A Map for the Missing(50)

    唐一田



The name written there—dark, permanent, his.

Now they were opening the first page of the test booklet. He heard students around him ripping through the thin paper in eagerness, but he lifted his own gently and creased the surface with soft pressure.

Thirty seconds . . . begin . . . the proctor’s voice faded in.

Yitian flipped to the long answers first. He and Hanwen had discussed this strategy of skipping to the questions with the most point value before returning to the rest. The wrong answer on just one of these could ruin his chances of passing the test at all.

A feeling of immense relief spread its hand across his heart as he read the prompt.


In his 1921 work, “My Old Home,” Lu Xun wrote, “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the Earth. For actually the Earth had no roads to begin with, but when many pass one way, a road is made.” Please comment.



He pressed his pen deeply into the surface of the paper and began to write.





Seventeen



He packed his things languidly on the exam’s final day. Now that they’d finished, the desks around the room had all been pushed out of their neat lines. Everyone else had already left the room, but he wanted to revel in these last few moments. To his surprise, the next three exam sessions had gone as well as the first. He was even able to quickly answer all of the questions on the mathematics exam, which had worried him most. All the time he’d spent with Hanwen, memorizing formulas according to the schedule she’d created for them, had paid off in the end.

Other students hadn’t fared so well. Thirty minutes into the math exam on the second day, Teacher Li had darted up from his seat and started cursing.

“You must stay in your seat, boy!” the proctor said, alarmed.

Teacher Li had sat back down, but soon after there had been the sound of a pen tip ripping through paper, sharp amidst the steady rhythm of softly scratching ink coming from the other desks. Yitian found Teacher Li crying outside of the classroom afterward.

“My hand cramped in the middle of the test and I couldn’t write anything.”

He held his hand cradled to his chest as gently as a swaddled infant. Yitian patted him on the back and tried to reassure him, but Teacher Li’s seat was empty in the afternoon session of the exam. The next morning, a different student had been given the desk. On the second day, the exam room was noticeably emptier, and the air had taken on a tone more serious than the simple excitement of the first day.

Before leaving, Yitian paused for a moment at the window, where a layer of condensation had formed from the heat of all the bodies cramped into a single room. The afternoon sun was just receding, darkening the room and splaying acute shadows from the window frame onto his hand. He wiped away a spot in the fog so that he could see outside. The rest of the students were gathered there on the basketball court, tearing up their notes in celebration, completely oblivious to the cold. After they threw all the remnants up into the air, they danced along the pieces of paper as if they were confetti.

The scene amused them, but he did not want to destroy the notes he’d made. He pressed his thumbnail into another foggy spot of the window and wrote

    唐一田



Pink light streamed through the transparency he’d created, glowing through his name. 一田, a single field, the name his grandfather had picked for him. That was all he needed, the smallest gift from Heaven capable of sustaining life.

Here in this room, he might have begun a life for himself much bigger than a single field. His name would fade quickly when the fog melted, but it seemed significant in that moment, like the signing of some document, his scholar’s name in scribbled cursive making claim on his own beautiful text.



* * *



—

God was watching for us,” Hanwen said to him.

“Perhaps it was God, or our own hard work.”

“I worked hard,” she laughed. “You just stole the smart things I said and wrote them down on your exam paper.”

She could have said anything in that moment and he wouldn’t have minded. They’d gone out with Yishou and some other students to a nearby food stall after the exam, and he was already tipsy from the homemade grain alcohol that Yishou had bought for them.

He knew going out to eat was reckless. It would be difficult for him to explain to his mother the spending when he’d supposedly only been away in his uncle’s village. But what did it matter? They’d finished the exam! None of the students who thought they’d done poorly had come out with them to eat, so the atmosphere was loud and celebratory. Each time the proprietress brought over a dish, she sucked her teeth in annoyance at how loud they were, but Yitian didn’t care. When he thought no one else was looking, he took Hanwen’s hand underneath the table and rubbed his own over her fingers. He stopped at the knotted mass that’d formed over the top knuckle on her ring finger, forged from the pressure of the pen.

“It’s your mark of success,” he announced.

He licked his own index finger and brought the damp pad onto her callous, rubbing the rough surface to soften the dense layer of skin formed there. He would not have dared before to do something like this in public, but the days of the exam had brought him new confidence. Somehow, all of his previous concerns about propriety felt trivial after they left the village. He hoped that, in a university in the city, they would no longer have to treat their relationship as something to hide. This was one, amongst many others, aspect of the Communist ideology that he did not understand. Mao said that women held up half the sky, but to display your love for a woman publicly was considered inappropriate. They were taught in school that relationships were a waste of the time that they could have otherwise dedicated to the Revolution.