The Season of the Stranger
Page 30
“Wonderful and wonderfully behaved. One of them is a former classmate of mine. The university is full of groups of soldiers and students, walking and talking.”
“Good,” she said, “And the City?” The City seemed unimportant. She knew it was not, but she had not even thought of it until now.
“Besieged,” he said. “Surrounded. But the capitulation should come today. They are incapable of holding out, and they do not want to.”
“Then there will not be much blood,” she said.
“No, there will not be much blood.” He looked at the door and at her again. “I will go now,” he said. “I want to talk with the soldiers. Will you come along?”
“No. I want to wait for Andrew.”
He nodded. “See you later.”
“See you later.”
She spent the day in the house. In the afternoon Wen-li went out to ask about Andrew, but no one had seen him. Wen-li was gone for an hour, and when he came back and told her what they had said she could feel her cheeks shrink and her back grow suddenly stiff and tired. She closed her eyes.
“Who was it that came for him?” Wen-li asked.
She opened her eyes. “I am not sure,” she said. She felt better. “But I know the voice. Let me think.” She went to the sofa and sat thinking of the students she knew. The voice did not fit any of them. She remembered her teachers. It was not one of them. “If I could remember,” she said. “If I could remember.”
“Think,” he said. He went out to the kitchen. As she thought, she could hear him working. She took Andrew’s class lists from the bookcase and went over the names. It was not one of his students. She remembered who had been in the dining hall the night before. It had not been the radio man or the telephone man or any of the people who had spoken to them. She concentrated on the voice itself, trying to remember it. She failed. She could hear it saying, “They want you at the gate,” but she could not remember whether it was deep or high or young or old.
Wen-li came in later and looked at her. She shook her head. “I can almost remember it,” she said, “and I know that it was familiar. But the answer will not come.”
He frowned. Then he said, “I looked out at them last night. I barely saw the man. But I thought I knew his walk. And now I cannot remember.”
“Then it must be someone from the university,” she said. “Someone we both know.”
He nodded. Then he smiled. “Then it is all right,” he said. “He must be at a long meeting. Perhaps they are deciding policies, or discussing something very important.”
“Yes,” she said. But she had begun to be troubled. Deep in her mind was the name of the man, waiting to be forced out, and the more she thought about it the greater grew a strange feeling that she would not be happy about the answer. She made fists of her hands and stared out the door into the courtyard.
“What is it?” Wen-li asked.
“I am worried,” she said. “Something worries me. I do not know what it is.”
His face clouded over with an understanding look, as though he too had a worry deep inside him. “I have asked a friend to inquire,” he said. “My friend is well-known and a gossip. He will find out and come to tell me.”
“Good,” she said. “May it be soon.”
Half an hour later Wen-li came in again. “My friend is here,” he said. “According to him no one knows anything of Mr Girard.”
She began to weep. She did not know why. Perhaps the strain of trying to remember had made her weep. If I could remember, she thought. Why can I not remember?
Still weeping, she said, “Will you go to Dean Chou? Ask him?”
Wen-li was not looking at her. “Yes,” he said quickly. “Yes, I will go now.” He went out.
When he was gone she gave way completely. She lay on the sofa and sobbed. Since the last time with her father she had not known what it was to be afraid, and now she was afraid. She was afraid all through. She wept and beat the pillow with her fists and wished aloud that she could remember, or that he would come, or that he would send a message. No one had heard from him, there was the horror. No one had heard. In her weeping she remembered what she had told him near the observatory the night before, and then the fear became terror. I have done it. This has happened because of my words. She bit the heel of her hand until she could not stand the pain.
Then the weeping was over, and the pillow-beating. She sat up and rubbed her face with a handkerchief. She breathed deeply and rested. She was still afraid, but something in her was congealing slowly around the fear. And now she knew that it was a fear for Andrew and not for herself. There would be no more tears. He would be home tonight and then the fear would be gone and the hollow tight feeling of her face and the tiring stiffness of her back. He would laugh and kiss her and she would not let him out of the house again.
She washed her face and straightened the sofa. She went to the kitchen and made tea. When Wen-li returned she was sitting at the kitchen table sipping from a teacup.
He stood in the doorway looking at her, and then he said, “The dean does not know. He has not seen him.”
The liquid tea in her stomach spread into a cold pain.
“That is not all,” Wen-li said. “The dean says that Mr Girard never came to the gate at all. They sent for him when the Nationalist soldiers were leaving, but he never came.”
She stood up and dropped the teacup. For a terrible moment she could not move. Then heat came over her and dizziness. She put her hand on the table.
“I know who it was,” she said. “I know who it was.” Her voice was dry and cracked.
“So do I,” he said. “I remembered on the way back.”
They looked at each other. For a long time they looked at each other. She could tell that he was in pain but it meant nothing. There was nothing in her eyes and it felt as though there were nothing in her chest and for a long time her mind was empty with just the pain running through it until she thought that everything was nothing and there would never be anything again. Then she moved, slowly. “I have finished with weeping,” she said. She walked past him and out the door of the kitchen. She walked into the house with the lame dragging steps of an old woman.
They did not speak much for the next few days. They stayed at home and were quiet. When people came to call Wen-li turned them away and sometimes he did it rudely. They did not eat much either. At night the lights remained on in the house, and Wen-li lay in his bed watching them. The morning was the worst time, but it was all bad. Kuo-fan came to call and to drink wine and he turned him away and when Kuo-fan would not go he yelled at him and pushed him out of the courtyard. Every day there was sun but it was not warm.
On the third day a man came into the court and Wen-li went out to tell him to go away. When he had told him the man stepped back. The man was ragged and Wen-li did not like his eyes. The man said quickly that he had a message for Hsieh Li-ling and for a short time Wen-li’s heart would not beat and then he asked the man what the message was and to tell him quickly.
“It is from her father,” the man said. Wen-li stepped toward him and the man backed away again. “He says to tell her that he left the City by plane at noon on the fifth day of this month.”
“And that is all.”
“That is all,” the man said. He hesitated and then said, “Is it not worth something?”
Wen-li went into the kitchen and picked up the poker and came outside, but when the man saw the poker he turned and was gone.
Wen-li went into the house. She was sitting on the sofa staring in front of her the way she had been for three days. She was not weeping. He gave her the message.
When he was through telling her she looked up at him and when he saw the look on her face he wanted a flood to come and destroy them all.
She said, “Thank you.”
He nodded his head and then stood still. She looked down at the floor and they stayed like that in the thick silence.
Then she pointed. “We will have to take the stove out,” she said
. “It is too late in the year for a stove.”
He nodded. He was going to cry, like a child. But he did not.
She looked up at him again. “I will do something. I will teach, or work at something. I will stay in this house, and you will stay with me.”
Then he turned and walked out because he could not look at her any more. He went to his room and sat with his chest hurting. He had a cigarette and after a time the pain went away.
The sun was coming in his window and little bits of dust were dancing in it. He was glad that they would stay here. He wanted him to come back, but there was no use thinking about that any more. He was glad that they would be where he had been.
He got up and stretched and stood blinking at the sun, and then he went into the kitchen and ran the water for the breakfast dishes.
About the Author
Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel’s The Town Behind the Wall and André Malraux’s The Conquerors. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include A Covenant with Death (1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis; When the War Is Over (1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee’s surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels: The Chinese Bandit (1975), The Last Mandarin (1979), and The Blue-Eyed Shan (1982).
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1951 by Stephen Becker
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2687-1
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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