The Vagrants

Teacher Gu shook his head. He was no better than she, he told himself. He was a man who had foolishly let himself be deceived by his own wishes. When he had first met his wife, she had just stopped belonging to her previous husband, as one of his five wives. She was the only one to leave the family of her own will when the newly established Communist government banned polygamy; the other wives had to be dragged away from the family by government officials. She was the first one to enroll in Teacher Gu's class for illiterate women-she was eighteen that year, her hair black and smooth as silk, her cheeks peach-colored, and her eyes two deep wells of sad water. She was born with an ill-favored face, people in town warned Teacher Gu when he decided to marry her. Look at her cheekbones, which are too high, her lips, which are not full enough, people said. He shrugged off their comments. Ill-fortuned she was, losing her parents at twelve, sold to a husband by her uncle at fourteen, serving a man forty years her senior as half wife and half handmaiden, but Teacher Gu did not want to listen to any of the talk. Husband and wife were birds of the same fate—so said the ancient poems. Wasn't it why they had become husband and wife in the first place? The day they got married, his first wife sent a telegram to him; keep each other alive with your own water, said the message. He hid the telegram, even though his new wife was not yet able to read all the characters in it. He never told her about the blessing, nor the fable behind those few words—two fish, husband and wife, were stranded in a puddle; they competed to swallow as much water as they could before the puddle vanished in the scorching sun so that they could keep each other alive in their long suffering before death by giving water to their loved one.

It was not a surprise that Teacher Gu and his first wife, being in love, had wished to be the two fish in the story, nor was it a wonder that this wish, along with other dreams and plans, was left unspoken at the end of their marriage. Nothing went wrong except, as she put it in her application for divorce, their marriage could not live up to the demands of the new society, she as a model Communist Party member, he a counterrevolutionary intellectual once serving in the Nationalist government as an education expert. She stayed in the university after the divorce, the first female mathematics professor in the tri-province area, later promoted to be president of a prestigious college in Beijing; he, the founder of the first Western-style high school in the province, was demoted to the local elementary school. If husband and wife were indeed birds of the same fate, he was not a good match for his first wife. He wished her better fortune in finding a husband appropriate for her position, someone approved by the party, or, even better, someone assigned by the party. But she remained single, childless. He never gathered enough courage to ask why. They exchanged a letter or two each year, saying little, because he felt that he had nothing, or too much, to say. Her letters were plain greetings for him and his family, and he dared not imagine her anguish beneath the calm politeness.

Teacher Gu's first marriage had lasted three years, and what he remembered, afterward, was many of their intellectual talks. Even on their honeymoon they had spent more time reading and discussing Kant than enjoying the beach resort. Early in his second marriage, he would sometimes watch his young wife asleep at night and hope that she would eventually offer more than her physical beauty, that he would be able to share his intellectual life with her—he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men's desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.

When he had finally come to terms with what he could expect from his young wife, he did not love her less. He felt more responsible for her, not only as a husband and a man, but also as a parent and educator. He had always thought of her as his first child, before Shan and the other children they could not save—their firstborn, a baby boy, had lived for three days, and when Shan was two they had made one more effort that ended with a miscarriage. They gave up after that, counting it their blessing that they had Shan, a healthy, strong, and beautiful girl.

A son might have been different, Teacher Gu thought now, a son who would have grown up into an intelligent young man, someone with whom he could have had a true conversation. A son would take care of his parents on this day of loss, and for all the days that were coming. But these were foolish thoughts, wishing for something in vain. He'd better put a stop to such irrational wanderings of his mind. Teacher Gu opened the drawer. He had not done his bookkeeping since the previous day.