The Eve of the Exam

It was the night before the results of the autumn exam, and in the small house by the river the wife could not sleep. Her husband had been gone for two months, gone to the prefectural city with a bundle of warm clothes and a box of brushes, and she had kept the lamp burning in his study every night since.

She was not, by nature, an anxious woman. She had been married for five years, and she had learned that anxiety is a thing a wife carries in the small hours, like a stone in the pocket, heavy only when one reaches in to feel for it.

But this exam was different. This was the exam that would make him, or unmake him. If he passed, there would be a post, and a salary, and a house larger than the one by the river. If he failed, they would be here another three years, and her mother-in-law would say, as she said every spring, that it was a pity a bright boy had married so early.

The neighbors knew. The woman who lived two doors down, whose own son had passed ten years before, came over in the afternoon with a plate of sweets and a look of grave compassion.

You must not wait alone, she said. There is an old rite. It is called listening at the mirror. A wife whose husband is at the exam performs it on this night. She puts a mirror in a sieve, and a child carries it out, and the first words the wife overhears are the answer the gods have sent.

The wife had heard of it. She had always thought it the sort of thing old women do, the way they burn paper money at the festivals: a comfort, not a truth. But that evening, sitting in her husband's study with the lamp burning, she found that she wanted a comfort.

She did not believe in it. She told herself, as she got the mirror down from the dressing table, that she did not believe in it. She told herself she was doing it because the neighbor had come, and because a plate of sweets had been left on the table, and because a woman waiting alone will do almost anything to fill the long dark.

The mirror was an old one, the kind backed in brass, that her husband's mother had given her on her wedding day. She polished it on a square of cloth until it shone, and she set it in the sieve, and she called to the neighbor's little boy, who had been playing in the yard.

His name was Ah Cheng. He was seven, and he did not know what he was being asked to do, which was, the neighbor said, the whole point. A child's hands are clean. A child's ears hear what the gods mean a wife to hear, and nothing else.

She knelt, and she lit incense, and she said the small prayer she had been taught: not for victory, but for the truth. She had learned, being married to a scholar, that the worst thing in the world is not bad news. It is the not knowing.