The Vagrants (40 page)

“Where are you going?” two men said, stopping Teacher Gu as he was leaving the alley.

“The Muddy River,” Teacher Gu replied.

The men looked at each other and told Teacher Gu he was not allowed to go there. Why? Teacher Gu questioned, but the men only shrugged and said nobody was allowed to move around town after eight o'clock. They pointed to where he'd come from and ordered him to go back home. Elsewhere similar requests were made, the curfew enforced by workers from another town.

Beware, Teacher Gu said, full of sympathy for these people who lived in blind faith and who would die, one day, without a single light shining into their souls. Butchers one day and the next day you will be the meat on the cutting board, he said to the men; your knives that slit open others’ throats will one day slit your own.

The two men, infuriated, pushed Teacher Gu and threatened to place him under arrest. Their mouths opened and closed with useless words and empty warnings. You stupid human beings, Teacher Gu said; with the resolution to meet the water that would carry him away, he struck at them with his cane and ordered them to let him pass. It did not take long for the men to pin the old man to the ground. Cold as water, the thought of relief passed through him like a whisper as he moved his head slightly so his cheek would hurt less from the smashed glasses.

Unknown to Teacher Gu's fading consciousness were the screams and howls of tortured flesh, muffled by unfeeling walls as well as unfeeling hearts. Tong's father, beaten into a stupor, for a moment was lost in one of his drunken dreams in which, behind his warm eyelids, his mother stirred a single egg, but the beat-beat of the bamboo chopsticks on the china bowl was then disturbed by the heavy thumping of boots on his head. Not far away, in another room, a man, father of two daughters who had once been among the girls dreamed of by Bashi, cried on the cold cement floor after having pressed a bloody fingerprint onto the confession thrust at him. Cautious man as he was, he had never been near any leaflet, but in Bashi's made-up and unsubstantiated account the man had turned up at the rally with a white flower.

In a different room Bashi cried too, rolling on the floor and grasping his crotch with both hands. Please big brothers please uncles please grandpapas please please, he begged; he was smaller than their smallest toenail he was smaller than his own fart please he would confess to everything anything they wanted him to; yes he was a counterrevolutionary yes he had been to the rally but please big brothers please uncles and grandpapas he remembered all of the people he had seen; he would give their names he would point out their faces in pictures please please don't kick don't beat because he was so low he would soil their shoes and their hands; please he had everything and anything to tell please he could tell them about the man who said bad words about Communism and the woman who spat at Chairman Mao's statue and yes yes he could tell them all about this man who raped and mutilated female corpses and who would do the same thing to their wives and their sisters if they did not catch him in time.

TWELVE

         
M
any years later, parents in Muddy River would point Tong out to their children, some saying he was the sole culprit for his father's deafened ears, broken skull, and forever-paralyzed body; others, out of fairness, would add that, despite Tong's stupidity, he was a good son who had never allowed bedsores to grow on his father's body, or let his mother suffer under the reign of a daughter-in-law. He went to work as a clerk at the administration building by day and read by night. He read till after midnight, and when his mother fell asleep, he took out a thick notebook from a locked drawer and scribbled in it, though he never went back to read what he'd written, and there was no one else in his world who demanded to read the words.

Regardless of how dismal his life would turn out to be, when Tong entered the principal's office the morning after his father's arrest, he saw nothing but the blossom of his belief, more splendid than all the flowers, purer than pure gold. He listed the names of the people he had met at the rally, uncles and aunties from his parents’ work units, teachers and neighbors, Old Hua and Mrs. Hua. He described unfamiliar faces and vowed to point out every one of them if given the opportunity. He would put his life into the punishing hands of the party and the people, and his father, please, could the principal let the officials know that his father was nothing more than a drunkard?

What a heaven-sent boy, the principal thought, studying Tong, with his odd accent and villager's looks. The boy was a slate for him to color, the principal thought, and whether it was red or black it all relied on his own genius.

The principal picked up the telephone and waited for the sweet-voiced woman at the switchboard to get him an education official at the city council. The boy sat in the middle of the office, looking at his shoes, and the principal had to signal twice for the boy to raise his head for him to get a better look. They were crickets bound by the same string now, the principal thought, his hands shaking yet his heart filled with the thrill of a gambler: The boy could be the youngest counterrevolutionary in this political storm and he, the failing educator, could lose the career he had diligently built up; or, if he could convince his superior that the boy could be turned into a young hero who would stand up to denounce all the criminals, including his own father, they, the architects of a boy hero, would win a bright star for their résumés.

He was ready to die for his cause, Jialin said to his mother when she was granted a visit the day before the trial, and it was time for her to feel happy for him instead of grieving. Some lives were lighter than a feather, and other deaths weighed more than Mount Tai. Jialin's mother pressed a handkerchief to her eyes and replied that a son's life, no matter how trivial it was to the world, was irreplaceable, and how could he expect her to celebrate her own son's misfortune?

Eight hundred and eighty-five people, those who had gone to the rally with the white flowers and those who had been accused of doing so by their neighbors and enemies, were investigated and later expelled from their work units. Among them was a doctor at the emergency room of the city hospital. Why was fate so blind? the doctor's daughter wrote in her journal, her mother's misfortune growing in her fourteen-year-old girl's mind into a poisonous tumor. A young receptionist, her wedding scheduled to take place in two weeks, on May Day, received a letter from her fiancé apologizing for the frailty of love and wishing her good luck in finding a new job and a new husband. A teacher in the middle school said farewell to his students in class; two best friends who had both had a crush on the teacher started to cry; their tears led to many visits to the principal's office and in the end they were turned against each other, both competing to reveal the other one's dirty thoughts over a man their fathers’ age.

Mrs. Hua and Old Hua were released from the makeshift detention center, a training camp for the local militia, a few hours after their arrest. Later Mrs. Hua learned that her boss, the old bachelor Shaokang, had been the one to help them out. They would forever remain grateful to him, Mrs. Hua said when she saw him again, and he replied in a stern voice that he did not have a job for her anymore. But how had he done it? she asked, still in disbelief of her luck; he must have some powerful connection in the government; was it a brother, or a relative, or a friend? Shaokang looked up at Mrs. Gu. Let it be forgotten, he said in a near-pleading tone, and she realized for the first time that there were well-guarded secrets in his bachelor's life that he had risked for their sake.

Nini ate, slept, and cried for four days in Bashi's house before she was discovered by the police. They had not come for her but to seek nonexistent evidence for a nonexistent crime, as Bashi was alleged by Kwen to have been an accomplice in his criminal actions against the body of the executed female counterrevolutionary. Both men's places were searched. Two glass jars of formaldehyde, in which a woman's severed breasts and private parts were on display, were uncovered by the police in Kwen's shack after they shot his growling guard dog in its forehead; in the other house they found a girl, along with her baby sister, intimidated into self-imprisonment by the criminal. The girl kept talking about a marriage arrangement that nobody believed to have existed and later, when she was escorted away from the house, she screamed and kicked her captors. A medical examination proved her to be mentally normal and still a virgin, and it mystified the police that she kept talking about her marriage to Bashi, her kidnapper. When questioned about why they had not reported the two missing daughters, her father said nothing but that he had forgotten the girls when he had to tend to two daughters who had been burned in a house fire as well as a wife who had miscarried. How could parents forget a daughter? a young policewoman asked her colleagues, and they replied that worse things had happened to other children, and she'd better toughen herself up for her line of work.

The tales, of the body parts from the executed woman, and the incarcerated girl discarded by her own parents who had begun to have feelings for her kidnapper, traveled from mouth to mouth, ear to ear; for the time being, they were the only topics safe to discuss in Muddy River, and people invented details, their imaginations drowning their fears of a life they did not understand.

Under the policy of giving the harshest punishment to all anti-government organizations and individuals, three hundred and eleven people who had signed the petition were tried as counterrevolutionaries, their sentences ranging from three years for the followers to lifelong imprisonment for the leaders. Upon reviewing the cases, the provincial officials pointed out that a warning to the masses would not be effective without a death sentence.
Kill a chicken to frighten all the mischievous monkeys into obedience,
one top official urged in writing, and several others chimed in with their consent.

SHE HAD NOT EXPECTED
the quietness. The sounds that had once made up the natural course of her day—Ming-Ming's crying in the middle of the night, Han's joking, her mother's complaining, the patriotic music she played for the town, her own voice, reading the news to the same uninterested ears—did not leave her; rather, they blocked out the everyday noises for Kai: water dripping, the crying and whispering of women in nearby cells, the unlocking of the window where meals were delivered, her own footsteps measuring the cube of her cell.

It was not a surprise that, after the first day of her confinement in the best guesthouse in Muddy River, Kai had been transferred, wrists cuffed, to her present cell. She did not know what to expect in the hours and days to come, yet in a strange way she was looking forward to it, as someone floating above unknown territory looks forward to landing on solid ground.

And now the phantom limbs of the once-familiar sounds pulled her down, and in the quietest nights she thought about Ming-Ming, for whom she would be slowly reduced, by his father and his grandparents, into a nonexistence. Of all the people she missed—her mother and her siblings, Jialin, and even Han—Ming-Ming was the one who would not have any memory of her once this page was turned. Had Autumn Jade wished, in her fearless waiting for death, that there could be a parallel world in which she could continue mothering her children?

Kai began to sing to take her mind off the pain. She sang the songs that had long ago been stored away with her youthful dreams. Her voice sounded different than what she remembered from years ago, but the open stage had not taken a grip on her then as the cold walls did now.

She sang the songs that Gu Shan must have been singing in her long years of imprisonment.
The flowers of May bloom on the prairie, and the red petals fall and cover the martyrs’ blood.
She had never felt this close to the people in her songs—the man and the woman who wedded themselves minutes before their execution, a jailed daughter asking her mother to bury her with her tombstone facing east so she would see the sunrise, a mother's lullaby to her child who had been tortured to death by the secret police in front of her eyes. They had been alive once before legend had claimed them, and they lived in her singing now, sharing their secrets with her and holding her hands, waiting with her.

Many years later, in his memoir, one of the imprisoned activists would write about listening to her singing. He had been released and depurged, and she had, by then, long ago been claimed by legends.

***

THE MAY DAY CELEBRATION
was marked by the public denunciation of Wu Kai and her accomplices in the antigovernment uprising. On the morning of the denunciation, Tong got up early and washed his face, wiping the backs of his ears with extra care. His mother had sewn a pair of blue pants and a white shirt for him the previous two nights, and after he dressed, she ran a hand across his clothes to get rid of the tiniest wrinkle. Tong was going to be one of the speakers at the denunciation meeting, along with Han and a few other model citizens of Muddy River who would be granted the title of Guardian Hero of Communist China. A special ceremony was to take place, before the denunciation meeting, for Tong to become a Communist Young Pioneer. He looked at his shirt, which would soon be decorated with the red scarf; when he looked up, his mother was gazing at him with awe and a sadness he did not understand. Be a very good boy, she said, and told him that she and his father were both very proud of him; Tong glanced at his father in bed—he had not recovered enough to recognize Tong's face—and said that he would win all the prizes and make them the happiest and proudest parents in the world.

Two women officers unlocked the cell door and came in, neither meeting Kai's eyes. A package from your mother, one officer said, and handed a bundle of clothes to Kai. Since her arrest, Kai had refused to see her mother, who had come several times to visit. What a hard-hearted woman she was, the judge had said to her at the first trial, which had been carried out in secrecy with only a few officials from the courthouse present; she had betrayed not only the party that had nurtured her but also her own mother, her husband, and her son. Kai remained quiet and aloof, and she was not surprised by the retrial, carried out in a similar manner. What was there to fear about death? she asked when the sentence was read to her; she imagined the same message being read to Jialin, knowing he was as ready as she was.

Kai unrolled the bundle, new clothes and shoes her mother must have wrapped up for her. It was her mother's misfortune to have a daughter like her, Kai thought, and she forced herself to focus on the small task of changing her clothes. She was not a daughter, or a wife or mother; she was herself, and she would remain herself for the rest of the day.

At half past nine she was escorted to a covered police van, her arms heavily bound behind her and already growing numb. The officers, two men and two women, were silent; the leader of the four, about ten years older than the rest of them, was almost courteous when he told her that she was not to make any counterrevolutionary speeches at the denunciation ceremony.

Why didn't they cut her vocal cords to ensure her obedience, as they had done to Gu Shan? Kai asked, almost out of curiosity. The three younger officers seemed unaware of what she was talking about, their faces remaining blank. Kai fixed her eyes on the older officer as the van pulled off; his eyes dropped from her stare but after a while he replied that all prisoners deserved civilized treatment, and if any extra procedure was to be carried out it would be done out of humanitarian consideration.

When they reached the East Wind Stadium, Kai could tell, from the slogan shouting and from her own past experience, that the ceremony must have reached its climax. When she walked onto the stage, she realized that her comrades had been escorted there before she had, and that the slogans must have been meant for them. Their arms were all bound, each with two officers standing behind them. Kai did not have a chance to meet their eyes when she was pushed to the middle. When the audience finally calmed down, a female voice announced the crime of the counterrevolutionaries.