A Map for the Missing(43)

They went on like this until they’d finished peeling all the chestnuts. This time, though he was still afraid, he did not make up an excuse to leave early, and they walked slowly down the hill together. Before they parted, she told him her name was Tian Hanwen. He immediately heard the culture in the characters, a name unlike any he’d ever heard in the village. Even his grandfather, who’d given both Yitian and Yishou their names, would never have come up with something so elegant.



* * *



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Questions about her life in Shanghai became his favorite ones to ask. He’d never been nearly that far—the biggest place he’d ever gone was Hefei City, but even that was a marginal point on the map compared to Shanghai.

“I’ve heard there are salons where people discuss literature all the time. Is that true?” he asked once, and she’d laughed.

“Professors and older scholars might do that. Not normal people like us.” Then, as if she’d seen the disappointment on his face, she hurried to say, “But if we go to college, we could go to places like that. Anyway, there are other things. I could see the tall buildings on Nanjing Road from my house. Oh, and the department store where we used to go play at night, it was so big and empty. We’d hide in the basement until the guard found us. . . . I’ll take you there!”

He was embarrassed by how little he knew; after she described the city to him, he could see how he’d fashioned an image of Shanghai out of childish fantasy. But he felt grateful, too, for the new practicality her stories gave him, which weighed his dreams with solidity.

He saw Shanghai and the big cities as appendices to the stories his grandfather told him, continuations of the glorious past into the present. A place like Shanghai was where history continued to be written onward, unlike his village, where history seemed to have stopped, and in recent years, even regressed to a less literate past. After each story she told about Shanghai, he went home and repeated her words to himself as he washed and prepared for bed. He pictured once again the glamorous cinemas with movies from all over the world and the library in her neighborhood where translations of foreign novels were slowly being allowed back. Visiting all these places with her. He wanted to memorize every detail of life there, in case his imagination was the only place where he’d ever be able to experience it.

He longed to kiss her, as the protagonist did in The Heart of a Young Girl, the tattered book, banned and hand copied, that all the boys had secretly passed around in the ninth grade. He wondered if her lips would feel supple against his, like the book described.

He approached Yishou for advice. He waited until one late afternoon when they were alone taking down blankets from the laundry line.

“Do you ever kiss your girlfriend?” Yitian asked quietly. He knew his older brother had a courtship with a girl in Han Village, whom he sometimes walked five li on weekends to go see.

“Why do you ask?” Yishou laughed loudly. He’d made no effort to follow Yitian in speaking softly.

“Oh, nothing—” Yitian blushed.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Yishou’s grin spread wider on his face. “Is she very beautiful?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Never mind.” He regretted asking his brother. Yishou had many skills, but being sensitive wasn’t one of them.

“Well, if you did, what you would do is this.” He lunged toward Yitian, bringing his face mere inches away, then yelped. Yitian was so shocked that he dropped the clean blanket he was holding onto the dirt.

His brother was laughing uproariously. “Come on, it’s not so hard! Even all the animals do it without worrying so much. Just look at them if you need help.”

When he met with Hanwen that Sunday, her very outline seemed charged and changed. He tried to be as carefree as Yishou would be as he sat down and closed the space next to her.

“You seem distracted,” she said.

“Do young people like us date in Shanghai?” he asked.

“What a sudden question!” she laughed. When she saw that he was serious, she said, “I’ve heard some stories from older girls. They said it all was very secretive. If a couple went to the movie theater, they had to buy tickets separately. And they waited until after the movie had started and always sat in the back, near the end of the row, so that no one could look over and see them.”

His heart pounded with the thought of what would happen after the lights had gone out in those theaters. He looked at her face, golden with the soft, late daylight of autumn, and leaned toward her. But when he brought his face close to hers, she turned away. She placed her hands on the ground behind her, so that her body was tilted away from him, and said, “Please don’t.”

“Is everything okay?”

After a while, she said, “When I was a kid, I saw so many women, our neighbors, accused in the large-character posters. They called them immoral and loose. They were screamed at, lost their jobs. Someone my mother knew even committed suicide.”

“It’s not like that anymore.”

She shook her head. “Please understand.”

He felt rebuked, and they sat in silence. He was afraid to look at her again. He’d tried on a role for which he was the wrong actor. He wasn’t like one of those handsome men in the Western novels they’d read together. His earliest worries, that there was no way she could be attracted to his tu face, had turned out to be right, after all.