The Vagrants (5 page)

“You may still have a chance, if you walk away by yourself now,” Han said, and in a lower voice, he told Kai to go on to the ceremony, as he would wait for the police.

The old woman looked up. “You'll all see her off in your way. Why can't I see her off in mine?”

The security patrol explained to Han and Kai that this woman was the mother of the soon-to-be-executed counterrevolutionary. Only then did Kai recognize the defiance in Mrs. Gu's eyes. She had seen the same expression in Shan's eyes twelve years ago, when they had been in rival factions of the Red Guards.

“Our way to send your daughter off is not only the most correct way but also the only way permitted by law,” Han said, as he ordered the security patrol to fetch water. Mrs. Gu poked the fire with a tree branch, as if she had not heard him. When the patrol returned with a heavy bucket, Han stepped back and motioned the man to put out the fire. Mrs. Gu did not shield her face from the splashing water. The pile hissed and smoldered, but she poked it again as if she were willing the flame to catch again.

Two policemen, summoned by the other patrol, were now pushing through the crowd and shouting, telling people to move on. Some people left, but many only retreated and formed a bigger circle. “Let's not make a big fuss out of this,” Kai said to Han, as he strode up to meet the policemen.

“Those who seek punishment will get what they ask for,” Han said.

The patrol greeted the police, and pointed out Han and Kai, but Mrs. Gu paid little attention to the men surrounding her, mumbling something before she wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

“Why don't you just let her go?” Kai said to Han, and she quoted an old saying,
Favors one does will be returned to him, and pains one causes will be inflicted on him.

Han glanced at Kai, saying that he did not know that she could be superstitious.

“If you don't want to believe in it for yourself, at least believe in it for your son,” Kai said. The urgency in her voice stopped Han, who looked at her with half-smiling eyes. He said he had never known she would take up the beliefs of the old generation.

“A mother needs all the help possible to ensure a good life for her child,” Kai said. “What if people direct curses at Ming-Ming because of what we do?”

Han shook his head, as if amused by his wife's logic. He greeted the policemen and told them to escort the old woman home and find someone to clean up the street. “Let's not make a big fuss this time,” he said, echoing Kai's words and adding that there was no need to put additional stress on this day. The other men complimented Han for his generosity: More power to him who lets someone off without pursuing an error, the older policeman said, and Han nodded in agreement.

THREE

         
M
rs. Hua did not see the policemen remove Mrs. Gu from the site of her crime; nor would Mrs. Hua have realized, had she witnessed the scene, that the woman who was half dragged and half carried to the police jeep was Mrs. Gu.

Like Mrs. Hua herself, Mrs. Gu would never become a grandmother. Mrs. Hua was sixty-six, an age when a grandchild or two would provide a better reason to live on than the streets her husband scavenged and she swept, but the streets provided a living, while the dreams about grandchildren did not, and she was aware of the good fortune to be alive, for which she and her husband often reminded themselves to be grateful. Still, the urge to hold a baby sometimes became so strong that she had to pause what she was doing and feel, with held breath, the imagined weight of a small body, warm and soft, in her arms. This gave her the look of a distracted old woman. Once in a while her boss, Shaokang, a man in his fifties who had never married, would threaten to fire her, as if he was angry with her slow response to his requests, but she knew that he only said it for the sake of the other workers in the sanitation department, as he was one of those men who concealed his kindness behind harsh words. He had first offered her a job in his department thirteen years ago, when he had seen Mrs. Hua and her husband in the street, she running a high fever and he begging for a bowl of water from a shop. It was shortly after they had been forced to let the four younger girls be taken away to orphanages in four different counties, a practice believed to be good for the girls to start anew. Mrs. Hua and her husband had walked for three months through four provinces, hoping the road would heal their fresh wound. They had not expected to settle down in Muddy River, but Shaokang told them sternly that the coming winter would certainly kill both of them if they did not accept his offer, and in the end, the will to live on ended their journey.

“The crossroad at Liberation and Yellow River,” said Shaokang, when Mrs. Hua came into the department, a room the size of a warehouse, with a desk in the corner to serve as an office area. She went to the washstand and rinsed the basin. There was little paste left; he had given her much more flour than needed, but she knew he would not question the whereabouts of the leftover flour.

Mrs. Hua went to the closet but most brooms had not yet been returned by the road crew. When all present, the brooms, big ones made out of bamboo branches and small ones made out of straw, would stand up in a line, like a platoon of soldiers, each bearing a number in Shaokang's neat handwriting and assigned to a specific sweeper. Sometimes Mrs. Hua wondered if in one of Shaokang's thick notebooks he had a record of all the brooms that had passed through the sanitation department: how much time they had spent in the street and how much they had idled in the closet; how long each broom lasted before its full head went bald. The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang's back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.

Mrs. Hua picked up the brooms that belonged to her and told Shaokang that the night before she had dreamed of painting red eggs for a grandchild's birthday. Mrs. Hua spoke to Shaokang only when there was no one around. Sometimes it would be days or weeks before they had a chance to talk, but neither found anything odd in that, their conversations no more than a few words.

“A dream is as real as a blossom in the mirror or a full moon in the river,”
said Shaokang. He did not look up from the notebook he was studying. Mrs. Hua sighed in agreement and headed to the door. Earlier that morning she had told the same dream to her husband, and he had replied that it was a good dream, if nothing else.

“Do you want some time off today?” Shaokang asked.

Why would she, replied Mrs. Hua. He worried that the denunciation ceremony might bore Mrs. Hua, Shaokang said, and added that enough workers would be representing the sanitation department. As if boredom was something that people like her should be concerned about, Mrs. Hua thought, but she could use a day off to help her husband sort out the bottles that had been accumulating in their shed. Indeed, she was trying to fight off a cold, Mrs. Hua said, lying for the sake of the office desk and the brooms and the four empty walls. Shaokang nodded and said that after she cleaned up the crossroad she need not report to the denunciation ceremony.

The pile at the intersection was scattered by the indifferent tramping shoes of adults as well as the kicking feet of children for whom the half-burned fabric and scorched shoes all provided endless amusement. Mrs. Hua shooed a few persistent children away and cleaned the street while thinking about her dream from the night before.

“Morning, Mrs. Hua,” a voice whispered to her, too close to her ears.

Mrs. Hua, startled, saw Bashi, that good-for-nothing idler, smile at her. She mumbled that she wished he had better things to do than frighten old folks in the street.

“Frighten? I didn't mean to. I was only going to remind you that Old Hua might be waiting for you at home.”

“Home? Rubbish collectors do not boast about home,” said Mrs. Hua. “It's a temporary nest.”

“But my home is your home, Mrs. Hua. I've told my grandma many times that you and Old Hua could move in with us any day you like. You know she's a bit lonely and wouldn't mind some old friends around,” Bashi said, looking sincerely into Mrs. Hua's eyes.

Mrs. Hua shook her head and said, “Nobody believes your sweet talk except your grandma.”

“I mean it, Mrs. Hua. Ask anyone in town. Everyone knows I am generous about my wealth, and ready to help anyone in need.”

“Your wealth? That's the money your father earned with his life.”

Bashi shrugged and did not bother to refute the old woman.

“Son, don't you worry about your future?”

“What do I have to worry about?” Bashi said.

“What can you do, son?” she said. “I worry about you.”

“I can go rubbish collecting with Old Hua,” Bashi said. “I can sweep the streets with you too. I'm a hard worker. See my muscles. Here and here. I'll tell you, Mrs. Hua, it's not a joke to lift dumbbells every morning.” There were neither dumbbells nor muscles worth bragging about, but such stories came readily and convincingly to Bashi.

“Street sweeping is a hard job to get now,” Mrs. Hua said. In the past two years, the end of the Cultural Revolution had brought many young people back from the countryside, where they had been sent over the past decade. Even a street sweeper's position was something people fought over now. She would not be surprised one of these days to find herself replaced.

“There's no permit required to go rubbish collecting,” Bashi said. “That's an easy thing to do.”

“It's a hard life.”

“I don't mind. Honestly, Mrs. Hua, I would love to go rubbish collecting, and baby collecting too, with you.”

Mrs. Hua gathered the wet ashes on the ground without replying. It had been years since she and her husband had given up the seven girls they had found in their wandering lives as rubbish collectors, and she did not know what continued to capture the young man's interest, when the story had long ago lived out its due in people's gossip and curiosity. He asked them often, and she never offered much to satisfy him.

“Would Old Hua and you bring up a baby girl again if you found a live one now?”

Mrs. Hua looked at the sky and thought about the question. Hard as she tried—often at night when she was unable to sleep—she could not summon up clear images of the seven faces. How could she forget their looks when she had raised them from rag-covered little creatures left by the roadside? But old age played tricks, dulling her memory as well as her eyes.

“Would you, say, keep an eye out for a baby girl?” Bashi persisted.

Mrs. Hua shook her head. “Too hard a life. A hard life for everybody.”

“But I could bring up the girl along with you, Mrs. Hua. I have the money. I can work too. I'm young.”

Mrs. Hua studied Bashi with her cataract-bleared eyes. Bashi stood straighter and arranged his hat. The young man in front of her had not had the first taste of hardship in life, Mrs. Hua thought, and said so to Bashi.

“I lost my parents when I was young,” Bashi said. “I'm as much an orphan as your girls were before you picked them up.”

Caught off guard, Mrs. Hua could not think of what to say. She had not known that Bashi would remember his parents. After a moment, she said, “Better to have left them to die in the first place.”

“Where are your daughters now?” Bashi asked. “How old are they?”

“Wherever their fates have brought them to. Where else can they be?”

“Where is that?” Bashi persisted.

“Three of them we left with people who were willing to take them in as child brides. The four younger ones were confiscated by the government and sent to orphanages because we were not the legal parents. What do you think of that, son?” Mrs. Hua said, unaware of her raised voice. “We fed them spoonful by spoonful and brought them up and then we were told it was illegal to keep them in the first place. Better just to let them die from the start.”

Bashi sighed. “It makes no sense, this life, does it?”

Mrs. Hua did not reply. Bashi repeated the line to himself and let it stay in the air between them for a beat longer.

NINI SLOWED DOWN
when she approached the alley where Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu lived. She had managed to get to the railway station in time, and the workers had given her coal and then shooed her away. None of them seemed to like her, and she often wondered if someday they would find her unbearably ugly and change their minds. That had not happened, but she often worried about it.

She worried too about Mrs. Gu's hospitality. For the past two years, Mrs. Gu had never failed to show up where her alley joined the street. Standing by a half-dead plum tree, she would put a hand on the trunk and swing her legs, one and then another, as if she were doing some halfhearted exercises, and when people walked past her she did not greet them. At the sight of Nini, Mrs. Gu would nod imperceptibly and turn toward her alley, and Nini would know that she was welcome in the house for another day.

This morning ritual had started not long after Nini's parents had made her responsible for providing coal. Since the Gus’ house was out of Nini's way, Mrs. Gu had been the one to seek Nini out one morning, asking politely if she would like a few bites of breakfast before going home. Nini thought the invitation odd and suspicious, but a hungry child all her life, she found it hard to turn away.

Nini did not know why Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu invited her to breakfast. They seldom talked between themselves, at least when she was around. They asked her about her family once in a while, and when Nini offered the briefest answers to their questions, they did not press for more information, so Nini knew they had no more interest in the topic than she did. Teacher Gu ate fast, and while waiting for Nini to finish her breakfast, he folded a frog out of the piece of paper he had ripped off the calendar and had kept neat and flat on the table. For your sisters, Teacher Gu said when he placed the paper frog in her hand, though she never passed it on to them. She had thought of keeping all the paper frogs but there was no corner in her house to save anything. In the end, she left them in the rubbish can, picked up later by Old Hua, unfolded, and sold to the recycling station.

Nini always worried that one day Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu would stop caring about her, and her bowl would be missing from the table. When she saw now that no one was standing next to the half-dead plum tree she wondered, for a second, if Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu had overslept; they could have gotten ill also, she thought, old people as they were, their bodies no longer reliable. Still, her instincts told her that they must have stopped wanting her around, and she decided to go to the Gus’ house, if only to make sure that was true.

Several steps into the alley a police jeep drove toward Nini with short impatient honks, and she hurried to make way for the vehicle, almost twisting her bad foot. When the jeep turned out of the alley Nini said a curse she had picked up at the marketplace—even though she understood little of its meaning, it fitted her mood and she used it often. She lingered in front of the Gus’ gate for a few minutes and made small coughing sounds, but neither Mrs. Gu nor Teacher Gu rushed out of the gate to apologize for their lateness. Nini pushed the gate ajar and let herself into the yard. The front room was unlit, and the window that faced the yard was covered with thick layers of old newspaper for insulation. Nini looked in, but could see nothing through the opaque newsprint. “Mrs. Gu,” she said quietly, then raised her voice a little. “Teacher Gu.” When no one answered, she tried the door, and it opened without a sound. The front room, dark and cold, was lit only by a long stripe of orange light on the floor that came from the half-closed door of the bedroom. “Mrs. Gu,” said Nini. “Are you feeling all right today?”

The bedroom door opened and Mrs. Gu stood in the frame, a dark silhouette. “Go home now, Nini,” she said in a flat voice. “We don't
owe
you any more. Never come to my door again.”