The Vagrants

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.”

A son was not what Teacher Gu had consciously hoped for, but now he wondered whether he was wrong. It would make a difference if he had a son, drinking with him, talking man-to-man talk. “Still, better luck than many other families,” Teacher Gu said.

Gousheng took a long drink from the bottle. “Yes, but I wouldn't have felt so much pressure if I'd had a brother.”

“You and—your wife—don't have children?”

Gousheng shook his head. “Not a trace of a baby anywhere,” he said.

“And you are”—Teacher Gu struggled for the right words—”active in trying to make a baby?”

“As often as I can,” Gousheng said. “My wife—Teacher Gu, please don't mind her rudeness—she is a soft woman inside. She feels bad about not being able to have a child. She thinks the whole world laughs at her.”

Teacher Gu thought about the wife, her words that issued like razor blades. He could not imagine her as a soft woman, but it pleased him, for a moment, that she was in well-deserved despair, though the joy of Teacher Gu's revenge soon vanished. They were all sufferers in their despicable pain, every one of them, and what right did he have to laugh at the woman whose husband was pouring his heart out to him, a man in sincere confession to a fellowman?

“I worry that her temper is making it harder for us to have a baby. But how can I tell her? She's the kind of person who wants everything, all the success and glory.”