The Season of the Stranger Read online

  The truck stopped and pressed them against the front wall of the trailer. Her hand moved to the small of his back. He brought her thighs against his own and held her tightly and comfortably and whispered: “Quiet.”

  He was not thinking of her. He was thinking of Ma Chi-wei and the soldiers and himself sick in the dust; thinking irrevocable; but I suppose it is irrevocable each time; and only now has it happened to me and I can see what it means to be committed and perhaps I am committed myself feeling stronger, suddenly better at the last thought. The truck staggered and moved forward. He felt it make two turns and knew that they were outside the gates. He felt it pick up speed and then he felt only his thoughts again why? why do they do it? why do they do it until they have done it one more time than the number of times they have failed? why do they risk; but it isn’t risk; why do they hypothecate their work and their power and ultimately themselves to borrow an afternoon of something they call truth or justice when the kind of truth or justice for which they do it does not exist for them is not now even known to them except from the pages of borrowed books?

  And I was with them feeling and acting which is even more foolish because they cannot know that it does not now exist for them but I can; I have seen it rarely and dimly but I know where and when it can exist and where and when it cannot so what was I doing feeling and acting with them? Thinking, almost saying the words good God good God good God; and then the thoughts were gone and there was only the motion, the slow and then swift motion, and the steady roll and sound and rush of the old moving truck.

  PART TWO

  12

  A morning sound or a morning movement started it. One instant from sleep and the beginning of it was all there, clear, and if she were to open her eyes the rest would not come:

  and he said Princess and I ran to the mirror. Princess he said while I looked first seeing the face to be sure it was I and then shifting my vision slowly from my head to my feet, very slowly so that I would miss no detail of the embroidered collar and the fine blue gauze like spiderwebs and the gold decorated sleeve cuffs and the hem, the wide fantastic hem and the red archers hunting green deer on it, and the shoes of shining blue satin, and quickly swept my vision back to the face and it was I, all this was I. Princess he said and took me on his knee it will be fifteen years and you will marry a prince. I was five years old then and did not know what blood was. I wore them all that day and took them off at night but put them on again the next morning and every day for fifteen days, each day a year, and I had the servants call me princess and bow. I remember them bowing low and him in the center of the room smiling and nodding and with his eyes always on me, and after the fifth day he came to me saying Princess I had forgotten this and held toward me a fan. You will not be a true princess without it he said and I opened it slowly with fat small hands and on it was the prince surrounded by his court. I stared long and hard at the prince and then fanned myself slowly and snapped shut the fan and I was not without it for the next ten days. I memorized the prince; I would know him when he came, erect and lean, wearing grey, in thicksoled shoes, to ask for me. Each day a year passed and on the fifteenth day I rose before the light came and washed and dressed, sorry now that I had worn them every day, that the shoes were scuffed and the hem was dirty, and I wound my hair carefully on my head and with a light cloth gave to my fingernails a soft shine, and I ate and all that day I waited. Late at night I ran sobbing to my room and my father followed and when I had torn off the outer garments I told him, told him of the years I had waited and now nothing had happened; and he laughed, he laughed so that he had to sit down, and I drove him from the room and wept until sleep came, but the next day I was once more five years old and I never wore them again and only once did I look at them, long afterward, remembering his laugh. It was never quite the same then.

  Perhaps the gifts were bad for me. Kumamoto came once with gifts. I had forgotten the prince by then. Kumamoto was in the pavilion with my father and they sent for me. I went to them and bowed and Kumamoto stood up, fat and tall, in a western suit of clothes and a short haircut. So you are twelve years old he said. Yes I said I am twelve years old today. Then he turned to my father and said She is beautiful with a wicked beauty. It will bring you trouble one day. My father was delighted and so was I and I smiled and Kumamoto stepped forward quickly and lightly for a fat man and bowed and stepped back, and then handed my father a small package, saying In homage to the princess. My father rose and bowed and looked at me smiling so I bowed and my father thanked Kumamoto in a long speech and Kumamoto answered with a short speech. I remember he called my father prince. When they dismissed me I went to my room and opened the package. The gift was a set of combs in old jade. Even then I knew that the jade was valuable. I loved my father. Now I know that the jade was very valuable but now I do not have the combs. Now I have something else.

  I knew that Kumamoto was Japanese but I never knew what the Japanese were or meant or had done until I came here. When they took the City I was nine years old and I had never left the house without my father, and I knew that something was happening because he had no time for me that day. He was directing the servants. I sat on my bed all day hearing the sounds of work around me: the scrubbing of floors, the painting of the gates, the sweeping of the courts and the snipsnip of the gardener’s tools, and my father everywhere at once, calling orders in an excited voice. I heard the noise of guns and the screaming in the streets but I did not know what it was; and the next day he came in to me and said All is well now and I was happy that there would be no more noise. And after that the house was always kept clean and we had visitors. Sometimes I was permitted to see them and sometimes I was not, but except for Kumamoto I never knew who they were, and even with Kumamoto I never knew what he wanted or why he was there.

  Until one day they were gone, a long time later, when I had heard the servants’ gossip and had felt even in my isolation that something had happened to the country (but I did not know what it was; I knew only that something had happened, like last night) and that my father too no longer liked them; but that day the noise was different, with nothing frightening in it, first a light rumble of sound from every direction and later, toward evening, a growing roar of pleasure, even mirth, the roar in the streets all night, dying only when the sun came up on the new day. That was the day my father sent for me and smiled when I came to him. I was almost as tall as he was now and I stood before him waiting. He asked me to sit down. I did. He stared out the window for a few seconds and then turned to me and said I will explain several things to you. I waited in silence. You know that your country has been at war. You do not know yet what your country is, but you know that there has been a war. It has not touched you. I have seen to that. The war is now over. It ended yesterday. I said The servants told me. He looked sharply at me. Have they discussed the war with you? No I said they rarely speak to me. But this morning they told me that it was ended. He said Good. Now that the war is ended we will not be receiving Japanese visitors. It is no longer necessary to refer to them in conversation. It would be better to forget them entirely. I nodded. He said I have made a decision. Your education will now proceed more rapidly than it has in the past. Your station in life will be high. It is necessary that you prepare for it. You may attend the Confucian school in the City, or one of the universities near the City. Your ability to meet and deal with people will be increased in either case. Whatever your decision, I will determine the nature of your studies. You will begin next month. You have two days in which to choose.

  And he signed that the conversation was over.

  So I had a great deal to think about in the next two days, and I still do not know why I chose the university, but even now I am happy that I did. Neither do I know why he permitted me to come here. He must have had high faith in my early training. But I sat in my room and thought of the people I knew who had gone to the Confucian school; friends of my father and I liked them but I did not enjoy the idea of going to school with t
hem; and I was afraid they would not like women at the Confucian school. I knew nothing of the universities, but the people in them would be my age and then suddenly remembering I thought that one of them might be the prince I had waited for so long ago and I laughed but I had already decided. When I told him he only nodded. I was at the door when he called me back. There is no further use for old Hu he said. You may say goodbye when you next see him. I started to protest and the words came as far as my throat and then stopped, because my father was a correct man and led the correct life and somehow there was nothing really to protest against. He chuckled and I remember the shock I felt looking at him; suddenly he was old, lined, slightly dirty; he was no longer the man who had given me the clothes of a princess but even then the rightness was there, with him, like an invisible cloak, casting no shadow, but there, or like a layer of skin handed from his father to him to be worn outside the layer handed from his father’s father to his father, and that outside the others, the hundred fifty others handed from male Hsieh to male Hsieh, so that he, now, had nothing of his own but was the sum of all of them; the sum, the goods and chattels and caste meaning not that he was good or bold or the princely man but meaning that he was right, the rightness justifying itself and being its own truth, the rightness that would some day be mine and that in that moment I knew for the first time I did not want. Out of his room I went to the mirror again and knew that I was no longer the princess, that I was no longer really anything and would not be until the day I left this house; and in the bitterness I went to my room and wept again and did not think of Hu until he came the next day.

  He walked in the way he had walked in almost every day for thirteen years, and bowed. I returned the bow and asked him to sit, and when he was seated the composure dropped from him and left him crumpled and with tears in his eyes. Then there were tears in my eyes and I was leaning across and touching his thin old hand and saying Then he has told you? Hu nodded and patted my hand and then straightened and ran the sleeve of his gown across his eyes. Unseemly grief is the mark of a hypocrite he said, but I knew that it was not unseemly and that only his deep sorrow had betrayed him into impoliteness. Today’s will be the last lesson he said. We will read from the Spring and Autumn Annals. We read from the Spring and Autumn Annals and no more emotion was shown. When we were through with the reading he rose to leave and bowed and then did a strange thing while his eyes held mine: he put his hand on my shoulder. After a moment he dropped his hand and turned to go out. I said to his back Were there presents? and without looking at me he said Yes. He gave me presents and then he was gone.

  I never saw him again although I thought I was looking at him one day a year later when my father and a young man confronted me as I stepped into the pavilion. I bowed and lowered my head, thinking in confusion It is Hu but how is he so young. My father introduced us, saying It is a nephew of old Hu and I bowed again, and then I asked to be excused and went to my room.

  When he came again and again I knew he had been chosen. He was handsome and tall and correct. We sat drinking tea with my father, and young Hu commented on business and politics. Every two weeks my father sent a note to the university telling me when to come, and when I reached home young Hu would be sitting with him. Young Hu would not like me now.

  After his third or fourth visit he indicated his satisfaction with me by light compliments. I have heard he said that you were placed immediately in the second year at the university. I said It is because of the excellent education my father saw fit to give me. Another time he said I have heard from your father that you are an extremely apt student of Confucius. I said It is because my father long ago stressed the importance of the ancient philosophers and young Hu nodded and smiled.

  After many weeks of this I was afraid because I knew that soon I would be asked to decide. I spent my time now in a world where an arranged marriage was a stupid anachronism; I neither associated often with nor knew much of that world, but here I agreed with it. My decision, when I made it, would not be the acceptance or rejection of young Hu; it would be the acceptance or rejection of the anachronism, and it made me afraid because I had never fought my father. I had not always loved him but I had never fought him and I did not want to fight him now.

  It came in December and it came the way I had expected it and for a time it paralyzed me. My father sent for me and told me that young Hu had made his formal offer and that I would be married to him in the spring.

  For a moment until I could breathe I stood with my head bowed and then I raised it and looked full at him and said No.

  He stopped writing and dropped the brush to the table. Otherwise he did not move.

  No I said again. I will not marry young Hu.

  It has been decided he said. He picked up his brush.

  I will not marry him I said. I will not appear for the ceremony. I will disgrace you. But I will not marry him.

  Go to your room he said.

  I stayed in my room for nine days. On the tenth day he permitted me to leave my room but not to leave the house. Once he came to the pavilion to see me and as he walked in I stood up and said No. I remember that No. He turned almost in midstep and left.

  I do not know even now what would have happened if it had continued that way. But I remember when young Hu’s father died and the government demanded a great deal of money and young Hu could not cope with them, so that he found himself with less than half the fortune his father had had and my own father, hearing of this, refused to admit him to the house and sent for me.

  He was chuckling again and he looked even older and drier. You were very intelligent he said. No one could have foreseen this. But you did. It appears that you have an instinct.

  I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but I never did because his rightness was there again, the rightness that should by then have been mine. Without it I was wrong but there was no way to explain that, no easy way, and even my not having it was part of the wrongness. So I said nothing and he released me then and let me return to the university.

  But it was never again the same between us. Andrew came to the university later and when my father heard that I had a foreign teacher he wanted me to leave but I would not and his threats did not frighten me. And then it was even more different between us, even before the blood: I knew too many people who were strangers and worse to him and I heard too many speeches and thought too many thoughts. I was still a student of the classics but I did not work at it. I went instead to classes in English and in political history. He knew about the English but no one ever told him about the political history. And for a long time no one ever told him that I saw Andrew often. It was never the same.

  And now it is worse. Now there is so little hope. I will think of him every day as I think of eating and sleeping and dressing myself and I will want to go back to him but it will be impossible. Or perhaps it will not. I wish I knew him better. My father, my own; I wish I knew him. I wish I did not have this fog of love and hate in me. I wish I had not begun to think of all this. I wish I were not weeping and lying in pain.

  Andrew moved. He rolled over and raised himself to one elbow. He looked down at her and then he pulled her closer to him. His body was warm. She could not look at it or at the sheet. She felt his body against hers.

  Now there is no one. If I had had a mother; but I never did. I wish there were someone now. I wish I were not so alone.

  13

  The walls were streaky white in Andrew’s house. Smooth, cheap furniture covered in green; brown woodwork; thatched floor and ceiling in Andrew’s house. Walls whitewashed in a now paintless country, a brown moribund country where the blinding reds and greens of other ages pushed singly and rarely up from the dust, reds and greens too healthy, too beautiful, like the sad momentary patches of color on a new corpse. On the whitewashed walls of Andrew’s house were dark shapeless spots, filthy sudden monuments to innumerable centipedes and mosquitoes and scorpions. On the ceiling of Andrew’s house, somewhere between the matted thatchi
ng and the ageless wood, lived two salamanders, inactive now in the winter, waiting with the living centipedes and mosquitoes and scorpions for the distant spring afternoon.

  Andrew gone, she sat encompassed by white wall and yellow thatch. She would not read. For many days she had read, sitting quietly in her yellow and white garden. She did not want to cook, today, either. She enjoyed not wanting to read and not wanting to cook. She would have been happy except for the whispers, her own unspoken whispers. Where do you want to go now? What do you want to do now? And tomorrow? There were no answers, there was just the concentration, the straining of her mind toward the answers. She imagined the slow flattening and grooving within her, imagined it as Andrew had described it, part of the mind worn to a path, smooth and direct, or cut to a gully, sharp and dangerous, by the thousandlegged thousandbladed thoughts she could not put away. What do you want to do? I want to walk in silence (save the sound of chanting fierce-plumed birds) in the garden whose garden? the garden of the queen where? in a scented sunlit land with whom? no one; alone, by myself, whole and untouched no one really no one? yes no one perhaps a fawn a soft tan speckled nuzzling fawn but no other and then what? that is all; just that. But here we have no such garden, the old woman said. I know, I said, and I did not expect to find it; but I was looking for it; I think you will find that we are all looking for it. I know, the old woman said, I have seen many come looking for it. And, I asked. And, she said, none of them have found it, not in this corner of the world nor in any; I would advise you, and you see that I am old and that I know much, to live in the world of men. How old are you, I asked, if it is not being impolite. It is not being impolite, she said; I am older than your country. That is strange, I said, because Andrew says what you say and he is very young. He is a fool, the old woman said, because he thinks that he will find it his way; and you are a fool because you think you will find it your way. And you, I asked. And I, she said, I know that the garden does not exist. Then you are a fool too, I said; because we have nothing else to do; even when we know that it does not exist we must go on looking for it. Of course, the old woman said; otherwise I would not be here.