The Vagrants

Teacher Gu did not say anything to encourage his wife's blind confidence. A few days later he went to the prison for a visit. The guards were rude to him, but he had become used to people's abuse over the years and thought nothing in particular about their behavior. What shocked him was Shan's condition—she was not the defiant, lively girl he had known ten years earlier. Her prison uniform, gray and torn, smelled of filth; her short hair, filthy too, had thinned and there was a big bald patch in the middle of her scalp; her skin was so pale it was almost transparent, and her eyes were wide and dreamy. She recognized him immediately, but it seemed that what had happened ten years earlier was all gone from her memory. She started talking when she sat down. She told him that she had written letters to Chairman Mao and he had replied, apologizing for the wrong decision and promising a release. It had been two years since Chairman Mao had passed away, but Teacher Gu, sitting in a cold sweat, did not point that out to Shan. She talked fast, about all the things she planned to do after her release. In her mind, she had a fiancé waiting for her outside the prison walls, and the first thing they would do was go to city hall to apply for a marriage license. Teacher Gu did not protest when, at the end of the visiting period, two guards grabbed Shan's arms roughly and forced her out of the room. She was still talking, but he did not hear her. He stared at her uniform pants, stained with dark menstrual blood. Death was far from the worst that could happen to a human being. Something bigger than fear crept over him; he wished he could finish his daughter's life for her.

Teacher Gu did not know how long his daughter had been mad, nor did he know if his wife was aware of this fact. Perhaps she had been keeping it from him for years. In turn he lied about a note from the prison informing them that Shan's visiting rights had been stripped away because of disobedience. His wife sighed but did not question further, which made him wonder if she accepted the order willingly for his sake. The death sentence came to him as a relief; perhaps it was for his wife too, but he had no way of knowing. With the failure of the appeal, Mrs. Gu started to talk about seeing Shan one last time, but her request for a visit was turned down, no reason given.

Mrs. Gu put on her coat. Women were like children, Teacher Gu thought, the way they tenaciously held on to things that had little meaning. When he begged her to stay, she raised her voice and asked why he did not let her see their daughter.

“Seeing is not as good as staying blind,” Teacher Gu said, quoting an ancient poem.

“We've been blind all our lives,” said Mrs. Gu. “Why don't you want to open your eyes and see the facts?”

In her eyes he recognized the same defiance that he had once seen in Shan's eyes. “The dead have gone. Let's forget about all of it,” he said.

“How can you forget so easily?”

“It's a necessity,” he said. “A necessity is never easy but we must accept it.”

“You've always wanted us to accept everything without questioning,” his wife said. “Why do we have to live without backbones?”

Teacher Gu averted his eyes. He had no answer for his wife, and he wished she would let it go without prolonging this suffering for both of them. Before he could say something, he felt a sudden dead-ness in the left side of his body and he had to kneel down. He looked up at his wife for help but his eyes could no longer see. She rushed to support him but he was too heavy for her; she let him lie down slowly and he felt the coldness of the cement floor seeping through his clothes and numbing his whole body. “Don't go,” he begged, longing for a fire, for her warm and soft body. For a moment he was confused and thought he saw his first wife's face, still as young and beautiful as thirty years ago. “Don't leave me,” he said. “Don't make me lose you again.”

THE WOMAN'S BODY was lying facedown on the crystallized snow, her arms wrenched and bound behind her back in an intricate way. Her head, unlike what Bashi had imagined, was in one complete piece. He stopped a few steps away and looked at the bloodstains on her prisoner's uniform. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“Why, are you afraid now?” Kwen said, and bent down to study the body. “I didn't pay you to tag along.”

“Afraid? No, no. Just making sure she has no chance.” “No chance at all,” Kwen said, kicking one leg of the body and then the other. He squatted down next to the body and pointed to the woman's back. “Look here. They bound her arms this way so her left middle finger was pointing right at where her heart was.”

“Why the heart?”

“So that the executioner knew where to aim his gun.”