Naked Earth (18 page)

As a matter of fact it had been done. He had heard of some high school boys and girls just out of school who had been given a year’s training and sent to the friendly countries as embassy staff members. All of them were under twenty. Perhaps a college graduate like Liu was already considered too old. He had been exposed to all kinds of poisonous influences in the old society and was not to be trusted until he had been thoroughly tested. The shortcuts in officialdom were not for him. Liu had to wrench his mind away from the subject. Always thinking in terms of promotion—he felt it was all the more despicable because it was so futile.

Everyone had finally arrived. Liu roused himself and sat up straight. In these informal meetings where everybody was required to say something, the trick was to speak up as soon as possible and say the expected thing before it got too repetitious. The meeting did not take long, once it got started.

At quarter past eight Liu and Chang were on the crowded tram, going back to their hostel. The rush hour on trams and busses came much later since most office workers did not go home until seven or eight. The harassed-looking, skinny little conductor expertly plowed a path through the passengers, singing out hoarsely, “Move farther in! Still plenty of room inside! Come right in! Come right in! Come sit in the parlor! Why is everybody hanging round the doorway? You think there’s a tiger inside there to eat you up?”

Liu kept his money in the envelope from one of Su Nan’s letters. As he took it out of his pocket he felt, as always, a twinge of tenderness. But tonight she seemed farther away from him than ever. He drew out a limp, discolored JMP bill and put away the creased envelope. There was a good supply of these envelopes so he always changed them when they got torn. She wrote fairly often. The letters themselves were nothing much, though. She was now working in the Chinan branch office of the New Democratic Youth Corps. It was a hard life but she was happy there. She was confident and optimistic about the future of their country and hoped he was well and happy and making fast progress.

The letters made him feel that he did not know her any more. Of course his own letters to her were just as unsatisfactory. The Organization might open their letters at any time. Writing too often and writing obvious love-letters were frowned upon. Still, her over-cautiousness maddened him sometimes. What’s the use, he would think. Their case was hopeless anyway.

He had heard stories of girl
kan-pu
cajoled into marrying old
kan-pu
who had given up much for the Revolution and ought to get their rewards now. Sometimes the girl was engaged already. The Organization would send some Big Old Sister to talk to her, talk and talk and talk, night and day, for days on end. Eventually she had to agree.

Having given the matter considerable thought lately, Liu decided to take such stories with a pinch of salt. The girls had simply decided in the end to marry for position and comfort—or anyhow, relative comfort. Lots of women had been doing that from the dawn of history. There was no reason why they should not go on doing it even if they had, on becoming
kan-pu
, joined the Revolution, technically speaking.

He believed that Su Nan was not that kind of person. In spite of their brief acquaintance he felt he knew a lot about her. But, knowing her, he felt sure that if anybody had been making marital overtures to her or putting pressure on her, she would not give the slightest hint of it in her letters, not wanting to upset him. And the knowledge of that kept him worried all the time.

How many years could she wait for him? What was there to hold her to him, except those few stolen moments that grew less and less real as time went on? It had been as unbelievable as those secret betrothals in “The Gilded Phoenix,” “The Twin Pearl Phoenixes” and “It Rained Flowers.” In these stories the boy and girl always “secretly booked up their whole lives in the back garden.” In the old days she would have considered herself “booked” once he had touched her skin, even if it was just her face and hands. That was no bond at all nowadays.

Liu hung on to the strap, looking at the row of faces reflected in the dark window glass. There was a woman who looked a little like Su Nan. It was easy for him to think so, with all the lights along the street passing through her face and hair, and neon signs like jewelled brooches sailing through her.

The man standing next to Liu had his eyes closed. He held his ticket in his mouth. The pink strip of paper hanging from between his lips looked exactly like a long tongue and was frightening against the grayish yellow of his face with its sunken cheeks. He swayed a little, hanging on to the strap.

THE PAPERS
said half a million people were going to take part in the Labor Day parade. A dealer in sheep waiting for a chance to cross the route of march had apparently given up and had tied his small flock to a tree on the close-packed sidewalk. The wool on the sheep was dark and ragged with the dampness of early summer. Five or six of them nosed around on the tiny square of earth under the plane tree. From the look in their apathetic faces they did not really expect to find anything edible and were grazing just for the lack of anything better to do. They paid no attention whatsoever to the people crowded around them. Now and then one of them would turn and glance indifferently at another sheep.

The procession had stopped to allow a dancing dragon to go through its little routine. The dragon’s body was just a big white cloth tube with scales drawn on it, and the shop assistants who had been designated to manipulate it for the occasion did it clumsily. The cyclindrical white length of cloth was in motion above the head of the crowd, going up and down in even waves to the furious banging of cymbals. Presently it was pulled straight and poised level and motionless in the air. While it rested, another light blue cloth tube had started to ripple up and down a little distance away, half submerged by the crowd.

Liu Ch’üan stood in line, resting on one leg. He looked at the sheep by the wayside. They were probably on their way to the slaughter house. Still, he thought he would like to scratch them under the chin.

Then a little boy among the spectators went and squatted before a sheep and chucked it under the muzzle. Liu felt a sudden tie of kinship with the boy. So he was not the only one who wanted to do that.

Up ahead of the front rank of Liu’s group were the employees of the Shanghai Optical Company. A man and woman leaned on a little cart bearing a huge pair of cardboard spectacles, they had been pushing. The man turned around and said to the man carrying the company banner behind him, “I’m all dragged out, Ch’en. You better come and help Miss Hsu push the cart.”

“What’s the matter?” asked the man named Ch’en.

“My piles!” the man groaned. “And you know I walked through half the city before the parade even started! Left home when it was pitch-dark—trams not out yet. Had to walk all the way to the shop to assemble. And I live so far off!”

“I used to dread parades too,” the woman said. She was scrawny and tall. A small bespectacled face peered out from under her cap. Her Liberation Suit, belted, made long vertical creases like box pleats down her flat chest. Stringy bobbed hair fringed the back of her cap, still a sign of unusual progressive zeal among the women of Shanghai. To cut off the curly ends of permed hair was for them as momentous a gesture as a Buddhist nun shaving her skull at her initiation.

“I used to complain too,” Miss Hsu said. “But it sort of grows on you. It can develop into a habit—parading. Now I don’t mind it at all, walking down the street with everybody looking at you,” she said, her face aglow for a moment.

“You don’t have piles, I guess,” Ch’en said. “I don’t mind the walking so much. It’s the waiting, standing around all the time.” Ch’en appealed to his listeners. “Why do we have to assemble at six when we don’t start out till nine?”

“Next time you remember to bring a little stool,” she said. “Sling it on your back, like some of the people from Wing On’s store did. Such a good idea!” She sighed wearily. “Ai! It’d been perfect if I’d thought of bringing a stool.”

“Well, why don’t you sit down on your cart for a while?” Ch’en said.

“I was afraid all this cardboard would collapse on me,” she giggled. But she lowered herself on to one side of the cart and settled back gingerly against the handbar. “Ai-ya! Better than any sofa!” she exclaimed with half-closed eyes.

The procession started to move again. Liu helped a Communications Officer push a small prisoner’s van with Comrade Ho huddled inside it, masked and dressed as President Truman. Chang Li as Chiang Kai-shek crouched inside another van, bandaged and plaster-crossed to show the People had defeated him. At the sound of a gong they both crashed up against the bars and pranced around, posturing like Tibetan devil dancers, now threatening, now leaping away frightened. Their bodies dwarfed by their enormous hook-nosed, shiny pink masks that reached down to their chests, they were as jerky and unreal as colored paper cutouts appliqued on to the drab, crowded scene.

Peddlers carrying baskets threaded in and out of the column, whispering the names of their wares in a low chant—long fritters, fritter-twists, sesame rice-flour balls, buns, red bean cakes. When they could not filter through the column they marched by its side.

To save money most of the paraders had brought their own food—sandwiches, steamed loaves, hardboiled eggs, thousand-layered flat cakes, Shantung style. It was hours before lunchtime, but the sight and smell of all the peddlers weaving in and out of their ranks reminded people that they were hungry. Soon throughout the crowd paraders were taking paper parcels out of their pockets, unwrapping food, offering samples to each other. Ch’en playfully snatched a sandwich from another clerk who worked for Shanghai Optical. In revenge the man bit off a good third of Ch’en’s bun. There was a lot of laughter and comments on the quality of the food.

“Whatever we Chinese do, it always includes eating a meal together,” Liu thought. “Start out in the morning when it’s still dark and you think it’s worse than a labor detail—all day on your feet. Bring out a steamed bun and it turns out to be quite a picnic after all.”

He hadn’t been feeling very well this morning and had thought briefly about staying in bed. But it was wiser to march in the parade since everybody knew it was much worse to be absent from celebrations like this than to be absent from work. Now, when he started to eat what he had brought, thinking that he must be getting weak from hunger, he knew he was really ill after one mouthful of the cotton wool bread. He supposed he had a fever. The scattered talk around him seemed to jump at him, loud and sudden.

“It’s drizzling,” said the man with piles, looking upward and making a disgusted, phlegmy noise in his throat. “
Ts’ao na
,” he swore. “And I didn’t bring my raincoat.”

“I didn’t either,” Ch’en said. “If you have it on all the time, it’s too hot. This weather can get awfully hot when the sun comes out. And it’s such a bother to carry anything when you’re tired. After ten miles one
catty
gets to be ten.”

“Might have known it was going to rain,” the other man grunted. “Ever had a parade when it didn’t rain?”

Ch’en did not answer. It was a standing joke that it always rained on parade days ever since the Communists came. The Study Unit had already pointed out to them that this was an acute form of Change-of-Weatherism as it obviously implied that Old Heaven was not on the side of the Communists, so they could not possibly last long.

An apprentice carrying a dancing lion on his back walked with bowed head and hunched shoulders, holding the paper lion by its front paws. Its rotund pale green body looked ridiculously long, the way it hung down straight from the boy’s back, its round rump dangling close to the ground. The paper-tasseled tail dragged on the wet, dark brown asphalt. But the boy was tired and he no longer cared.

Everybody was past caring now. Paper flags were carried tilted back, resting on shoulders. Men spat on the ground and sauntered lazily with dragging steps like beggars hired to carry wreaths and mourning banners in a funeral procession. A young boy noticed it too, whispered it to the man beside him and there were snickers as they turned to look at the large, fern-bordered portraits of Stalin and Mao being carried like portraits of the dead.

It rained harder when they reached the crossroad where there was a Comfort Station. At the sight of the company banner the workers in the station started to shout, “Our respects to the comrades of the Shanghai Optical Company! Come on, straighten up, comrades! Comrades of the Shanghai Optical Company, we salute you!”

“Really does something to you, doesn’t it?” Miss Hsu burbled. “A real pick-me-up.”

The drenched paper flags had become pink and green tatters but all the flag poles now stood erect. The people at the Comfort Station, who were shop assistants and shop-girls themselves, dipped enamel mugs into huge earthen jars and handed out cold tea in the rain.

The column proceeded. A woman among the spectators suddenly stepped forward under a big black umbrella. “Hey,” she said, and thrust a raincoat into Ch’en’s hand.

“Yieh!” somebody exclaimed in surprise. “If it isn’t Mrs. Ch’en bringing him his raincoat!”

“Hey, Ch’en! Your missus really takes good care of you, eh? Just dotes on you, it looks like. Been standing here waiting in this rain, scared that you’d get wet.” There was a babel of laughing voices.

“As faithful as Meng Chiang Nu going all the way to the Great Wall to bring her husband winter clothes.”

Ch’en said, blushing, “Cut it out! No point to it, all this leg pulling—an old married couple like us!”

He held his bamboo stick under one arm while he struggled into the raincoat and buttoned it as he walked. The black umbrella had moved away swiftly, disappearing down the street. The column had gone another block and all his colleagues had stopped teasing him. But Ch’en was still protesting, “There’s nothing between us, no feelings at all. Never have anything to say to each other when I get home.”