Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the same schoolhouse, his twenty-second year
By the time Ren Zhuo was twenty-two, the stair to the upper field had become too much for the master. Some mornings he still tried it, one hand on the wall and the other on the rail, stopping at every turn to find his breath. Then the snow came early, and after that he didn’t try at all. He took the wooden armchair by the window instead, the one with the cushion that had gone flat. He sat in it from the time the stove was lit until the light had left the road.
Ren Zhuo did the teaching now. He had taken over the morning letters three winters before, when the master’s hands began to shake too badly to hold the brush for more than a few strokes. There were nine children this year, all small enough to share a bench two to a side. He had the benches in order before the bell and the stove lit before the children had their coats off. He had learned to hear a fever in the way a child breathed, and to correct a wrong letter gently, so that it wouldn’t be remembered twice.
