Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his seventy-ninth year
The stove had burned down to a red eye behind its iron door, and the room had grown cold around it the way old rooms do, from the boards upward. Ren Zhuo felt it in his shins first. Years ago he had learned that the cold came up through the floor and not down through the roof, and that a blanket over the knees kept it at the distance of a polite visitor. He had the blanket. He had the chair at the window, which the children were not allowed to touch, and below the window he had the bend in the road, white from one bank to the other.
Bai Tong came in from the back room with a wooden shutter under his arm. He was past fifty now. His hair had gone the colour of wet ash at the temples. He moved like a man who had carried a great many benches up a great many steps and had stopped expecting thanks for it. He leaned the shutter against the wall by the door and looked at it, then at the window, then at the old man in the chair.
