The Season of the Stranger Read online

  “How can I go back to that overcoat?”

  “I do not know. It never kept you warm.”

  “Another reason for my staying where I am.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Another reason.”

  They played, close to the lamps for the thin warmth of the vapor.

  It was almost midnight when she decided to go. He stood and stretched and limped to the door on a sleeping foot. “It is still bad outside.”

  “It makes no difference. I have not far to go.”

  “Take my old coat,” he said. “You have been sitting in the little warmth here wearing your own. You may catch a cold.”

  She shook her head. “It is a very short distance.”

  “All right. Let me get my gown and I will walk with you.”

  She shook her head again, the hair lifting and falling with the movement. “No. And for the same reason as that of the coat.”

  He stared. She smiled in apology. “Ah,” he said. “Public opinion. All right. I will see you to the road, though.”

  He twisted the knob and pushed. They crossed the yard and when they left the shelter of the buildings and small trees they were suspended in impotence and surprise at the sudden bellowing gust from the north, a nightsplitting blast that broke against them and swirled rapidly around them and ran off southward; a whitecap of Siberian air, more an explosion than a flow. They stood together waiting as though for the anger of the gods to pass, waiting in an obeisant half-crouch. They ran then to the shelter of a wall and with their backs to it they heard the gale come, the clap of billow on billow against the stone behind them, and the wind then losing direction, whirling at them from the south, beating in cries across the earth like a flock of stricken, panic-swift swallows.

  “Leave me here,” she said. “I will run.”

  “Yes. But the darkness—”

  “I know the way.”

  “Then go. Hurry.”

  She started out of the shelter of the wall into the noise and movement and dropped forward stumbling. He found her arm as she fell and twisted her upright, holding her by the inside of the elbow as she flexed her arm about his fingers and let the storm blow her trembling to her feet.

  “Thank you, Andrew,” she whispered, brought up against him. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Li-ling.”

  She ran then in short tight steps, bound by the skirt. He saw her run as far as the stand of saplings near the library and when he could no longer see her he turned and ran homeward, moving in long bounding strides and letting the wind tear at his throat.

  3

  The local newspaper was in his lap. He was reading about the glorious lineshortening tactics of the army in the north. When he heard the knocking he thought it would be Li-ling. He had been thinking that for ten days. After the storm he and Wen-li had put the stove in, where she wanted it; he had bothered Wen-li to keep the house clean and the temperature right. He had taught his classes and made jokes and been histrionic where they expected him to be histrionic. At night he had sat reading, waiting for knocks at the now weather-stripped door, or he had wet the inkstone and with a brush written the same character hundreds of times, any character, covering sheets of paper with it, faulting always on one or another of the delicate precise demanding strokes. He had gone shopping with Wen-li. He had met the manager of the Greater China Meat Market (and the manager’s wife, who had insisted on tea and a sample of pig’s liver), the owner of the coalyard, and the happy proprietor of the town’s single wine shop, who had told him that he would make contact immediately with the good French fathers who produced the red wine, if Mr Girard sincerely preferred red wine; but meanwhile would he try a cup of his unusually good hot yellow wine. He and Wen-li had come home late that day. “It is a generous town,” Wen-li had said later. “We were treated well. Let me introduce you one day to the brothel-keeper.”

  Girard dropped the newspaper and answered the knock. Nine or ten men stood in the court, breath trailing upward in the rays of the yardlight. He opened the door and they greeted him loudly and pushed stamping into the room. He remembered then that he had invited them, and went out to see what Wen-li might have in the kitchen. Wen-li was surrounded by small cakes and borrowed teacups, and on the massive stone stove were three pots, two of which Girard had never seen before, of boiling water. “Ya,” Wen-li said. “You forgot.”

  “Ya,” Girard repeated. “I forgot.”

  In the house the students were making decisions. “Very warm here, Mr Girard.”

  “Yes, very warm, professor.”

  “We shall stay the night.”

  “Where is the tea?”

  “Do you have whiskey?” Girard laughed, hearing the English word.

  They sat in chairs or on the sofa or on the floor. While they passed the cigarettes Girard arranged himself on the reed mat, his back to the phonograph table. “Why not write to Aid to China for whiskey?” he said.

  “Ya.” Cheng spoke, a stocky boy with long hair and bad teeth; he was sitting on the floor with his legs crossed in front of him. “The mayors of Tientsin, Shanghai, and Tsingtao have much to be grateful for in the way of aid to China.” The others laughed. “I,” he went on, tapping significantly his chest, “I have not had whiskey for weeks. I die for it.” They laughed again. Another stocky one, Yang, bushy-eyebrowed, spoke:

  “One cup of rice wine is sufficient. After that he wants to defile the graves of his ancestors. He has never seen a bottle of whiskey. Thus the big drinking one.”

  “There is no need to be impolite,” Cheng said. “I am simply trying to put Mr Girard at greater ease by behaving like his countrymen.” Half of them laughed immediately. The rest waited until Girard had smiled.

  “You force me badly,” he said. “If I behave like some of my countrymen you will laugh; if I do not, you will call me renegade.”

  “No, not at all.” Wu was speaking. Wu had come to a Shakespeare examination with the collected writings of Sigmund Freud under one arm and had spent two hours writing about Othello, a play they had not discussed in class. “We decided before coming here tonight that you have at least one Chinese ancestor. You may therefore call yourself an amalgam. This excuses everything.”

  “It is possible,” Girard said. “After the French revolution there was chaos for some time. I may also be part yak, which would explain the hairy pelt.” The others laughed and looked at one another.

  “You should beat your cook,” Yang said. “He is late with the tea.”

  “If I beat my cook there would be a delegation of seven hundred students at the house the next day. And they would come at six in the morning. You will be reported for proposing dynastic measures.”

  “Or Chiang K’ai-shek will make him minister of labor,” Cheng said. They laughed.

  “Speaking of delegations,” Liu said softly from the corner of the sofa, “we have had another meeting.” He wore steel-rimmed glasses and his hair was cut short. He did not laugh often.

  “About what?”

  “You may have heard,” he said, looking seriously at Girard, “that ten days ago Ma Chi-wei was beaten.”

  “Yes,” Girard said. “I have heard.” The others were silent.

  “Since that time we have had two meetings. Nothing more has happened, but when there is a little excitement it is better to have meetings. We yell harmlessly at meetings.”

  “Why do you never come to the meetings, Mr Girard?” Wu asked. The others murmured the question after him.

  “For the reason Liu gave,” he said. “A meeting is a place to yell harmlessly; or at least so far. With a foreigner present there might be embarrassment and perhaps not so much yelling. There might even be politeness, and a meeting is no place for politeness.”

  “But you follow our activities. You always seem to know what we are doing.”

  “There are the wall posters,” he said. “And friends come sometimes to discuss the meeting with me afterward.” He stopped and smiled. “Once a friend came to discuss
the meeting beforehand. I made a suggestion which he proposed later at the meeting. It was voted down.” They laughed uneasily. “Events proved them right.” They laughed more loudly.

  “There was an incident in Chekiang two days ago,” Liu the second said.

  “What happened?”

  “A student was found with some friends in Shanghai and taken by the police. They took him back to Chekiang and put him in jail on a conspiracy charge. They killed him on the third day.”

  “I saw the report,” Girard said, “but it was in the government newspaper. It said that he had killed himself with a piece of glass across the throat.”

  “Ya,” Cheng said. “A piece of glass across the throat which left a hole three inches deep and half an inch wide. And there was no glass in the cell when they threw him into it.”

  “More than that.” Liu the first picked himself up to a sitting position against the wall. “The president of his university fainted when he saw the body. The police asked him to sign a statement which said that he had seen the corpse and that it was obviously suicide. He refused to sign.”

  Wen-li pulled the door open and the talking stopped. He nodded hello to them and they nodded back. While he put the cups and pot on the table and the plate of cakes in the center of the small floorspace Girard was thinking of the man in the cell and the guard who had come in, probably bald, perhaps his head yellow in the light, perhaps there was no light; and the boy: what did the boy do; what did he do when they came to prove to him that everyone has a last day? At what—eighteen, nineteen?

  Wen-li brought another teapot from the kitchen and left a second time. No one had spoken.

  Girard stood up and went around with the teapot. “There is enough to be angry about,” he said.

  “Yes. And if the war comes closer there will be more.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Will there be panic and terror?”

  “In the City there will be.”

  “Why in the City?”

  “Because in the City are the factories, the shops, the houses. In the City are the railroad stations and the airports. And if the war comes closer, those who have become rich in the City and therefore no longer belong to the City will flee. But they will not flee with empty pockets; they will flee with cash and jade and gold, and there will be terror in the stealing of that. And there will be more of these people fleeing than there are seats on an airliner, and there will be panic in the stealing of those.”

  They thought about that. Girard said, “When all those have fled who are able to flee, will there be terror among those who remain?”

  Liu the first said, “Yes. But that will pass. It will pass when food comes, and when the stealing stops. This is nothing political. It has happened with every northern invasion in history.”

  “Except the Japanese,” Yang said.

  “That was not from the north. It was from the sea.”

  “Invasions from the sea are always bad,” Cheng said. “The one after the Japanese was bad too.” They waited for Girard to speak.

  “I must believe you,” he said. “I was not here.” He slurped the hot tea and took a cake, passing the plate. Each of them took one and Wu put the plate on the floor again.

  Cheng said, “It has had its aftereffects.” He bit off half the cake and chewed. “Arms and ammunition are still here, and money comes in. Where it then goes seems to be the business of no one.”

  “Some of it goes back where it came from,” Girard said, “with another name on the bankbook.”

  “Yes,” he said, “much of it. And the flavor of the transaction lingers in the mouths of the people. In famine areas they taste nothing else for weeks at a time.”

  “Do you say this because you think I can do anything?”

  “No, Mr Girard.” He shook his head and put the other half of the cake into his mouth. “You can do nothing. I do not even believe that we are talking about you.”

  “But I share the nationality.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and you are part yak but we do not look for milk. It is curious,” he sighed. “I know many of your nation, and all but the businessmen and missionaries I like.”

  “My father is a businessman,” Girard said.

  They looked attentively at him. “Of what business?”

  “He is a maker of pots and pans.”

  “An artisan,” Cheng said.

  Girard laughed. “Not exactly. He has a factory. He makes them on a large scale.”

  “Are you friends?”

  “Great friends,” Girard said. “We rarely write, and we have nothing to talk about. But we are great friends.”

  “Do not be offended at what I say.”

  “I think it is far too late for me to be offended.”

  They all smiled.

  “It is not a question of nation,” Cheng said, still smiling. “Neither do I like the Chinese missionaries and businessmen.”

  “You cannot be right,” Girard said. “There must be too many exceptions. I know several missionaries whom I like. Doctor Lo is a missionary.”

  Yang waved a hand. “But he is a teacher.”

  “Teaching is not much more than an avocation with him,” Girard said.

  “Then like many wise men he does not let his vocation corrupt his avocation.”

  “Philosopher,” Cheng said, lifting his upper lip. “Mr Girard is right. I am wrong, wrong within my own memory. In the west I knew missionaries: men of strength and compassion who worked in the fields in shorts, shirtless, and confined their metaphysics to the seventh day. And when there was famine they prayed less and worked more. One of them became so worldly as to produce a planeload of food from his headquarters in the east.”

  “Then these men are not missionaries,” Liu the first said. “They are farmers.”

  “No,” Cheng said. “We must go further back in the relationships. Would they be here if they were not missionaries? No. They would not come here, even for the cheaper living, without some sort of faith. Even the doctors, who have sense enough to pay more attention to the body than to the soul, do it because they believe that it is part of a divine mission.”

  “That is the one happy thing about western religion,” Wu said. “The greatest excesses may be committed, and excused with the statement that it is all divine will; but these excesses may be in either direction. The missionaries may pay their servants two dollars a month and they may pray earnestly over a dying beggar, in which case we shrug and say it is the church; or they may pay their servants well and give food and warmth to the dying beggar, in which case we cannot shrug: we are reminded of Christ.”

  “Have you studied the western religions?” Girard asked.

  Cheng laughed. “You will be surprised to learn that Wu and I come of Christian families. Until the age of ten or eleven I studied Christianity; I also went to a church every seventh day.”

  “And now?”

  “And you yourself now?”

  Girard nodded. “It must have been about the same thing.”

  “There are many of us,” Wu said. “And our parents were not riceChristians, but believers. My father was a fanatic churchgoer for ten years before I was born, and after I was born until he died when I was twelve.”

  “And there are many adults who convert and endure only a year or two of the new religion,” Cheng said. “This is true of the more traditional. Their respect for the old Chinese doctrines is too deeply bedded; they can absorb only the outer layer of western religion. And then why stay with it? We take the teachings of Christ literally and seriously, and we leave Saint Paul alone; and when we see more of Christ in Gandhi than in all the churches of China, it is hard to remain faithful to the churches.”

  “Yes,” Wu said, “and often where the missionaries have uprooted the beliefs in the old native doctrines they have uprooted in the same process all sense of religion. With the tares has come the wheat, and after that there is neither planting nor harvesting.” He nodded, smiling almost fiercely. “That, too, the miss
ionaries have done.”

  They said nothing. Cheng moved. Then he said, “In spite of all this most of your nation is very likeable. Another major exception is the soldiers; but we assume that they were not themselves at the time. A war is no place for judgment.”

  Liu the second looked at Girard. “Do all Americans here have your problem?”

  “No,” he said. “Very few of the older ones do. They have come to believe what was formerly believed by all of China: that with age comes wisdom. I think they confuse,” he stopped. “What is the word for prudence?” Wu told him. “Thank you,” he said. “They confuse prudence with wisdom. Believing their prudence to be wisdom, they act almost always toward personal security.” He looked at the empty cups. “Have some tea.” Ch’ang, one of the silent listeners, took the teapot and started around the room. “The younger ones, those like me, have the greater problem. You have it.” He took a cake.

  “What is the problem?” Wu asked. “The tea is not at its hottest.”

  “Wen-li will be here with more,” he said. “The problem is that we have values which do not rest on anything yet universally accepted. Most of us do not know what our values are; we feel them and cannot explain them. We are accused of being emotional and unreasonable; in other words, of having no values. And if we put the feelings into words and make standards of them, they stop being entirely applicable as soon as they are stated; and intelligent people realize that they are not much better as doctrines than the doctrines they replaced.”

  “We should really have yellow wine for this discussion,” Cheng said.

  He laughed. “Yes. I should never have started. Someday in class we will examine it. Probably we will be forced to revise our opinions of Shakespeare.”