Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Neither talked for a moment. Old Hua laid the pickax aside and began to work on the dulled edge of a shovel.

When Mrs. Hua broke the silence she said that they should go to the city square the next morning.

Old Hua looked up at her and did not reply.

She felt responsible for Teacher Gu, Mrs. Hua said. It had been on her mind since she had learned of Teacher Gu's illness. They should go there and apologize to Mrs. Gu.

Old Hua said that they were hired for a burial.

They could go early, before they went out to the burial, Mrs. Hua said. Bashi had come earlier in the evening and said that he had a bad cold, and asked the couple to bury his grandmother themselves. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua had pointed out the lie to the boy's face; he had paid them generously.

Old Hua nodded. So they would go, he said, as she had known that he would.

T eacher Gu pretended to be asleep while his wife moved quietly in and out of the bedroom on the morning of Ching Ming. He ignored the small noises and tried to focus his memory on another morning, the distant day of his first honeymoon, when his wife had slipped away from the wedding bed and made tea for him. He had willed himself not to hear the small clicking of teacups and saucers, but when he had opened his eyes with feigned surprise at the tea, she had smiled and scolded him lovingly for his playacting. Didn't he know his quivering eyelashes had betrayed him, she said, and he said that he did not, because he had never had to feign sleep for anyone before.

“I'm going out for a few hours,” Mrs. Gu said to him, by the bedside. “Here's your breakfast, in the thermos. I'll be back soon.”

Teacher Gu did not answer. He willed her to disappear so he could go back to that other morning.

“If you need to use the chamber pot, I've put it here behind the chair.”

Teacher Gu thought about the things that he had not known on that newlywed morning, of the intimacies one would never wish to share with anyone but oneself, the vulnerability one was forced into in old age. He thought about secrets too, of sleeping in the same bed with one woman and dreaming about the other, of his wife hiding a social life from a sick husband half dying in the hospital. Such deceptions must take place under every roof, some more hurtful than others. His first wife must often have thought about other men during their honeymoon, thoughts without romantic desire but nameless strangers occupying her mind nonetheless; she had arranged the honeymoon in that specific sea resort so that, with a husband who served at the National Congress as a cover, she could work as a secret messenger for the underground Communist Party. These stories, hidden from him for the duration of their marriage, had been revealed after they signed their divorce papers. He had not doubted her love then, even after she showed him the divorce application, but now, thirty years and the death of a daughter later, he wondered if he had been too naïve to see the truth. Perhaps his first marriage had been based, from the very beginning, on the merit of his serving the government that she and her comrades were fighting to overthrow. He provided cover for her, and brought home government papers not meant for her to peruse; had she ever considered him an exit plan, in case her side failed to win?

Teacher Gu struggled out of bed. Mrs. Gu entered the bedroom, already dressed up to venture into the early April morning, a black mourning band on her arm. “Do you need something?” she said, coming over and helping him into his shoes. “I didn't hear what you said.”

“I said nothing,” he said. “You were hallucinating.”

“Are you all right? Do you need me to find someone to sit with you while I'm away?”

“What's the good in sitting with a half-dead man?”

“Let's not argue.”

“Listen, woman, I'm not arguing with you, or anyone. You have your business, and I have mine.” He pushed her hand away and limped into the front room. By the door he saw a photo of Shan, enlarged to the size of a poster and framed with black paper and white silk ribbon. “I see your comrades and you are making her into a puppet ,” Teacher Gu said. Before his wife answered, he shuffled to the old desk in the kitchen and sat down. He pushed away two glasses and a plate of leftover food.

“She is a martyr,” Mrs. Gu said.

“A martyr serves a cause as a puppet serves a show. If you look at history, as no one in this country does anymore, a martyr has always served the purpose of deception on a grand scale, be it a religion or an ideology,” Teacher Gu said, surprised by his own eloquent and patient voice. He had been conducting these dialogues in various imagined conversations with his first wife in the past few days. Mrs. Gu said something, but Teacher Gu did not catch her words. Already his mind was floating on to the other woman, who had—or had not, if he still had some remaining luck from a luckless life—intentionally deceived him for three years. He wanted to write a letter to her and request the truth.

Mrs. Gu left with the picture without a farewell. Teacher Gu thought for a moment and remembered he had been looking for his fountain pen. He tried the two drawers by the table, in which he was horrified to find all kinds of odds and ends, as if he had forgotten they had been there for years. After some fumbling, he realized that his wife must have moved his decades-old Parker pen someplace for safekeeping after he had fallen ill. Had she been expecting him to die, so that she would burn the pen with him? Or had she already sold the pen to the secondhand store for a few chickens? This new fear left Teacher Gu in a cold sweat. The pen had been a present from his college professor when Teacher Gu had established the first boys’ school in what was then one of the least educated provinces in the nation; the gold tip had worn out and been replaced twice, but the body of the pen—smooth, dark blue, and polished by years of gentle care—retained its aristocratic feel. Even Shan, in her most fervent years as a young revolutionary, denouncing anything Western as capitalist, had spared Teacher Gu the pen by pretending not to know its hiding place, sewn into the middle of a quilt by his wife.

Teacher Gu pushed himself against the table and stood up. There were not many places in the house for safekeeping, and he located the pen in the bedroom in a wooden box, where his wife kept a few of her jewels that had survived the Cultural Revolution as well as a snapshot of all three of them from when Shan had been a toddler. Teacher Gu squinted at the picture, taken by a friend who had come to visit them in the spring of 1954; Shan was staring at the camera while her parents were both watching her. The camera had been a novelty in Muddy River back then, and a group of children and a few adults had gathered and watched the black box hanging from their friend's neck. He snapped shots generously, of Teacher Gu's family as well as of the onlooking children, but this picture was the only one his friend mailed. Teacher Gu wondered what had happened to the other pictures; another letter he needed to write, he thought, before remembering that the friend had taken his own life, in 1957, as an anti-Communist intellectual.

Teacher Gu shuffled back to the front room. He took the pen out of the velvet box, unscrewed the cap carefully, and wiped off the dried ink on the gold tip with a small piece of silk he kept in the box for that purpose.

Greatly respected Comrade Cheng, he started the letter, and then thought the opening ridiculous with its revolutionary ugliness, even though he had addressed her with this formality in his letters, once or twice a year, for the past thirty years. He ripped the page off the notebook and started again. My once closest friend, colleague, and beloved wife, he wrote with great effort. “My once closest friend, colleague, and beloved wife,” he read it out loud, and decided that it suited his mood.