The Vagrants

covering his animosity.

“He who is in your house is a guest,” Mrs. Gu said, and he recognized the tone of disapproval. “You're not behaving like a good host today.”

“Teacher Gu must be tired now,” Kai said. “I'll come back later to talk to him.”

He did not answer either woman. He stumbled out of the chair and into the bedroom. The stove was burning well, and all of a sudden he was exhausted by the warmth. He listened to his wife apologizing to Kai, and Kai replying that of course she understood, and no, she did not mind it at all. Soon their conversation became inaudible. Teacher Gu looked at the clock on the wall. He wondered how long it would take his wife to remember her sick husband, made too hot and uncomfortable by the burning stove in the middle of a spring day.

Seven minutes Teacher Gu had counted on the clock when Mrs. Gu came in with the untouched bowl of stew. “You really should eat a little,” she said.

“Where's that woman?” he said.

“Her name is Kai,” Mrs. Gu said.

Teacher Gu struggled to drag himself into a sitting position. He was surprised that his wife did not hurry to help him.

“You were very unfriendly to her, as if she owed you something,” Mrs. Gu said.

“She lied to us. Why was she here?” Teacher Gu demanded. “She's a political tool for the government. What does she want from us?”

His wife stared at him with a quizzical look that reminded him of his rebellious daughter ten years earlier. “Didn't you teach your students to use their brains and not to jump to quick conclusions?”

So this was what he had come home for, Teacher Gu thought, an unpleasant wife who questioned his every word. “How long do you plan to remain this person that I don't think I've had the privilege of knowing before I went to the hospital? Do I deserve an explanation?” he said, raising his voice.

“The doctors said to remain calm,” she said.

“Never is there a calmer person than a dead one.”

His wife put the bowl on a stool next to the bed. He thought she would sit on the stool and feed him. When she did not, he made an effort to reach for the spoon even though he had no appetite.

“There's something you should know—we didn't tell you before because we thought your recovery was more important then,” Mrs. Gu said.

“Who are ‘we’?”

“Kai and I, and her friends. We're mobilizing the townspeople for a petition for Shan.”

The change in his wife—her eyes that were no longer directed downward when she spoke, her clear pronunciation of words beyond her vocabulary—alarmed Teacher Gu. In almost thirty years of being second-class citizens, and especially in the ten years since Shan's imprisonment, they, as a couple, had retreated to a cocoon they had woven together, a flimsy and claustrophobic shell that provided their only warmth; sometimes it was hard to tell where one self ended and the other began; they were the two fish that chose to live the rest of their lives in the same drying puddle—had all this been an illusion? Who was this woman in front of him, trusting young strangers with some crazy and meaningless idea about a protest that could never change his daughter's fate? The feeling of falling down, unable to grab onto something—the same feeling he had experienced when he was first ill—made his breathing difficult.

“I thought I shouldn't hide this from you now,” said Mrs. Gu. “It's become the biggest news.”

“A new star you've become.”

She ignored him. “You can't believe how many people are sympathetic. People are afraid but that doesn't mean they are callous. We just need to find them.”

Teacher Gu watched his wife. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes, two deep wells of water that had gone dry over the years, looked somewhere beyond his head, with an unusual glimmer. A coldness crept into his body despite the burning stove. It was a disease—this passion for politics, for mobilizing the masses as if they were grains of sand that could easily be gathered under a magic spell and turned into a tower—it was a deadly disease. It had claimed his daughter's life, and now it was fastening its grip on the most unlikely person in the world, his wife, an obedient and humble old woman. “What do you want?” he asked finally. “Shan is already gone.”

“We want the government to acknowledge the mistake. Shan was innocent. Nobody should be punished because of what she thinks. It's wrong and it's time to correct that mistake.”

These words had been fed to his wife, probably by Kai, that young woman whose job it was to read aloud all the grand and empty words created to cast a mirage for suffering souls. “Shan is dead,” Teacher Gu said. “Whatever you do, you won't bring back her life.”

“It's not her life we're fighting for. It's the justice she deserves,” Mrs. Gu said.

Stupid, stupid woman, talking like a parrot and offering their daughter's body as a public sacrifice in return for an empty promise. These women, with their flimsy logic and hungry minds, these women who let themselves be dazzled by magnificent words, their brains washed and refilled by other people. Was it his fate to face such an enemy all his life, first a wife who was so devoted to Communism that a marriage had to be dissolved, then a daughter, and now the only woman left in his life, who had been immune to this disease for the longest part of her life? He stared at his wife. “How long did it take for them to make a heroine out of you?” he asked coldly. “Five seconds, I imagine.”

Like him, she had had doubts too, Mrs. Gu said in a calm voice, but they had to keep hoping for a change. They could not let their daughter's life be sacrificed for nothing.

Their daughter had died out of stupidity, because of trusting the wrong people all her life, Teacher Gu wanted to remind his wife, but in the end he only told her to stop what she was doing. “I won't allow this,” he said. “I forbid you, or anyone, to use Shan's name as an excuse to gain anything.”

Mrs. Gu looked up in shock. After a long moment, she smiled at him. “Teacher Gu, weren't you the one to teach