The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li

  When none of the adults replied, Bashi turned back to Nini. “They are executing someone today. A woman. Think about it. One can't commit a crime and think one can run away without punishment.” Then, in a lower voice, he added, “Say, do you want to come and chat with me?”

  “Where?”

  “Come with me. I can show you my house now.”

  Nini shook her head. It was getting late, and her mother would be cursing her and her bad leg for being slow. “I need to go home,” she said.

  “Will you be free after breakfast? I'll wait for you upriver, by the old willow tree. You know that place?”

  The willow was an old, gnarled tree with a full head of branches, like a madwoman. It was quite a walk from Nini's home, past half the town, past the birch woods on the riverbank, until one could see not the low row houses but the high chimneys of the generation plant. Nini had been there before Little Sixth's birth; she had not been charged with most of the chores then, and in the spring, sometimes she had been sent to dig new dandelions and shepherd's purses. Through the spring and early summer, her family ate the edible grass, boiled in water and salted heavily; they ate it long past the season, until their mouths were filled with bitter, hard fibers. The memory made Nini's mouth full of the grassy taste.

  “How about it?” Bashi said. He looked at her as if her face were any other girl's face, her mouth not skewed to the left, her eyes not drooping in the same direction. Her left hand and left foot were bad too, but he seemed not to have noticed them either. “Are you coming?”

  Nini nodded.

  “Great,” Bashi said. He took a biscuit out of the tin in Nini's hand and popped it into his mouth before he walked away.

  TEACHER GU STARTED the fire and poured water on the leftover rice. He watched the yellow flame lick the bottom of the pot, the murmuring of the water inside soothingly hypnotic. A grain of sand is as complete as a world, he said to the fire, his voice audible only to his own ears. The thought that someone sitting above the clouds could gaze into this small cocoon in which he and his wife were trapped in pain comforted him; their suffering to the eyes above could be as tiny and irrelevant as the piece of coal in his own eyes, a burning ember that would soon cool into a gray ball of ash.

  The water boiled, and the lid of the pot let out sighs of white steam. Teacher Gu stirred the rice and sat down at the table. There was no sound from the bedroom, and he wondered if his wife had been falling into sleep; she had been escorted back by two policemen earlier, and they had made some harsh threats before taking off her handcuffs. He had worried that she would become hysterical, but she had kept herself still until the moment Nini arrived, the last person in the world who should be receiving his wife's anger.

  Teacher Gu's hands probed around on the table as if they belonged to a blind man. Over the years he had developed a habit of busying his hands with anything they could reach, a sign of some disturbing psychological problem perhaps, but Teacher Gu tried not to dwell on it. Apart from a bowl of leftover soup, the table was empty. Another broken ritual, Teacher Gu thought, gone with Nini and the folding of a paper frog out of the calendar. It had started when Shan was fourteen, a young Red Guard ready to rip the world apart. He had folded paper compulsively, his busy fingers saving him from the sorrow of watching his daughter transform before his own eyes into a coldhearted stranger. At breakfast on an early summer day when Shan had given a speech on how he should bow to the revolutionary youths instead of resisting with his silence, he made the paper frog jump and it landed in his wife's unfinished porridge. Neither Mrs. Gu nor Teacher Gu removed the frog, and he knew then that they would never laugh together as a family again. On the same morning, when Shan's young revolutionary friends came over, she suggested that they go out and “kick the bottoms of some counterrevolutionaries.” So easily she had let these vulgar words slip out, this daughter whom he had taught to recite poetry from the Tang dynasty since she was very young. Later, someone came to his school with the news that besides booting some people's bottoms, Shan had also kicked the belly of a woman eight months pregnant. Teacher Gu hid himself in his office and wrote a long essay, a meditation on the failing of poetry as education in an unpoetic age. Upon finishing and rereading the essay, he tossed it into the fire and braced himself to face his wife, with whom he shared the responsibility of having brought a near murderer into this world.

  How Shan had escaped the consequences of her action was beyond Teacher Gu's understanding. His wife began to break down and weep often, first thing in the morning or sometimes in the middle of a savorless meal. What wrong had she done to deserve Shan? his wife asked him. Was heaven punishing them because they had both been married before and thus brought impurity to their marriage? This notion was superstitious nonsense, Teacher Gu wanted to remind his wife, but she was lost too, led astray by the belief that she herself was responsible for the crimes committed by their daughter. In his quiet disapproval she grew into an ordinary, witless woman, trying to find a reason for every calamity and failure, as if the world were explainable and life would have to make sense for one to continue living.

  Teacher Gu shook his head. He was no better than she, he told himself. He was a man who had foolishly let himself be deceived by his own wishes. When he had first met his wife, she had just stopped belonging to her previous husband, as one of his five wives. She was the only one to leave the family of her own will when the newly established Communist government banned polygamy; the other wives had to be dragged away from the family by government officials. She was the first one to enroll in Teacher Gu's class for illiterate women-she was eighteen that year, her hair black and smooth as silk, her cheeks peach-colored, and her eyes two deep wells of sad water. She was born with an ill-favored face, people in town warned Teacher Gu when he decided to marry her. Look at her cheekbones, which are too high, her lips, which are not full enough, people said. He shrugged off their comments. Ill-fortuned she was, losing her parents at twelve, sold to a husband by her uncle at fourteen, serving a man forty years her senior as half wife and half handmaiden, but Teacher Gu did not want to listen to any of the talk. Husband and wife were birds of the same fate—so said the ancient poems. Wasn't it why they had become husband and wife in the first place? The day they got married, his first wife sent a telegram to him; keep each other alive with your own water, said the message. He hid the telegram, even though his new wife was not yet able to read all the characters in it. He never told her about the blessing, nor the fable behind those few words—two fish, husband and wife, were stranded in a puddle; they competed to swallow as much water as they could before the puddle vanished in the scorching sun so that they could keep each other alive in their long suffering before death by giving water to their loved one.

  It was not a surprise that Teacher Gu and his first wife, being in love, had wished to be the two fish in the story, nor was it a wonder that this wish, along with other dreams and plans, was left unspoken at the end of their marriage. Nothing went wrong except, as she put it in her application for divorce, their marriage could not live up to the demands of the new society, she as a model Communist Party member, he a counterrevolutionary intellectual once serving in the Nationalist government as an education expert. She stayed in the university after the divorce, the first female mathematics professor in the tri-province area, later promoted to be president of a prestigious college in Beijing; he, the founder of the first Western-style high school in the province, was demoted to the local elementary school. If husband and wife were indeed birds of the same fate, he was not a good match for his first wife. He wished her better fortune in finding a husband appropriate for her position, someone approved by the party, or, even better, someone assigned by the party. But she remained single, childless. He never gathered enough courage to ask why. They exchanged a letter or two each year, saying little, because he felt that he had nothing, or too much, to say. Her letters were plain greetings for him and his family, and he dared not imagine her anguish beneath the calm po
liteness.

  Teacher Gu's first marriage had lasted three years, and what he remembered, afterward, was many of their intellectual talks. Even on their honeymoon they had spent more time reading and discussing Kant than enjoying the beach resort. Early in his second marriage, he would sometimes watch his young wife asleep at night and hope that she would eventually offer more than her physical beauty, that he would be able to share his intellectual life with her—he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men's desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.

  When he had finally come to terms with what he could expect from his young wife, he did not love her less. He felt more responsible for her, not only as a husband and a man, but also as a parent and educator. He had always thought of her as his first child, before Shan and the other children they could not save—their firstborn, a baby boy, had lived for three days, and when Shan was two they had made one more effort that ended with a miscarriage. They gave up after that, counting it their blessing that they had Shan, a healthy, strong, and beautiful girl.

  A son might have been different, Teacher Gu thought now, a son who would have grown up into an intelligent young man, someone with whom he could have had a true conversation. A son would take care of his parents on this day of loss, and for all the days that were coming. But these were foolish thoughts, wishing for something in vain. He'd better put a stop to such irrational wanderings of his mind. Teacher Gu opened the drawer. He had not done his bookkeeping since the previous day.

  He paged through the notebook carefully, but there was no trace of the receipt. He went over the day before in his mind, the two officials, not impolite, and the pink, yellow, and white copies of the receipt they had produced. It had never occurred to Teacher Gu that he and his wife were to pay for the bullet that would take their daughter's life, but why question such absurdity when it was not his position to ask? He signed, and counted out the price of the bullet, twenty-four cents, for the two men. The price of two pencils, or a few ears of corn—what he had often bought for his poorer students. He remembered folding the receipt once in the middle and putting it into the notebook when his wife came back from the market, a cabbage and a radish in her string bag. In the alley, she did not question the two men leaving; perhaps she had not seen them, or perhaps she had already guessed who they were. He and his wife had not talked about Shan's case since the appeal had been turned down.

  Teacher Gu went over the notebook again. His wife never touched it, trusting him with all monetary matters. He himself had not opened the notebook since last night. “It must be taking a walk with a ghost,” a familiar voice said to Teacher Gu, and for a moment he was startled but then he recognized his nanny's voice from decades ago. She had been a servant for his grandparents, and she called him Young Master, but she was more like his mother—his own mother had been the headmistress of a boarding school for girls and had spent most of her time fund-raising for students from poor families to receive secondary education. Your mother is more capable than a man, he remembered his nanny saying with admiration. She herself, like the generation of women from her background, did not have any education, but she had theories and explanations for the smallest incidents in life. A misplaced hairpin must be taking a walk with a ghost, so too a lost coin or a missing tin soldier; sometimes the ghosts returned the runaway items but to different locations, because ghosts were forgetful, which also explained the permanent disappearance of things. She had a husky voice, which she said was a result of having cried too much over her husband and children, all of them caught in an epidemic of cholera. Gone to pay off their debts, she would talk about her family as if their deaths had just been another ordinary circumstance that required some straightforward explanation.

  Teacher Gu closed his eyes; in his drowsiness he felt as if he had been returned to his childhood, nodding off on the stories told in an unhurried manner by the nanny.

  The bedroom door opened, and before Teacher Gu could put away the notebook, his wife rushed to the stove and moved the pot away from the fire. The porridge had long ago stopped gurgling, and the front room was filled with a heavy, smoky smell. Teacher Gu looked at his wife apologetically, but she averted her eyes and scooped the meal out for them both, the less burned portion for him and the black bottom for herself.

  They ate without talking and without tasting either. When they had both finished, she got up and washed the bowls. He waited until she finished. “Nini's done nothing wrong. You should not treat her like that.”

  The words, once out of his mouth, sounded more accusing than he had intended. His wife stared at him. He tried to soften his voice. “What I mean is, after all, we've done more harm to her and her family. They've done nothing to us.”

  “They're part of the world that will celebrate your daughter's murder,” his wife said. “Why do we have to feel that we owe other people, when we're owed more than anybody?”

  “What I own is my fortune; what I'm owed is my fate,” Teacher Gu answered. The words sounded soothing and he repeated them one more time to himself, in a low, chanting voice. His wife did not reply and shut herself in the bedroom.

  ***

  NINI FINISHED all the biscuits and threw the tin away before she pushed open the gate. Unlike most families in Muddy River, hers did not have a rudimentary storage shed in their small yard. She poured the coal into a wooden crate covered by an old tarpaulin. The white hen, one of the two that her family owned, flapped its wings and leapt onto the crate. With a smack Nini sent the bird fluttering to the ground. The nosiest creature in the world, the white hen came to check on the coal every morning as if she had been assigned by Nini's mother to supervise her; in a low admonishing voice, Nini told it to mind its own business. The white hen strolled away, unruffled.

  In the front room that served as a kitchen, Nini's mother was cooking over hot oil, and Nini wrinkled her nose at the unusual aroma. The other hen of the family, a brown one that was not as diligent as the white hen in laying eggs, flapped her wings when she saw Nini come in, though her legs, bound together and tied to a stool, forbade her to move far. Without turning to look at Nini, her mother raised her voice over the sizzling pan and asked what had made Nini late. Nini, expecting her mother's anger, and a punishment with no breakfast, spoke haltingly of the long wait in the railway station, but her mother seemed not to hear her.

  Inside the bedroom, Nini's father and her sisters sat around the table on their brick bed. The small wooden bed table was the only good furniture they owned; the rest of the house was filled with cardboard boxes that served as closets, trunks, and cabinets. The brick bed was where every family function took place, and the bed table served as their dinner table, her sisters’ desk for homework, as well as their workbench. Nini's father worked in the heavy-metal factory and her mother packed ginseng and mushrooms in the wholesale section of the agricultural department; they earned barely enough to feed Nini and her five sisters, and clothes were passed down in order, from the parents to Nini and then to the rest of the girls. Every evening, the family sat together around the bed table and folded matchboxes to earn extra money. Even the three-year-old was given a small batch to finish. Besides the baby Nini was the only one who did not fold matchboxes. Her bad hand made her useless for the job, and it was made clear to her many times that she was living not only on her parents’ blood and sweat but also on that of her younger sisters.

  The fire had been built up in the belly of the brick bed. Nini's father was sipping cheap yam liquor from a cup, but he did not look as gloomy as he did when he drank in the evenings. Her mother came in with a plate of fried bread. Nini was shocked to find such an extravagant breakfast.

  Nini's father beckoned to her and said, “Come on. If you don't hurry, we'll finish yours for you.”

  Her sisters all giggled, a little nervously at first, more boldly when their mother did not shout and tell them to stay quiet. Even Little Sixth was making loud and happy noises. Nini's father dipped the end of his chopstick
s into the liquor, and then let the liquid drip into the baby's mouth. Nini's mother raised her voice to stop him but only in a laughing and approving way. The three-year-old and the five-year-old clamored and asked for a taste of the liquor, and their father gave them each drops of liquor too. The two older girls, already in school, knew better and did not ask, but they both sat close to their father. Lately they had begun to compete for his attention, the second daughter running to get his slippers and tea when he came home. But hard as she tried, replacing their mother in many ways to care for their father, Nini could see that she was no rival for the third daughter. The eight-year-old was a barometer of their father's mood—when he was in a good humor, she acted as if she had been his only love, demanding more attention with soft whining and intimate gestures; when he was in a bad mood, she kept to herself and tiptoed around the house.

  Nini climbed up on the bed. She huddled at the corner of the table farthest from her mother and asked the ten-year-old, “What happened to the brown hen?”

  “We'll make a chicken stew tonight for celebration,” her mother answered. “Feast on. Every wronged soul has a day to be compensated. I'm happy to see the day finally come.”

  Every spring, peasants from the mountain came down to Muddy River with bamboo baskets full of new chicks, yellow, fluffy, all chirping and pecking. Young children timidly asked for one or two as their pets and were surprised when their parents paid for ten or fifteen. The chicks died fast, breaking many children's hearts, but by the time summer came, with luck a few chickens would still be alive, among them a hen or two that would soon begin to lay eggs. Nini's parents did not have the money to buy in large numbers, so they farmed out Nini's sisters to watch the chicks in the spring so that they would not be devoured by hungry stray cats. In the evenings, when Nini cooked for the family, her sisters helped the neighbors round up the chickens for the night. Sometimes a family had an extra chicken left by the end of the summer, and they would give it to Nini's family. The transaction was based on trust and understanding, but the neighbors were often left with none after a whole season, and no one could be blamed for that.