A Map for the Missing(40)

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The final exams for his last year in high school were approaching. Even though the grades had no meaning—there would be nowhere to go after he graduated—he wanted to do his best. Those days and in that heat, studying in his home was almost impossible. One afternoon, he was so frustrated that he did a quick calculation. It was the second week of June. Her production team was at its busiest this time of year, during the small window of time when they would harvest rice before the next planting would have to begin. He decided to risk a visit.

After he’d gone to the hilltop a few more times without seeing her, he relaxed. Math was his weakest subject, and so it was especially important that he could concentrate completely. The problems weren’t hard when he put his mind to them, but he didn’t understand why he had to commit the formulas to memory when, for the rest of his life, he would be able to reference them in a book. The process wasn’t at all like remembering the stories from history and the ones his grandfather told him, which had so much art and logic in the way they built upon one another.

One day, he’d been studying for an hour when he heard the approaching footsteps coming up the hill. Though he knew what the sound meant this time, he still panicked.

Sure enough, there she came, just moments later, her arms pushing a path through the prickly wild grass. “Oh, it’s you again. I was wondering when I would see you,” she said. She didn’t look surprised at all. He noted that her face was actually a bit different than he remembered, her eyes more almond-shaped than how he’d pictured her at night.

“What are you doing today? Still reading?” She sat down right beside him and glanced over his shoulder at his notes. “Oh, trigonometry?”

“I have a final exam next week,” he explained lamely.

“You’re studying the sum to product formulas?”

Before he could cover up his notes, she pointed at a line of his writing and said, “Sine a plus sine b, hmm, let me see.” She looked up to the sky, thinking, then recited, “Sine of angle one plus sine of angle two is equivalent to two times sine of the sum of the angles divided by two, all multiplied by cosine of the sum of the angles divided by two.” She checked the paper and her face fell. “Oh, it’s cosine of the difference of the two angles. How could I forget?”

“How did you know that?” He was amazed.

“I really like math. But I’m not as good as I used to be. I never would have made such a mistake before.”

“But how? Do you take math classes here?” That didn’t make sense. The sent-down youth didn’t go to school.

“I brought some of my old textbooks from Shanghai here. I review them sometimes, just in case I might need to know some fact in the future, but I don’t have very much time anymore, because we’re so busy. I’m forgetting a lot of stuff I used to know easily.”

“You were close.”

“I can help test you, if you want. I might have forgotten some of the formulas, but it won’t matter if you give me the sheet to look at.”

She stretched out her hand and he passed her the paper. At least if she tested him, he wouldn’t have to really talk to her at all; he would only be reciting formulas.

They went through every line. He winced whenever she corrected him, glad that she was too occupied scanning the paper to notice.

“Have you always come up here so often?” he asked, when they finished. “I never used to see you when I came up.”

“No, actually, I’ve been coming up to read your books.”

She looked embarrassed as she said this, and he had a thought he found almost impossible to believe. Had she been coming up here in hopes of seeing him?

“I hope you don’t mind. You only told me not to tell anyone, but I figured if I only read them myself, it would be all right. . . .”

“You can read them. No one else in the village cares about them.”

He didn’t know what else to say to her. He made an excuse that his mother was waiting for him at home, so he could rush down the hill himself without having to walk together with her. If anyone he knew spotted them, he would surely have been teased endlessly.

Even before he began to run, his heart was already pounding through his chest. Instead of the formulas he was supposed to be memorizing, he thought of her the entire way home. She’d been reading his books! It occurred to him then, what he could have said, an idea so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it earlier. Why hadn’t he simply asked her what she thought of the books?



* * *



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When the results of the math final exam were posted, he’d scored top in his class. This was new to him, and a surprise even to his teacher. He was near the top of every subject, but never math.

“Hard work pays off,” his grandfather said, when Yitian told his family.

“Too bad there’s no prize for scoring the highest,” said Yishou.

“Learning is a great reward, all of its own,” his grandfather replied.

Yitian looked for her in the fields all that week, trying to guess by the shape of the faraway bodies which one might be hers. It was difficult to tell, because the sent-down youth were working in an area that was three tracts away from him, but finally he distinguished someone wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the hot summer sun who seemed to match her height and figure.