by Yiyun Li
“What kind of teaching is that!” the old man grunted. “You may as well stay away from such a useless place.”
Tong wondered if he should leave the old man who claimed to be a schoolteacher but talked like a grumpy old illiterate. “You want to run away from me now?” the old man said. “You think I'm talking nonsense? Let me tell you: You could learn all the characters in the dictionary, and write the most spectacular articles in the world. You could be more learned than Confucius—do you know who Confucius was? Well, how could one expect you to learn anything from school these days? In any case, you could be as knowledgeable as a scholar, but still you could be more ignorant than an illiterate peasant or a beggar. Do you understand?”
Tong shook his head.
“What I'm saying is this”—the old man hit his cane on the ground—”you don't get real intelligence and wisdom from textbooks. As far as I can tell, you may as well run away from your stupid teacher who stuffs your brain with nothing but lard.”
Tong smiled in spite of himself.
“Now, if you want to be a good and useful human being, help me get this letter to the mailbox.”
Tong accepted the letter from the old man and was surprised by its weight. He glanced at the envelope, which bore several stamps. “No peeking!” the old man shouted, and then changed his mind and asked Tong to hand the letter back.
“I can help you, Grandpa. There's a mailbox there.”
“I know it perfectly well. Call me Teacher Gu. I'm no one's grandpa.”
Tong returned the letter to Teacher Gu, who patted it and then put it in his coat pocket. Tong held the old man's free arm with both hands. “I'll help you to walk,” he said.
“Thank you, but no, I can walk perfectly well,” Teacher Gu said, and he pushed Tong aside and let his cane lead him forward.
Tong followed Teacher Gu, for fear the old man's cane would catch in the gutter. Teacher Gu, however, stumbled forward without paying attention to Tong, as if all of a sudden the boy had ceased to exist for him. When they approached the mailbox, Teacher Gu studied the collection schedule, in small print, on the side. “What time does it say?” he said after a long moment of frowning.
Tong read to Teacher Gu, who looked at his watch. “Twenty past ten,” he mumbled aloud. “Let's wait then.”
Tong thought it strange that someone wanted to wait for the postman. Wasn't that the reason that a mailbox was installed in the first place, so that people could just drop their letters in and not have to wait?
“Why are you standing here?” Teacher Gu said after a while. “Were you sent by someone to spy on me?”
He thought he had been asked to wait, Tong explained, but Teacher Gu acted as if he had forgotten his own words. He checked the street and then tapped a finger on his watch for Tong to see. “Whoever is responsible for this mailbox is late,” he said. “Don't ever believe in what's written down.”
NEVER BEFORE had the midday break seemed so long. Teacher Gu drummed on the table with his fingers and waited for his wife to finish her lunch and go back to her bank teller's window. Near the end of the previous week, his school had sent a request for his early retirement, due to health reasons, and seeing that he was qualified for three-quarters of his pension, Teacher Gu had signed the paper without a moment's hesitation, or consultation with his wife. There were plenty of educated youths returning from the countryside; he might as well leave his position, no longer fulfilling to him anyway, to a young man for whom the dream of a family would make the long hours among noisy, pestering children endurable.
“You don't have to sit here and wait for me,” Mrs. Gu said. “Or do you need more rice?”
“I'm fine as I am.”
Mrs. Gu finished her lunch. When she cleaned up the table and washed the dishes, she poured a cup of tea and left it by his drumming hand. “Do you want to take a nap?” she asked.
“Don't you need to go to work now?”
“Yes.”
“Then go. I can take care of myself perfectly well.”
Mrs. Gu, to his disappointment, took a seat at the table. “Do you think we need to hire a girl from the mountain to help with the housework?”
“Are we rich people?”
“Or perhaps Nini? I've been thinking—you need a companion. You may need help too,” said Mrs. Gu. “Nini would be a good person in many ways.”
“I thought you hated her.”
Mrs. Gu looked away from his stare. “I know I've been unfair to her,” she said.
“She'd better learn to live with that then,” said Teacher Gu. “You won't be the last person to treat her unfairly.”
“But we could make it up to her,” said Mrs. Gu. “And her family too. I saw in the street that her mother was expecting again. They will need some extra money.”
Teacher Gu thought about how his wife had been brainwashed by her young comrades. Her desire to do good and right things disgusted him. “Don't we have enough spying eyes?” he said. “No, I would rather be left alone.”
“What if something happens to me?” Mrs. Gu looked at him and then shook her head. “I'll go to work now.”
“Yes. It's good not to ask questions we don't have to answer now,” Teacher Gu said to his wife's back, and when she closed the door behind her, he retrieved his fountain pen from the drawer and found the page in the notebook that contained another halfway-composed letter to his first wife. He reread it, but hard as he tried, he could not resume the thought that had been interrupted when his wife came home for lunch. He ripped the page off and put it in an envelope that already contained three similarly unfinished letters. Let her decide how she wanted to sort these out. On a new page he began writing:
Recently, I have been going over the Buddhist scriptures. No, they are not in front of my eyes—the scriptures my grandfather left me, as you may imagine, did not survive the revolutionary fire, started by none other than my own daughter. The scriptures I have been reading, however, are written in my mind. I am sure that this is of little interest to you with your Communist atheism, but do imagine with me, for one moment, the Buddha sitting under the holy tree and speaking once and again to his disciples. He who was said to be the wisest among the wise, he who was said to have vast and endless love for the world—who was he but an old man with blind hope, talking tirelessly to a world that would never understand him? We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.
Teacher Gu stopped writing when he heard someone walk into the yard through the unlocked gate. He looked out the window and saw his neighbors, the young revolutionary lunatic and her husband, coming to his door. The wife raised her voice and asked if there was anyone home. The door to the house was unlocked too, and for a moment, Teacher Gu wondered if he should move across the room quietly and bolt the door from the inside. But the distance to the door seemed a long, exhausting journey. He held his breath and closed his eyes, wishing that if he remained still long enough, they would vanish.
The couple waited for an answer and then the woman tried the door, which she pushed open with a creak. “Oh, you're at home,” the woman said with feigned surprise. “We heard some strange noise and thought we would come to check.”
Teacher Gu replied coldly that things were perfectly fine. Discreetly he moved a newspaper to cover his unfinished letter.
“Are you sure? I heard you had a stroke. We'll help you check,” the woman said, and signaled for her husband to come into the room from where he stood by the door, his two hands rubbing each other, as if he was embarrassed. “Is your wife home?” the woman asked.
“Why should I answer you?”
“I was just wondering. It's not a good thing for a wife to leave her husband home.”
“She's at work.”
“I know, but I'm talking in general. When you were in the hospital, I saw her leaving home after dark at least twice,” the woman said, and turned to her husband. “Why don
't you check and see what that noise is? Maybe it's a litter of rats.”
The man stepped up unwillingly and looked around, avoiding Teacher Gu's eyes. The woman, however, did not conceal her interest as she walked around the room and checked all the corners. When she took the lid off a cooking pot and looked in, Teacher Gu lost his patience. He hit the floor with his cane. “You think we're too old to take care of a rat in our cooking pot and need you snakes for that?”
“Why, it's not good manners to talk to your neighbors this way,” the woman said, throwing the lid back on the pot. “We're here to help you before things get out of hand.”
“I don't need your help,” Teacher Gu said. He supported himself with one hand on the table and stood up, pointing to the door with the cane. “Now leave my house this very instant. You don't happen to have a search warrant, do you?”
The woman ignored his words and moved closer to the table. She lifted the newspaper, uncovered the half letter, and smiled. Before she had a chance to read a word, Teacher Gu hit the tabletop with his cane, an earsplitting crack. The cup of untouched tea jumped off the table and spilled onto the woman's pants; the saucer, falling onto the cement floor, did not break.
The husband pulled his wife back before she could react; her face remained pale when he assured Teacher Gu that they did not mean him any harm. The husband's voice, a polite and beautiful baritone, surprised Teacher Gu. The man was a worker of some sort, as he wore a pair of greasy overalls and a threadbare shirt. Teacher Gu realized that he had never heard the man speak before. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine a more educated mind for that voice.
The wife, her face regaining color, stepped from behind the man. “What do you think you are doing? This is a civilized society.”
The woman's voice was shrill. Teacher Gu could not help but feel sorry for the husband, whose beautiful voice—were it to have a life of its own—would probably be disappointed beyond words by the mismatch of the other voice, blade-thin and ugly.
“Don't think you can scare me with that Red Guard style of your daughter's,” the wife said. “Let me tell you, truth is not to be enforced by violence in our country.”
Teacher Gu pointed his cane at the woman's face, his whole body shaking. “Do not come and shit in my house,” he said slowly, trying to enunciate every word.
“What vulgarity for a schoolteacher,” the woman said. “The earlier you are fired, the better for the next generation.”
The husband pulled her back and moved between her and the shaking cane, apologizing for the misunderstanding. She pushed her husband aside and said there was no need to succumb to the rudeness of the old man. “Now I dare you to hit me. Hit me now, you counterrevolutionary fox! Hit me so we can put you under the guillotine of justice.”
Teacher Gu watched the woman, frothing with a hatred that he did not understand; she was his daughter's age, without much education perhaps, without a brain for sure. He let the cane fall to the floor and said to the husband, “Young man, I beg you—this request is between two men—and I beg you sincerely. Why don't you tell your wife that such behavior will only make her an ugly, unwanted woman in the end?”
The woman sneered. “What a rotten thought. Why should I be taught anything by my husband?” she said. “Women are the major pillars for our Communist mansion.”
Teacher Gu sat down and wrote in big strokes on a piece of paper, his handwriting crooked, with no beautiful calligraphy to speak of. SHUT UP. GO AWAY. He showed the paper to the couple. He had decided not to waste one more word on the woman.
“Who are you to order us around? Let me tell you, you and that wife of yours are like the crickets after the first frost. There's not much time left for you to hop.”
The man dragged his wife away, and when she resisted, he said in a low voice that she might as well shut up now. She raised her voice and questioned him. The man half dragged and half carried her out of the house. Through the open door, Teacher Gu heard her shouting and cursing at her husband's cowardice even in front of an old, useless man. Teacher Gu gathered all his energy to move across the room and close the door. When he returned to the table, his hands were shaking too hard to write. The visitors, even though farcically obvious in their intention to uncover some firsthand secrets, spelled danger; but while waiting for the noose to tighten around his neck, what could a man do except close his eyes and believe that the possibility of escaping one's fate lay not in the hands of others but in one's own will?
UNDER THE SHELTER of a dark evening sky on the day after Ching Ming, ten houses were entered and searched. Arrests were made, and none of the suspects resisted. By nightfall the first victory against the anti-Communist disruption was reported in a classified telegraph to the provincial capital.
A high-ranking party official, flown in from the provincial capital to take charge, was met by the mayor and his staff. Han and his parents, once considered the most trustworthy assistants to the mayor, were excluded from the meeting. Special security teams, formed to ensure an impartial investigation and cleansing of Muddy River, and made up of police and workers from a city a hundred miles away, were transported into the city in ten covered army trucks. During the ride, a young man who had recently inherited his father's position in the police department, worked loose a knot in the tarp cover and peeked outside. The silver stars in the sky and the dark mountain, even from afar, made him shiver like a young dog. He had just turned twenty, and had never left his hometown. He imagined the stories he would tell, upon his return, to the young clerk at the front desk; she would call him a braggart, insisting she did not believe a single word, but her blushing smile would tell a different story, understood only by the two of them.
The people of Muddy River, despite speculation and uncertainty, trusted in the old saying that the law did not punish the masses for their wrongdoing. This belief allowed them to busy themselves with their nightly drinking, arguing, lovemaking—their grand dreams and petty desires all coming alive once again on a night like this, when wild peach and plum trees blossomed along the riverbank, their fragrance carried by the spring breeze through open windows and into people's houses.
A carpenter and his apprentice walked on the Cross-river Bridge in the direction of the mountain, the young man pushing a wheelbarrow with his tools and watching the red tip of a cigarette dangling from his master's mouth. The carpenter had bought the cigarettes with their last money, as he had sworn before coming to the city that he wanted to have a taste of cigarettes. There had been other promises, made to the carpenter's wife and the apprentice's parents, before they had left the mountain, but their hope of making a small fortune was defeated by the officials who hired them to make, among other things, three television stands without paying more than the minimum compensation. City dwellers, the carpenter said between puffs, were a bunch who'd had their hearts eaten out by wild dogs; he warned his apprentice not to make the same mistake again, but the young man, who had been puzzled by the television sets he had seen in the officials’ homes, imagined himself sitting in one of the armchairs he had helped to make and enjoying the beautiful women who appeared on the television screen at the push of a button.
A blind beggar sat in front of the Huas’ shack and ran a small piece of rosin along the length of the bow for his two-string fiddle. He had been on his way from one town to the other when he met Old Hua and his wife, who had invited him to stay at their place for the night and had treated him to a good meal. The beggar had not met the couple before, though it did not surprise him, after a round of drinking, that they began to tell stories about their lives on the road. People recognized their own kind, despite all possible disguises, and in the end, the three of them drank, laughed, and cried together. The couple asked the beggar to stop drifting and settle down with them, and it seemed natural for him to agree. But now that the magic of the rice liquor had waned, the blind man knew that he would leave first thing the next morning. He had never stayed with anyone in his life, and it was too late to chan
ge his fate. He tested the bow on the string, and the fiddle sighed and moaned.
The door opened, and the blind man stopped his bow and listened. The husband was snoring from inside the shack, and the wife closed the door as quietly as she had opened it and took a seat near the beggar.
“I'm waking you up,” the blind man said.
“Go on and play,” Mrs. Hua said.
The blind man had planned to sneak away without waking the couple up, but now with the wife sitting next to him, he owed her an explanation. “It was nice of you to invite me to stay,” he said. “I don't mean to be a man who changes his mind often, but I think I may have to decline your kindness.”
“You have to be back on the road. I don't blame you.”
“Once destined to be homeless, one finds it difficult to settle down.”
“I know. I wish we could go back on the road too,” Mrs. Hua said. “Now go on and play”
The blind man nodded, knowing that the couple would not take his departure as an offense. Slowly he drew the bow across the string and played an ancient song called “Leave-taking” for his day-old friendship.
ELEVEN
Bashi was in love, and it perplexed him. The desire to be with Nini for every minute of his life seemed not to come from between his legs but from elsewhere in his body, for which he had no experience or explanation. He thought hard and the only similar experience had been when he was three, not too long after his mother had left him with his grandmother: Winter that year had been particularly harsh in Muddy River, and every morning they would wake up to frozen towels on the washstand, even though his grandmother had not spared one penny on coal. Every day they slipped into bed together straight after dinner, and often in the middle of the night Bashi would wake up with icy cold feet. He would whimper, and his grandmother, still dreaming, would grab his little feet and hold them against her bosom, not one layer of nightclothes in between. The soft warmth made Bashi shiver with inexplicable fear and excitement, and he would lie awake, wiggling one toe and then another, imagining the toes in their adventure until he fell asleep.