The Vagrants (18 page)

Life seemed the same after the previous day's event. All these people must have attended the denunciation ceremony, but none of the faces betrayed any memories. The announcements, some torn down and others now only fragments glued to the walls, were no longer noticed by the passersby. In the marketplace, housewives bargained in loud, accusing voices, as if the vendors were all shameless liars. At a state-run vegetable stand, a male sales assistant, bored and idle, formed a pistol with his hand, aiming it at a female colleague's bosom. The woman, in her twenties with a round, full moon face, waved her hand as if chasing away an annoying fly, though every time the man made a banging noise, she laughed. Tong smiled, but when she caught sight of him, she called him a little rascal. “What are you looking at? Be careful or I'll scoop out both your eyeballs.”

Tong blushed and turned away. Behind him the male assistant asked the woman why he himself hadn't the right to such a luxury. She replied that she would oblige him on the spot by removing his eyeballs if he really wanted to be blind; the man urged her to do so, saying that he had no use for his eyes now that he had seen her heavenly beauty. Tong walked on. There was a secret code to the adults’ world, Tong realized once again, and without knowing the rules, he would always be found offensive for reasons he did not understand.

Around the corner a few chickens sauntered in an alley. Tong fixed his eyes on a bantam hen, willing her to stop pecking, but she searched attentively for food, oblivious. A feral cat quietly approached the chickens from behind a three-legged chair, but before the cat could move closer, an older woman, sitting on a wooden stool in front of a yard, hit the ground with her stick and shrieked. The chickens scattered, flapping their wings and cooing frantically. Caught off guard, Tong took a few breaths to calm down before asking the old woman if everything was all right.

“Things could've gone wrong if not for my vigilance,” replied the old woman.

Tong turned to look at the feral cat, studying them at a safe distance. “That cat probably just wanted to play,” he said.

“I'm not talking about the cat,” the old woman said. Tong looked up at the woman, baffled. “I'm talking about you, boy. You thought you could snatch the hen when nobody was around, huh?”

Tong stammered and said he had never thought of stealing anyone's chicken.

“Don't think I didn't hear that little abacus clicking in your belly when you looked at my chickens,” the old woman said. “A village boy like you!”

Tong retreated from the alley. There was little he could say to defend himself.

AFTER LUNCH KAI WENT
to the one-room clinic on the first floor of the administration building and told the doctor that she didn't feel well. The doctor, around sixty-five years old, was entitled to give out only cold medicines and slips for a sick leave—with any problem bigger than a cough or a runny nose, the officials and clerks would go to the city hospital across the street.

Three days? the doctor asked while writing Kai's name neatly on top of the slip.

An afternoon would be fine, Kai replied. The doctor put down a cold that required a half day's rest, and then studied his old-fashioned penmanship for a moment with satisfaction before signing his name. Could he run it over to the propaganda department? Kai asked; she did not want her colleagues to make a fuss about a small cold, she explained, and the doctor nodded understandingly saying he would personally deliver the slip.

Kai went up to the studio through the back stairs and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside was an old cotton jacket of brownish gray color, with mismatched buttons, and patches sewn on both elbows. A scarf was tucked into one pocket, and in the other pocket was a white cotton mask. The jacket and scarf had belonged to their previous nanny, and Kai had traded with the woman for a jacket and a scarf of her own. For possible out-of-town assignments, Kai had told the nanny, and even though she had tried to keep the explanation vague, the nanny had replied that of course Kai would not want to wear her woolen jacket or silk scarf to some of the filthy places the lower creatures dwelled in.

Kai changed into the outfit. Underneath where the outfit was kept were a stack of letters, in unmarked envelopes, all from Jialin. Before she locked the drawer again she took one envelope randomly from the stack. Inside she found a long letter about the nature of a totalitarian system, and Kai, having reread it many times and memorized the content by heart, scanned the page; it was written more as a meditation than a letter, and she always wondered if the same letter had been sent to and read by many of Jialin's friends. On a separate page in the same envelope there was a note, a brief paragraph about a new program from Britain, broadcast in Mandarin, which Jialin said he had picked up recently on his shortwave transistor radio. Once again Kai wondered if it was pure imagination when she had sensed his eagerness to share the news with her; it was these shorter notes, addressed to her and about the small details of his life that were largely unknown to her, that made her unwilling to burn his letters as he had instructed her to do.

Jialin and Kai did not see each other often, and sometimes a week or two would pass before she could find an excuse to walk to the town library. They did not talk much, but quietly exchanged letters tucked inside magazines. Sometimes there would be several letters in the envelope he passed to her, and she tried not to wonder whether he might be waiting for her in the reading room day after day, or about his disappointment when she did not show up. The librarian was his friend, Jialin had once said; she allowed him to sit in the reading room as long as he had his mask and gloves on. Kai made herself believe that the librarian, a quiet woman in her late forties, offered enough friendship to Jialin so that his trips to the library were not futile.

Jialin and Kai never planned their encounters, and in their letters they dwelled little on the world where they would have to find excuses to see each other for just five or ten minutes; rather, they wrote about topics they could not discuss in person. She saved every letter from him. She wished she could bring herself to burn them, as she knew he must have dutifully done with every letter she had written to him, but one day she would have nothing left of him but his words, written on sheets of paper from a student's notebook, his handwriting slender and slanted to the right. Sometimes the ink from the fountain pen would run out and the dark blue words turned pale in the middle of a long passage; only when the words became as light as the paper, seemingly engraved onto the page rather than written, would he remember to refill the fountain pen.

Kai put the sheets back into the envelope and locked it with the others. A few minutes later, she left the building, her head wrapped up in the old scarf, her face covered by the mask. Few would recognize her now as the star announcer, and she felt momentarily free.

The library, the only one in town that was open to the public, was in a house that had once served as the headquarters for a local faction of Red Guards. Before that the house had belonged to an old man, but soon after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the man had killed himself with rat poison. His action baffled the townspeople. The man, said to have been an orphan adopted by a doctor and his wife, had grown up as half son, half apprentice to the doctor, who was the only medical expert in town when Muddy River was no more than a trading post; when the old couple passed away the man inherited their money and the old-style house, built as a quadrangle around a small and well-groomed garden, near the town center. The man practiced acupuncture occasionally but only for older patients troubled by back pain and arthritis; he was sage-looking, polite, and friendly, and it seemed that there was little reason for him to fear the upcoming revolutionary storms. But as any death had to be accounted for—suicide in particular, since any suicide could be a sinful escape from Communist justice—rumors started that the man was a Manchurian prince who had been biding his time to resurrect the last dynasty; as a famous general had said, a lie repeated a thousand times would become truth, and after a while the old man was deemed a political enemy who had slipped through the net of justice with an easy death. The local Red Guards soon occupied the property, printing out propaganda leaflets and storing ammunition; for months the back rooms also served as a makeshift interrogation room and prison cell.

The library, established now for a mere year and a half, occupied the two front rooms of the house. A few desks and chairs lined one side of the reading room, and on the other side was a butcher's workbench, where a dozen magazines were on display. The librarian sat at a desk at the entrance to the reading room, and if one asked for a book from the collection, she would unlock the door to the other room, where there were no more than ten shelves of books. There were no cards or catalogs; rather, when one was looking for a specific subject, the librarian would go into the collection and then come out with a book or two she had deemed fit for the subject at hand.

Few people in town used the library, and it had not surprised Kai that Jialin chose this place to wait for her. The librarian nodded at Kai distantly when she arrived, and went back to her reading. Kai wondered if the woman recognized her as the news announcer, but probably she just remembered Kai as the woman who stopped by once in a while to check out the few magazine subscriptions in the reading room. Kai did not talk, so that the librarian would not recognize her voice. The woman was a widow, and her late husband, a clerk in the city government, had jumped into the Muddy River when two young boys called for help; the man himself could barely swim and had saved neither his life nor the two boys’, in the end. The city government granted the man the title of hero, and when his wife, once a schoolteacher, requested a less challenging job, the government gave her the newly established position as the town's librarian, a position with an abundance of time for her to mourn in quiet.

Jialin was the only person in the reading room. Sitting in a corner and facing the door, he looked at Kai from above his cotton mask before resuming his writing in a thick notebook. She always looked for a change of expression on his face, but there never was one, and she wondered if her own eyes above her mask looked as blank as his. She walked to the magazine display and picked one up, the front cover showing an enlarged picture of the new national leader.

Kai read a few words on one page and then turned to another. The librarian, behind her desk, seemed to pay little attention to the two people in the reading room. Kai took out a piece of paper and scribbled a few words on it before walking past Jialin for another magazine.
We need to talk,
said the note that she dropped next to him. She wondered if he could sense the urgency in it. She had never requested anything before; a letter, drafted and revised, was what she usually passed to him.

Jialin put his notebook away in a bag and got ready to leave. Meet him at his place, instructed the note left inconspicuously next to the magazine that Kai was feigning interest in.

After waiting for a while she left too, walking away from the city center and into a more crowded world where cats, dogs, and chickens shared the alleys and the afternoon sunshine with dozing old men. It was a world Kai had once been familiar with—before she had moved away to the provincial capital she had lived in one of these alleys with her parents and siblings. The shabby house had been one of the reasons for her mother's unhappiness, as she believed that Kai's father had not climbed up the ladder fast enough to move them into one of the modern buildings. Only after Kai's marriage to Han did her parents get the flat that her mother had been dreaming of all her life. Their farewell to the alley was celebrated by Kai and her family at the time, but now she wished she had never left this world.

Kai found Jialin's house and pushed the slate gate ajar. The yard, the standard size of fifteen feet by twenty, was filled with all sorts of junk: unused pickle jars placed haphazardly on top of one another; inner tubes twisted and hung from the handlebars of a rusty bicycle, its two wheels missing; cardboard boxes crushed flat and piled high; three metal chain locks displayed prominently, forming a triangle inside which were three bayonets. They belonged to his three younger brothers, Jialin had told Kai the first time she visited him; he was walking her out to the gate then, and the passing comment about his brothers, along with the clutter, were mere facts about some strangers’ lives. But six months later, seeing them again, Kai knew she would one day remember these details as part of the world Jialin had inhabited; one day they would be used to construct him in her memory.

The door to the house opened. “Do you need help?” asked an older woman wrapped in a long cotton coat.

Kai pointed to the shack and said in a muffled voice that she was looking for Jialin. The older woman, who was no doubt Jialin's mother, with traces of him recognizable in her face, nodded and waved before closing the door.

His mother had learned not to ask about his life, Jialin explained when he caught her glancing back at the closed door of the house. He let Kai into the shack and pointed to the only chair.

“Your mother—she's not working today?” Kai asked.

“She has a cold.”

“And your brothers—are they at school?”

Jialin looked surprised by the small talk that never occurred between them. He hoped they were at school, he said, but rumors were that they had become part of a street gang and skipped school for their own business.

“Do your parents know?”

“The parents are always the last to learn of any bad news.”

“Don't you want to talk to your brothers, or at least let your parents know?”

They expected him not to interfere with their lives, Jialin said; in return they left him to his own world. Besides, they were only his half brothers, and there was little reason for him to step in front of their birth father and claim any responsibility. Did he share these stories about his life with his other friends? Kai wondered, thinking of all the questions she could not ask him.