The Vagrants (9 page)

Jialin was not in the shack, and she wondered where he could be on this morning. He did not leave home often, and she was almost happy that she had a moment alone in his shack. When he was around he was polite; he thanked her for the food and hot water and clean laundry she brought over but he did not invite her to sit down. That Jialin was someone she would never understand was a fact she had long ago accepted, but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory. She picked up a book and flipped to a random page; someone had underlined the paragraph with thick red and blue marks—Jialin perhaps, or the previous owner of the book, but she would prefer to think that the book had no history but belonged entirely to her son. She looked at the words that she could not read—she was illiterate, and it was for that reason, Jialin believed, that she had been assigned as an undertaker of banned books in the factory that produced paper products. He had begged her to save some of the books for him; he had by then been ill with tuberculosis for a year, and a son isolated from the world was enough to turn a mother into a petty thief. Every day she took a book or two from the piles to be pulped and hid them under her clothes. The books came home with her body temperature. His face brightened when he saw the books, and for that rare happiness she, an honest woman who had not cheated a soul in the world, never regretted her crime.

Someone called out from the house to complain about the late breakfast, and she hurried back to the kitchen to get the meal ready for the rest of the family: her three younger sons, aged nineteen, sixteen, and fourteen, who would do no more than pick up the chopsticks laid out for them next to their hands, and her husband, who praised the boys for behaving like men.

Jialin was a son from a previous marriage that had ended with a drowning accident; her first husband, a strong man who had grown up near the sea, had dived into the Muddy River and broken his neck, three months before Jialin's birth. A son who came to claim his own father's life, people said when they came to her with marriage offers and advice to give up the baby for adoption. She did not want to hear this nonsense, and waited for ten years before remarrying, but sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake. Had Jialin been taken in by another couple, perhaps he would have had a different life, free of illness and unhappiness, neither of which she understood. Jialin was thirty-two, old for a marriage, too young for death. She would never see him get married to a woman but she would live to see him die. She took a deep breath but tears no longer came to her eyes. She did not know where he had contracted tuberculosis, just as she did not know where his bookishness came from; his own father, like her present husband, was a man without much education. Her three other sons were all robust, rude, boisterous—each a younger version of their father, who worked as a laborer at the loading station. Jialin was different, as if he had come from a different breed, not the son of her first husband but of a kind, graceful man of knowledge. Such a thought sometimes occurred to her, too strange to articulate even to herself.

Jialin's mother had once dreamed about another man, when she had been a new wife and attended a class for illiterate women set up by Teacher Gu. She had been married less than a year. Already her husband had caused her all the pain a man could inflict on a wife. Teacher Gu was the gentlest man she had ever met, his eyes sad behind black-rimmed glasses, his shirt and trousers impeccably clean. She noticed his fingernails, kept neatly short, when he showed her the right way to grip the pencil, and the image made her blush afterward when she lay awake next to her snoring husband. She was disappointed when she heard that Teacher Gu was going to marry one of her classmates, a landlord's concubine, a used woman with a small heart-shaped face, and it was the indignity she felt, as much as her pregnancy, that stopped her from attending the classes. Over the years she caught sight of Teacher Gu in town, quiet and melancholy, as she remembered him. He did not recognize her, but the fact that she could see him from afar was strangely comforting. She imagined how the old man would feel, losing a daughter at gunpoint; even Teacher Gu's wife, once the object of her secret envy, was forgiven now because, after all, a son was what Teacher Gu needed but she had given him just a counterrevolutionary daughter. If only he had a son like Jialin, who, with his pale complexion and the unhealthy blush on his cheeks, was as sad a man as she remembered Teacher Gu to be. They would understand each other, she thought for a long moment, and shook her head. She carried the food to the dining table and sat down next to her husband. Jialin would die a young man; what kind of solace would he be as a son to Teacher Gu? They had kept him in the sanitarium for some time but he had shown little hope of recovering. There was no point in wasting money on him, when the three younger boys seemed to be outgrowing their clothes overnight; she didn't need her husband to remind her of this, before she agreed to take Jialin home. Her husband had built a shack in the yard for Jialin, and it was expected, though not said, that Jialin would spend the rest of his days there.

TEACHER GU LEFT HOME
after breakfast, avoiding the eyes of the neighbors who were walking or riding bicycles to their work units. A few students from his school shouted out greetings to him. He nodded, unable to tell if there was a difference in their attitudes toward him. Would their parents tell them about his daughter? He wondered what the children would think of him when he returned to his lectern the next day, teaching the same lessons from which his own daughter had gone astray.

It was a half-hour walk from his house to the west end of town. When he turned into the main street, Teacher Gu was aware that his hands, thrust into his coat pockets, held no banners, and his tired legs could not keep up with the others. He decided to take smaller side streets and alleys, where, after the departure of people for the denunciation ceremony, came the chickens, cats, and dogs, as well as old widows and widowers, to claim the space between the rows of houses. An elderly man, sitting on a low stool, looked up at Teacher Gu and mumbled something through his toothless mouth; Teacher Gu nodded, not grasping what he had been told, and a woman, younger than the man but old nonetheless, stooped close and wiped the drool off the old man's chin with a handkerchief pinned on his coat, before she walked across to where she had been sitting, balancing on a chair with a broken leg and knitting something with used, rust-colored yarn.

When Teacher Gu walked past the passenger station, the train running to the provincial capital was making its brief stop. The guardian, who had been sitting in the booth during the day and sleeping in an adjacent cabin as long as Teacher Gu could remember, was yawning by the track. A girl of seven or eight was selling hard-boiled eggs through the windows to the passengers, her fingers frostbitten and as swollen as baby carrots. Teacher Gu slowed down and looked at her. Out of habit, he thought of finding out where she lived, and if she ever went to school, but he dismissed the idea. For thirty years, he had helped children from poor families, mostly girls, to go to school, paying their tuition and fees when their parents could not spare the money. He saw the joy of being able to read, in his wife's eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students—his wife and his daughter—had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn't been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses. His wife would have simply endured the loss of Shan in painful silence, as all illiterate women endured the loss of their children, surrendering them to an indisputable fate and putting their only hope in the next life.

The old guardian rang a bell. Teacher Gu stopped and watched the white steam in the cold morning air, and the passengers who were being taken away from him, a man stuffing an egg into his mouth, a woman nibbling on a homemade sausage. Soon the train sped up, and he could no longer identify faces. This was where he and his wife were in their life, where one day could be indistinguishable from the next, and they shouldn't be worrying about a moment or a day being too long or too miserable. At least that's what he had told his wife when she returned from burning the clothes; they were to look forward and understand that the pains would not be as acute a year or two from now. “Everybody dies,” he had said. “We're not the first parents, and won't be the last, to lose a daughter.” It was not the first time they had lost a child either; he had not said it but hoped his wife would remember that.

The train passed, and a conductor standing at the rear of the train waved at Teacher Gu. After a few seconds, Teacher Gu gathered some energy to wave back, but the man was a small dot already, too far away to see his gesture.

Teacher Gu walked across the track. Where the street became an unpaved dirt road that pointed to the rural areas in the mountains, Teacher Gu found the Huas’ cabin. Old Hua was squatting in front of the cabin and sorting glass bottles. Mrs. Hua was stirring a pot of porridge on the open fire of a small gas stove. Teacher Gu watched them, and only when Mrs. Hua looked up did he greet them.

The Huas stood up and greeted Teacher Gu. “Have you had your breakfast? Please join us if you haven't eaten,” Mrs. Hua said.

“I've eaten already,” said Teacher Gu. “Sorry to disturb your breakfast.”

“Don't apologize,” Mrs. Hua said, and she placed an extra bowl of porridge on the wooden table inside the cabin door. “Do join us. We don't have a lot to offer.”

Teacher Gu rubbed his hands and said, “You are so very kind, Mrs. Hua.”

Mrs. Hua shook her head. She placed a misshapen pan on the fire and dripped some cooking oil from a small bottle that had once been used to keep honey. “A fried egg, Teacher Gu?”

He tried to stop her, but a few minutes later, she put a fried egg onto a small plate for him. Old Hua stopped his sorting and again invited Teacher Gu to sit down for an extra bite. Finding no way to start the conversation without accepting their hospitality, Teacher Gu took Old Hua's chair, while Old Hua stacked two baskets for a makeshift seating for himself.

“Spring is late this year,” Old Hua said. “Quite unusual, wouldn't you say?”

“Indeed,” Teacher Gu said.

“You are doing well?” Old Hua asked.

“Yes, yes.”

“And Mrs. Gu, is she all right?” Mrs. Hua asked.

“She is a little unwell from the season, but nothing too much.”

“I hope she gets well soon,” Mrs. Hua said, and nudged the plate toward Teacher Gu. “Please help yourself.”

“This is too much,” Teacher Gu said, and passed the plate to Old Hua. “I'm rather full.”

After a minute of pushing to and fro, Old Hua, accepting that Teacher Gu would not touch the egg, divided it with his chopsticks and passed one half to his wife. Teacher Gu waited in silence until the couple finished their breakfast. “I've come to ask a favor from you,” Teacher Gu said. The couple sat quietly, both looking down at their empty bowls.

Teacher Gu brought out a package and pushed it toward Old Hua. “A big favor, in fact, and I hope this is enough compensation for your trouble.”

Old Hua exchanged a look with his wife. “Are you trying to find someone to take care of your daughter today?”

“Yes,” Teacher Gu said. “It's our shame not to have educated her well enough to be a useful human being …”

Mrs. Hua interrupted, almost with vehemence, saying that her husband and she had little use for such official talk in their place. Teacher Gu apologized and, for a moment, was unable to speak.

“We're sorry,” Mrs. Hua said in a softened voice. “For you and Mrs. Gu.”

Old Hua nodded in agreement.

“You are very kind,” said Teacher Gu.

“But you have to forgive us,” Mrs. Hua said, and pushed the package of cash across the table. “We can't help you.”

Teacher Gu felt a sharp pain in his chest and could not find the words to reply. Old Hua coughed with embarrassment and looked away. “We're sorry,” he said, echoing his wife.

Teacher Gu nodded and stood up. “No, I'm the one to apologize for having come and bothered you with this inappropriate request. Now if you will forgive my visit, I will leave.”

Mrs. Hua picked up the package and passed it to Old Hua. Old Hua put it into Teacher Gu's hands and said, “We thought you might come so I asked around to see if anyone would be willing to help. Do you know Old Kwen?”

Teacher Gu replied that he did not know Kwen, nor did he want to bother Old Hua further. It was irresponsible of him to think that the Huas would step in as undertakers for every unwanted child, Teacher Gu thought of adding, but he stopped himself.

“Not a trouble,” said Old Hua. “He's a bit unfriendly but an old bachelor can come to that. He does a good job with whatever he puts his hands on. If you don't mind, I'll walk with you to his place.”

“Too much trouble for you,” Teacher Gu repeated. He felt a weakening in his legs and had to support himself with both hands on the table.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mrs. Hua said.

Teacher Gu nodded, wishing, for a moment, that the couple would change their minds. He imagined walking to another house and waiting for a stranger to despise him or, even worse, to take pity on him. Fatigue overtook him.

“Old Kwen lives not far from here,” Old Hua said, and put on his sheepskin coat. “A five-minute walk.”

Mrs. Hua put an old woolen hat on her husband's head and flicked off some dust. “We wish we could help you, but we have our own difficulties,” she said.