A Map for the Missing(12)

“We’ll have so little time.”

“If I was still in the city . . .” she said. “They’re going to be studying all day back in Shanghai, I bet. They won’t have any trouble getting textbooks, not like us. And how will I figure out how to study during the busy season?”

“They can’t have read as much as us.”

He said the words partially to convince himself. He hoped they were true. If they didn’t have a chance, then who did? Whenever they met here, they talked about books. They read widely, whatever they could get their hands on. One week it had been Ibsen’s Dollhouse, the next The Origin of Species. Sometimes even a mathematics textbook. Then back to fiction, Bront? or Turgenev. The Russians, most frequently. The books came to them haphazardly, cobbled together from ones she’d brought from Shanghai, his grandfather’s old books, books that Yitian traded from other students when he’d attended the township’s high school. He read each book first, and then passed it to her at the end of the week. She did the same the next week. They discussed the book the following Saturday. Then they began the cycle again. At times one of them dared to voice the hope that they’d one day be able to use this knowledge as students in a university, but mostly he believed that their discussions would be finite, limited to their love of the subjects themselves and the conversations here on the embankment.

“You’re right,” she said. She set her face, and he could see the old seriousness and determination had returned. “What’s the use in complaining, anyway? We should get to work studying right away.”

An abrupt horn shouting into the air caused them both to startle. He hadn’t realized how late it had gotten—the evening news broadcast was about to begin. He looked down at the peanuts, on which he’d hardly made any progress. He’d surely be scolded by his mother, but what did it matter? There was an opportunity to go to college. Soon, with any luck, the world of these crops would mean little in his life.

They brushed off their clothes and walked home to the sounds of the trumpets of “The Sun Rises in the East” playing from the loudspeakers bandaged onto the trees and eaves of homes.

When they were halfway up the hill, he heard—

The Ministry of Education has announced today that there will be a trial reinstatement of the gaokao this year . . . Exact dates will be set by provincial committees . . .

He whooped aloud this time. He turned around, so quickly that he almost slipped upon the pebbled dirt and had to grab her by the shoulders. This time, she was the one surprised. She looked around to see if anyone had seen them—an instinctive gesture; surely there’d be no one else here at this time of day—and then began to laugh uproariously, uncontained, an unabashed moment of elation he rarely saw from her. “You should have seen how you looked just now!” She waved her arms wildly in imitation of his clumsiness.

“Do you finally believe me now?” she asked. He held her hand, dropping it when they began to descend back into the village. He was overjoyed at the news, even more overjoyed that it was Hanwen he’d been with when he heard it. The sterile and shiny voice of the female broadcaster continued to sound, but the words hardly registered in his ears.

“I’ll let you know everything I hear,” she said. “And I’ll make a schedule of what we’ll need to study. You’ll have a lot to catch up with in math, I think.”

“And you’ll have nothing to catch up with at all?” The news had made him feel playful.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. You know so much more than me.”

They parted in the dark, at the alleyway leading to his home. Only then did he realize he hadn’t thought of his grandfather since Hanwen had come down the hill, the longest period he’d gone since the death.

I may go to college, he whispered to his grandfather, later that night after they snuffed the flames of the tung oil lamps and he lay in bed next to Yishou, who’d taken his grandfather’s place beside him. They are finally bringing back the examinations, his mouth said against the coarse cotton revealed by the quilt’s torn patches. If only you’d made it for a few more days, you could have helped me. Eleven years had passed since the exams had last been administered—that day’s news was a miracle. He felt as if he’d been journeying on a flat plateau all his life and finally, this hope on the horizon had made the topography of his future visible. There was a crevasse in his life now: on one side were his mother and Yishou and his father and their old way of living; he and Hanwen, hope and possibility, on the other.





Five



He seemed to have entered a new season of his life; the surprises continued to come. He marveled at how, after years when the days seemed like they would never change, the events after his grandfather’s death tumbled into one another with rapidity.

His father arrived home a day later. Yitian was sitting on a stool in the courtyard, still wiping sleep from his eyes, when the door suddenly swung open.

“Mother of Yishou!”

His shape caught the rays of the first dawn, so that his broad shoulders and wide back, made larger by the cardboard box strapped to it, were shadowed across the floor.

They hadn’t expected him so early in the day. He wore his faded green military uniform. Yitian’s mother dropped the egg she was holding, just collected from the coop, sending the still-warm yolk sliding down the courtyard floor. Yishou called Ba! in his own booming voice, rushing to take his father’s bag onto his own back.