The Vagrants

Bashi tried to make something up, but before he spoke, the policeman turned away to shout at someone who was trying to push through the children's parade. Bashi shrugged and said under his breath, while he slipped away, “My name is Your Uncle and my work unit is your mother's bed.”

A few steps later, Bashi asked someone else, and found out that people in this district were all marching toward a high school, one of six sites for the denunciation ceremony before the execution.

“Do you know who the woman is?” Bashi asked.

“A counterrevolutionary,” the man replied.

“I know, but who is she?”

The man shrugged. “What's that got to do with you?”

“Where do you get the ticket?” Bashi asked.

“Ticket? Go with your school.”

“I'm out of school now.”

“Go with your work unit.”

Bashi thought of explaining that he was a free man, but he stopped midsentence when the man seemed not to be listening to him. Bashi stood and watched men and women, students, and retired workers march by. They all looked happy, singing songs, shouting slogans, and waving colorful banners to the sky. Bashi had never considered the importance of being a member of a unit. He thought of tagging along behind the high school students, but without a banner in his hand, he would look suspicious. After a while, he said to himself, “What's so special about the denunciation ceremony? I'm going to the island to see the execution itself.”

Once the words were said, Bashi's mind was made up. Why should he be one of the marching crowds when he had all the freedom in the world to do what he wanted? “Bye-bye,” he said, smiling, and waved at these people who pushed along in the street like a herd of sheep.

FOUR

         T

he East Wind Stadium, built at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, in 1968, and modeled on the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, though with much less seating capacity, was not an unfamiliar stage for Kai. Several times a year she served as the master of ceremonies, celebrating May Day, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, National Day, and achievements of various kinds that the city government decided to honor in mass gatherings. From where she stood, she could not see most of her audience, and she had learned to gauge the attention of fifteen thousand people through her own amplified voice, which, it seemed, could be affected by even the smallest change in the air. Sometimes the echo of her voice came back with a life of its own, vibrant with energy, and Kai knew that she was being watched with admiration and perhaps benign desires, replacing a lover, a wife, or a child in a stranger's heart, no matter how fleetingly. But these moments had occurred less and less in the past year; more often now she felt like a beggar, her voice lost in an intricate maze and bouncing off cold and uninterested walls.

“Are you nervous?” Han said when they stopped at the side gate. He looked around before touching her face with the back of his hand. Things would be all right, he said. She shook her head without replying. The previous fall, after she had returned to work from her maternity leave, she had lost control of herself onstage at the celebration for National Day. Her choked voice and uncontrollable tears had passed within a minute, and the audience, if baffled by her behavior, had not reacted in any way detrimental to the event. Still, the tears must have been noticed and talked about by the officials sitting closest to the stage as distinguished guests. It must be the hormones, the mayor's wife commented to Kai at the banquet afterward, and Han's mother, in a less generous and forgiving mood, warned Kai in front of the other guests not to let a woman's petty sentiments get in the way of her political duties.

“People will always pay attention to a woman about to be executed,” Han said. Kai looked up at him, taken aback by the simple and cruel truth she had not known he was capable of speaking. Days after the crisis on National Day, Han had asked her what had happened; she had been worrying about the inattentiveness of the audience, Kai lied, knowing that she could never explain to Han or to anyone else the immense desolation that had engulfed her onstage.

Han assured her again that she would not lose her audience today, and Kai nodded and said she had to go into the stadium. He would see her at the banquet, he said, and she looked at the rehearsed curving of his mouth—like a teenager who was very aware of his handsome looks, Han practiced his facial expressions in front of the mirror, smiling, grinning, frowning, and staring—and felt a moment of tenderness. Had Han been born to parents of less status, perhaps the boyish innocence would have made him, in addition to being a good husband and a good father, a good person, but then that innocence might have long ago been crushed by the harshness of life. For the first time that morning, she looked into his eyes and wished him good luck for the day.

“Luck's always on my side,” Han replied.