A Map for the Missing(41)

She was so surprised when he approached that she leaned on her hoe, off balance, and nearly fell over.

“Be careful!” he said. He instinctively touched her elbow. Even though he’d only grazed her through her clothing, he snatched back his hand. He looked around to see if anyone had seen. His fingers felt like they’d been burned.

“I wanted to give this to you,” he said. He pulled out his math textbook from the waistband of his pants, bending the softcover back and forth to soften the crease that had formed there. “To thank you. I placed first in my class. I don’t need the book anymore, so I thought you might want it.”

She looked shocked. “I know it’s old and used,” he stuttered, “but it’s hard to come by textbooks here, so I thought it would be okay to give to you. It’s fine if you don’t want it, though—”

“No, I’m very glad to have it. This is very kind of you.” She took the book from him.

A group of the other sent-down girls was approaching them. He’d never talked to so many girls at one time, much less ones who all came from the city. He panicked.

“All right, then I have to go now,” he managed, kicking up clouds of dirt as he ran away.





Fourteen



She next approached him in the same way on the first unbearably hot day of the year. Passing the river, he’d stopped to dip his shirt into the water, whose depths the sun had not yet warmed. He’d been enjoying the feeling of the cool water lapping at his hands when she caught him off guard.

“I have a book for you. I thought you might like it,” she said.

He glanced around them to make sure no one else had seen, before saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t take this gift.” It was acceptable that he’d given her something, because she’d helped him study. He’d done nothing for her, however, and a gift from her would have meant something else entirely.

He expected her to leave, but instead she put the book at his feet before walking away. Unsure of what to do and afraid a passerby might question him about it, he hurriedly stuffed the book into the waistband of his pants.

He did not have a chance to get back to it until that evening as everyone was preparing for bed. He snuck into his bedroom and took the book out to examine the cover under lamplight. He peered at the title: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront?. Though he’d heard of this book before, he’d never read it.

When he heard his brother’s footsteps, he wedged the book under the pallet so Yishou would not see. It stayed there for four days, until, one afternoon, he could not stand waiting any longer. He devoured the story of Heathcliff’s wild spirit. He’d never read anything like the tale before, and he flipped through the diaphanous pages of their doomed love so quickly that he had to tell himself to slow down for fear of ripping their edges. After he finished, he couldn’t understand why she’d chosen this book instead of any other. Was she trying to tell him something through the romance that was depicted? It was so turbulent, so doomed. And yet it seemed to express a longing that he wouldn’t have been able to force into the frame of words. He sensed there was something she wanted to say to him.

In later years, he’d see even more starkly how much she’d pushed herself past her own comfort to give him that first book. She wasn’t so completely bold; she, too, experienced fear. “Why did you do it?” he asked once, and she replied, a mystery even to her own self, “Sometimes I feel seized to do what I’m afraid of.”



* * *



—

They continued to exchange books like this, passing them gently through their hands like baby calves, just born. He never became less nervous and didn’t say much to her each time he gave her a new book. The most he would do was make a remark about the weather or ask how the fieldwork had been that day.

He learned about her through guessing at the small signs that she left in between the pages. Often, he discovered places where the words had been made transparent by oil spots. So she liked to read while she ate. He found this charming—her ability to be so engrossed in reading that even other forms of sustenance became superfluous.

He wanted nothing more than to meet her and talk alone, but it was also the thought that scared him most. He worked in a different part of the fields than the sent-down youth, so they didn’t ever come into close contact. Now that it was autumn, the young villagers sometimes went to the dormitories of the sent-down youth to make popcorn in the little kernel popper they’d procured and that held them all fascinated, but he never went with them.

Then one day, when she gave him a book, he opened the front cover to see, written in pencil in handwriting that he would later come to know intimately:

    Meet me at the hilltop this Sunday,

at the same time we met before.





* * *



—

He arrived there before she did and sat against the abandoned well. That morning, he’d scrubbed his face with his washcloth so vigorously that Yishou had noticed and asked what the special occasion was. There were parts of his neck that were, even now, red and raw. He kept imagining scenarios in which she and the other sent-down girls had set him up as part of an elaborate joke. A country boy with so many pimples on his face, trying to go after one of us!

Time seemed to be moving much more slowly than ever before as he waited. He listened closely to hear the sounds of her approach.