Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

“Are you all right?” It was the neighbor with the beautiful voice, whose name Teacher Gu had never bothered to find out and whose wife had been so keen on spying on them. He braked his bicycle next to Teacher Gu and supported him with a hand.

Teacher Gu, in a moment of confusion, tried to wriggle his arm free and run away. The man's grip, however, tightened like an iron clamp. He got off the bicycle, and with one hand still on Teacher Gu's arm, he said, “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“I'm going to the mailbox,” Teacher Gu said, when he regained his dignity.

“I can do it for you,” the man said.

Teacher Gu shook his head. He wanted to hear the thud of the letter dropping into the metal box. How many days had it been since he had sent out the first letter? He counted again, not knowing that the letter, bearing his name and address, would be, as were the other thick letters he had sent out, intercepted and read by a stranger first. The man who read the letters, an older man serving his last year in a clerical position at the police department, agonized over the almost-illegible passages, which reminded him of his dying parents and his own imminent retirement. He could circle the lines that spelled some unfriendly message to the government and make a big fuss, but in the end, finding no reason to cause undue pain to a fellow-man in the final, joyless years of old age, he stamped the letters as harmless and let them continue on through the post. He even wondered, at night, when he could not fall asleep, about the woman who would be reading the letters and writing back. He wished it was his duty to read the letters sent back to the Gu address, but that job belonged to another colleague, a woman in her late thirties who always sucked hard candy when she read, and the small distracting noise the candy made, clicking against her teeth, annoyed the old man. He could not bring himself to ask her about letters from a certain woman to Teacher Gu, but he was curious, almost as eager as Teacher Gu, for the woman to write back. Neither knew that the letters were sitting unopened in a study, along with other mail, the woman in question dying of cancer and loneliness, in a hospital for high-ranking officials in Beijing.

“I'll help you to the mailbox,” the man said now to Teacher Gu.

Teacher Gu did not speak. He freed himself from the man and walked on, but after a few steps, when the man offered again, he did not protest. He had not eaten anything since the night before, and when the man came back and found him barely supporting himself by the wall, he picked Teacher Gu up easily and placed him on the back rack of his bicycle. “I'm taking you to the hospital, all right?” he said in a raised voice, one hand gripping the handlebars of the bicycle and the other stabilizing Teacher Gu.

Teacher Gu protested so vehemently that he almost caused both of them and the bicycle to fall over. Another neighbor came to help, and together they rolled the bicycle slowly to Gu's gate. The man leaned the bicycle against the wall and helped Teacher Gu to get down from the rack, but before they could enter the yard, the man's wife appeared as if from nowhere. “What's going on here?” she said, clicking her tongue. “Aren't you the one who hates us proletariats?”

Teacher Gu stopped, and it took him a moment to realize she was addressing him, her eyes enlarging in front of his face, as she stood ridiculously close. “Where's that wife of yours?” she said. “Do you now believe in the power of the people?”

The other neighbor slipped away, and the man said to his wife, “Go home now. Don't make a scene.”

“Why shouldn't I?” the woman said. “I want to see these people rot in front of my eyes.”

Teacher Gu coughed and the woman shielded her face with her hand. “Go ahead. Come on in,” Teacher Gu said weakly. “It won't take too long.”

The woman opened her mouth but the husband said again in a pleading voice, “Go home now. I'll be back in a minute.”

“Who are you to order me around?” the wife said.

Teacher Gu, past the bout of dizziness now, carefully pried the man's fingers off his own arm. “Thank you, young man,” he said. “This is my home and you can leave me here.”

The man hesitated and his wife laughed. “Come on,” she said. “He's not your father and you don't have to follow him around like a pious son.”

The man left with his wife without a word, as she continued to ask why he was being courteous to an old counterrevolutionary. Teacher Gu watched them disappear through their own door. After a while, he entered the quiet house, dim and cold. For a moment he wished for a garrulous wife like the neighbor's. He wished she would flood the house with her witless words so he did not have to find meaning to fill in the emptiness himself. He stood and wished for things unwisely before pulling himself together. From a kettle he poured lukewarm water into a teacup and then added spoonfuls of powdered sugar to the water. He would need the energy to take care of all the necessary things first, the empty stomach and the full bladder and later the filled chamber pot. There would be other things to tend to afterward, plans to locate his wife, the procedures to go through to see her, all the things he had once done for his daughter and now would have to do again, less hopefully than ten years earlier, for his wife. Teacher Gu sipped the sugar water, chokingly sweet.

A single knock on the door announced once again an uninvited visitor. Teacher Gu turned and saw his neighbor, still in his worker's outfit, dark grease on the front of his overalls. “Teacher Gu,” he said. “I hope you don't mind my wife's rudeness.”

Teacher Gu shook his head. He invited the man to sit down at the table with a wordless gesture. The man brought out a few paper bags from his pocket. He ripped them open and let their contents—fried tofu, pickled pig's feet, boiled peanuts, seaweed salad scattered with white sesame seeds—spread onto the flattened paper. “I thought you might want to talk to someone,” the man said, and handed a small flat bottle of sorghum liquor to Teacher Gu.

Teacher Gu looked at the palm-sized flat bottle in his hand, green thick glass wrapped in a coarse paper with red stars. “My apologies for having nothing to offer you in return,” said Teacher Gu when he handed a pair of chopsticks to the neighbor.

The man produced another bottle of liquor for himself. “Teacher Gu, I've come to apologize for my wife,” he said. “As you said, man to man.”

Teacher Gu shook his head. As an adult, he had never sat at a table with someone of his neighbor's status, a worker, a less educated member of the all-powerful proletarian class. His only similar memory was from when he had visited a servant's home as a small boy—her husband was a carpenter who had lost the four fingers of his right hand in an accident, and Teacher Gu remembered staring at the stumps when the man poured tea for him. The smell from the man's body was different from the men he had known, masters of literature and teachers of the highest reputation. “What do you do, young man?” Teacher Gu asked.

“I work in the cement factory,” the man said. “You know the cement factory?”

Teacher Gu nodded and watched the man put two peanuts at a time in his mouth and chew them in a noisy way. “What's your name? Please forgive me for being an old and ignorant invalid.”

“My name is Gousheng,” the man said, and then, as if apologizing, he explained that his parents were illiterate, and that they had given him the name, a dog's leftovers, to make sure he would not be desired by devils.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Teacher Gu said. “How many siblings do you have?”

“Six, but all the rest are sisters,” Gousheng said. “I was my parents’ only good luck.”