The Season of the Stranger Read online

  “Probably we will be forced to revise ourselves,” Yang said, just audibly. “You will have us stop eating because eating is dogmatic.” As he spoke Wen-li opened the door. Holding the teapot he stepped into the laughter and stood puzzled, tentatively returning a smile of his own, a smile which appeared and disappeared twice, quickly, and then came to stay as they laughed again, at him.

  He left and they blew into their cups and drank, sucking the tea noisily, swallowing and then opening their mouths to the cooler air. Liu the second, pulling at a loose reed in the floormat, spoke first. “We have the same problem. Probably Confucius is of less help now than ever; but he has been quoted and held up as authority more often and more publicly in our generation than at any time.”

  “Yes,” Yang said. “We are expected to take the vague advice of a man twentyodd centuries dead, to guide us while we go through our American, French, Russian, and industrial revolutions in a fifty year period.”

  Three of them were pulling at the matting. Ch’ang was scraping with a bitten fingernail a faded yellow stain on his gown. Only Cheng looked at Girard.

  “I do not think that he himself would approve of the use of his doctrines now,” Wu said. “But he has been too long and too intensively taught. It is impossible to contradict him without being thought unChinese.”

  Cheng still looked at Girard. “There are many students who still read him faithfully,” he said, “but the larger trouble is that he has always been, whether he originally wanted it or not, the philosopher of the rulers. He began as a guide to princes and has become a justification for despots.”

  Yang looked up and looked away quickly. “With the reverence for Confucius often goes a love of the oldfashioned: properly arranged marriages, absentee ownership, respect for great wealth; and most of all an admiration for the tight and rigid family hierarchy. I do not say that Confucius alone is responsible for this. But these attitudes go hand in hand now.”

  Liu the first spoke. “In the City most of all it is that way. The north has always been the spring of China’s culture, and it is easier here to adopt the classical attitude. Principally among the merchants and the officials.”

  Liu the second, intently stripping long fibers from the yellow reed in his hand, took it up. “The worst is that the prejudice against foreigners lingers in these surroundings. One of the newspapers in the City described an exchange between the American and Russian governments. The headline was Verbal Battle Between Western Powers, but the character Power was not used; neither was the character Country. They used instead the old character Barbarian. This may have been a joke. To us it was not so funny.”

  Cheng, staring toward the floor with bright unfocused eyes, his hands folded loosely in his lap, said, “So we cannot claim to be free of the nonsense which debilitates your country. And this nonsense is common here.” He paused. “The students have no share in it.” He closed his eyes and pivoted his head slowly, opening his eyes as he turned, until he was looking directly at Girard. “But very often our parents do.”

  “Ah,” Girard said. He looked at his shoes. Only the slight dry snap of burning coaldust relieved the silence. He said, “Give me a cake.” Someone passed the plate to him. He sat it in his lap and put one of the cakes into his mouth. It was dry. He swallowed some lukewarm tea and finished the cake, thinking it took them a while to get to the point and then when will I see her. When he felt the pain in his eyes he knew that he had been glaring unseeing at the lightbulb. He blinked tightly and the pain disappeared. No one was looking at him.

  Yang spoke suddenly and rapidly. “It is not that way with the students. Any of the students.” His voice was like a lost confused locust buzzing through the room and vanishing.

  “Most of them are nationalistic politically,” Liu the first said, “but international in their social dealings.”

  Girard set the plate on the floor and smiled. “I am glad to hear that,” he said. Cheng looked up at him and smiled easily.

  Ch’ang ran a finger under the high collar of his gown and said: “Some of them may even marry foreigners.”

  Cheng stopped smiling and looked over his shoulder at Ch’ang. The others sat expectant and unmoving. Girard laughed, almost a snort, and they looked at him. “I approve in principle,” he said. “I hope they will all be very happy.”

  Cheng stood up. “A game of chess, Mr Girard. An intellectual game.”

  “Why choose an American opponent?”

  “I can defeat no other.” They laughed.

  “May I play some music?” Ch’ang was looking at the phonograph.

  “Of course,” Girard said, watching him.

  “Thank you, Mr Girard,” he said.

  “Yes,” Girard said, still looking at Ch’ang’s profile. “And if our conversation is to continue being so intimate you might as well learn to use my first name. Even Ch’ang.”

  Ch’ang looked up then, smiling foolishly. He nodded several times.

  Cheng took the chessboard and the box from the bookcase while Girard was out borrowing Wen-li’s small table. When Girard came in again a card game had started and the music was loud enough to be heard over the excited suddenly released mutterings of the men. He dropped the table into place and sat opposite Cheng.

  They sat watching the pieces and forgetting the sounds around them, chewing on cakes, never letting the board out of vision, as though the wooden men, if left to themselves, would topple in a few frantic moments the poised structure they were building. After the twelfth move Girard wiped his face and removed his gown. Cheng looked away from the board for the first time and passed a hand across his forehead; they saw that someone had shaken down the stove and that the heat was mounting, and as they watched, Girard remembered the sounds of the room, hearing then what he had not heard before: the music different, the voices lower; all this quickly, as though motion and life had ceased on command, leaving sound and warmth to coalesce through time.

  They played then in warm deliberation, the heat of their bodies running through their fingers to the wood of the pieces and the paper of the board. Cheng was good, better than Girard, Cheng who remembered, planned, isolated, attacked, methodically and patiently achieving his domination of the board, cutting through patterns, laying traps; meeting Girard’s helpless smile with a smile and a shrug in return; then stalking again. When Yang tapped Girard’s shoulder and said that he would leave, Girard resigned the game and told them that he would walk with them to the dormitory.

  When they were ready he switched off the lights and followed them into the etched, shadowed night. The moon made men and bears and primitive stern Buddhas of the trees and rocks half hidden in the middle distance. High in the southeast a thin dark blade knifed across the moon; as the cloud drifted into darkness the moon became yellowgreen. In the north was blackness; no stars above, no lights below; following the darkness up and overhead they saw the line advance southward, the stars swallowed slowly and sometimes the moonlight illuminating the clear bright cloudfront in one long scalloped eastwest arc.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Snow tomorrow, I think.”

  They reached the huge brick dormitory and gathered at the stoop, all of them cool and friendly, no one speaking. For a time again they faced the moon, heads thrown slightly back, as though they had come to be healed; and then, filing by, each took Girard’s hand momentarily, saying quietly, “Goodnight, Andrew,” and passed into the dark hall. Cheng waited until the others were inside, and when he took Girard’s hand he said, “Do not worry, Andrew.” He pressed Girard’s hand and pushed through the door.

  4

  Twenty minutes from the house, north of the university, there was a park. It had been a palace until an army leveled it in a campaign of terror. A few foundations remained, and some benches, and the lakes. The smaller lakes were now riceponds. The swells and dips were there, the vertical variations, the mark of Chinese landscape architecture, sine curves once wooded now rolling nakedly in cold humped order. Th
e benches were on the western slopes. A path wandered through the park, shaded long ago by trees trained in growth to a barrel vault, and visible now in treeless segments from the low hills. On a windless day people read, even in winter, on the benches. In warm weather there had been classes on the lawns, or if the lawns were occupied they had sat circumscribed by the foundation of what had once been the women’s pavilion or the prince’s bath.

  They were sitting on a bench which had been built into the hill, using the snowy slope as a backrest. In midmorning of the cold sunny day she had pulled him from the closed lonely circle of books and sleep and food and now they sat angled away from each other, she looking at the snow on the mountains and he watching the ice on the ricepond below them. He had not shaved. There were lines of sleeplessness on his face. She was wearing western flannel slacks under a fleecelined maroon gown and her hair was pulled back and caught together behind the neck by a clip. It looked like a jade clip. When she leaned forward there was dry powdery snow on the gown.

  “Is it waterproof?” he asked, brushing the snow from it.

  “Yes.” She pointed. “Look at the mountains. The shadows change beautifully as the sun goes higher.”

  “They should change,” he said. “We have been here an hour.”

  “Poor Andrew. Are you cold?”

  “No. Just my nose.”

  She laughed. “Then you must be very cold.”

  He bent for a handful of snow and as he brought it up she pushed him off the side of the bench. He sat smiling at her while she threw snow at him. He stood and picked her up then and walked down the hill to the ricepond. “Apologize,” he said.

  “I apologize.”

  He shook his head and looked vague. “Not enough.” He changed the look from vague to thoughtful. “I should make demands now.” He could feel the warmth of her through the gown. He looked at the mountains.

  “Yes,” she said. “Make demands.”

  He looked at her face. She looked up at his. He shivered. He put her down and shook the wet snow from his face and hair.

  When they looked away from each other they saw a tall stocky man in gown and fur hat walking the path across the ricepond. His arms were crossed inside his heavy sleeves. The sun flickered off his glasses as he looked up. “Dean Chou,” Girard said to her. He waved and smiled and Li-ling smiled. The dean nodded twice and turned with the path and was gone.

  “I wonder what he thought of our exhibition,” she said.

  “Why should he think anything? He is one of the best people here. He approved the use of the palace grounds for classes.” They started walking around the pond, she in front of him on the narrow sidepath. When they reached the wider path he walked beside her. “Where are we going?”

  “To eat,” she said. “You think that you can spend the day with a woman and refuse to feed her. I think differently. You have money?”

  “I do not need money,” he said. “We can go to my home. I have some Japanese pictures which will be interesting to you.”

  She grunted. “I can imagine your Japanese pictures. Where did you buy them?”

  “I did not buy them. A student gave them to me. I think he was afraid his family would see them if he kept them at home.”

  “I have seen some,” she said. “The subject is to be expected and is bearable. But the fineness of the lines, the wrinkled details, the flabby drooping flesh: they disgust me. And I saw one where the brothel-keeper was holding the girl in position for the man. I prefer even the paintings you showed me last year, which resemble nothing.”

  “They resemble much,” he said. “You saw them but you did not study them.”

  “It is not necessary to study the best art.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “You do not study the best Chinese art because you are accustomed to it; you have seen them all before and you know who painted them and what they are about. But originally you studied them.”

  “I do not remember it.”

  “You must have. When there is no perspective, for instance, no fading away in the distance, and the parts of the painting are above and below one another, as though each group had assembled on a higher cloud. You did not study that?”

  “I studied each group, yes. And you cannot say that there is no perspective. It is just that the parallel lines come together in your eye and not in the distance. It opens as you look at it, so the subjects must be ranged one above the other. Your western paintings, above all those that I can understand, are limited by size and horizon.”

  “And those that you cannot yet understand are closer to your own because they are not limited. It requires only study.”

  “All right,” she smiled. “I will study.” They came out of the park. “This way,” she said.

  “Why? Are we not eating at home?”

  “No. We are going to the Pearl River restaurant.”

  “That would be silly,” he said. “Wen-li will have a lunch prepared.”

  “My eye,” she said. He stopped and laughed.

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked her.

  “In a novel you gave me. Did I use it correctly?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is the first English I have heard you use in a long time. Do you still study?”

  “I read. I would like to speak with you in English, but I am afraid you will not progress with Chinese if you speak too much English.”

  “It is not as bad as that,” he said. “We will use English sometimes in the evenings. I have not used it myself for almost two weeks, except in class.”

  “But you read almost always in English.”

  “Yes. I should be ashamed. But English is easy, and except for the new magazines Chinese literature is not yet as interesting to me as my own. I mean the content.”

  “I know,” she said. “The novels you gave me are as interesting to me as our own. This way.” She turned.

  “What about Wen-li?”

  “I told him before we left that we would not be back for lunch.”

  “Really,” he said. “Thoughtful.”

  “He asked me if you knew. When I said no he thought it was very funny.”

  “He will never respect me again.”

  “He will always respect you because you are a teacher.”

  “A fine teacher,” he said. “Led around by a woman of twenty years.”

  “Here we are,” she said.

  He pulled open the rotting wooden door and followed her into the dark restaurant. There were six tables and no customers. They took a table in the rear, against the wall. “The stove is just behind the wall,” she said. It was warm. They sat on cramping uncomfortable wooden sawhorses. He put two together and was more comfortable. “Give me another,” she said. He fixed it for her and they sat down again. The waiter came in with a strip of paper. He put it on the table and stood waiting.

  “Tea first,” Girard said.

  “Pour tea,” the waiter shouted. They read the menu.

  “Sweet and sour pork,” Girard said, “and a Miss Huang plate. Rice. Afterward cabbage soup.”

  “Sweetsourpork. Huangplate. Rice,” the waiter yelled. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Warm?”

  “Yes.” She picked up a newspaper that had been lying against the wall. “Today’s.” She read through the first page. “Ten thousand communist troops killed.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That brings the total to well over three hundred million. More than half of China. At a sacrifice to our own brave armies of twelve men, four million five hundred thousand square li, and one drummer boy.”

  “One what?”

  “Drummer boy. As in the opera. A small one who drums. The western armies used to have them.”

  “Oh. It says here also that Kuach’eng has repulsed an enemy attack.”

  “That means it has fallen. It is the only way to be sure. Wait until the government newspaper says the enemy has been beaten back, and then make your bets. Where is Kuach’eng?”

  “A smal
l town in the north. The girls said this morning that it had fallen, but no one can be sure.”

  “We can be sure now,” he said. “The government has said that it still stands. Is it an important town?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “I am not familiar with the small towns of the north. I think a railroad goes through it because I have seen the name on the old British timetables.”

  The waiter came with the tea. He was about eighteen years old and he had once had smallpox. He put the tea on the table and went back to the kitchen.

  “Are you,” he said, and stopped.

  “Am I what?”

  “I do not know the word,” he said. “It is what a doctor does so that you will not get the disease the waiter has had.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Vaccination. Smallpox. Yes, I am.”

  “How do you say them?” She told him and he sat remembering them and using them in sentences. “Smallpox,” he said. “Vaccination.”

  She turned a page and folded the newspaper double. “That’s right.” She did not look up.

  “Let me see the characters for Kuach’eng,” he said. She held the newspaper toward him and put her fingernail under the characters. “Oh,” he said, “that is kua. Now I know where it is.”

  “Where is it?” She was reading again.

  “South of Shenyang. Very important.”

  “Why?”

  “If it has fallen the whole war may move southward quickly.”

  The waiter came in with the rice and the pork. He set two bowls of rice in front of them and put the meat in the center of the table. He dropped four sticks on the table and two square patches of paper, and went out again and brought in a bowl of hot water. They dipped the sticks in the hot water and rubbed them clean and dry with the paper. The sweet and sour pork was sticky and too hot to take by itself, without rice. The other was a platter of hot and peppery finely chopped pork in a watery sauce. Li-ling put away her newspaper and they ate.

  Before they had finished the first bowl of rice four customers came in and ordered. A beggar came in after that and sat in the corner near Girard, on the floor, making noise over the hot tea the waiter gave him. The waiter said to him, “How are you?”