A Map for the Missing(17)
He was late today, which was unlike him. Usually, by the time she arrived, he was already waiting for her. She would run down the hill toward where he sat and he would gaze up shyly at her before scooting over to make space on the board he brought, so that her clothes wouldn’t dirty from the embankment, often muddy from rain or frost. For the first few moments, he would be nervous, allowing her to guide the conversation until he felt comfortable again and spoke quickly and with excitement. Even though it had already been a year since they first met, he never lost that uncertainty when she first came running down toward him, as if each time he believed she stopped wanting to see him in the intervening week. It charmed her that she could assure him over and over again that nothing had changed.
She wondered if sadness at his grandfather’s death had kept him today. She’d tried to comfort him, but whenever she heard herself speak, her words of reassurance felt thin and small against the expanse of his loss. She’d thought the announcement of the gaokao had excited him again, but perhaps she’d been wrong.
He was the only person whom she’d thought about as she’d made her plan to leave. She felt enormous affection for the villagers and the girls of their dormitory, nothing more. She had to remind herself that her fear wasn’t on his behalf, but for the limits of the person she might be without him. She would miss him when they were apart, but he would be fine studying alone. And if her plan worked, she could write him once she returned to Shanghai. Then, with some luck, they’d be able to reunite in college.
After an hour, she gave up waiting and returned to the dormitory.
“So soon?” Pan Niannian said. Niannian was sitting in the lower bunk, knitting. “I thought you were going to spend the whole day with your boyfriend.”
It was the kind of remark that the girls of their dorm would normally have stopped to laugh and gossip about, but no one turned from their studying to respond. Niannian would be disappointed, she knew. Of the four of them, Niannian was the only one who’d decided not to take the gaokao, and she seemed almost resentful that the others had. Ever since the announcement of the exam, she mocked the others for the late hours they spent studying after the day’s work finished, and complained every night that their lamplight was too bright for her to sleep.
Hongxing and Wu Mei were reading at the single table they shared. Accustomed to studying under difficult circumstances, they didn’t even look up. During the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, Hanwen would arrive to school in the morning to find that one of her teachers had suddenly disappeared, reassigned to education through labor without any notice. Even if the teacher was there, she’d have to strain to hear the lecture over the shouts of students in the back deliberately disrupting class, as their revolutionary teachings had taught them to do. The most important principle was not to let anything take away your concentration.
Hanwen collected her sickle from underneath the bed, where she kept her best tools, far away from the barn where there was the danger others would use and ruin them.
“I’m going out to cut some grass,” she announced to the room, as lightly as she could. No one took any notice. Only when she paused by the door to fix the heel of her shoe did Hongxing look up, as if the words had just reached her.
“You’re going to cut grass now?”
“Yes. For fuel. I wanted to do it now so that I’ll have more time to study during the week.” She’d prepared the excuse earlier in case anyone asked.
“You plan every part of the day around this exam. What a joke,” Niannian scoffed. Hanwen ignored her and left the room.
They kept the whetstone outside the dormitory. She’d never become particularly adept at using it to sharpen tools, and she usually had to ask Niannian for help. Niannian had been in the village the longest, and in those years had mastered bringing blade to stone at the precise angle of contact that would rub the dullness away. Hanwen’s motions were awkward as she scraped the blade against the stone now, but she didn’t need the sickle to be as sharp as when they worked in the fields.
She walked until she was half a li behind their dormitories, where there was a small hill covered in prickly grass they cut for cooking fuel. In this season, the waist-high grass was beginning to dry, but hadn’t yet coarsened to the texture of later autumn. She squatted down in the grass, so that anyone approaching would have to squint closely to notice she was there.
She’d devised the plan the week before to hurt herself with the sickle. She didn’t want to injure herself permanently, only to do enough damage that it would be impossible for her to work for a few weeks. Then she’d be sent back to Shanghai to recuperate, where she could study for the exam without obligation or distraction.
She took the sickle in her hand. The splinters of the wooden handle dug into her palm. With the index finger of her free hand, she pressed lightly against the blade. She saw the skin of her finger turn white, then the bloody pucker that rose from the shallow incision. It was only the depth of a simple paper cut, but still she gasped so sharply that she dropped the tool.
She hadn’t anticipated being so afraid. She’d hurt herself accidentally so many times before while using the sickle to harvest, when the blade was too dull or her chopping suddenly hit a knot in the stalks. From these accidents, she had cuts on her arms and legs, none of them ever deep enough to require more than a bandage and a few days of healing. They’d faded into brown scars that joined all the others collected upon her body from her days here, the patches like tree bark upon her shoulders where the carrying poles had rubbed against her flesh, and the glossy remnants of skin where calluses on her foot had bubbled then popped.