The Guide

The hoofbeats stopped in front of our gate just as the sky finished turning light.

I heard the horse let out its breath. This time I heard it clearly, just outside, on the far side of the gate. Then someone knocked. Three knocks, not heavy, not hurried—one, then one, then one, as if the hour had been settled long ago.

I had lain seven days. I heard those three knocks all the way through. The medicine bowl still stood by the bed, the medicine long cold, a brown scum settled at the bottom. I had counted the three scratches in the beam, counted the ink-stains on the wall, counted my own heartbeats. In seven days I had counted everything in this room. Now there was a sound at the door I could not count.

My mother was in the kitchen. I heard her put down the firewood, cross the main room, stop—then go to the door.

The door opened.

No wind came in. A man stood outside in a grey robe, holding the lead of a white horse. The horse was tall, with a white blaze on its forehead, as if painted there. The man stood without moving, without bowing, and looked into the house—not at my mother. At me.

My mother stepped aside. And I saw, then: there was no sun outside, and no wind. The trees in the yard did not stir. But the hem of the man's robe moved slightly, as if something invisible were blowing at it.

He crossed the threshold. When he passed my mother she did not move, only stood there. He did not look at her. The two of them did their separate business and did not disturb each other.

He came to my bed and stopped. He did not ask how I was. He did not look at the medicine bowl, or at the ink-stains on the wall. He stood there and took a document from his sleeve. It was folded from yellow paper, the corners creased square and even—the kind of yellow paper used at ancestral offerings, with two creases at the edge, as if cut from a larger sheet. He held it in both hands, without opening it, and said one thing:

"Come. There is an examination for you."

I opened my mouth. My throat was packed with cotton. It took me a long time to get a sentence out:

"The examiner has not arrived yet. How can there be an examination?"

He looked at me and said nothing. He only held the document out a little farther.

Then I saw his face. Forty or so, no beard, eyebrows so pale they were like a brushstroke left out of a painting. He was not looking at the document. He was looking at my eyes. His eyes were empty, empty as a dry well. But I knew those eyes.

The man Aunt Li had spoken of yesterday. The one who had stood at the village gate half the day, leading a white horse, asking where the Song scholar's house was, saying he would come again tomorrow.

It was him.

And I remembered what Aunt Li had said—half a day at the village gate. A man in grey, holding a horse, waiting at the gate of a village for a man who was sick and dying. He had waited patiently.

My hand went out and touched the document. The paper was warm, as if someone had been holding it. It was not opened, but I knew, clearly, what was written on it: my name, my birth date, my district—and a line that read: permitted to sit the examination.

I do not know how I knew. But my hand had already come back, and I found I was sitting up. For seven days I had not sat up. I did it now without effort. I threw off the quilt and stood barefoot on the floor. The bricks were cold under my feet, but solid—not that hollow, cotton-wool feeling of sickness. I looked at my own hands: the knuckles stood out, the nails were clean. They were not the hands of a man who had been ill.

"Your shoes," my mother said.

She had come out of the kitchen without my hearing her, carrying a pair of shoes—my winter cloth shoes, the soles sewn close and thick. She had been working new stitches into them a few nights ago, by the lamp. She knelt and set them at my feet, the way she would for a man going on a journey. I did not put them on at once. I looked at her first. She kept her head down, looking only at my shoes, not at my face.

I put them on. The soles were warm, as if they had been dried by the stove. My mother stayed where she was, watching me lace them, and only then stood up. She wiped her hands on her apron.

The man in grey was already waiting at the door.

"Let me get you a coat," my mother said.

"No need," I said. "I'm not cold."

The words surprised me as I said them. For seven days I had been cold all the time, cold under two quilts. Now I stood in the main room in a single shirt, and I was not cold. Not only not cold—there was a lightness in my body, as if something carried for a long time had been set down.

My mother was startled too. She opened her mouth. No words came.

"Mother," I said. There was a great deal I wanted to say. At my lips it came to nothing.

"Go," my mother said.

I turned. She stood inside the threshold of the main room, still holding half a stick of firewood. She was not looking at me. She was speaking to the horse outside the gate. Her voice was low, as if she had said these words to herself many times.

"Go," she said again. "And on the road—don't look back."

I wanted to ask her things: how she knew I was leaving, why she had never spoken of the hoofbeats that came three nights running, whether she had known the man in grey when she opened the door. But she had already turned into the kitchen. The smoke went up. She crouched to feed the fire and did not look at me again.

The man in grey waited at the door.

I stepped out. The white-blazed horse lifted its head. It looked at me—not the way a strange horse looks at a stranger. It looked at me the way a horse looks after waiting many years, at last. It blew softly through its nose and brought its face over and rubbed against my hand.

I touched its forehead. The white ran from between its eyes down to the bridge of its nose.

The man in grey took the lead rope. "Mount," he said.

I mounted. A sick man should not have had the strength. I did not think about it—or rather, I did not dare to. I gripped the reins, and the horse walked. Its hoof came down on the threshold of the gate, and I heard a light sound: click.

Inside the gate, my mother stood at the kitchen door, watching me.

She did not come after me. She did not cry, did not call out, did not even raise her hand. She stood there in the smoke of the kitchen fire and watched me ride out of the gate, down the road I had walked for over forty years, out of the village.

I kept looking back at her, until the old locust at the village gate hid her from sight. Only then did I turn forward.

And it was then that I saw the people at the village gate.

The Wangs' daughter-in-law was drawing water at the well. The bucket came up, water splashed on the well-curb, and she did not look up. Aunt Li was shelling beans in her doorway; a bean rolled into the road, and she did not pick it up. The peddler from the east end of the village came by with his carrying-pole, bells ringing, and passed before my horse. His eyes were fixed ahead, past the village, at a place I could not reach.

They did not see me.

The man in grey walked on ahead, without turning, and said one thing:

"The road is long. Sit steady."

The white horse walked very steadily. The hoofbeats were soft, soft as if falling on cotton. I looked down at the road: the dirt road out of the village, the road I could walk with my eyes shut, every stone I knew. And I saw that the dirt road had become the color of yellow paper.

My heart lurched. I wanted to look back for my mother, to call out "Mother—"

But when I turned, there was no village gate behind me, no locust tree, no house.

There was only a road of yellow paper, straight ahead, running to the edge of the sky. No wind. And the trees on either side cast no shadows.