Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

He had enough to work on now, and she would respect his friends’ wishes and leave them alone, she said; there was no need for him to worry about how she felt. She knew where to find him, as he knew where to find her. For a moment her voice wavered, and she left abruptly before they might weaken and let out all that was better left unsaid.

THE OTHER PATIENTS in the ward must have heard about his daughter. They glanced at Teacher Gu when they thought he was not paying attention. When he looked back, they turned their eyes away and lowered their heads. Teacher Gu saw their efforts to refrain from talking about the case. A pitiful man, they must be thinking, unable to stand up straight, easily defeated. Teacher Gu did not talk to his ward mates. When visiting time came, and their wives and children swarmed into the ward, he hid under the striped blanket and pretended to be asleep. His wife did not talk to the other patients and their families either. She came with a thermos of chicken soup and sat on a chair by his bedside; half past the visiting hour, when he still refused to acknowledge her, she rocked him gently and told him that he'd better drink the soup before she had to leave. He let her prop him up on the pillow; she moved from the chair to the bedside, spoon in her hand. He obeyed and drank the soup without making a fuss and waited for three days before asking why she had killed their two hens for a useless man; the hens were their only children, he thought of saying, but did not let the cruel remark slip out. She had not touched their hens, she said, offering no explanation as to how she had managed to afford the chickens. She bought other food too, from the expensive store next to the hospital—canned fruit of all kinds, dried-milk powder, dates cured with honey, condensed orange juice that Teacher Gu believed to be made of nothing but saccharine and orange dye. After another day, he could not help but ask about the money for these unnecessary luxuries. She hesitated and said that someone kindhearted and sympathetic had slipped money into their yard. He imagined that she had withdrawn money from their meager savings account and then agonized over how to cover the expense, making up philanthropic strangers he no longer believed existed. He didn't cross-examine her lies. The world was cold enough; if she wanted to light a small fire of hope, he would let her, but he refused to be drawn into her fantasy.

The stroke, not a fatal one, had left Teacher Gu's left side paralyzed, though it was not a serious case compared to a few other old men in the ward, and he was expected to recover some ability to move. Dr. Fan, a woman in her forties, harshly ordered about all the patients in the ward when she oversaw their physical therapy; and the other patients and their relatives, despite the deference they showed to her face, had nicknamed her the Tigress.

On the fifth day of Teacher Gu's stay in the hospital, Dr. Fan was late for her morning rounds, and when she did come she wasn't wearing her doctor's white cap. Teacher Gu noticed that her short hair had been transformed into many small and busy curls. She must have wanted not to destroy her new perm—indeed it was the first perm she'd had in her life, as her generation had grown up at a time when a permanent wave was an illegal bourgeois legacy. After being ordered to lift his arm and leg, which he could not possibly do, Teacher Gu complimented Dr. Fan on her new hairstyle.

Taken aback, Dr. Fan blushed without saying anything. She moved quickly to the next bed and soon regained control of herself by chiding the man lying there. Her flustered gesture saddened Teacher Gu. He took pity on Dr. Fan, and a generation of women like her, who had spent their best years in dull-colored and baggy clothes and short straight hair that had stripped them of their feminine beauty, and who were now trying to catch the last of their no longer youthful days, hoping to look beautiful. But then what right did he have to think of these women in such a way, when he himself, old and invalid, was the object of people's pity?

There were eighteen beds in the recovery ward, fifteen of them occupied, mostly by old people suffering from strokes and cerebral hemorrhages. One man, however, had a unique condition that fascinated everybody. Teacher Gu too paid attention to the discussions among the patients, families, and nurses, even though he never let it show. From what he had overheard, Dafu, who was in his late forties and had lost his wife a year earlier, had been a healthy man before he committed himself for a special operation to take out his gallbladder—he had gallstones but did not suffer much, and it seemed that there was little surgical necessity for it. However, news came that the army hospital in the provincial capital needed a model patient to demonstrate a new, drugless anesthetic method. Dafu, through some connection, got himself chosen for this political assignment on the condition that his two daughters would be granted positions in factories. The daughters, both educated youths who had been sent down to the countryside for years and had just returned to the city, had not been able to find jobs. The father underwent surgery without anesthesia, except for five acupuncture needles in his hand. Told to stay still while he was filmed, Dafu suffered so much pain during the procedure that afterward both his legs were paralyzed for no clear medical reason, and his ability to urinate was permanently impaired. After a few days of observation, the perplexed army doctors decided that the problems were psychological and sent Dafu back to Muddy River.

It amazed Teacher Gu that a man could exercise such stoicism for his daughters. Dafu, however, did not think himself a hero, as his ward mates did. A low-ranking clerk, he was easily embarrassed when his selflessness was commented upon. He apologized when he failed to urinate. “Relax,” Nurse Shi, the older one who had gentler hands than the others, urged him. The doctors had told Dafu that because he had used such great control to endure the pain of the operation, his muscles were in a constant seizure, which explained his symptoms. “Relax,” Nurse Shi repeated. “Use your imagination. Think of when you were young and could not hold your pee. Did you wet your bed when you were a boy?”

“Yes,” Dafu said.

“Close your eyes and think of the time you wet your bed. You want to hold it but you can't because oh, oh, it's coming out. It's coming out.” Nurse Shi's voice became breathy and urgent, and at such moments, the patients, even the four old men on the far end of the ward who enjoyed drawing attention by moaning and complaining about nonexistent problems, dared not make a noise. To further stimulate his imagination, Nurse Shi would order a young nurse to turn on the tap at the washstand and have the water drip into an empty basin. Dafu sat awkwardly at his bedside, supported by Nurse Shi and another nurse, his pants rolled down to his ankles and a white enamel bedpan waiting between his legs. The water would drip, Nurse Shi would murmur encouragements, and everyone else in the room would hold his breath until, eventually, one of the four old men at the far end of the room would break the silence and yell that he could not hold his pee anymore, and could someone please pass him a bedpan. A young training nurse would try to conceal her joy as she obliged the old man; Nurse Shi would comfort Dafu, saying he was doing better and she believed that the next time he would succeed. His face the color of a beet, Dafu would apologize for all the trouble he had brought to the nurses and everyone else in the room. He apologized constantly, even to his two daughters, who came to the ward to show him the white lab coats they wore for their positions at the pharmaceutical factory, white rather than the regular blue, which would, in the eyes of people unfamiliar with their jobs, promote them to the same level as a nurse or perhaps even a doctor. The daughters did not talk about the possibility of attracting suitable men with the coats, but the father saw such hope in their eyes; they were twenty-six and twenty-seven, no longer young for marriage. At night he practiced secretly in the darkness, willing his legs to move so he would not become a burden to his daughters; the prospect of marrying a woman with a bedridden father might frighten away potential suitors, and Dafu imagined his dead wife looking down at him with disapproval from the heavens. On the morning of the day when she had been run over by a truck, they had had an argument over some small household chores; she had married the worst man in the world, who was of little use to his wife and daughters, she complained then, the last words she said to him. He had wondered ever since if she believed it, but she was known to be unable to choose the right words when she was overtaken by her temper, and perhaps the comment was not meant to harm him. There was no way he could know now, Dafu thought; all he could do was prove to himself otherwise.