The Season of the Stranger (25 page)

At the gate of her father's house she stood, and the sweetness washed away, leaving her cold, heavy-limbed, heavy-throated. If she had not so many times before reached for the knocker, she would not have been able to do it now. Her hand dropped stiffly to her side. She could hear the echo of the knocks.

Feng opened the gate. He stood blocking the entrance. His chin hung down over his fleshy neck and his eyes protruded.

She said, “Good morning, Feng.”

He closed his mouth. His eyes took on their usual blankness. Then he said, “Good morning, Miss Hsieh. Come in.” He let her pass and turned to close the gate behind her.

When he had finished she asked him, “Is my father in?”

“Yes.” He led her across the court. It had never been so bare, so cold. They went through the first pavilion and crossed the second court, each of them strangely silent in the walking, the cloth shoes making no sound on the smooth stone. Under the clouds the second pavilion was gloomy, drab; there was no light inside. Feng led her to the drawing room. “Wait,” he said.

She sat on a k'ang and smoothed her gown. Stroking the cloth steadied her fingers and kept her skin quiet. The high ceiling was in darkness. As she waited the room came alive, surrounding her with moist fears, talking to her, warning her away. She tried to laugh aloud and nothing happened. She tried again, and the sound, coming suddenly from her throat, frightened her. There was no other sound in the room, no other being. She rose. She walked. She stepped heavily and scuffed. The noise was pleasing. She spoke to herself aloud. She waited.

Feng came back and bowed. “What does he say?” she asked him.

He hesitated. “He says that he does not recall a daughter.”

That was expected. “Tell him that the one who waits comes to him not as a daughter.”

Feng bowed again and went out. She wanted to follow him. She wanted to ask him to send someone to stay with her while he was gone. Who could have come? The grey glare of the one window tore at her eyes. Let him come, she thought, and then Let him not come, let me go in peace. No, let him come, let me face him. I am safe from the wrath of man.

Her stomach pounded dully; empty, it ached as after a too full meal. She sat down. When she leaned forward it was better. Then she could feel the blood whispering through her temples. “He is my father,” she said.

When she heard footsteps in the corridor she turned again. The nausea returned, and with it a dizziness and a fatigue. Her father stepped into the room. Neither of them spoke or bowed. They stood face to face in their own silence. Again the blood curled and hummed in her head.

Then he said, “You are quite independent now.” He smiled.

“Yes,” she said.

He sat on the k'ang. “And you have come here freely.”

“Yes.”

“To see your … to see me.”

“Yes.”

He smiled again. His hands trembled in his lap. He looked at her and his eyes followed all the length of her, and then he laughed. It was a laugh she had never heard before. It would have been a laugh of great mirth but puffing at the tinny edges of it were fear and ridicule and contempt and tears. Her body was cold.

“Why have you come?” He was old now and not laughing. His face was hidden, his head bent.

“To talk,” she said. “To plead. Perhaps to argue.”

At the word argue his eyes flashed up at her, once; then he lowered his head again. “Who sent you?”

“No one. I came of my will and my love.”

The eyes flashed again. “Speak.”

Now it was worse. Her tongue and lips formed the words with slow ridiculous care. “It is about differences that I wish to speak.” She paused, and then went on more quickly. “About the differences between men, and between the ways in which men think. The trouble between us arises from these differences. As I would wish for love from you, so I would wish to convince you that differences do not kill, and that men have changed their minds before and will change their minds again.” She stopped. He said nothing. “Between you and the students, between you and the professor Girard, there are questions. And between me and them there are ties. As long as you refuse to consider the questions, they will remain between you and me.

“And if you would consider them, consider them in kindness, we might yet come together. You might find that there was a new way of life, and you might find the new way to be better than the old. It is this that I have come to talk about. I have come because the happiness of many people depends now on you. Mine, and his, and your own. I ask you to subscribe to nothing, not now, not for some time. But I ask you to reconsider our lives.

“I have thought that perhaps what you loved in the old way of life, being something human, might be found again in the new.”

She had not known before what she wanted to say, and the long humble speech had left a strange taste in her mouth, like the taste of clear but bitter water.

He sat in a generating, brooding silence. The grey shine of the window threw his face into shadow. A sound came from his throat. He was chuckling.

“You are not too unreasonable,” he said. “I will admit that you are not too unreasonable. There is one problem only.”

“And that?”

“I might ask the same reconsideration of you. And if you will reflect, you will see that the arguments are with me and against you.”

She said nothing. She watched him, and as she watched the chuckling ended and the curve of his mouth flattened until he was again the hard dry impervious man who had entered the room; she knew he was remembering. Then suddenly there was no hope. She felt her hands become cold and a spasm of panic run through her, the first shock, shaking her, and then a numbness began, freezing even her mind so that all she could think was
He is right, always right
and then
Why did I come when I knew I was wrong
and then nothing, just a sensation of floating and waiting and great calm and fear.

“Who sent you?”

“No one.”

“You lie to your father.”

She thought he would rise, even saw him stand, his eyes wet and pale, and move to her; her muscles had begun to tighten before she knew that he had not moved. She let them tighten and held hard, saying to herself
I must hold, I must find my strength
.

“You have run off with the foreigner,” he said, and his voice was higher.

She backed away from him and leaned against the wall.

“The students and the professors,” he said. “The whiners sent you.” He spat on the floor. She closed her eyes. “And you have come here with lies on your lips, when you should have come naked for all to see the shame of you.” His breath came quickly. “But they cannot deceive me, none of them. I know them and I know what they would do to me. I know what they have done to you. They swirl about me like mud, rising, using the ruins of what they have destroyed, as steppingstones; now they are at my ankles, now at my knees, now at my waist, until one day soon my mouth and nose and then they would take me in my extremity.”

She opened her eyes. He was not looking at her. He stared off into a dark corner of the room.

“And do you know what they would do with me then? They would cage me and parade me through the streets. They would voice my defeat to the people, and after that, torture and my death. They will lie to their own and they will heap upon me the sins of their own. And my fault? My own sin? Not simply that I am not of their own, but that I need not be, that I cannot be, that I would not be. That the good and the common will not mix. And it is not even so much that, as it is that they know that I know; that is their wound; that I know, and that I will not submit to their illusion. They do not fear a general, and they appear brave; but they fear me, and that is their cowardice. To destroy reality they must kill those who recognize it.”

Now he looked at her, a rapid furtive gleaming glance. “And they send you to corrupt me, to weaken me. They deceive themselves with the thought that I can be deceived. They forget the majesty of life I once enjoyed, and the power over life I still possess.”

He was quiet for a moment. A change came over his face. His eyes stared wildly at her and the corners of his mouth pulled back. His nostrils twitched, widened. He straightened.

She stiffened and brought her hands quickly together at her waist. In the silence of the room his voice trumpeted. “You they send, the harlot, the impure. The harlot who will bear the children of the foreigner.” Her head filled with a thickness. She wanted to move. Her body would not respond. Only the moisture on her neck moved, coldly running down her body. “In the bed of lust and impiety. Sickening, cheapening, destroying yourself, you, in hot sweat and wet skin.” He was screaming. “Excommunicated fornicating from the world of kings and from home and family. And you come to me, asking that I hasten your downfall, that I join the murderers of my country, that I subordinate to their hot vulgarity the power of the imperial house.”

His voice had chilled and heightened and thinned to an icy uncontrolled womanly chittering. He brought his arms down and clasped himself, swaying. Behind him his faint shadow swayed. He held himself and swayed, his eyes gleaming white, moisture on his chin and on his beard. He chanted in the near darkness, his shadow chanting behind him. His voice came to her from the walls, from the ceiling, from the hidden high crest of the room. Then slowly he trailed into silence.

Her body was wholly wet. Her knees shook, beyond control. She wanted Andrew. She wanted Andrew and the stove and the cheap smooth furniture. She thought
I will not leave this room
.

His voice began again, without words, a liquid roll of sound, a high horrific paralyzing keen.
What does he do?
The thoughts came slowly, blurred, frozen.
What has he done all his life?
And then, the blood rustling in her temples,
I will not leave this room
.

As though he had heard her think he looked at her and nodded. He closed his mouth and released himself. He stood erect before her and it dropped away from him, all of it, sound, anger, motion, as though by a process of will he was stripping himself of shameful human actions, leaving only a dignity in face and posture, a motionless distant chill dignity not human and not inhuman but somewhere between. A warmth came to her body, a wild inrush of relief and knowledge. She did not speak. Neither moved for a long rigid instant.

With tight short steps he crossed the room, moving slowly and economically in the stylized intense fashion of imperial dignitaries and operatic heroes, unaware of the room or anyone in it, conscious only of the path to be followed. He walked to the door and out and moved slowly down the long hallway. He turned a corner; the last she saw was his old calm profile; and he was gone.

She went to the k'ang and sat, thinking nothing and feeling nothing. She sat for a long time in the darkness, until Feng came into the room and told her she ought to leave now. She nodded and followed him to the gate, not seeing the rooms as she passed through them, only watching Feng's shoes and following him. At the gate Feng said goodbye. She answered automatically and stepped into the street. She heard the gate closing behind her and then the bolts grating on the wood. The street was quiet. The clouds were breaking up and there were many people.

17

It was Thursday by the calendar on the wall and she had been Han-li's roommate again for two weeks and six days. For a week of that time she had also been her patient. Each morning while she slept Han-li had made tea and prepared a rice gruel and heated a cake and before she was properly awake Han-li had seen to it that she ate; then calmly, like a shepherd who had been doing this every day since the time he found he could carry the crook, Han-li had directed her outside, and had said, “We will go this way,” or “We will walk to the observatory and back,” or “Today you will help me shop.” Li-ling had had no will. She had shivered and she had recognized objects and people and places but she had not wanted to do anything with them. Once she had taken down a book and opened it, and she had seen the characters and known them automatically, later realizing that they had been meaningless, that she had known them but not their functions, the way sometimes she would meet a childhood friend after ten years and he would be recognizable, even familiar, but she would not know where he had come from or why he was here.

In the afternoons she had napped and Han-li had watched her, waiting for nightmares or unexplained writhings. They had never come. In sleep she had been secure. After her naps they had walked again, and talked, and in the early evenings she had experienced great clarity and Han-li had encouraged it. Slowly and sometimes brokenly, in the halfsentences and incomplete phrases by which people can communicate when they have lived together long enough, she had told Han-li the story. Walking across the rice-fields to the old palace she had told her the truth about the day of the riot, and crossing the meadow from the town to the university she had told her what she knew about her father, and once at night after supper she had told her about Ma Chi-wei's last half-hour, telling her everything, the details she could remember, the color of his face and the movement of his mouth and what they did with him when he was dead, and then she was sick and supper was gone and Han-li put her to bed. The next day she had not wanted to talk and Han-li had let her be silent, masking her curiosity but not well enough, and the day after that she had told Han-li about Andrew and the weeks after the riot and Wen-li and the stove and the bed. But always during that week her mind had reverted to the horrors, and always she had had to talk about them; Han-li had listened.

There had been horror in Han-li's life too and Han-li had told her of that, never looking at her while she talked, once becoming angry and once weeping. They sat in the shelter of hills or houses and stared off as they spoke, stared at the empty unproductive winter land, watched the frail black branches waver in the weak northern breezes. Their voices all that week were unnaturally low and they wore the same clothes for seven days and their actions were slow and meaningful; they wasted nothing, neither emotion nor energy. And by the seventh day a great quiet had come to them, and a great habituation, each to the other and both to the earth, so that on the last day of her sickness they shared with the land its depth of repose and with the wind its constancy, and from both they took endurance and deliberation. The sky existed now and would exist tomorrow, and watching it silently they knew that they would see it often again; crossing frozen streams they remembered spring, and spring, too, they would wait for.