Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

“How disappointing. No offense, but I think it's unacceptable to refuse a cigarette offered to you. At least here in our town.”

The older man nodded apologetically and brought out two cigarettes, one for himself and one for his companion. The younger man struck a match and lit the older man's cigarette first. When he offered Bashi the match, already burning to the end, Bashi shook his head. “So, where are you from?” he said.

“Why do you ask?” the older man demanded.

“Just curious. I happen to know a lot of people in town, and you don't look like one I've seen.”

“Yes? What do you do?” the older man said.

Bashi shrugged. “Have you heard anything about this fire?” he said.

“There was a fire?”

“A house was burned down.”

“Bad luck,” the younger man said.

“So you haven't heard or seen anything? I thought maybe you would know, the way you have to stand here all day.”

“Who told you we stand here all day?” the younger one said. The older man coughed and pulled his companion's sleeve.

Bashi looked at the two and smiled. “Don't think I'm an idiot,” he said. “You're here because of the rally, no?”

“Who told you this?” the two men said, coming closer, one on each side of Bashi.

“I'm not a blind man, nor deaf,” Bashi said. “I can even help you if you help me.”

The older man put a hand on Bashi's shoulder. “Tell us what you know, Little Brother.”

“Hey, you're hurting me,” Bashi said. “What do you want to know?”

“All that you know,” the older man said.

“As I said, you need to promise to help me first.”

“You don't want to bargain on such things.”

“Oh yes? Do you want to know what that person did?” Bashi pointed to a middle-aged man, who exited the hospital and crossed the street.

The older man gave the younger man a look, and the younger man nodded and went across the street, running a few steps to catch up with the middle-aged man.

“If you can go into the ER and ask them if there was anyone hurt in the fire, I'll tell you what he did,” Bashi said, when the older man pressed again.

“Tell me first.”

“Then you won't help me.”

“I will.”

Bashi studied the man and then said, “I'll take your word. That man—I don't know his name but I know he works in the hospital-he signed a petition for the counterrevolutionary woman. Now you need to go in there and help me.”

The older man did not move. “Just that?”

“Why? This isn't important enough information for you?”

“Use your brain, Little Brother. If he signed the petition, why do we need you to tell us?”

“Then what do you want to hear?”

“Did you see anyone, say, who went to the rally without leaving a signature?”

That was what they were after, Bashi thought, and nodded with a smile, pointing to the entrance of the emergency room. The older man looked at Bashi and then flipped his finished cigarette into the gutter. “I'll do this for you and you better have something good for me in return.”

A few minutes later, the man came back and said nobody had died in the fire, but two little girls, badly burned, had been transferred that afternoon to the provincial capital. Bashi thought about the small bodies engulfed by the fire and shuddered.

The man studied Bashi. “The girls didn't die—I'm not sure if that's good news or bad news, but I've found it out for you. Now your turn.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I've said, all that you know.”

“This old woman—the mother of the counterrevolutionary, if you know whom I'm talking about—is a master behind the scene.”

The man snorted, unimpressed. “What else?” he said. “Tell us something we don't know.”

“I saw so many people I can hardly remember all their names.”

“At least you remember some?”

“Let's see,” Bashi thought, and listed the names, some he had seen at the rally, a few others who had, at one time or another, offended him. The man seemed uninterested in checking the validity of his report, so Bashi went on more boldly, giving as many names as he remembered from the rally and then throwing in a bunch of people he considered his enemies. The man wrote down the names in his notebook and then asked for Bashi's personal information.

Bashi gave the man his name and address. “Anytime you need help,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” the old man said. “Why did you go to the rally?”

“Just to see what was going on,” Bashi said, and bid farewell to the men.

THE JOY OF YOUTH shortened a day into a blink; the loneliness of old age stretched a moment into an endless nightmare. Teacher Gu watched his slanting shadow, cast onto the wall of the alley by the evening sun. The envelope in his hand was heavy, but for an instant he could not remember what he had been writing to his first wife. How long did it take for his letters to reach her desk, be opened, read, reread, and answered? He counted and calculated the time it should take for her letter to arrive, but the number of days eluded him.

His wife had been taken away the night before by two policemen, and now he remembered he had mentioned the arrest in a matter-of-fact way in the latest letter. The police had come and pushed open the door after one knock, and she came out of the bedroom and let them cuff her wrists without saying anything. Teacher Gu was sitting at the table, his fountain pen in his palm even though he wasn't writing a letter. Neither the policemen nor his wife said anything to him, and for a moment he felt that he had become transparent, according to his own will. He wrote a long letter to his first wife, the spell of his liberation turning him into the poet that he had long ago ceased to be.

His wife did not return for breakfast or lunch, and by now, when homebound people were starting to fill the streets and alleys with their long overlapping shadows, Teacher Gu knew that she would not come home for dinner, or, as far as he knew, for the rest of his life. They all disappeared in this manner, not giving him any chance to participate, or even to protest: his first wife, late from work one day and the next thing he knew she had left a letter proposing divorce, written in her beautiful penmanship, next to a pot of tea that he had brewed for her and that later turned cold, untouched; Shan had been reading a book in her bed when the police came for her, close to bedtime because that was when all the arrests were customarily carried out, and there had been scuffles, resistance on Shan's side, questioning the legality of the arrest, but in the end Shan had been dragged away, leaving the dog-eared book by her pillow; his wife, the night before, had said nothing to question the police when they informed her of the arrest, nor had she resisted. She had said some words of apology to her husband's back, but what was the point of it, her heart no longer with him in the house they had shared for thirty years, but floating to a farther place, ready to occupy an altar? They all took their exits so easily, as if he were a dream, neither a good nor a bad one but an indifferent one filled with uninteresting details, and they would wake up one day and continue their lives, oblivious to his absence. Would they have a moment of hesitation and think about him, when they saw his face between two tree branches, or heard him in an old dog's coughing? Was his wife, wherever she was now, thinking about him, this aged invalid who had nothing better to do than wait and weep in the alley? Teacher Gu tried to steady himself with his cane but his hand shook so hard that, for a moment, he thought this was the end he had been looking forward to, when his body would exert its own will and throw him into the gutter before his mind could stop it.