The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li

  A strange smell came from the stove, reminding Nini of her father's sheepskin hat that had been shoveled into the belly of the stove under their bed at home; it was Little Fourth and Little Fifth who had dreamed up this mischief, for reasons that Nini didn't understand, but it was Nini who had received a good beating on their behalf, her back swollen for a week afterward.

  Nini poked the burning fish bones with the iron tongs but the nauseating odor became stronger. She went into the bedroom and rummaged through the closet and chest of drawers, and found nothing but an old bottle of floral water that must have belonged to Bashi's grandmother, the green liquid already sticky. She opened the lid and poured a small amount in her palm, and was horrified by the pungent fragrance condensed by years of sitting in the bottle. It made her sneeze.

  Nini put her hand under running water for a long time and then sniffed her palm. It was less noticeable. She was relieved when she found half an orange left next to Bashi's pillow. She peeled one slice and sucked it while putting the rest of the orange into the fire. The fire engulfed the half orange and soon the room was filled with a more pleasant smell.

  Someone knocked on the gate. She turned off the light in the room and slipped out of the house and into the storage cabin. The pounding of something metal on the thin wooden gate frightened Nini. Soon these people would come in, devils sent by her parents to destroy her hope of a happy life, and Bashi was not here to protect her; soon they would drag her away from this house and put her back into the jail run by her parents.

  “Hello, what are you doing to my gate?”

  Out of gratitude Nini almost wept when she heard Bashi's voice.

  “Are you Lu Bashi?”

  “I don't know any other Lu Bashi in my life.”

  “Then come with us.”

  “Where to?”

  “You'll know when you get there.”

  “That sounds exciting,” Bashi said. “But I can't go with you just now. I have more important business to deal with.”

  “Be disappointed, then,” the man said. “Nothing is more important tonight than coming with us.”

  Something metal was shaken outside.

  “Are the handcuffs real? I remember I had a toy pair when I was this small,” Bashi said.

  “Try them on.”

  “Sorry, but I would rather be the one to cuff others,” said Bashi. “What are you here for?”

  “You know better than we do.”

  “I truly can't think of anything I've done wrong.”

  “Well, you can keep thinking about it when we get to the station.”

  Nini thought about opening the gate and dragging Bashi in before the men registered her existence. She could bolt the gate from the inside, and by the time the men broke it down she and Bashi would be gone from the yard, the house, and this world of horrors.

  “But I'm busy tonight. Can I come tomorrow morning?”

  A man grunted. “Look here. Do you know what this is? Can you read?”

  “Arrest order. Now what is that for?”

  “Well, let's go. I've never seen a person who talks as much as you.”

  “Please, brothers, give me a hint. Is it because of a girl? Do you know if this has anything to do with a girl?”

  “A girl!” the men said, laughing. “Did you get lost in your own wet dreams to think that we would come to get you because of a girl?”

  “So it's not girl-related,” Bashi said.

  Her parents, after all, did not care about her enough to go through the trouble to find her, Nini thought. Perhaps they would celebrate their good fortune in her loss.

  The men again urged Bashi to go with them.

  “Wait a second. Comrades, you are very gracious. Do you want to give me a minute to get a few things settled in my house?”

  “You look enough like a man but fuss like a girl,” one man said, shaking the handcuffs again. “We have other houses to visit. We don't have the whole night to entertain you.”

  “Please, just one minute. I have to tell my grandmother that I will not spend the night at home. You know how it goes with old women—they worry all the time even when there's nothing much going on.”

  “Now don't fool us. Here it says you're the only resident in this house, isn't that correct?”

  “True for the household register, but think of the ghost of my grandma—she raised me and she wouldn't leave me here all by myself so I talk to her every day and let her know where I am. If you take me away without informing her, what if she followed me to the station? What if she made a mistake and followed you two home instead and disturbed your children's sleep? Don't say you're from out of town and you don't worry about such things. Ghosts travel faster than you and me.”

  Nini shivered in the darkness. She looked up at the ham hanging just above her head. What if the ghost was watching her? But what kind of a ghost was she if she didn't come to rescue her own grandson? Nini said a low prayer to the old woman and asked her to understand who her real enemies were.

  “Are you bluffing? You know this is a new society where superstition has no place.”

  “Well, if you don't trust me, take me away now. The thing is, you never know. Ghosts don't read newspapers and they don't listen to government broadcasts.”

  “That's all right,” the voice that belonged to the older of the two men said. “Let's give him a minute. It's not like he can run away from us.”

  “No, I won't run away from you,” said Bashi. “You have my word—I'll only be a minute.”

  “What do you mean by that? We're coming in with you.”

  “But my grandma hasn't invited you.”

  “We'll be good houseguests.”

  The gate opened and the three men came into the yard. Nini, squatting behind a jar in the storage cabin, remembered Little Sixth fast asleep in the bedroom, and her heart began to pound. “Do you smell that?” she heard Bashi say, after the door was open.

  “What's the smell?”

  “My grandmother's floral water,” Bashi said. “How long has it been since I smelled it? The last time she used it I was still a child going into the street without my pants.”

  The two men coughed uneasily and one of them said, “Now hurry up.”

  “You're not coming in with me? Perhaps my grandma knew you were coming and prepared some food for you.”

  “Let's go now,” one man ordered suddenly with a sharp voice. “I'm tired of your superstitious nonsense.”

  “Are you scared, comrade?” Bashi said, but his laughing was interrupted when one of the men yanked him back and made him stumble down the steps. He cried out loudly, but the two men grabbed him and dragged him out the door. “Nana,” called out Bashi. “Did you hear the gentlemen? I need to be away for a night. No need to worry, Nana. I'll be back in a blink and you be good and stay here. Don't ever think of being naughty and following the gentlemen here, all right? I don't want you to get lost.”

  Someone cursed and then Bashi screamed in pain. Nini squatted in the darkness and cried. She heard the neighbors’ gates open with creaks and then close. After a while, she came out of the storage cabin. A crescent moon was halfway up the sky, reddish gold. The gate to the alley was open just a crack. Nini walked quietly to the gate and looked out. The neighbors had returned home, every gate closed in the alley. She pushed Bashi's gate, inch by inch, until it shut soundlessly. There was no ghost in the world, she thought; the old woman was buried, cold in the dirt, and she would not come to rescue Bashi or be offended by Nini. They were at the mercy of strangers, as always.

  THE WATER DRIBBLED in a slow, hesitant rhythm, as the raindrops had done many years earlier in his grandparents’ garden, dripping from the tips of the banana leaves to a small puddle beneath. Any moment now his nanny would come, and he would have to shut his eyes, but she was always able to tell that he'd been crying. Look at your pillowcase, his nanny would say, and stroke his wet eyelashes with a finger, the light from the red lantern in her other hand warm on his face, but th
ey were never able to expel his gloom, just as he was never able to find an explanation for his tears. Young Master has been crying again, he heard her say to his grandparents after she walked out of the bedroom, and his grandmother would explain, once again without losing her patience, that children cried so that all the sadness they had to carry from their last lives would leave with the tears.

  A perfect cycle it was, Teacher Gu thought, one's life starting with the pain carried from the previous life, growing up to shed the burden only to accumulate fresh pain for the next life. Slowly the world came back to him, and with great effort he turned on the bedside light. He was in his shirt and underwear. His jacket and pants-soiled by his vomit, he supposed—had been washed and now hung on the clothesline, dripping into a small puddle on the cement floor. Gousheng had left a pot of tea by his bedside, still warm to the touch. How long had he been unconscious? Teacher Gu opened his mouth but no sound came from his scratchy throat. So this was what he was reduced to, an old man hung over, from nothing other than his own illusion of staying alive. Staying alive had been his faith since his divorce, and for this he had given up dignity, hope, anger, and his loved ones; but where did this faith lead him except back to this cycle that no one could escape?

  Dearest love, my mind is as clear as a mirror wiped spotless under the silver light of a full moon, Teacher Gu wrote, and put it with other notes to his first wife in a large envelope. For the last time he spelled out her name and address, and then screwed the cap carefully back on his Parker and inserted it, with his letters, in the envelope.

  Underneath the bed was the old wooden chest where his wife had kept their precious possessions, and it cost Teacher Gu a great effort to drag it out. There was a Western-style suit in the chest. The suit had belonged to her grandfather, Teacher Gu told Shan the night before she and her comrades planned to come and cleanse him of his bourgeois possessions; the umbrella next to the suit, a souvenir of his parents’ love story. He would appreciate it if she could spare the few things he had kept from his parents. At the time, Shan sneered at his pleading, but the next day she decided to overlook the suit and the umbrella while she threw the other stuff into the fire, including her mother's silk blouses and Teacher Gu's college graduation robe.

  Teacher Gu buttoned the suit and tidied his hair; it was one's responsibility to leave the world as a clean person.

  The distance to the mailbox was longer than he'd thought, and twice he had to stop and catch his breath. The letter weighed no more than his own heart, and no sound came back when he dropped it into the metal box.

  A dog barked; a feral cat whined and another answered in a shriller voice; a child cried in a nearby house and a mother sang a lullaby; the world was a beautiful place under the spring sky with the new moon surrounded by silver stars and a gentle breeze combing its unseen fingers through the long branches of the willow trees. Teacher Gu listened. His heart was a bottomless well; each small sound, a sigh and a whisper and the flapping of the most tender wings, was welcomed with deep-felt serenity.

  “Where are you going?” two men said, stopping Teacher Gu as he was leaving the alley.

  “The Muddy River,” Teacher Gu replied.

  The men looked at each other and told Teacher Gu he was not allowed to go there. Why? Teacher Gu questioned, but the men only shrugged and said nobody was allowed to move around town after eight o'clock. They pointed to where he'd come from and ordered him to go back home. Elsewhere similar requests were made, the curfew enforced by workers from another town.

  Beware, Teacher Gu said, full of sympathy for these people who lived in blind faith and who would die, one day, without a single light shining into their souls. Butchers one day and the next day you will be the meat on the cutting board, he said to the men; your knives that slit open others’ throats will one day slit your own.

  The two men, infuriated, pushed Teacher Gu and threatened to place him under arrest. Their mouths opened and closed with useless words and empty warnings. You stupid human beings, Teacher Gu said; with the resolution to meet the water that would carry him away, he struck at them with his cane and ordered them to let him pass. It did not take long for the men to pin the old man to the ground. Cold as water, the thought of relief passed through him like a whisper as he moved his head slightly so his cheek would hurt less from the smashed glasses.

  Unknown to Teacher Gu's fading consciousness were the screams and howls of tortured flesh, muffled by unfeeling walls as well as unfeeling hearts. Tong's father, beaten into a stupor, for a moment was lost in one of his drunken dreams in which, behind his warm eyelids, his mother stirred a single egg, but the beat-beat of the bamboo chopsticks on the china bowl was then disturbed by the heavy thumping of boots on his head. Not far away, in another room, a man, father of two daughters who had once been among the girls dreamed of by Bashi, cried on the cold cement floor after having pressed a bloody fingerprint onto the confession thrust at him. Cautious man as he was, he had never been near any leaflet, but in Bashi's made-up and unsubstantiated account the man had turned up at the rally with a white flower.

  In a different room Bashi cried too, rolling on the floor and grasping his crotch with both hands. Please big brothers please uncles please grandpapas please please, he begged; he was smaller than their smallest toenail he was smaller than his own fart please he would confess to everything anything they wanted him to; yes he was a counterrevolutionary yes he had been to the rally but please big brothers please uncles and grandpapas he remembered all of the people he had seen; he would give their names he would point out their faces in pictures please please don't kick don't beat because he was so low he would soil their shoes and their hands; please he had everything and anything to tell please he could tell them about the man who said bad words about Communism and the woman who spat at Chairman Mao's statue and yes yes he could tell them all about this man who raped and mutilated female corpses and who would do the same thing to their wives and their sisters if they did not catch him in time.

  TWELVE

  Many years later, parents in Muddy River would point Tong out to their children, some saying he was the sole culprit for his father's deafened ears, broken skull, and forever-paralyzed body; others, out of fairness, would add that, despite Tong's stupidity, he was a good son who had never allowed bedsores to grow on his father's body, or let his mother suffer under the reign of a daughter-in-law. He went to work as a clerk at the administration building by day and read by night. He read till after midnight, and when his mother fell asleep, he took out a thick notebook from a locked drawer and scribbled in it, though he never went back to read what he'd written, and there was no one else in his world who demanded to read the words.

  Regardless of how dismal his life would turn out to be, when Tong entered the principal's office the morning after his father's arrest, he saw nothing but the blossom of his belief, more splendid than all the flowers, purer than pure gold. He listed the names of the people he had met at the rally, uncles and aunties from his parents’ work units, teachers and neighbors, Old Hua and Mrs. Hua. He described unfamiliar faces and vowed to point out every one of them if given the opportunity. He would put his life into the punishing hands of the party and the people, and his father, please, could the principal let the officials know that his father was nothing more than a drunkard?

  What a heaven-sent boy, the principal thought, studying Tong, with his odd accent and villager's looks. The boy was a slate for him to color, the principal thought, and whether it was red or black it all relied on his own genius.

  The principal picked up the telephone and waited for the sweet-voiced woman at the switchboard to get him an education official at the city council. The boy sat in the middle of the office, looking at his shoes, and the principal had to signal twice for the boy to raise his head for him to get a better look. They were crickets bound by the same string now, the principal thought, his hands shaking yet his heart filled with the thrill of a gambler: The boy could be the youngest counte
rrevolutionary in this political storm and he, the failing educator, could lose the career he had diligently built up; or, if he could convince his superior that the boy could be turned into a young hero who would stand up to denounce all the criminals, including his own father, they, the architects of a boy hero, would win a bright star for their résumés.

  He was ready to die for his cause, Jialin said to his mother when she was granted a visit the day before the trial, and it was time for her to feel happy for him instead of grieving. Some lives were lighter than a feather, and other deaths weighed more than Mount Tai. Jialin's mother pressed a handkerchief to her eyes and replied that a son's life, no matter how trivial it was to the world, was irreplaceable, and how could he expect her to celebrate her own son's misfortune?

  Eight hundred and eighty-five people, those who had gone to the rally with the white flowers and those who had been accused of doing so by their neighbors and enemies, were investigated and later expelled from their work units. Among them was a doctor at the emergency room of the city hospital. Why was fate so blind? the doctor's daughter wrote in her journal, her mother's misfortune growing in her fourteen-year-old girl's mind into a poisonous tumor. A young receptionist, her wedding scheduled to take place in two weeks, on May Day, received a letter from her fiancé apologizing for the frailty of love and wishing her good luck in finding a new job and a new husband. A teacher in the middle school said farewell to his students in class; two best friends who had both had a crush on the teacher started to cry; their tears led to many visits to the principal's office and in the end they were turned against each other, both competing to reveal the other one's dirty thoughts over a man their fathers’ age.

  Mrs. Hua and Old Hua were released from the makeshift detention center, a training camp for the local militia, a few hours after their arrest. Later Mrs. Hua learned that her boss, the old bachelor Shaokang, had been the one to help them out. They would forever remain grateful to him, Mrs. Hua said when she saw him again, and he replied in a stern voice that he did not have a job for her anymore. But how had he done it? she asked, still in disbelief of her luck; he must have some powerful connection in the government; was it a brother, or a relative, or a friend? Shaokang looked up at Mrs. Gu. Let it be forgotten, he said in a near-pleading tone, and she realized for the first time that there were well-guarded secrets in his bachelor's life that he had risked for their sake.