A Map for the Missing(44)

“Why did you talk to me on the hill that day?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“That first time you saw me up here. You could have just turned around and gone back down. Why did you keep talking to me?”

He looked back up at her. She was using a twig to pick a hole in the dirt. “Something about the way you were sitting there that first day reading, looking so engrossed. I could tell that you were someone I would want to talk to. Someone I would like.”

“But you have all those girls in your dormitory who read and went to school in Shanghai. You could have just talked to them.”

“It’s not the same. We talk about books and our lives, but it’s not the same as with you. I could tell how much you cared. They aren’t like that. I’m not even like that.”

“You are,” he said.

She shook her head.

She’d seemed so confident the first day on the hill. Now a string hummed in his chest at the sudden recognition of himself in her.

After some time had passed, she said, “I do like you, you know that?” Her voice trembled slightly. She reached out to interlace her fingers with his. When she squeezed his fingers and buried the knot of them in the grass, he felt relieved. He was surprised to find he believed her words, fully and completely. Wasn’t it true, that love grew in ways beyond what he’d ever read or understood from a book? It could come from something as small as what she’d just described, or the way a person squinted thoughtfully toward the sun before she answered your questions. That was all it took, a moment enough to lodge in your mind and replay itself over and over, affecting your days forever after.





Fifteen


NOVEMBER 1977


After his father hid the hukou booklet, Yitian felt a darkness smothering his body. A door to the future had suddenly closed and left the room of his life in shadow. His grandfather was dead. He couldn’t see anything new that would come in his lifetime.

He found the act of lifting himself out of bed to be physically impossible, his body losing all the vigor that he hadn’t realized had once animated it. His mother pitied him and did not scold him as harshly as he was sure she otherwise would have. His father showed no such lenience. Whenever he caught Yitian dawdling around the home, he began berating him. Only his mother’s intervention stopped the shouting.

That Sunday, Yitian didn’t meet Hanwen. He avoided her in the fields. Once, he saw her shape approaching him and he hurriedly announced to Yishou that he was going to use the bathroom. He did not want to see what her face might look like when he told her his father had taken his hukou booklet. He was not the person he’d made himself out to be, a scholar just like her. She would take the gaokao and go on to college, but he’d remain a farmer, just as everyone in his family had always been. They’d say goodbye soon, anyway, when she left for that life; he was only making the departure easier.



* * *



—

When Yishou asked him if he wanted to go to town that weekend, he was in the courtyard, laying out radishes to dry, a task so easy that he was sure his mother’s assignment had been deliberate.

“Come on, little brother,” Yishou said. “You need some distraction. Town will be fun. You can check out the stores while I get the grains.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Why not? You can’t just sit here all day, looking sad.”

Why can’t I? he wanted to respond, but this sounded whiny, even to him. Instead, he told his brother, “There’s no point. Besides, it’s too cold.”

“There might be a surprise for you if you come,” his brother said, but Yitian was even more irritated by the childishness.

“Suit yourself,” Yishou said. “You’d want to come if you knew what kind of surprise this was.” He packed up his knapsack and left.

Yitian felt both annoyed at and envious at how simpleminded Yishou was. Only one character differed between their two names, but Yishou was the kind of person for whom all unhappiness was only temporary, easily cured by buying a youtiao in town. His thoughts seemed to end with life’s facts, a quality that made him an excellent farmer. Their mother speculated that the difference was because of the years that separated their births. Yishou was born during the worst of the Great Leap Forward famine years, while Yitian’s birth came two years later, as conditions, though still bad, had improved tremendously.

“How can he forget that? He was born in a time when we had no mind for anything except for food. Not like you, spending all your time thinking. We were all so hungry back then,” she said. “His body will remember, even if the mind forgets.”



* * *



—

He heard the footsteps of Yishou’s return late that evening, after everyone else had gone to bed. Yitian pretended to be asleep and waited for Yishou to flop himself onto the pallet and the snoring that usually began immediately.

“Wake up,” Yishou said, shaking his shoulder. His voice was urgent in Yitian’s ear. Yitian wondered if his brother was drunk from his trip.

“Wake up, Yitian. I have something to show you.”

Reluctantly, Yitian sat up. His brother stood next to the pallet, fumbling with the lining of his coat. When he finally untangled the object from the cotton padding, he whistled quietly in celebration.