Free The Season of the Stranger by Stephen Becker Page A

living had left the smells in the street, the collar of it ripped away from the body and flapping uselessly against Girard’s hand as he held the neck.
    He swallowed again and turned the face toward the light. A frozen trickle of blood lay in the wrinkle from the mouth to the side of the chin. The eyes were open and dry and glassy. Girard bent the dead arm at the elbow and brought the hand up into the light. The fingers were rigid and cold, and between the thumb and the knuckle of the index finger there was pressed a torn triangle of colored paper.
    Girard stood up and rubbed his hands against the cold cloth of his gown. “I gave him too much,” he said.
    She came against him and shivered and squeezed the upper part of his arm with both her hands. When they left the alley she was still shivering.

6
    The man at the student center woke him at seven. He thanked him and went to the faucet behind the building to wash. The water stung in the cold morning air and there were no towels. He went inside again and stood near the infant fire swabbing at his face with a handkerchief. When he was warmer he said goodbye and crossed the street to a teashop. The busstop was twenty yards from the teashop. He finished the tea and a small cake and bought a newspaper on the way out.
    When he reached the house he asked Wen-li to make some breakfast, with coffee. He went inside and threw the newspaper on the sofa and washed again in warm water. He changed his clothes. When he came out of the bedroom breakfast was ready. He ate, and drank the coffee, and found his books and portfolio and walked to his nine o’clock class. When he saw the low series of wood and cement buildings (which had been designed by a foreigner and had the corridors to the south and the windows to the north so that the sun and not the wind was kept from the classrooms) he remembered that he was to see the dean. He said good morning to the half dozen already in the room, and picked up the poker and rattled the small stove. A puff ascended whitely, curling through the crack in the lid, and settled slowly on the blueblack metal in cold minute ashspots. He went to the corridor and shouted for the caretaker and told him that it was nine o’clock and there should have been a fire at eight and here they were without heat. The caretaker mumbled something he could not understand and brought the kindling and coal into the room. He cleaned the stove and started the fire. Girard thanked him. As the caretaker went out the students, now a dozen, came to the front of the room and stood waiting for the cold metal to produce warmth. “How is the heat in the dormitories now?” Girard asked.
    One of the men laughed. “Warm water,” he said. “Warm water pumped through pipes. When it reaches the third story it freezes the pipes.”
    When the bell boomed gloomily from the auditorium roof they walked back to their seats. He waited until they were quiet and then shut the door and stood leaning on the lectern toward them.
    â€œAll here?” he said, and then in English, “We are going to talk today about habituation.”
    He talked about habituation. The girls stared gravely at his chin, scribbling sometimes in the notebooks or on the scraps of yellow and white paper in their laps. The men sprawled easily and looked at one another and at the women and sometimes at him. He walked across the front of the room as he talked. Twice he wrote on the blackboard and each time the girls copied what he had written. The thin handsome man who had learned English on the Malay peninsula and spoke it always as though he were condescending to use the language was looking at a newspaper; he leaned across the aisle and whispered, moving one hand jerkily in front of him, to Cheng. Cheng looked apologetically at Girard. Liu the first, behind the thin handsome man, was half standing reading the newspaper over the other’s shoulder.
    Girard continued talking and losing