A Map for the Missing(102)

“Yishou didn’t like to read,” his mother said.

“Yishou! What a nice name you have,” the shopkeeper said.

“No, that’s my brother’s name.” He couldn’t make any sense of it. “What book did he buy?”

“No idea. I can’t read any of the titles. Isn’t that funny? An old lady who owns a bookshop can’t read anything! Ha. Let me call my husband.”

She shouted, and a man—also elderly, but less stooped than her—emerged from behind a curtain in the back of the store. The opening it covered was barely wider than his body.

“What is it?” the man grumbled. He rubbed his bald head. Like his wife, he was impossibly thin. “When are you going to start making lunch?”

“Remember that strange old man that was here, about a week ago?”

“The only people who come in here are strange old men,” he muttered.

“No, no, the one who you wouldn’t let stay. Remember he was going to go see his son? Look, he’s arrived.” She nodded her chin toward Yitian. “I told you something was wrong with him! We should have helped him. Now his son is here and said his father never turned up.”

“That was your father?” The old man squinted at Yitian. “You don’t look anything like him.”

“Of course they look alike!” Yitian’s mother cut in. Yitian waved his hand at her impatiently.

“Look, look—I wasn’t sure whether he was some riffraff, you have to understand. There have been people like that in the past. My wife wants to help everyone. But I can’t let just anyone who comes in stay with my family.”

“I don’t care about any of that. Can you just tell me what book he wanted to buy?” Yitian said.

The man’s mouth closed just as he was about to reply. He turned around brusquely to the glass-enclosed bookcase behind the counter. The layer of dust covering it was so thick that it was impossible for Yitian to see what was inside.

The old man slid aside the glass and placed a volume onto the counter. A particle cloud flew up into their faces.

“What is it?” Yitian’s mother asked between coughs.

The volume was one of the old books that had been bound without hard covers, raw signatures exposed along with the thick thread that knotted each group of pages together. Yitian ran his fingers down the front page gently so he wouldn’t disturb the ancient paper. One small catch and it could snag and rip.

He inhaled deeply when he found the title. The first volume of the Twenty-Four Histories.

“Your father wanted to buy all of them,” the man gestured to the opened bookcase, which Yitian could now see was filled with rows of identical volumes. “But obviously he didn’t realize how much it would cost. I told him to go home and get some more money.”

Yitian trembled as he flipped the pages of the book. The type inside was minuscule, vertically printed and further obscured in places where the printer’s hand must have pressed unevenly upon the ink blocks. Even now, he couldn’t help the smile tugging at his lips at the names that jumped out at him, ones he’d first learned when his grandfather told him stories and that he hadn’t heard in years. The brothers Boyi and Shuqi. Confucius’s disciples. Han Fei, the scholar with whom the emperor was so desperate to have an audience that he’d been willing to go to war. That was the first time Yitian had stood in awe of the value of sustained thought—it could make even an emperor feel helpless.

Would any such memories have surfaced for his father, looking at this page? Yitian was convinced of one thing. This book couldn’t possibly have been for Yishou.

“They could have helped him,” his mother whispered. But Yitian was filled with gratitude; he couldn’t summon up any anger toward the old couple at all.

The bell over the shop door clanged, startling him. He looked over to see a young boy and girl skipping in, their bodies deftly moving through the narrow aisleways. At once, the old woman was upon them, using her finger to clean some speck of dirt off the boy’s face, needling the girl to button her coat properly. The old man’s face broke into the first smile Yitian had seen all this time. “Slow down, slow down,” he shouted at his grandson. He turned to Yitian. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’ll need to go prepare lunch for my grandchildren now.”

“Sorry, I just have one more question. What is this place?”

“Ha! You’re not from here, I can tell. Everyone around here knows this town. We used to be famous for our library.”

“No, no, I know that place. I’ve been before. With my brother.”

“Are you sure? If you’d been here, you’d know people from as far as five townships over used to come here to borrow books. We were known everywhere around here for that. Whenever I could tell people that I was from Five Groves, I felt very proud.”

“But how did all the books get in here?”

“Well, you know, people started going to the cities to live after the Chairman died. The librarian couldn’t earn any money from what he was doing, so finally his daughter told him they had to go to Shanghai. I was tired of farming, looking for a business opportunity. I used some savings to buy the collection. I’ve always liked books, since I was a kid. That’s the only reason I did this stupid thing. Everyone else now is rich! Opening their chicken farms, their factories to manufacture candy. Every time I heard about something like that, I had to say no because I was running this store.” He sighed. “Well, anyway. It’s enough to live.”