Free The Season of the Stranger by Stephen Becker Page B

interest. Even the girls turned to look at the knot of men huddled whispering around the newspaper. Girard stopped. After five or ten seconds the men were quiet. They looked at him in surprise, as though he were sick or had seen something through the window and had been forced to stop because of that.
    â€œWhat are you deciding back there?” he said. The man with the newspaper folded it and stuffed it into a pocket. Cheng spoke.
    â€œWe were deciding the routes by which the war would reach the City,” he said.
    â€œThen you have heard the reports,” Girard said.
    They nodded and Cheng smiled and said, “It is difficult to think about foreign literature now.”
    â€œIt must be,” Girard said. He looked at his watch. “We have used only twelve minutes of the period.” They watched his face carefully. Only Cheng settled smiling in his chair. Girard took an empty desk in the front row and spun it on one of its legs. He sat facing them and took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. “Those who wish to go may go. Those who wish to smoke and talk about the war may stay.” He threw the package to Cheng. “Pass them around.”
    He did the same thing with the ten o’clock class and when the bell rang at eleven he was out of cigarettes. He stood up and stretched. They had talked about the war for two hours and no one knew too much about what was happening. Kuach’eng had fallen and that had left a line of thirty miles of railroad without a garrison and the war was proceeding in spear fashion down the rails and spreading like a muddy stream in a flat field into the small pockets and towns beside the track and the City was beginning to know now that it was next; that the railroad led to it and that its airports were large and valuable and that if it were not conquered (and how many times, they asked themselves, have the streaming pennons come, come from any point of the continent and sometimes from all points at once, and conquered; and in conquering how many times have the conquerors and their pennons ceased to exist and in conquering lost homeland, spirit, culture, all, while China and the City endured and grew with the heavy new life in them; and how many rude and unwritten languages have perished and melted and been remolded; how many of us can think back to greatgreatgrandfathers and further who rode once on the stocky ponies of Asia and came with the bows and silks and stirrups and songs of the mountains or the plains or the islands or even the jungle, who came to conquer and stayed to be conquered, who lost the centuries of their own past and then took from and added to the centuries of China’s history; how many times?) it would be surrounded and suffocated, choked into the new pattern (this time to stay? they asked themselves); and calmly, low-voiced, they searched for answers.
    He stood in the feeble sunlight and watched them talk in groups across the tan snowpatched campus. He looked at his watch again and decided to see Doctor Liao. He went home first and dropped his books and the portfolio and took another package of cigarettes. When he got to the doctor’s house they said that the doctor had been called to the infirmary. He went back across the humped stone bridge and followed the path to the doctor’s office.
    The doctor called him in when he knocked. He sat waiting while the doctor inoculated a student. The label on the bottle said “Typho-Cholera.” When it was over the doctor said, “Let the arm remain bent for a few minutes,” and sent the student away. He swiveled in the mahogany chair and folded his hands on his lap, tilting backward on the upper part of the chair. “Well,” he said in English, “are we again friends?”
    Girard smiled. “Of course. Would you speak English if we were not?”
    â€œI’m sorry about yesterday.”
    Girard opened his hands and let them drop to his thighs. “As much