The Vagrants

She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time—so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite high school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters—they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.

In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs. Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize.

SEVEN

         The nanny stood by the doorway of the nursery, watching Kai and Ming-Ming with detached patience. The morning leave-taking was never easy, but before the girl's gaze Kai felt more incapable than ever. The nanny was young, fifteen and a half, but there was a look of resignation on her face that made the girl look old, as if an aged woman had taken over and lived out all that was to come in her life before her time.

“Now, now,” said the nanny finally, when Kai failed to pry Ming-Ming's small fingers off her hand. He screamed in protest when he was pulled out of Kai's arms, and the nanny caught the small wrist and shook it gently. “Ming-Ming will be a good boy. Wave to Mama and let Mama go to work. Without work Mama doesn't make money. Without money there is no food. Without food Ming-Ming's tummy will rumble. And when Ming-Ming's tummy rumbles Mama will be too sad to go to work.”

The girl had a way of talking in circles, her tone flat and unhurried, as if she was telling an old folktale that no longer held any suspense, and Ming-Ming always calmed down. In those moments Kai felt that the girl was innocent and mysterious at once, a child and an old woman sharing the space within her skinny body, neither aware of the other's existence.

Han came out of the bathroom, buttoning the last button on his Mao jacket. “Let Mama go to work, yes,” he said, and tickled Ming-Ming under his chin. “But your baba will make more than enough money even if Mama doesn't work. Aren't you a lucky boy?”