The Season of the Stranger Read online

  “Thank you,” Girard said. “I will.” He bowed shortly and left.

  Wen-li was not at the house. Girard wrote a note for him, propping it against the grease-dish in the kitchen. He locked the kitchen door and walked toward the library. He was not sure that he had locked the house door and before he reached the library he decided to go back. When he turned he saw Wen-li bicycle up to the kitchen on the other road, the road from the small shops.

  He came through the trees and into the clear space behind the library. A dog ran around the corner of the building screeching with his tail rigid along his belly and after him came five children shouting and laughing at one another and throwing something back and forth. When it began to fall apart they stopped throwing it and bunched to look at it. The oldest boy was holding it. He had a wet knife in his right hand. He was probably eleven. He produced a hide sack and held the object high for a final inspection and then dropped it in the sack. He put the sack in the inside pocket of his gown and said something. The other children laughed. They chattered about the dog and looked for him. He was gone. Girard could hear him screeching somewhere. He went around the corner of the library and walked quickly. He could hear the screeching until he left the road and turned into the compound.

  When he stepped onto the porch of the dean’s home the door opened immediately and he was bowed into the living room by a servant. He looked at the record albums until the dean came in and shook his hand and said that lunch was ready. They walked into the dining room, the dean first, and sat face to face at a collapsible bridge table.

  “I suggest,” the dean said, “that we eat in comparative silence and have our discussion over tea.” Girard said nothing. The dean reached for his sticks and left his hand on them on the table and said, “Will the suspense spoil your appetite?”

  “No,” Girard said. His hands were in his lap.

  “I see,” the dean said. “You are wondering whether or not you should take the food of someone you would perhaps not enjoy being obliged to.” The dean picked up his sticks. “Eat,” he said.

  Girard tapped his sticks on the table to even them and dropped a small piece of Mandarin fish into his rice. “Sauce,” the dean said. Girard took some of it in a red and white porcelain spoon and spread it over the rice and mixed the rice and the sauce with the sticks. The ricebowls matched the spoon: white with a veined red cracked-ice design.

  The servant brought a plate of green peppers. They were stuffed with hot pork and onion. Girard had never seen them like that before. “What do you call these?” he asked, waving one between his sticks.

  “Pepper dumplings,” the servant said.

  “I live on them,” the dean said.

  “They are very expensive,” the servant said, and went out. The dean laughed.

  “They are my extravagance,” he said. “And I do not drink wine.” He took a pepper and snatched it from the sticks with his teeth. When he had chewed it out of the way he said, “The servant likes wine and does not like peppers. We have been fighting about it for twelve years.”

  Girard laughed. “Was he with you at K’unming?”

  The dean nodded, his mouth full again.

  They ate in silence after that, except for the clicking of the sticks and the mouth noises. It was a three plate lunch, with two bowls of rice each. The dean continued to eat as though he would be leaving for a famine area immediately after the meal, great mouthfuls swallowed in unhurried but unhesitating succession. He lifted the ricebowl to his lips after each dumpling or piece of fish and shoveled the hot white grains balled together by the sauce quickly and purposefully into his open waiting mouth, closing his mouth suckingly and capturing the loose grains on the rim of the ricebowl.

  When the servant came in with the soup the dean said, “Bring us hot towels. I have somehow dipped myself in the fish sauce.” The soup was clear and watery with floating egg and mushroom. They used the spoons for the egg and mushroom and when the solids were eaten they lifted the bowls and drank from them. The servant brought two hot towels and they removed the grease from their hands and faces. “To the study for tea,” the dean said. He grunted and stood up and they went to the study. Girard sat on the sofa and the dean took an easy chair near his desk. The dean sat down slowly and when he was seated he belched. Girard echoed him lightly.

  The dean settled himself carefully among the cushions of his chair and said, “I have a meeting at one-thirty. We had better start.” He cleared his throat. “Understand first,” he said, “that I am merely an agent in this affair.” He took a pipe from the top of the desk and leaned back to open a drawer. He withdrew a pouch and settled himself again. “It concerns you and Miss Hsieh,” he said. Girard waited. “Certain members of the faculty have seen you together.” He opened the pouch. “They are not sure that the relationship becomes a man in your position.”

  “What is my position?”

  “To begin with, you are not Chinese. There is always that. Secondly, you are a teacher.”

  “But she is not a student.”

  “Granted,” the dean said. “But she is a graduate, and has a connection with the university.”

  “Just what are the objections?”

  The dean struck a match. “I wish I knew.” He lit the pipe. Girard waited. “The difficulty is that we cannot accuse you of any breach of conduct. If you had been talked about before this we might say that it was a matter of reputation and publicity. I myself have no objection to your activities. Do you know Franz Langner in the City? A good friend of mine. Married to a Chinese girl.” The servant came in with a teapot and two cups and put the teapot on the desk. He put a cup on the table beside the dean and gave Girard the other to hold. He poured the tea and put the pot back on the desk and went out.

  “The fact that Langner married a Chinese girl has no relevance,” Girard said. “No one has mentioned marriage.”

  “Of course,” the dean said. “No one has mentioned marriage. Here we are handicapped. Certain members of the faculty demand an explanation: what is the relationship? There has been no mention of marriage, but they are together often.”

  “And what would they say if marriage were mentioned?”

  The dean smiled. “They would be a little outraged.”

  “Then if marriage is in mind, the community disapproves. And if marriage is not in mind, the community disapproves.”

  The dean looked at him. “Listen to me,” he said. “I do not think that we are dealing here with fact and reason. I think that we are dealing with shadows. The shadows of millennia of isolation and fear, and the shadows of decades of war and exploitation.”

  “The nice thing about a university,” Girard said, “is that we can always busy ourselves with shadows.”

  The dean shook his head. “Do not, for a few minutes at least, become hurt and angry. It will not help.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “It is all right. But consider your position under these shadows. A foreigner: it can be forgiven but never forgotten. A teacher: responsible to your students and to yourself.” He hesitated. “Another thing. Politically you are more with the students than with the teachers.”

  “Ah,” Girard said. “We are coming out of the shadows.”

  “Yes. A ray of unwanted sunlight comes in, like the dawn to bedded lovers. We approach politics.”

  “We have been approaching politics for a long time,” Girard said.

  “Remember,” the dean said, “the teachers are not afraid of the students. They do not see this as a war between castes. For them it is a fight to keep a position, the only position in which they can live at peace. I do not mean a job. I mean a position in history. Because of the need for this position they are in a state of perpetual compromise.”

  “Common among intellectuals.”

  “Yes. Most intellectuals are lonely, either behind their world or ahead of it. A few are always with their world. They are the ones who have stopped compromising. Often, here, those few lose their jobs. They lose t
heir positions in history. They lose their friends. Often they are the only intellectuals worth keeping.”

  “But there are not many here like that.”

  “No. Those who are here have had to compromise politically all their lives. It has shaped them, this spirit of compromise. Do you see that they must go on living, doing the only thing they know how to do?”

  Girard nodded.

  “I have seen them suddenly stop compromising,” the dean said. “In K’unming.” He looked at Girard unsmiling, his teeth showing. “There I saw the shadows we are talking about. I saw the Yünnan troops blow open the college gate and come in like a boiling river. A girl stood in their way, almost by accident. One of their grenades exploded and left her standing bewildered staring at the stumps of her wrists. When the blood ran quickly she screamed and when they heard her scream they bayoneted her in the breast. Her name was P’an Yang.

  “And when we organized finally in the horror of smoke and dust and noise there were eleven students already killed. We started stretcher trains. I took the front of a stretcher and ran along the wall out of breath after three steps. We found a student who had been shot in the leg and we put him on the stretcher. We had to cross an open space on the way to the infirmary and in the confusion and the layers of dust and smoke we carried him across. We were not more than one minute from the hospital when a soldier saw us. He struck me on the arm with the butt of his rifle and broke the bone for me. I lay there not moving while they dragged the student from the stretcher and crushed his head with the rifle butts. When they hit him I thought of Kansu melons falling off a cart and being pulped by the wheels. When he was dead and there was nothing but red mud where the top of his head had been they bayoneted him. His name was Li Lulien. It was at this time three years ago. The first day of the twelfth month. A clear cold afternoon.” He put the pipe in his mouth. “Sometimes we stop compromising. Usually when we are about to die.”

  And always passively Girard thought. It is not that you stop compromising but that they stop you from compromising. But it can’t be any other way, I guess.

  There was nothing he could say.

  The dean pulled on his pipe. “Getting back to you and Miss Hsieh,” he said. He stopped.

  “I do not see it,” Girard said. “The connection. The faculty has nothing to fear from the students. Miss Hsieh herself is not a very political being. How is the faculty hurt? For that matter, how are they affected at all? What ruin can this bring down on them?”

  The dean folded his heavy smooth hands and smoked, staring at the bookshelf above Girard’s head. With the pipe in his mouth he said, “Have you ever heard of Hsieh Ming-p’u?”

  “No,” Girard said.

  The dean blew long slow smoke, fanning it as he exhaled. “I will tell you,” he said.

  “Hsieh Ming-p’u was in nineteen ten a minor official under the last empress. He was of an old northeastern family, the kind of family that enjoys pretending that there is a Manchu race or nation which differs from and is culturally superior to China and the Chinese. The kind of family that in general enjoys pretending. With that background he opposed the revolution, when it came, as violently as he could in his unimportant official position. When the revolution succeeded he left office and isolated himself. A little later Yüan Shih-k’ai came into control of the north. Hsieh Ming-p’u came back to life. I think he knew from the beginning that Yüan would betray the revolution. There are still those who say that the moving force behind Yüan’s abortive and illegitimate self-coronation was Hsieh Ming-p’u. No one knows. But from that time on Hsieh was active. After Yüan’s death and all through the ten great warlord years he worked, first on one side, then on another, always where there appeared to be the greatest chance of success and power and wealth.

  “When the southern republican government finally marched north and took the City, Hsieh disappeared again. For two years nothing was heard of him. And then, in nineteen thirty, he made a new start, as a very high official in the government’s opium control bureau.”

  Girard leaned toward the dean with his hands fisted between his knees, listening to the sound of his own breath, breathing more quickly and then ceasing to breathe and hearing the last part of the history with his lungs straining and tight.

  The dean took the pipe from his mouth and ran a finger along the stem. “In nineteen thirtyone the Japanese came to the northeast; in nineteen thirtyseven they came to the City. Hsieh’s record is not a public matter. But he prospered. He is now rich. He has the wealth and power that he wanted. He is old, of an ageing in which years play only a small part. He is a major official. He keeps himself hidden away, in a large house in the City which has belonged to his family for three hundred years.” He put the pipe in his mouth. “He is also the father of Hsieh Li-ling.”

  Girard breathed then in a long dying sigh. They looked at each other. Girard looked away. There were yellow flowers in the rug at his feet. She had worn a row of yellow jasmine. He saw it clipped to her dark grained hair.

  “I should go,” he said. “You have a meeting.”

  “I am late now,” the dean said, and then gently, “I am sorry.”

  They walked to the door and shook hands. Girard looked out at the line of naked charcolored trees linked high by waving dark hands above the frozen road. “Can you give me an answer?” the dean asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “It is ironic,” the dean said.

  “I am surrounded by it. What is the irony this time?”

  “You are an imperialist now.”

  Girard stared at him.

  “In that you are a foreigner,” the dean said, “and some part of the course of our lives depends on you.”

  “There is no irony,” Girard said. “Some part of the course of your lives has always depended on me.” He made a nervous gesture. “Part of mine on you.” He turned away.

  The dean touched his arm. “Good. Take your time. And remember that when the war comes you will be free. But before then we can be hurt. We have lived in fear for a long time.”

  He listened to the dean with his head down. He looked at his shoes. When the dean stopped talking Girard went home.

  7

  The letter came that afternoon: on grey paper, thin and dry, feeling as though it would crumble soon like leaves in late fall. The writing was irregular, thick and thin strokes, heavy dots, classic in its balance of incomplete rushingly poised squares. Only the signature was different, running and weak with the last stroke thickening and the point of it running off the page. There was nothing on the back. The envelope was of the same fragile grey foil. Wen-li said, “Can you read it all?”

  He gave Wen-li the envelope. “What is the name of the street?”

  “Tsung Pu Alley,” Wen-li said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I can read the rest.” Wen-li turned and started out. “I will not eat at home tonight,” Girard said.

  Wen-li slapped lightly his thigh. “When am I to have the honor? And I have already chopped the meat.”

  “Invite a friend,” Girard said.

  “What time will you leave?”

  “Before six.”

  Wen-li nodded. “I will. Thank you.” He left.

  At five-thirty Girard walked away from the house in the best clothes he had been able to find: new and tight shoes, clean shirt, and a pressed unspotted thin outer gown over the winter gown. He had brushed the fur hat. At the fork of the road he went to the right, through the trees. It was almost dark in the long shadows of late sunlight. He left the road and walked over a small hill and down into the lighter clearing where the bus stood. He went around the bus to the driver’s window and asked him where Tsung Pu Alley was.

  “Near the four eastern posts,” the driver said. “About ten minutes from the last stop by threewheeler.” He thanked the driver and climbed into the bus and took a seat near the front. When the man came with the tickets he asked him what the price would be today. The man said that the price had not changed fo
r two weeks and that this was very unusual. Girard said that he was right and paid him.

  Tsung Pu Alley was fifteen minutes from the last stop and it took them five minutes more to find the number. He paid the threewheeler man and knocked at the gate. It was almost seven. There was no sound in the courtyard, over the wall. He knocked again. Footsteps came into the courtyard and the gate rattled and opened. A face looked out at him.

  “It is I,” he said.

  “I perceive it, sir,” the face said. The gate opened farther. “Come in.”

  He walked into a large courtyard planted with thickly grouped shrubs. The man closed the gate and they walked forward into the light of window lanterns. They went through the first building and came into the second court. The man pointed.

  “Go across this courtyard,” he said. “That is the door. Knock.”

  Girard went and knocked. The door opened immediately. He stepped into the hall. A man stood with an oil lamp, looking up at Girard’s face. “This way,” the man said. They walked down a corridor lighted solely and badly by the lamp. He could see large polished jugs and several wall hangings with much red in them. At the end of the corridor the man knocked at a door and a voice answered. The man opened the door and bowed to Girard and went back down the corridor.

  Girard crossed the doorsill and stood looking at the third man. Neither of them moved for the space of five breaths. Then the man said:

  “You are Girard.”

  Girard said: “Yes. And you are—”

  “His secretary,” he said. “You may remove your hat and place it on the table at your left. He will be here shortly.”

  Girard put his hat on the table and looked around him at the room. There was a cold stone fireplace in front of him. The ceiling was high and completely darkened. There were three tables, more wall hangings, and two oil lamps; and from the wall on either side of the fireplace extended two platforms of the shape and dimensions of double beds. They were of stone and uncovered.

  “You may be seated,” the secretary said, pointing to one of them. “I shall leave you.” He bowed and left by the door through which Girard had come. When he was gone Girard went to the stone platforms and sat on one of them and discovered that it was warm. He recognized it then as a k’ang, a stone couch with hollows winding through it and heat from some central fire in the hollows. He rested his hands flatly on it. He looked into the courtyard and wondered which building she was in.