Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (4 page)

He broke this chain of her thinking. The cities of the North were far away.

“Why did you go there today?”

“I sat and sewed on your blue coat. Then I had no more thread and your mother had only white. So then I went out to buy some of the blue thread. When I went to the village there the people were.”

He broke in again.

“I wish you would not go on the street alone.”

“Why?”

“Other men will see you.”

“I do not look at them.”

“I do not want them to look at you. You are pretty and you are my wife.”

“But how can I stay always in the courtyard? These are not ancient times.”

“I wish it were those times. I would like to lock you up.”

“If you locked me up I would not eat and then I should die.”

“I would not let you die.”

She laughed. “But still these are the new times and I will come and go.”

“Does any man ever speak to you?”

“Not more than to another he knows.”

They fell silent again and then he began. “Tell me what you thought of me when you first saw me.”

She plucked at the blue and white flowered cotton cover of the bed. “The first time I saw you I cannot remember.”

“No, I mean when—after we were married.”

She turned her head away. In the moonlight he could see her forehead and small straight nose, her lips, the lower one a little behind the upper, and her full chin.

“I was glad you are taller than I am. For a woman I am too tall,” she said.

“No, you are not.”

She let him say this and did not answer.

“And then what did you think?” he asked her.

Now she hung her head. “Then I wondered what you thought about me.”

“But you knew I wanted you,” he said.

She lifted her head suddenly. “And then I wondered—if we should ever talk together. Were we to be to each other only what others married are? Yes, and would you care what I am or only that I gave you children and made your food? And was I to be yours or only belong to your house? Will you learn to read? There are things in books to know. Will you buy me a book? … There—that is my secret. Instead of the earrings, buy me a book! It is why I cut my hair off. I was going to sell it to buy a book. Then I was afraid to tell you, so I said earrings. It is a book I want.”

She leaned over him in her anxiety for him to hear her.

“A book!” he said. “But what have people like us to do with books?”

“I want only a book,” she said.

“But if you cannot read?”

“I can read,” she said.

Now if she had told him that she could fly like a bird, she could not so have astonished him.

“How can you read?” he cried. “Women like you never read!”

“I learned,” she said, “a word at a time. My father sent one of my brothers to school, and from him I learned a little every day. But I have no book of my own.”

He thought about this a moment.

“If this is what you want,” he said slowly, “I will give it to you. But I never thought to see a woman read in this house.”

So they talked on, half the night through, until they were drowsy with weariness.

“We must sleep,” he said at last. “Tomorrow’s work must be done. And if I am to go to the city, too, to buy the book—”

He stopped and held his breath. For now she curled down beside him as he spoke, and put herself close to him as she never had. It was so sweet, this movement of her own will toward him, that he could not say another word. It was the sweetest instant of his life, better by far than the first time he had taken her on his wedding night, for this was the first time she had ever come to him of her own will. Why had he been such a fool, he asked himself, as not to know before how a woman’s heart was made? But none had told him. He had stumbled upon the knowledge out of his own discontent that even marriage had not given her to him. Now he possessed her because she gave herself to him.

When he slept that night he knew as surely as though a god had been in him that out of this night she would conceive a child. Out of this night a son would be born to him.

N
OW LAO ER HAD
often bought goods for his father, because of all three sons he was the one who was most at his ease in the city. The father never entered the city gates if he could help it for he said his breath would not come in and out evenly once he was there, and his wife would not go often because she said the city people all had a stink to them. This Ling Tan himself would not wholly allow, because he said each kind of human flesh had its own smell, and then she said that if this were so, she would stay with her own kind of flesh that lived in the fields and ate its meats and vegetables fresh and not decayed from long lying in markets. The eldest son was too trusting a man for the city and he believed what city folk told him, and the youngest was too young and Ling Tan would not often allow him inside the city gates, lest he learn evil. So it came about that Lao Er was the son who did the city business, who took eggs to the corner shop at the Bridge of the South Gate, and who weighed the pig’s meat when they killed, who carried to the rice shops their surplus rice after each harvest.

This he had done for years enough so that now when he came through the great gate he did not feel frightened or abashed or trip one foot over the other for staring as most countrymen did. He walked in with his head up and his face clean and a decent blue coat and trousers covering his body. He did not wear socks because it was summer but he put on a fresh pair of straw sandals that he and his brothers wove out of rice straw in the long winter evenings, and he smoothed down his short black hair as he came into the first busy street. He knew where to go for his business, and when he talked to the men in the city he did it with sharp cool sense and yet with good country courtesy. If he were given a bad penny by the eggman who bought his eggs, he took it and said nothing to the man’s face but he took care the next time he brought in his eggs to have all very fresh except three rotten ones. Since three eggs were anywhere bought for a penny when the man found these three rotten he perfectly knew why they were there, and knew that Lao Er could discern a bad penny as well as he a bad egg, and so the two understood each other as well as though they had spoken, and there had been no need for anger between them. By such means Lao Er had come to be respected among the people he knew in the city, and so he respected himself there.

But today when it came to buying a book he knew no more than a child. He went to a certain street where booksellers had their wares out on boards set on benches and stared awhile at them. Except that some were large and some were small each book looked like every other. Seeing how long he stood there, one bookseller after another asked him what book he wanted and he had always to say he did not know. He was ashamed to say he wanted a book for his wife, because this would make her seem strange and unlike other women, so he pretended it was for himself.

Now without exception these booksellers were small old weazened men who had once been scholars or teachers in little schools, men who had not succeeded well, and so had sunk to the selling of books for merchandise. But none of them so much as imagined that Lao Er could not read. One by one they put out their wares saying, “Here is a good one full of laughter about the foreign devils,” or “There is a pleasant dirty tale of a nun and her lover,” or they said, “Here is the
Three Kingdoms
if you have not already read it and who has not?” They tossed the books before him and still they looked alike to him. He picked up by chance one that had a bright pink cover and said, “What is this one?”

“Why, what you see,” the bookseller said carelessly, pointing to the letters on the back.

Lao Er laughed, shamefaced. “The truth is I cannot read.”

That man could not believe what he heard. “Why then do you buy a book?” he inquired. “Why do you not buy sweet stuff or a toy or a piece of cloth for a new coat or a silver earpick or anything except a book?”

His voice was so full of scorn that Lao Er was angry. “I will buy a book, but it shall not be yours,” he said sharply and turned away. He would go to his elder sister’s house and if her husband were at home he would ask him what was a good book and then he would come back and buy it from the table next to this old man’s and before his very eyes.

He strode off down the crowded street and across three others and came to the shop where his sister’s husband was the master. It was a shop for foreign stuff, full of all sorts of wares, foreign flashlights and rubber shoes and bottles of all kinds, cakes and foods in tin boxes, and garments of knitted yarns in all colors and pens and pencils and dishes and framed pictures of fat white women with round blue eyes. Usually Lao Er could spend all the time he had looking at one thing after another in the cases locked under glass tops, but today he went straight through the shop to the court behind where his sister lived, and the two clerks knowing him let him pass.

There he found his sister’s husband holding his last child on his knee as he leaned back in a rattan chair fanning himself. The man was fat for his age and he was now naked to the waist, his body soft and pale as a woman’s. Around his pale smooth wrists were rings of flesh and his fingers were fat and pointed. All his friends cried that he was getting rich since he ate and drank so well, and he laughed and let them think it.

“Ah, my wife’s brother,” he cried when Lao Er came in. “Sit down—sit down!”

He raised himself a little, but not more than he needed to do for the younger brother of his wife, and he bellowed for her to come.

“Here is your second brother, mother of my son!” he bawled.

She came running out, her coat loose at the neck and her round face cheerful as it always was.

“There you are, brother,” she shouted at Lao Er, though he was only a few feet away, “and how are the old ones and all the others? And why does my sister-in-law never come to see me? Is she with child yet? Why, what a puny man you are!”

She threw out these words one after the other like bubbles from her full red mouth, laughing between them and with them until words and laughter were all mixed together. Then she ran back and brought out some foreign cakes such as came from the shop and she poured out fresh tea for him.

Then Lao Er told all the news and toyed with the child and listened to his sister’s husband tell how good business could be if only the students would not preach night and day against the buying and selling of foreign goods, since left to themselves people never asked where goods came from, and what had business to do with such matters as students and love of country. When all had been said then he could put the matter of the book to his brother-in-law.

Now this brother-in-law, Wu Lien by name, could read because he was a city man and his father and grandfather had been city men before him. But each in his generation had taken for his wife a woman from outside the city walls and this was because women in the city after a generation or two grow soft and sleep long in the day and sit late at night gambling with bamboo pieces, and will not suckle their own children and are too easily willing for their husbands to take concubines. And so Wu Lien had read plenty of books in his youth, and even now he read them often when the day was hot in summer or when in winter it was cold in the shop and the best place to sit was beside a brazier of coals in his own room. He put the child down from his knee and spoke gravely as a man ought when he speaks of letters.

“There are books for every need,” he said. “It must first be asked why the book is wanted and who is to read it. If a man wishes to read it secretly and for his own private pleasure there are books for that. If he is tied to his house and cannot travel and he longs to travel, there are books for that. If he likes to think of poison and murder and dares not commit such deeds himself there are books for that. For what is your book wanted?”

Lao Er grinned half in shame and then made up his mind to tell the truth.

“Why, here it is, brother,” he said. “I married my woman thinking her like any other one, and now I find out she can read and yearns after a book. She cut off her long hair to sell, even, that she might buy a book and without telling me why when she did it. So, instead of a pair of earrings I had promised her, I said I would buy a book for her, and that is why I am here today. But how can I tell one book from another?”

“You should have asked her what she wanted,” Wu Lien said and Lao Er agreed.

“But I never thought of such a difference in books,” he said.

Wu Lien pondered the matter a moment and then he turned to his own wife who sat there listening to all this with her mouth open. “You are only a woman, mother of my son,” he said, “and if you could read what would you like to read?”

The idea of reading set her to laughing behind the hand she always put in front of her face when she laughed because her teeth were black.

“I never thought of it,” she said. But when she saw her city husband look at her with impatience on his fat face she took her hand away and made herself grave and considered what he had asked.

“When I was a child in the village,” she said, “I used to hear the old one-eyed man who told stories tell about certain robbers who lived near a lake. When he told them, every one, man or woman or child, they all leaned forward to hear what would come next and when he paused at some point where a man lay caught in a trap or a battle was about to be fought and passed his basket for pennies, they rained into it like hail on a ripe rice field.”

Wu Lien looked at her proudly.

“You have hit on exactly the right book,” he said. “That is the one, my brother,” he said. “It has everything in it, and all the women who deceive their husbands are punished and the righteous prevail. It is a naughty book sometimes, but the naughty ones are always punished and go down in battle before the others. The name of the book is
Shui Hu Chuan,
and it is full of righteous robbers. Yes, I read that book when I was a small boy and I could read it again.”

He began to pull his fat underlip, smiling as he did so, and remembering the pleasure he had once had in the book. Lao Er rose and repeated the name of the book and thanked them and bade them good-bye and was making his way through the shop, now crowded with many customers, when he was stopped by the sound of quarreling voices. These voices shouted so loud and so suddenly that everybody stopped buying and turned their heads toward the wide door of the shop. Lao Er found himself held there by an army of young men with rocks and sticks in their hands.