The Season of the Stranger Read online

  It takes a long time to empty the auditorium. If there were ever a fire. Those children trapped in the balcony. The noise and smoke. I suppose the building is fireproof. I feel much better. Perhaps now that I know this so well about my father I will not have the dream. Next week: Do Not Dream. The bravest thing. What would be the bravest kind of bravery? To lose your bravery, perhaps. Deliberately and voluntarily, to help someone by losing your bravery. Like a bodhisattva. Renounce. But not the body. Renouncing the body is too easy. The vanity. Renounce the vanity. Like the Christians. But they never do.

  There must be a way to become brave without losing Andrew. We are outside now in the cold, and he is talking to me.

  They were home. Andrew lay on the sofa. “What are you thinking?” he asked her.

  She thought she must have looked silly. She had been sitting in the large chair, looking at nothing, her lips loose and turned downward. “Bravery,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Ma Chi-wei.” His eyes were closed. The sofa complained mildly as he breathed.

  “Yes. Ma Chi-wei.”

  He opened his eyes. “Who, then?”

  She said nothing. She looked at him. He looked down toward his feet, at the other end of the sofa. Then he glanced up at the window. With his teeth he tore a shred of skin from his lower lip, and then he sat up.

  “I guess I have been cruel,” he said. “Busy, but cruel too. It has not seemed as though there were time.” She watched his mouth move. “And I wanted you to do it by yourself.”

  “Do what?”

  He gestured. “Beat it down.”

  “Then you know what is wrong.”

  He nodded. His heavy eyebrows drew together. It looked to her like an easy way to show concern. He pressed his lips together, completing the portrait of sympathy.

  “What should I do?” she asked him.

  “Forget,” he said. “Work, or play, do anything, but forget. Slash yourself away. You belong here now.”

  “Just like that,” she said slowly.

  He shook his head. “I know it’s hard. You have yourself to fight and then you have the people who make speeches.”

  “You were thinking of him too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you look at me while he was speaking.”

  He leaned toward her and put his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know if it was sympathy or curiosity or what it was. I had to look at you.”

  “Why just then?”

  Andrew hesitated. “I don’t know. What was he saying?”

  “He was talking about tax collectors and opium traders.”

  “Oh,” he said, and then, “I don’t know.”

  “Andrew,” she said, “I don’t know what my father does, exactly.”

  “I know you don’t,” he said.

  “I know that he is in the government, but I don’t know just what he does. Will you tell me?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know myself.”

  “You know that he is with the government.”

  “Yes. I know that. And I know that he is very highly placed.”

  “And you know nothing more?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You are lying,” she said.

  “How?”

  “He must have told you. When he frightened you so much.”

  Andrew looked down and his teeth played with his lip again. “Don’t bite your lip,” she said. He stopped.

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “Your father told me that he was powerful, and that’s all he told me. He showed me some people who worked for him. They were rough.”

  She took in a deep tired breath and let it out slowly. “I want very much to know.”

  “Why? Can’t you forget the whole thing?”

  “Twenty years of my life?”

  One of his eyebrows went up, and the corner of his mouth with it. “What if you’d been married? You’d have had to forget it then, wouldn’t you?”

  “No. If I had been married it would have been to a man of his choosing, even to a man of his employ. There would have been weekly visits. There would have been the same life.”

  “Would you have been happier?”

  “Not in the end. But there would not have been this particular problem.”

  “No,” he said. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Forgetting it is impossible,” she said. “Remember that.”

  “Why?”

  “I owe him something. If not love, loyalty.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s my father. Just that.”

  He breathed a heavy, settling breath, and leaned back against the sofa. “Not enough,” he said. “It could have happened to anyone.”

  “But it happened to me.”

  “What is there to repay him for?”

  She considered. “My youth, my upbringing, my education.” She was leaning toward him.

  “All of which he did in self-interest.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know it.”

  “Even if that is true,” she said, “there is more to it.”

  “Such as.”

  “Such as that I cannot leave anyone to whom I owe something.”

  “But you don’t owe him anything.” He sounded as though he were trying to explain subtraction to a stupid schoolgirl.

  “But I do,” she flared. “I’ve told you. And then to leave him without repaying him, to leave him in his loneliness—”

  “He deserves it.” Andrew’s voice snapped hard across the space between them.

  “Then you’ve made the final judgment.”

  “It wasn’t difficult. He deserves all he gets now for what he’s been all his life.”

  “And what has he been all his life?” She was tight inside again.

  Andrew looked at her with nothing in his eyes and said, “He’s been a bloodsucker all his life. Living on the flesh of the human race.”

  She had thought that herself an hour before and still she wanted to leap upon Andrew. Instead she waited until her voice could be calm, and said, “What did you expect him to be?”

  “Something human. Not a leech. Something with enough simple humanity in it so that he could stay awake a night now and then worrying about other people.”

  “He worries about me.”

  “Yes, he worries about you. He worries about you because you’re all he has now to remind him of the days when he never worried at all. He would worry more about his decorations and his yellow and purple horsejackets if he still had them.”

  “Horsejackets,” she murmured. Otherwise for a moment she did not seem to have heard him. Then she nodded slowly and looked up at him. “Let’s work at it in another way. Sit back and be comfortable.”

  He smiled hesitantly and lay back on the sofa. “Go on. I will try.”

  “First, about the classical greatness of China. Do you think it was real and valuable?”

  He looked puzzled, and then he considered. “Yes.”

  “What was its origin?”

  “Emperors,” he said. “Dukes. Scholars.” He frowned.

  “The elite,” she said.

  “Yes. But an elite—”

  “I know.”

  “Supported by the rulers who in turn were supported by a hundred million starving peasants who gave them all, and who were kept poor and were kept giving by any means, by lies and theft and bribery and murder and a thousand unrecounted corruptions.”

  “Does that make any less valuable the greatness?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not less real.”

  “Not less real,” he agreed. “But less valuable. Less great because there is always a feeling in the back of the mind that there must be an undefinable and unpublicized rottenness at the heart of the greatness. Less valuable for the same reason. It cannot be completely trusted.”

  “And if that feeling in the back of the mind does not exist?”

  “All right,” he said. T
here was a white ridge of skin between his eyebrows. “Even if there are people who do not have that feeling, there is another reason. Call it waste. Say even for the moment that there is no difference in quality between what comes out of free people and what comes out of an elite supported by slaves. There is still a waste. One hundred million free people can produce more of anything than ten thousand comfortable parasites.”

  “How do you know?” There was an edge to her voice. It surprised her.

  “I do not know. But the elite produce because they are free; why wouldn’t the others if they were free? And what they produced would be circulated. Why were reading and writing high and occult arts here for three thousand years?”

  “Power,” she said. “They meant power.”

  “Then if all could read and write, there would be more total power. More production. More greatness.”

  “No.” Her voice was quiet and even again. “The greatness needed leisure, and the only way to get the leisure was to be powerful enough; to protect yourself from other kingdoms and from your own peasants.”

  “And the power would not have been there if the people had been free?”

  “No. Not then. Or only if it had been true of the whole country, which was impossible. If three parts of the country had been free, the fourth, with slave soldiers and no internal arguments, would have conquered them. Free states have always lived shorter lives than empires.”

  He licked his lips. “Have you ever read Plato?”

  “No.”

  “You ought to. Perhaps he has been translated. He argues at times almost the way you do. It leads to a kind of fascism.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You had to mention that. Words like that. Conserve your words for those whom words hurt. And do not attack me on the basis of what I have not read.”

  His face reddened. “All right,” he said. “I will agree for now. If you will remember that we are talking about the past.”

  “The past. What do you suppose the present is for most Chinese?”

  “A time of discovery,” he said. “And growth.”

  She shook her head. “Not for many. It is only a continuation of the past. For the government and for people like my father it is one more struggle for power. For the farmer it is one more rumored change that has nothing to do with him and that he cannot believe ever will. Only among the intellectuals is there discovery and growth.”

  “And in the north?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps where it has been imposed the people have come to like it. But the north is still a small part.”

  “But they learn,” he said. “They will continue to learn. It will be done more quickly than you think.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “How did you learn?”

  His eyes emptied, looking beyond her for a moment. “I do not know,” he said. “I seem to have absorbed it as a child. I grew up where it was written down and sometimes believed, and even existed occasionally.”

  “Which is one difference between us. I grew up where it did not exist at all and had been written down only by foreigners.”

  “And Sun Yat-sen.”

  “Who got it from the foreigners.”

  “All right,” he said. “The foreigners and the difference are all right.”

  “Good.” It would be harder now because she was not so sure of the facts of what she wanted to say. Without losing him, she thought. She went on slowly. “Why is there the difference?”

  “The societies. The societies in which we grew up.”

  Looking hard at him she bent forward. She put one hand on the low table and leaned toward him. The tips of her fingers near the nails showed white. “Exactly,” she said. “Your ethics. Western ethics. I know something about western ethics. I am of the elite. I have had time to study it. And look what it has brought you. It took your world two thousand years to formulate socialism as a politics, even when Christ was a kind of socialist.”

  “Ah, how you oversimplify,” he said. “Even if it were true there is no reason to believe that it will take so long here.”

  She sighed. “You speak always as though we wanted the western ethics.” They were quiet; and then she said, “Do you see now? All our past greatness comes from what you would call crime, and it is all the greatness this country knows. Do you see how some of us can believe that we are as right as you believe you are? How we can believe that westerners are children and fools with dangerous mechanical toys but with the souls of old delicate women?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But do you see that our rightness is better?”

  “Ah,” she said, leaning forward again, feeling the anger start its slow heat, “you have missed it entirely. You talk now like the man from Honan who says that Honan ducks are better than Hopei ducks, or like the man from Hopei who argues the point with him. That is how you talk when you lose your intelligence.”

  He reddened again. His voice was harder when he spoke and he did not look at her. “Then you defend a society whose greatness comes from murder and bribes?”

  “No,” she said. “I think I want what you want. But my father is righter than I am. All I want to make you see is that my father is righter for himself than we are for ourselves. A man can free himself only to a small extent from his first thirty years and his last hundred ancestors.”

  Now he looked up, flinging the words at her. “And you? You with the same hundred plus him? Are you lost with him?”

  “Again you forget something,” she said, her voice bitter. “I am not a man. Fifty years ago I might have been drowned at birth, and if I had not been I might have wished later that I had.” Now she raised her voice again. “You want to give me equality, but this is one equality that you and the students and the government together with all your words and work could not give me, and they gave it to me, the ancestors, the last hundred and the hundred before that and back to the first, so that now no one can give it to me and no one can take it from me: universal female equality with every outlaw and peasant and slave that exists, equality to be equally unwanted, and you don’t know about that one, you can’t.”

  She breathed heavily. “Or a reason,” she went on in the same warm bitter voice, “a reason to believe them when they come to tell me of a new world. Do you know who the Communists are among the students? They are the poor; and when they are not poor they are newly rich; and when they are neither they are women.”

  “And still you justify your father.”

  “Yes. And do not sneer as though it were a weakness in me. What I am does not change him. If I have the right to rebel, he has not.”

  “So you will support him.”

  “No. But I will not be righteous in condemning him.”

  “I am happy that there is only one of you,” he said. “I do not think that the others will hesitate.”

  “And you will not?”

  “No.”

  “Where now is the western ethics?”

  “Your father has no place in it,” he snapped. “He has rejected it. Wholly.”

  “He has never known it,” she said, with a weariness in her voice. “And even if he had, would you be justified in abandoning it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When it is necessary.”

  “I see,” she said.

  He stood up quickly and stared down at her. “What would you have me do?” he asked in a heavy angry voice. “Approve of him for the sake of a principle when the approval violates tens of other principles?”

  “Principles,” she said. “Dogma.” Without losing him.

  “No.”

  “Do not underestimate him. Do not forget how to understand. Do not lose everything in your anger.”

  “And do not worry,” he said. He snorted. “I hope you will not be crushed when something happens to him.”

  When she heard it her body stiffened. Without looking up she said, “I do not think so.”

  “I hope not,” he said. “You defend him loyally enough.”
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  “You have missed all that I said.”

  “No,” he said. “But I have heard of too many men like him who were spared on much the same principle and who later made terrible trouble for many people.” He moved away from her. “It has happened in half the countries of the world. It happens even now.” He stood at the bookcase and ran his hand along the edge of a shelf. “And I do not want it to happen here,” he said softly.

  “No,” she said, in a voice she had not heard before, “no. Not to you brave Chinese.”

  He had not been looking at her, so that in the silence now he stood, his back to her, his hand motionless and gripping the shelf, he unable to see the hate and fear and shame on her face but feeling them across the room; until he turned slowly and saw them, as she saw the lines gather on his forehead and at his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth, the cold white furious lines. When he had turned he was silent a little longer, and then he said, “Yes,” and paused again until the room became unbearable. He said then, “I live here and I work here and I live and work in the language of the people. I have never been happy before and I am happy here, happy with my friends and my food and my clothes and the woman I live with. Or had you forgotten that?”

  She was standing suddenly, facing him, feeling the hate jet like steam to her head, hating his face and his eyes and the white hard lines. “I had forgotten that about the woman you sleep with,” she said. “I had forgotten how that gave you the right to be Chinese.”

  She saw the angry shock of comprehension on his face; she went on, shouting now, knowing that she must say it all while it roared in her wanting to be said, say it all before the tears came, “I had forgotten that. I remember now. I remember my function. I am proud and happy—”

  “Stop,” he said. “Don’t. I—”

  “to have made you eligible to do what you will to my father—”

  “Shut up, shut up,” he whispered furiously, and she felt the agony in him, “there—”

  “to have been privileged to contribute to your political—”

  “But to explain,” he shouted back.

  “If your naturalization is complete,” she said, “I will go now.” She saw him breathe hard and the lines come back to his face, and she saw his hands fist at his sides, and she heard him say loudly and with his voice trembling, “All right. Don’t bother. If the explanation doesn’t interest you don’t bother. If you are not willing …”