Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Tong followed Teacher Gu, for fear the old man's cane would catch in the gutter. Teacher Gu, however, stumbled forward without paying attention to Tong, as if all of a sudden the boy had ceased to exist for him. When they approached the mailbox, Teacher Gu studied the collection schedule, in small print, on the side. “What time does it say?” he said after a long moment of frowning.

Tong read to Teacher Gu, who looked at his watch. “Twenty past ten,” he mumbled aloud. “Let's wait then.”

Tong thought it strange that someone wanted to wait for the postman. Wasn't that the reason that a mailbox was installed in the first place, so that people could just drop their letters in and not have to wait?

“Why are you standing here?” Teacher Gu said after a while. “Were you sent by someone to spy on me?”

He thought he had been asked to wait, Tong explained, but Teacher Gu acted as if he had forgotten his own words. He checked the street and then tapped a finger on his watch for Tong to see. “Whoever is responsible for this mailbox is late,” he said. “Don't ever believe in what's written down.”

NEVER BEFORE had the midday break seemed so long. Teacher Gu drummed on the table with his fingers and waited for his wife to finish her lunch and go back to her bank teller's window. Near the end of the previous week, his school had sent a request for his early retirement, due to health reasons, and seeing that he was qualified for three-quarters of his pension, Teacher Gu had signed the paper without a moment's hesitation, or consultation with his wife. There were plenty of educated youths returning from the countryside; he might as well leave his position, no longer fulfilling to him anyway, to a young man for whom the dream of a family would make the long hours among noisy, pestering children endurable.

“You don't have to sit here and wait for me,” Mrs. Gu said. “Or do you need more rice?”

“I'm fine as I am.”

Mrs. Gu finished her lunch. When she cleaned up the table and washed the dishes, she poured a cup of tea and left it by his drumming hand. “Do you want to take a nap?” she asked.

“Don't you need to go to work now?”

“Yes.”

“Then go. I can take care of myself perfectly well.”

Mrs. Gu, to his disappointment, took a seat at the table. “Do you think we need to hire a girl from the mountain to help with the housework?”

“Are we rich people?”

“Or perhaps Nini? I've been thinking—you need a companion. You may need help too,” said Mrs. Gu. “Nini would be a good person in many ways.”

“I thought you hated her.”

Mrs. Gu looked away from his stare. “I know I've been unfair to her,” she said.

“She'd better learn to live with that then,” said Teacher Gu. “You won't be the last person to treat her unfairly.”

“But we could make it up to her,” said Mrs. Gu. “And her family too. I saw in the street that her mother was expecting again. They will need some extra money.”

Teacher Gu thought about how his wife had been brainwashed by her young comrades. Her desire to do good and right things disgusted him. “Don't we have enough spying eyes?” he said. “No, I would rather be left alone.”

“What if something happens to me?” Mrs. Gu looked at him and then shook her head. “I'll go to work now.”

“Yes. It's good not to ask questions we don't have to answer now,” Teacher Gu said to his wife's back, and when she closed the door behind her, he retrieved his fountain pen from the drawer and found the page in the notebook that contained another halfway-composed letter to his first wife. He reread it, but hard as he tried, he could not resume the thought that had been interrupted when his wife came home for lunch. He ripped the page off and put it in an envelope that already contained three similarly unfinished letters. Let her decide how she wanted to sort these out. On a new page he began writing:

Recently, I have been going over the Buddhist scriptures. No, they are not in front of my eyes—the scriptures my grandfather left me, as you may imagine, did not survive the revolutionary fire, started by none other than my own daughter. The scriptures I have been reading, however, are written in my mind. I am sure that this is of little interest to you with your Communist atheism, but do imagine with me, for one moment, the Buddha sitting under the holy tree and speaking once and again to his disciples. He who was said to be the wisest among the wise, he who was said to have vast and endless love for the world—who was he but an old man with blind hope, talking tirelessly to a world that would never understand him? We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.

Teacher Gu stopped writing when he heard someone walk into the yard through the unlocked gate. He looked out the window and saw his neighbors, the young revolutionary lunatic and her husband, coming to his door. The wife raised her voice and asked if there was anyone home. The door to the house was unlocked too, and for a moment, Teacher Gu wondered if he should move across the room quietly and bolt the door from the inside. But the distance to the door seemed a long, exhausting journey. He held his breath and closed his eyes, wishing that if he remained still long enough, they would vanish.

The couple waited for an answer and then the woman tried the door, which she pushed open with a creak. “Oh, you're at home,” the woman said with feigned surprise. “We heard some strange noise and thought we would come to check.”

Teacher Gu replied coldly that things were perfectly fine. Discreetly he moved a newspaper to cover his unfinished letter.

“Are you sure? I heard you had a stroke. We'll help you check,” the woman said, and signaled for her husband to come into the room from where he stood by the door, his two hands rubbing each other, as if he was embarrassed. “Is your wife home?” the woman asked.

“Why should I answer you?”

“I was just wondering. It's not a good thing for a wife to leave her husband home.”

“She's at work.”

“I know, but I'm talking in general. When you were in the hospital, I saw her leaving home after dark at least twice,” the woman said, and turned to her husband. “Why don't you check and see what that noise is? Maybe it's a litter of rats.”

The man stepped up unwillingly and looked around, avoiding Teacher Gu's eyes. The woman, however, did not conceal her interest as she walked around the room and checked all the corners. When she took the lid off a cooking pot and looked in, Teacher Gu lost his patience. He hit the floor with his cane. “You think we're too old to take care of a rat in our cooking pot and need you snakes for that?”

“Why, it's not good manners to talk to your neighbors this way,” the woman said, throwing the lid back on the pot. “We're here to help you before things get out of hand.”

“I don't need your help,” Teacher Gu said. He supported himself with one hand on the table and stood up, pointing to the door with the cane. “Now leave my house this very instant. You don't happen to have a search warrant, do you?”

The woman ignored his words and moved closer to the table. She lifted the newspaper, uncovered the half letter, and smiled. Before she had a chance to read a word, Teacher Gu hit the tabletop with his cane, an earsplitting crack. The cup of untouched tea jumped off the table and spilled onto the woman's pants; the saucer, falling onto the cement floor, did not break.

The husband pulled his wife back before she could react; her face remained pale when he assured Teacher Gu that they did not mean him any harm. The husband's voice, a polite and beautiful baritone, surprised Teacher Gu. The man was a worker of some sort, as he wore a pair of greasy overalls and a threadbare shirt. Teacher Gu realized that he had never heard the man speak before. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine a more educated mind for that voice.