“As am I,” I said.
That night, as we lay in our beds, I wondered what my husband had been like before we met. I thought about this more the longer we were married, especially as I didn’t know that much about him. I knew that he was from Prefecture One, and that both of his parents had been professors at a big university, and that at some point both of them had been arrested and taken to rehabilitative camps, and that he had an older sister, who had also been removed to the camps, and that because his immediate family members had been declared enemies of the state, he had been expelled from the university where he had been a graduate student. We both had been officially forgiven under the 2087 Forgiveness Act and given good jobs, but we would never be allowed to reenroll in a university. Unlike my husband, I had no desire to return—I was satisfied being a lab tech. But my husband had wanted to be a scientist, and yet he never would. Grandfather had told me this. “I can only do so much, little cat,” he had said, but he never explained what he meant by that.
After Lunar New Year came Honor Day, which was always on a Friday. The state had instituted it in ’71. All businesses and institutes were closed on that day, and you were supposed to spend it quietly, thinking of people who had died, not just in ’70 but from any of the illnesses. The motto for Honor Day was “Not all who died were innocent, but all who died are forgiven.”
Couples usually spent Honor Day together, but my husband and I did not. He went to the center, where the state sponsored a concert of orchestral music, and lectures about grieving, and I took a walk around the Square. But now I wondered if he had in fact gone to Bethune Street.
Mostly, though, I thought of Grandfather, who had not died of an illness but was dead nonetheless. We had spent every Honor Day together, and Grandfather would show me pictures of my father, who had died in ’66, when I was two. He hadn’t died of disease, either, but it wasn’t until later that I learned that. That was also when my other grandfather had died—they had died at the same time, in the same place. It was this other grandfather to whom I was genetically related, although I can’t say I missed him, because I didn’t remember him at all. But Grandfather always said that he had loved me very much, and I liked hearing that, even though I didn’t remember him.
I can remember almost nothing of my father as well, because I have only a few memories of my life before the illness. Sometimes I had the sense that I had been a different person altogether, someone who didn’t have such a difficult time understanding other people and what they were really trying to say beneath the thing they were actually saying. One time, I asked Grandfather if he had liked me more before I got sick, and he turned his head away for a moment and then grabbed me and held me to him, even though he knew I didn’t like that. “No,” Grandfather said, in a funny, smothered voice, “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way,” which was nice to hear and made me feel good, like I did when it was cool enough outside to wear long sleeves and I could walk and walk and never get overheated.
But one of the reasons I suspected that I might have been different was because, in the most vivid memory I have of my father, he is laughing and twirling a little girl around by her hands, spinning her so fast that she is soaring, her feet sweeping through the air. The little girl is wearing a pale-pink dress and has a black ponytail that sails behind her, and she is laughing, too. One of the only things I remember about being sick is this image, and after I got better, I had asked Grandfather who that little girl was, and he got a strange expression on his face. “That was you, little cat,” he said. “You and your father. He would spin you around like that until you both got dizzy.” At the time, I had thought this was impossible, because I was bald and couldn’t imagine having so much hair. But then, as I got older, I thought: Suppose that was me, with all that hair? What else had I had that I couldn’t remember? I thought of the little girl laughing, her mouth wide open, her father laughing with her. I could never make anyone laugh, not even Grandfather, and no one could make me laugh. But once I had. It was like being told I had once known how to fly.
Grandfather had always said that Honor Day was to honor me, because I had lived. “You have two birthdays in one year, little cat,” he said. “The day you were born, and the day you came back to me.” This is why I always thought of Honor Day as my day, though I would never say that aloud, because I knew it was selfish and, moreover, was impolite, because it disregarded all those who had died. The other thing I would never say aloud was that I had liked to hear Grandfather tell me about when I was sick; how I had lain in a hospital bed for months, and for weeks my fever had been so high that I couldn’t even talk; how almost all of my fellow patients on the ward had died; how I had one day opened my eyes and asked for Grandfather. I felt cozy hearing those stories, hearing Grandfather say how worried he had been, how he had sat by my bed every night, how he had read to me every day, how he had described to me the kinds of cakes he would get for me if I got better, cakes made with real strawberries swirled into the batter, or topped with sheets of chocolate that had been stamped to look like tree bark, or sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Grandfather said I had loved all sweets, especially cake, when I was a little girl, but after the illness, I had lost most of my taste for them, which was just as well, since by that point sugar had also been declared a restricted asset.
Since Grandfather had died, however, no one remembered that I had once been sick, or that someone had wanted me to get better so badly that he had come to visit me every night.
That year, Honor Day was particularly lonely. The building was silent. The day after the lunar holiday, our next-door neighbors had been taken in a raid, and although they had never been loud, it turned out that they had made more noise than I had thought, because our apartment was deeply quiet without them next to us. The day before, I had checked the envelope that contained my husband’s notes, and had found a new one, written in the same hand, on another scrap of paper. “I’ll wait for you,” it said, and that was it.
I wished, as I often did, that Grandfather were alive, or that I at least had a recent picture of him, something I could look at and talk to. But I didn’t, and I never would, and thinking about that made me so upset that I got up and began pacing, and suddenly the apartment seemed so small that I was unable to breathe, and I took my keys and ran downstairs and out onto the street.
Outside, the Square was as busy as always, as if it wasn’t actually Honor Day, and I joined the group of people who walked around and around it, feeling myself becoming calmer as I did. I felt less alone being with them, even though the reason we were all together was because we were all alone.
I used to come to the Square with Grandfather when he was alive. Back then, there had been a cluster of storytellers who would congregate in the northeastern corner of the Square, which had been Grandfather’s favorite place to come read outdoors when he had been younger. He once told me a story about how he had been sitting on one of the wooden benches that had then snaked all along the Square, and had been eating a pig-and-egg sandwich when a squirrel leapt on his shoulder and grabbed the sandwich out of his hands and ran away with it.