey. Nini stuffed her mouth with a spoonful of honey. He was a good person, after all, generous and kind, even though his jokes left her confused at times. “What are you doing?” she mumbled through the sweet stickiness between her lips.