Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Nini hugged the baby closer, and Little Sixth ran her hand along Nini's cheek until the small fingers got ahold of Nini's ear; she pulled at Nini's ear, a gesture comforting to both of them.

“I've been thinking,” Nini's mother said after a while, her voice calmer now. “I want to have a perm done tomorrow. Many of my colleagues have had it.”

“Will it be safe for the baby?” Nini's father asked.

“I've checked, and they say it's safe,” Nini's mother said. “It's time for me to look more like a woman than a ghost.”

“You've always been the most beautiful woman to me.”

“Who believes your drunken nonsense?” Nini's mother smiled, and raised her cup to meet the cup of her husband.

BASHI WHISTLED and walked home in long and bouncy strides. Every ten or fifteen steps he saw people gather in front of an announcement, and more were walking along the road to join their work units, holding banners and slogans. His mind occupied with Nini, Bashi did not have time to stop and distract himself by talking with these people. He wondered why the idea had never occurred to him before. For several years, he had seen Nini in the street, hauling baskets of coal from the railway station in the early morning; during the day she went to the marketplace and gathered half-withered vegetable leaves the housewives peeled off before they paid. A despicable creature, he had thought of her then. She was still an ugly thing, but she definitely looked more like a girl now. Twelve years old, Bashi said to himself, savoring the pleasure of saying the sweet number out loud. With all the girls growing up healthily and beautifully in the world, who, besides him, would have thought of Nini as a desirable girl? He whistled, loudly and off-key, a love song from a romantic film in the fifties. Two girls in front of the gate of the middle school pointed at him and snickered, and he smiled back nicely, blowing a kiss to them as he had seen an actor do in a movie that, imported from some eastern European country, was the first foreign film ever shown in Muddy River. Bashi had been impressed with the man's ease and had practiced the gesture many times in front of his grandmother's dressing table. The girls walked faster, their faces flushed with indignity, and he laughed and blew another kiss, one of hundreds of kisses he'd blown, and would be blowing, that landed nowhere.

Bashi thought about Mrs. Hua, and then let his thoughts wander to the seven girls the old woman no longer had as daughters. They, although deserted by their parents, must have better faces and bodies than Nini. He wondered why it had never occurred to Nini's parents to leave her on the riverbank to die when she had been born with that horrible face, or why her parents had kept Nini's sisters as well, when obviously a son was what they were trying to get, baby after baby. He thought about the daughters that Mrs. Hua had left with other people as child brides. Perhaps that was what he needed, a young girl purchased from someone like the Huas as a future wife. But a thing like that would take some time. Meanwhile, he had Nini to think about, the ugly yet real girl Nini, who would be expecting him soon.

When Bashi got home he found a bamboo steamer on the table, kept warm by a small square of cotton blanket. Underneath, six white buns nestled together, fresh and inviting. He pinched one and was amused to see his fingers leave dents on the smooth crust. He called out to his grandmother that breakfast was ready; hearing no answer, he walked into the bedroom that he shared with her. Both beds had been made, and the curtain between the beds had been pulled back and tied with a ribbon. The curtain had been installed by Bashi two years earlier, when he had learned the exciting things he could do with himself in bed. Not that his grandmother would ever wake up to spy on him, her senses already dull as a rusty knife unearthed from an ancient tomb, but Bashi insisted on the necessity of a curtain, which added pleasure to his secret games.

Bashi took a bite of the bun and walked closer to his grandmother, who was dozing in a cushioned armchair on her side of the bedroom. He put a finger under her nostrils and felt her breath. She was alive. “Get up, get up, lazy piglet. The sun is shining and the house is on fire,” Bashi said, squeezing his voice into that of a woman—his grandmother's voice when he had been a young boy— and singing, but she did not open her eyes. “Breakfast is ready, and the ants are waiting for your crumbs,” Bashi chanted again. She opened her eyes, nodded briefly, and went back to dozing. He gave up. She was eighty-one and she had the right to indulge herself in anything she liked: short naps in the mornings, a bite now and then, long moments spent sitting and snoozing on a chamber pot. It was no longer safe for her to go to the public outhouse, where people hopped in and out, through the stinky swamp, on boulders and rocks. Someday, Bashi knew, someday he would have to start to take care of her, cooking for her, making her bed, cleaning the chamber pot, cleaning her. He did not fear it. His grandmother had taken care of him all his life, and he would look after her when she needed him. If he was ever to have a baby girl, he would do the same thing for her. If he could find a baby girl now, Bashi thought, he would name the baby Bashiyi, Eighty-one, after his grandmother, the eighty-one-year-old baby. Bashi himself had been named the same way, as he had been born the year his great-grandfather had turned eighty. “Bashiyi,” Bashi said aloud to the room, and thought that only a genius could have come up with the name—it would make the baby girl his sister, as even a fool could see, but the girl would also belong to him. Eighty-one existed only because eighty did, and where would you find Bashiyi without Bashi? He felt the urge to share this thought with someone, but his grandmother was becoming more forgetful by the day; conversation between them was often interrupted by irrelevant comments about events that had happened years or even decades before. Perhaps he could tell Nini. Would she understand him? She looked like a stupid little thing, but people in town had agreed that he himself was dumb. “You never know,” Bashi said, and nodded in a knowing way, as if someone were standing right next to him. “She may be much smarter than you expected.”

Bashi squeezed the rest of the bun into his mouth, and left the house when the clock was striking eight. The main street was in a festive mood. Two men with red armbands were locking up the marketplace . Students from a nearby elementary school were marching and singing a Soviet song, the tune familiar to Bashi's ears though he had never learned the lyrics, and he could not make out the words while listening to the children, shouting more than singing, their mouths a string of Os. In a side street, two day care teachers were hurrying twelve small children to join the parade, their hands holding a rope with its two ends in the teachers’ hands. The workers from the candy factory, men and women in blue overalls, chatting and laughing, were waiting for the students to pass and two men whistled at a few older girls from the elementary school who probably had been kept back many times and were old enough to be ogling back.

“Where's the denunciation ceremony?” Bashi asked a policeman at a crossroad.

The policeman pulled Bashi back by his arm and said, “Don't block the traffic.”

“What harm do I do standing here, comrade?” Bashi said. “Do you see that slogan on the wall? It says serve the people . Do you know who wrote that? Chairman Mao. Is that what you do to serve the people, huh, shout at them and almost break their wrists?”

The policeman turned to look at Bashi. “Who are you?”

“I'm a member of the people whom you serve.”