Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Kai had never seen Han speak with such candor, nor had she expected his insight, and this alarmed her. She had thought that there was little in him beyond the spoiled boy, and she had found it suffocating to tend the boy both as a mother and a playmate. Now she wished that was all he was. She looked at her watch. She needed to get ready now, she said, and Han nodded. In a lighter voice he told her to forget their conversation. Spring fever, he said of himself, and promised to recover from the illness by the time he saw her for lunch.

IT TOOK BASHI A FEW SECONDS to realize that the night had long been over. The patch of sky in the high bedroom window was blue and cloudless, and through the half-open door of the bedroom he could see the living room filled with bright sunlight. He had missed the best time to see Nini. He wondered if the girl had looked for him. It had been a restless night for Bashi. He had been going over the different ways he could reveal Kwen's crime to the town, but none of them seemed right. In the meantime, he had a feeling that the woman's ghost was perched at the foot of his bed, and when he shut his eyes and refused to acknowledge her presence, she took over the space inside his eyelids. After an hour of tossing and turning, he masturbated. The woman's ghost retreated, taking with her his usual joy in the activity. In the end, he exhausted himself, in pain more than enjoyment, and fell into a series of dreams. In one, a double wedding was taking place, Nini and himself the first couple, the executed counterrevolutionary and Kwen the other. What a horrifying dream, Bashi thought now, but perhaps it was a sign that justice would send Kwen to his dead bride.

His grandmother did not answer when Bashi asked her for the time. He raised the curtain between them and found her in her bed. What dreams had kept her in bed? he asked. Had his grandfather come for a visit? Bashi thought of joking, but before the words came out, he noticed that there was something odd about his grandmother, her cheeks ashen-colored.

After five minutes Bashi was convinced that she was dead, even though her skin still felt lukewarm to the touch. He sat down next to her on the bed, unsure what to do next. She had been less of a nuisance than any other woman her age when she was alive, but she had chosen the most inconvenient time to die. It was the beginning of a new life for Bashi, with Nini to befriend and Kwen to battle with, and he needed his grandmother to live a while longer to take care of him. Bashi checked a few more times over the next half hour, but she was colder with each inspection.

His grandmother had been preparing for her own ending for some time. A few years ago she had hired two carpenters and a painter to make a casket, and she had supervised the whole process to ensure that no effort was spared and that the casket turned out as she desired. She also accumulated stacks of embroidered outfits for the burial—black silk robes with blooming golden and pink chrysanthemums, ivory-colored shoes and sleeping caps, made of fine satin, with dozens of the embroidered symbol shou— long life—arranged in intricate patterns. A box of cheap replicas of her jewels would go to the next world with her; the authentic ones—gold and silver and jade and emerald—had been sold for cash when Bashi failed to secure a job after graduating from high school. “I've arranged everything for you,” she said to him when she went over her inventory for the next world, once or twice a month. “I won't be a burden to you.”

How could she call herself a burden, when she was the dearest person he had in life? Bashi often told her, but instead of making her happy, the words would bring her to tears. “What a bitter life you were born into. Not knowing one's own parents! Thank heaven that I was given a long life to watch you grow up,” Bashi's grandmother said, and would repeat stories from different eras of her life.

This talk had always made Bashi laugh. What did he need an old woman for, when he could take care of himself perfectly well? But now he wished she were here to help him. She had said she was ready to go, but what were the things he needed to do to make her really go, out of the house and into the ground? Bashi sat by her bedside for some time and decided to seek help. The neighbors wouldn't do—even though they were friendly with his grandmother, they all despised him; putting her into their hands would only make him more of a talking point at their dinner tables. Nini wouldn't know anything other than her baskets of coal and rotten vegetables. Kwen seemed to be a man of the world, as he had been sought by the other family to bury their daughter, but with Kwen's dark secret fresh in his own mind, Bashi would never want him near his grandmother. The only people left were Old Hua and his wife. They took care of babies thrown out like rags; surely they would help to bury an old, respectable woman.

The street was the same one as the day before, but people on the way to their work units would not look at Bashi and understand his loss. He walked south to the riverbank and, from there, along the river to the west. When he was out of sight of the townspeople, he sat down on a boulder and wept.

“What are you crying here for, first thing in the morning?” asked someone, kicking his foot lightly.

Bashi wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was Kwen, a heavy cotton coat on his shoulders and a bag of breakfast in his hand. He must be coming back from the night shift. “Leave me alone,” Bashi said.

“That's not the right way to answer a friendly greeting. Would you care for a piece of pig-head meat?”

Bashi shook his head. “My grandma died,” he said, despite his determination to keep Kwen an enemy.

“When?”

“Last night. This morning. I don't know. She just died.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kwen said. “But how old was she?”

“Eighty-one.”

“Enough to call it a joyful departure,” Kwen said. “There's no need for the tears. Be happy for her.”

Bashi's eyes reddened. These were the first words of condolence he'd heard, and he almost felt he had to forgive Kwen. “I'm wondering what kind of funeral would honor her life. She's been father and mother and grandmother to me,” Bashi said. The thought of being an orphan made him feel small again, as he had felt on the day his mother deposited him, years earlier, with his grandmother. He tried to cough into his palm but it came out as sobbing.

“Hey, we know you're sad, but if you want to do her a favor, don't waste your time on tears now.”

“What can I do? I've never taken care of a dead person,” he said.

Kwen looked up at the sky. The wind from the night before had died out, and the weather forecast predicted a warm front. The sun, halfway beyond the mountain, promised a good early spring day. “It will thaw in two weeks,” Kwen said. “I would find a place to keep her before thawing. Go to the city hospital and rent her some space.”

“Why didn't the family yesterday rent from the hospital?” Bashi asked, but once the question came out, he regretted it.

“The morgue only accepts bodies from natural deaths.”

“What's a natural death?”

“Like the one with your grandmother.”

The image of the woman's body came back to Bashi. He breathed hard, trying to control a bout of nausea. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I'm going there now.”

“But you're walking in the wrong direction,” Kwen said.

Bashi looked at the road, leading west into the mountain where the woman's body lay butchered under a bush. He wondered if Kwen had seen through him. He wanted to report the news to Old Hua and his wife first, Bashi said, as they were old friends of his grandmother's.

Kwen studied Bashi, and he felt his scalp tighten under the man's gaze. “So I'm going,” Bashi said, raising a hand hesitantly.