by Yiyun Li
Bashi decided to go to the city hospital to find any news. Someone there must have information if the two sisters, as Nini believed, had been caught in the fire. He had found Nini curled up in a ball in front of his locked door earlier that afternoon when he had returned from his visit to the Huas. Wake up, girl, he had said, saying he had brought great news, but when she opened her eyes he was struck by how, in less than an hour, she had become a stranger—Nini always had everything on display in her small face, hunger and anger and curiosity and determination, but now the blankness in her face frightened him. Little Sixth, hearing him, crawled out of the storage cabin and smiled.
Did he still want to marry her, a bad-luck girl who had murdered her sisters and left her family homeless? Nini asked. It took Bashi a few minutes to understand the question. He tried to think of something to lighten Nini's mood, but his brain seemed frozen by her unblinking eyes. The Huas had agreed to take her in if her parents agreed to the marriage proposal, Bashi said, the news delivered with less confidence and joy than he had imagined. They could have been in heaven, Nini said; they could have been so happy. They could still be happy, Bashi said, but Nini shook her head, saying she was being punished for her happiness. Heaven was the stingy one, taking back more often than giving—Bashi remembered his grandmother's favorite saying and told it now to Nini. Heaven was the mean one, Nini said, and Bashi replied that, in that case, he would go to hell with her. For a while after that they watched Little Sixth crawl in the yard, their hands clasped together. They were two children for whom the world had not had any use in the first place, and in each other's company they had grown, within half a day, into a man and a woman who would have no more use for that world.
On the way to the hospital, Bashi saw unfamiliar faces loitering in twos and threes in the street. If not for the fire he would have been talking to these strangers, trying to strike up conversations, but now Bashi watched them with detachment. The world could have been collapsing but it would not have made any difference to Nini or to him.
The receptionist at the emergency room was unfriendly as always, and when Bashi could not pry any useful information from her, he thought of the two strangers in front of the hospital. “A busy day, brothers,” Bashi said when he approached them.
The two men looked Bashi up and down and did not reply. He offered them a pack of cigarettes. The younger one, not much older than Bashi, held out a hand and then, taking a quick glance at his companion, shook his head and said they had their own cigarettes.
“How disappointing. No offense, but I think it's unacceptable to refuse a cigarette offered to you. At least here in our town.”
The older man nodded apologetically and brought out two cigarettes, one for himself and one for his companion. The younger man struck a match and lit the older man's cigarette first. When he offered Bashi the match, already burning to the end, Bashi shook his head. “So, where are you from?” he said.
“Why do you ask?” the older man demanded.
“Just curious. I happen to know a lot of people in town, and you don't look like one I've seen.”
“Yes? What do you do?” the older man said.
Bashi shrugged. “Have you heard anything about this fire?” he said.
“There was a fire?”
“A house was burned down.”
“Bad luck,” the younger man said.
“So you haven't heard or seen anything? I thought maybe you would know, the way you have to stand here all day.”
“Who told you we stand here all day?” the younger one said. The older man coughed and pulled his companion's sleeve.
Bashi looked at the two and smiled. “Don't think I'm an idiot,” he said. “You're here because of the rally, no?”
“Who told you this?” the two men said, coming closer, one on each side of Bashi.
“I'm not a blind man, nor deaf,” Bashi said. “I can even help you if you help me.”
The older man put a hand on Bashi's shoulder. “Tell us what you know, Little Brother.”
“Hey, you're hurting me,” Bashi said. “What do you want to know?”
“All that you know,” the older man said.
“As I said, you need to promise to help me first.”
“You don't want to bargain on such things.”
“Oh yes? Do you want to know what that person did?” Bashi pointed to a middle-aged man, who exited the hospital and crossed the street.
The older man gave the younger man a look, and the younger man nodded and went across the street, running a few steps to catch up with the middle-aged man.
“If you can go into the ER and ask them if there was anyone hurt in the fire, I'll tell you what he did,” Bashi said, when the older man pressed again.
“Tell me first.”
“Then you won't help me.”
“I will.”
Bashi studied the man and then said, “I'll take your word. That man—I don't know his name but I know he works in the hospital-he signed a petition for the counterrevolutionary woman. Now you need to go in there and help me.”
The older man did not move. “Just that?”
“Why? This isn't important enough information for you?”
“Use your brain, Little Brother. If he signed the petition, why do we need you to tell us?”
“Then what do you want to hear?”
“Did you see anyone, say, who went to the rally without leaving a signature?”
That was what they were after, Bashi thought, and nodded with a smile, pointing to the entrance of the emergency room. The older man looked at Bashi and then flipped his finished cigarette into the gutter. “I'll do this for you and you better have something good for me in return.”
A few minutes later, the man came back and said nobody had died in the fire, but two little girls, badly burned, had been transferred that afternoon to the provincial capital. Bashi thought about the small bodies engulfed by the fire and shuddered.
The man studied Bashi. “The girls didn't die—I'm not sure if that's good news or bad news, but I've found it out for you. Now your turn.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I've said, all that you know.”
“This old woman—the mother of the counterrevolutionary, if you know whom I'm talking about—is a master behind the scene.”
The man snorted, unimpressed. “What else?” he said. “Tell us something we don't know.”
“I saw so many people I can hardly remember all their names.”
“At least you remember some?”
“Let's see,” Bashi thought, and listed the names, some he had seen at the rally, a few others who had, at one time or another, offended him. The man seemed uninterested in checking the validity of his report, so Bashi went on more boldly, giving as many names as he remembered from the rally and then throwing in a bunch of people he considered his enemies. The man wrote down the names in his notebook and then asked for Bashi's personal information.
Bashi gave the man his name and address. “Anytime you need help,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” the old man said. “Why did you go to the rally?”
“Just to see what was going on,” Bashi said, and bid farewell to the men.
THE JOY OF YOUTH shortened a day into a blink; the loneliness of old age stretched a moment into an endless nightmare. Teacher Gu watched his slanting shadow, cast onto the wall of the alley by the evening sun. The envelope in his hand was heavy, but for an instant he could not remember what he had been writing to his first wife. How long did it take for his letters to reach her desk, be opened, read, reread, and answered? He counted and calculated the time it should take for her letter to arrive, but the number of days eluded him.
His wife had been taken away the night before by two policemen, and now he remembered he had mentioned the arrest in a matter-of-fact way in the latest letter. The police had come and pushed open the door after one knock, and she came out of the bedroom and let them cuff her wrists without
saying anything. Teacher Gu was sitting at the table, his fountain pen in his palm even though he wasn't writing a letter. Neither the policemen nor his wife said anything to him, and for a moment he felt that he had become transparent, according to his own will. He wrote a long letter to his first wife, the spell of his liberation turning him into the poet that he had long ago ceased to be.
His wife did not return for breakfast or lunch, and by now, when homebound people were starting to fill the streets and alleys with their long overlapping shadows, Teacher Gu knew that she would not come home for dinner, or, as far as he knew, for the rest of his life. They all disappeared in this manner, not giving him any chance to participate, or even to protest: his first wife, late from work one day and the next thing he knew she had left a letter proposing divorce, written in her beautiful penmanship, next to a pot of tea that he had brewed for her and that later turned cold, untouched; Shan had been reading a book in her bed when the police came for her, close to bedtime because that was when all the arrests were customarily carried out, and there had been scuffles, resistance on Shan's side, questioning the legality of the arrest, but in the end Shan had been dragged away, leaving the dog-eared book by her pillow; his wife, the night before, had said nothing to question the police when they informed her of the arrest, nor had she resisted. She had said some words of apology to her husband's back, but what was the point of it, her heart no longer with him in the house they had shared for thirty years, but floating to a farther place, ready to occupy an altar? They all took their exits so easily, as if he were a dream, neither a good nor a bad one but an indifferent one filled with uninteresting details, and they would wake up one day and continue their lives, oblivious to his absence. Would they have a moment of hesitation and think about him, when they saw his face between two tree branches, or heard him in an old dog's coughing? Was his wife, wherever she was now, thinking about him, this aged invalid who had nothing better to do than wait and weep in the alley? Teacher Gu tried to steady himself with his cane but his hand shook so hard that, for a moment, he thought this was the end he had been looking forward to, when his body would exert its own will and throw him into the gutter before his mind could stop it.
“Are you all right?” It was the neighbor with the beautiful voice, whose name Teacher Gu had never bothered to find out and whose wife had been so keen on spying on them. He braked his bicycle next to Teacher Gu and supported him with a hand.
Teacher Gu, in a moment of confusion, tried to wriggle his arm free and run away. The man's grip, however, tightened like an iron clamp. He got off the bicycle, and with one hand still on Teacher Gu's arm, he said, “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“I'm going to the mailbox,” Teacher Gu said, when he regained his dignity.
“I can do it for you,” the man said.
Teacher Gu shook his head. He wanted to hear the thud of the letter dropping into the metal box. How many days had it been since he had sent out the first letter? He counted again, not knowing that the letter, bearing his name and address, would be, as were the other thick letters he had sent out, intercepted and read by a stranger first. The man who read the letters, an older man serving his last year in a clerical position at the police department, agonized over the almost-illegible passages, which reminded him of his dying parents and his own imminent retirement. He could circle the lines that spelled some unfriendly message to the government and make a big fuss, but in the end, finding no reason to cause undue pain to a fellow-man in the final, joyless years of old age, he stamped the letters as harmless and let them continue on through the post. He even wondered, at night, when he could not fall asleep, about the woman who would be reading the letters and writing back. He wished it was his duty to read the letters sent back to the Gu address, but that job belonged to another colleague, a woman in her late thirties who always sucked hard candy when she read, and the small distracting noise the candy made, clicking against her teeth, annoyed the old man. He could not bring himself to ask her about letters from a certain woman to Teacher Gu, but he was curious, almost as eager as Teacher Gu, for the woman to write back. Neither knew that the letters were sitting unopened in a study, along with other mail, the woman in question dying of cancer and loneliness, in a hospital for high-ranking officials in Beijing.
“I'll help you to the mailbox,” the man said now to Teacher Gu.
Teacher Gu did not speak. He freed himself from the man and walked on, but after a few steps, when the man offered again, he did not protest. He had not eaten anything since the night before, and when the man came back and found him barely supporting himself by the wall, he picked Teacher Gu up easily and placed him on the back rack of his bicycle. “I'm taking you to the hospital, all right?” he said in a raised voice, one hand gripping the handlebars of the bicycle and the other stabilizing Teacher Gu.
Teacher Gu protested so vehemently that he almost caused both of them and the bicycle to fall over. Another neighbor came to help, and together they rolled the bicycle slowly to Gu's gate. The man leaned the bicycle against the wall and helped Teacher Gu to get down from the rack, but before they could enter the yard, the man's wife appeared as if from nowhere. “What's going on here?” she said, clicking her tongue. “Aren't you the one who hates us proletariats?”
Teacher Gu stopped, and it took him a moment to realize she was addressing him, her eyes enlarging in front of his face, as she stood ridiculously close. “Where's that wife of yours?” she said. “Do you now believe in the power of the people?”
The other neighbor slipped away, and the man said to his wife, “Go home now. Don't make a scene.”
“Why shouldn't I?” the woman said. “I want to see these people rot in front of my eyes.”
Teacher Gu coughed and the woman shielded her face with her hand. “Go ahead. Come on in,” Teacher Gu said weakly. “It won't take too long.”
The woman opened her mouth but the husband said again in a pleading voice, “Go home now. I'll be back in a minute.”
“Who are you to order me around?” the wife said.
Teacher Gu, past the bout of dizziness now, carefully pried the man's fingers off his own arm. “Thank you, young man,” he said. “This is my home and you can leave me here.”
The man hesitated and his wife laughed. “Come on,” she said. “He's not your father and you don't have to follow him around like a pious son.”
The man left with his wife without a word, as she continued to ask why he was being courteous to an old counterrevolutionary. Teacher Gu watched them disappear through their own door. After a while, he entered the quiet house, dim and cold. For a moment he wished for a garrulous wife like the neighbor's. He wished she would flood the house with her witless words so he did not have to find meaning to fill in the emptiness himself. He stood and wished for things unwisely before pulling himself together. From a kettle he poured lukewarm water into a teacup and then added spoonfuls of powdered sugar to the water. He would need the energy to take care of all the necessary things first, the empty stomach and the full bladder and later the filled chamber pot. There would be other things to tend to afterward, plans to locate his wife, the procedures to go through to see her, all the things he had once done for his daughter and now would have to do again, less hopefully than ten years earlier, for his wife. Teacher Gu sipped the sugar water, chokingly sweet.
A single knock on the door announced once again an uninvited visitor. Teacher Gu turned and saw his neighbor, still in his worker's outfit, dark grease on the front of his overalls. “Teacher Gu,” he said. “I hope you don't mind my wife's rudeness.”
Teacher Gu shook his head. He invited the man to sit down at the table with a wordless gesture. The man brought out a few paper bags from his pocket. He ripped them open and let their contents—fried tofu, pickled pig's feet, boiled peanuts, seaweed salad scattered with white sesame seeds—spread onto the flattened paper. “I thought you might want to talk to someone,” the man said, and handed a small flat bottle o
f sorghum liquor to Teacher Gu.
Teacher Gu looked at the palm-sized flat bottle in his hand, green thick glass wrapped in a coarse paper with red stars. “My apologies for having nothing to offer you in return,” said Teacher Gu when he handed a pair of chopsticks to the neighbor.
The man produced another bottle of liquor for himself. “Teacher Gu, I've come to apologize for my wife,” he said. “As you said, man to man.”
Teacher Gu shook his head. As an adult, he had never sat at a table with someone of his neighbor's status, a worker, a less educated member of the all-powerful proletarian class. His only similar memory was from when he had visited a servant's home as a small boy—her husband was a carpenter who had lost the four fingers of his right hand in an accident, and Teacher Gu remembered staring at the stumps when the man poured tea for him. The smell from the man's body was different from the men he had known, masters of literature and teachers of the highest reputation. “What do you do, young man?” Teacher Gu asked.
“I work in the cement factory,” the man said. “You know the cement factory?”
Teacher Gu nodded and watched the man put two peanuts at a time in his mouth and chew them in a noisy way. “What's your name? Please forgive me for being an old and ignorant invalid.”
“My name is Gousheng,” the man said, and then, as if apologizing, he explained that his parents were illiterate, and that they had given him the name, a dog's leftovers, to make sure he would not be desired by devils.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Teacher Gu said. “How many siblings do you have?”
“Six, but all the rest are sisters,” Gousheng said. “I was my parents’ only good luck.”
A son was not what Teacher Gu had consciously hoped for, but now he wondered whether he was wrong. It would make a difference if he had a son, drinking with him, talking man-to-man talk. “Still, better luck than many other families,” Teacher Gu said.