The Falling Leaves

Sun Guifang had swept the same stretch of street for twelve years.

Her beat ran from the entrance of the Industrial and Commercial Bank at the east end of the city to the wedding shop with red lanterns at the west, a measured eight hundred and sixty-three meters. The team leader had paced it out with a tape the first year, and the number had become the length of her every day since.

For the first three years she used a broom bound from bamboo twigs; by the end only a bare half-stalk remained. Later the team issued plastic-bristled ones, light, but they scattered in the wind and would not gather into the pan. Still she could not bear to throw the bamboo broom away. It leaned against the stairwell wall like a dry bone.

She left before the light. At half past four the alarm woke her and the city was still black, the streetlamps dragging her shadow out long. She pulled on the orange-red vest, the loudest color in the city and the only one that let her live among the traffic. The year after her husband died she had signed on with the team; the leader looked her over and said, your age is fine, but the contract is temporary, no insurance, whatever happens is on you. She nodded. She was forty-nine.

In twelve years her wage crept from nine hundred to twenty-one hundred, slower than anything else. Yet the list of fines only grew. At first she was fined for visible litter on the assigned stretch; then it was itemized: one fallen leaf counted, one cigarette end counted, even a melon-seed shell wedged in a tile seam counted. The leader carried a little notebook and inspected stretch by stretch, and wherever he marked he drew a red line, and at month's end twenty was docked from her pay. Once Guifang argued, pointing at the bright-scoured tiles: look at this seam, I picked it clean with a chopstick. The leader said, rules are rules; what do you want to argue with a rule for.

She stopped arguing.

The hardest thing was the toilet. On her stretch there were three shops; two thought her dirty, and the third said she could use it only when no customers were in, but when were there no customers. So she held it, from the moment she left home to the moment she finished, eleven hours. One summer she held until she was sick, a burning pain below, and the clinic doctor said it was from holding, keep it up and your kidneys will go. She spent eighty on medicine and saved the money from her mouth - no pickles at breakfast, no egg at lunch.

Her son, Little Qiang, delivered parcels in the provincial city. He came home once a year, stayed two nights at the Spring Festival, and left. At first he still called her mother; after he married, his wife minded that she did that kind of work, and so he stopped. Last year at the Dragon Boat Festival she steamed rice dumplings and sent them by a neighbor; Little Qiang replied with a message: Ma, don't send anything, it's awkward if coworkers see. She held the phone a long while, typed a fine and deleted it, and in the end sent nothing.

The year the city campaigned to be declared civilized, a sign went up on her stretch, red ground, white words: littering strictly forbidden here. Yet once the sign stood, more people littered, as if the red were an invitation. Three days before the inspection team came, the leader gave a standing order: no leaving the stretch, sweep every leaf as it falls, kill every cigarette end on sight. She stood twelve hours, the sun bleaching her vest, her legs swollen until the shoes would not go on. The inspection team came in a car; the window rolled down a crack, someone leaned out, looked, and rolled it up. The car left. Her legs gave and she sat on the curb, looking down at her swollen ankles, and it came to her that the eyes that had leaned out of that window had looked at her no differently than at a dead tree by the road.

That autumn a food-delivery scooter hit her.

The young rider was racing a deadline, took the corner without slowing, and knocked her and her broom down together. She lay on her side, a bruise spreading on her left shin, the broom snapped in two. The rider's first words were not to ask if she was hurt but to shout: why'd you sweep out into the road like that! She wanted to answer, but lying there she felt she had indeed been in his way. The traffic police came and split the fault; the rider paid three hundred. When the team heard, they said, call that a work injury? Temporary, no coverage, your medical bill is your own business. She went to the hospital for a film; nothing broken, they gave her something for the bruise, a hundred and twenty. She folded the receipt into the inside pocket of her vest and did not claim it.

Winter was cruelest. Snow fell through the night and before first light she had to sweep the stretch clear on both sides, leaving the middle for feet. Her hands cracked and bled; she wound an old cloth around them and the cloth turned dark red. Once a girl in a down jacket slipped and cursed as she got up; Guifang did not catch the words, only saw the girl's white snow boots stamped with her blood, one deep print, one shallow, like two seals someone had pressed on the road.

Twelve years on, she was sixty-one. The team issued a new rule: those over sixty must pass a health check, and fail and you are let go. She went; high blood pressure, fluid in the knee. The leader spoke with her: you've done well, but rules. She asked, then what were all these years. He said, temporary, you always were.

She made no scene. She gathered the half-stalk bamboo broom and went back to the basement she rented. The basement window faced a stretch of drainpipe and saw no sun all year. She sat on the bed's edge and folded the vest again and again into a small square.

The next morning she went out again. Not to the team - to the stretch. She had not collected a new vest; she wore the old one, its orange-red faded to a tired brown. She took up the broom again and swept, stroke by stroke, the street that would never come clean.

The wind rose and the poplars by the road began to drop their leaves. One, two, they fell across the ground she had just swept. She straightened, looked at the grey-white sky, and bent again. The leaves fell faster than she could sweep.

She thought, this street - I could sweep it till I die and it would never be clean.

But she went on sweeping.