Naked Earth (23 page)

He had returned to the bottom step when a bang overhead made him look up again. The window was closed, with sheets of water running over it. The green curtain hung straight and narrow and still, imprisoned behind the glass.

Liu stood in the downpour staring up, then he walked away quickly in great anger.

There never was anybody up there but she. The servant or caretaker of the house did her room for her, but if it had been the servant he would have answered the door.

The next day when Liu came to see her, there was a dark ruddy-faced young man there named Chou, who worked in the Vigilance Section of the Cultural Bureau. Ko Shan introduced them and did most of the talking. The two men were polite but had very little to say to each other. Liu could see that Chou was grimly determined to out-stay him. He finally had to look at his watch. It was earlier than what he imagined it to be, but he had slipped out of the office on a fake errand and really ought to be getting back.

“Have patience,” Ko Shan said. “You know what those people are like—can’t expect them to be punctual, they’re so rushed.”

“Who’s coming? You waiting for somebody?” the young man asked.

She seemed reluctant to talk, but she tilted her chin slightly toward Liu and murmured vacantly, looking at neither of them, “Comrade Liu here wants to see Old Pai on some business, so I asked them to meet here. We’re going out to tea.”

“Which Old Pai?” the young man said, visibly startled. “You mean our Old Pai?”

She smiled at him. “Now don’t go and tell everybody in your office, though it’s nothing special.”

“Old Pai is coming
here
? I thought he’s having a meeting.”

“Did he say that?” she said smiling. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

The young man laughed. He still seemed a little dubious but he soon remembered an appointment and excused himself hastily.

Ko Shan stretched and yawned as soon as he was gone. “Isn’t it sickening? If I didn’t scare him off with his boss, the bench would rot under him before he got up!”

Liu smiled. “You can’t blame him, Maybe he thought you want him to stay. How was a man to know?”

She gave him a withering look. “None of your lip! If you’re so smart, why couldn’t you have thought of some way to get rid of him?—Left everything to me.”

He didn’t answer.

She flopped into his lap and gave a little jerk that set her swinging slightly on his legs. “Now you’ve got to make it up to me.”

“Make up for what—the loss of his company?” Liu joked.

“Now if you’re going to get nasty on top of all this—” She dropped her head wearily on his shoulder. “Here I was waiting for you; I knew you were coming today. And that little grub popped up and just sat and sat and sat. Might have wasted the whole afternoon.” She rubbed her cheek against his. “Were you caught in the rain yesterday?”

“Oh, it was raining all afternoon.”

“I got soaking wet downtown.”

“I thought you were home,” he said. “Saw you close the window.”

She opened her eyes wide. “You’re seeing things! If I was home, why didn’t I let you in?”

“How should I know?”

She hit him on the back with a playful fist. “What do you mean?” she asked incredulously. “You saw
me
here closing the window?”

“What difference does it make,” Liu said listlessly, “whether it’s you or whoever you have with you.”

So he had not seen distinctly who it was and did not even know whether it was a man or a woman. She immediately became aggressively indignant, slid off his knees onto the sofa and tried to drive him off it with wild pushes and pummelling. “All right, you go! Go away! I’m fed up! Picking on me, spying on me all the time! Let me tell you: Yes, there was somebody here yesterday! Old Li. You haven’t met him. He’s married and his wife works in the News Publication Department. He lives in a men’s hostel and she lives in a women’s hostel, so what can they do? He talked me into lending them the room. Just for the afternoon. That’s very common nowadays, with everybody living in hostels.”

“Sure, there’s nothing wrong in that,” Liu said smiling. “Perfectly legal too, since they are married. I don’t see why you had to keep it secret for them.”

“I wasn’t keeping it secret! Only I didn’t feel like telling you because I didn’t like the idea too much myself—sort of turning my place into a cheap hotel. Besides, I didn’t know you were going to be so silly.”

He knew she was lying, though it was a good smooth lie, something he could pretend to accept without losing face.

Then it was bedtime. It always was, with her. Feeling bitter and greedy for compensation, Liu submitted himself to the influence of
Ch’uang Kung, Ch’uang Mu
, Old Father and Mother Bed, the traditional peacemakers in conjugal quarrels. The bed too has its pair of guardian gods like the door and the kitchen stove. And these domesticated gods are usually married couples, like cook-and-butler teams.

Liu looked down on the face he knew so well from this angle, framed on the straw pillow mat with its chalky red-and-green border of woven patterns. He looked searchingly into her curved, smiling eyes. All he saw was his own face reflected in her pupils, mildly distorted, convex and chinless, the nose magnified and elongated, the small eyes anxious and peering. He was furious at the sight of it. If only he could bruise her some way she did not like.

Her eyes had dissolved into bright moonlit water and they were narrowed in her flushed smile as though to keep from running over. She suddenly bent her head forward and drew him down to her, pressing her lips against him between his neck and shoulder and sucking hard.

“What for?” he asked.

Her movement had seemed intent but unemotional, with an animal purposefulness. The blunt softness of puckered lips pulled steadily on him. It ached a little and he began to feel queer, as if she was drawing in some spirit or air or energy from him in a small quiet stream. A thrill ran through him that was almost like fear. “What are you doing?” he said, smiling.

She took her mouth away for a moment to inspect the spot under his shoulder. “
Hu Sha
, sucking the sunstroke out of you.”

“I’m not ill,” he said.

“Just to make a mark on you, so you’ll think of me whenever you see it.” When she had removed her lips the second time there was a small purplish red bruise on his skin, like the
sha
marks that people make by pinching or scraping the flesh with a copper coin.

He looked curiously down on his shoulder. “Won’t it ever come off?”

“Not for two or three weeks.”

He lowered his lips to her shoulder with sudden urgency. He would have her branded as his, if only for two or three weeks, if only so that her other lovers would know that someone had left this on her and feel pained. But he didn’t have the knack of it. All he did was to wet her with saliva. It was as hopeless as trying to dent or scratch the warm smooth surface of river water. A man could only drink his fill and go away.

“Hey, no biting!” she screeched, laughing, pushing his face away.

He gave up. A sadness overwhelmed him as he fingered her hair on the pillow. A curly strand had got caught in the coarse weave of the pillow mat. He disentangled it without thinking, fanning it out with a slight rustle, passing his fingers over it and looking at it. Abstractedly, he listened to the measured crunch-crunch of the bed mat.

“I know it’s too much to ask—to think that you’ll ever think of me when you’re not here.” She gave him one of her lingering, plaintive glances.

He buried his face in her hair, which smelled slightly of oil and cigarette smoke. Then his muffled voice said, “Say something nice to me. For a change.”

“Say what?” she said laughing.

“Something nice.”

“No, you’ll just go plumb crazy. Frankly I’m afraid of you when you go crazy,” she said in her low musical, injured tone.

She was probably afraid that he would be through too soon, he thought. “You’ll get mat burns,” he said smiling.

“A lot you care,” she said in that same hurt tone which could be so fetching.

Then Liu lifted his head, listening to the knocking on the door.

“That must be Comrade Pai,” he said wryly.

“Who?”

“Old Pai—Small Chou’s superior. Didn’t you say he’s coming?”

She broke out laughing. “Yes, it might be him. Talk of the devil.”

The knocking became louder and the door-knob turned once or twice. Then all sounds stopped.

“Remember the first time you were here?” she said softly. But of course she knew he would not be thinking of the first time, but of the day before, when he had come and gone away.

“What’s the matter?” she said laughing, giving him a little slap on his buttocks. “It’s all right, you can’t hear from outside.”

“No, you can’t hear a thing from outside,” he assured her with a slight smile, his head still turned toward the door.

She looked at him sharply.

He thought the man must have left already. But then a tiny white triangle appeared on the floor just under the door, swiftly growing larger and larger. It became a rectangle, a folded sheet of paper pushed in through the slit under the door.

It was suddenly too much for him. He sat up and reached for his clothes.

“What’s the matter? Don’t be crazy!” She also sat up and put her arms around his waist from behind, half laughing. He just went on tying his shoelaces.

She saw from his full, unhurried movements that he was not going after the man, but just leaving. And she got very angry. “All right, go! Nobody’s going to stop you!” she said. “Really—getting crazier and crazier! Seems I can’t even have a letter sent to me without you throwing a fit! It’s getting to be a disease with you, this awful dirty-minded suspicion. I’ve had enough of you, you Fort of Bigotry, retrograding eighteenth-century brain! Now you go—roll out of here! But don’t you ever come back again! From now on we don’t know each other!”

Liu did not say anything. He was still dressing. She suddenly grabbed his bare arm and stubbed out her cigarette on it. He threw her off hard and she fell back across the bed, hitting her head against the wall with a sharp, wooden thud. Something in him whimpered with rage against himself for making it even more ridiculous than it was. He stalked out of the room, not wanting to slam the door. It slammed anyway.

THE NEWSPAPERS
had stepped up the campaign for the “extermination of imperialist elements wearing the cloak of religion.” The latest figure in the limelight was a Father Riberi, a native of Monaco who had just been arrested. Ko Shan was sent to the reference room to search for all available material about him, proof of his Anti-People Crimes. Where exactly was Monaco, she wondered.

As Riberi was not a well-known figure, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The only time Ko Shan could find that his name had appeared in the newspapers was when he had been sent to China as Minister from Monaco. A blurred photo showed him presenting his papers to Chiang Kai-shek. The entire letter of state was quoted. Monaco hoped that the friendship between the two nations would be ever on the increase, expressed admiration for Chiang, the head of the Chinese national government, and felt confident that China was marching toward a brilliant future under his leadership. It was a routine letter, worded in the usual diplomatic phrasing. But since that was all there was, she brought it to the chief’s room. He had told her that it was very urgent, that “the top level is placing great importance on the Riberi case.”

She knocked on the door. “Come in,” Lin I-ch’ün’s voice said.

When she pushed the door open, she found that he had a guest, Shen K’ai-fu, the head of the Hsin Hua News Agency. Shen nodded at her without rising from his seat.

“How are you, Comrade Ko?” he said smiling, looking at her a little curiously. He must have heard that one about her linguist eyes, she thought. His brief appraising glance cut sharply through the pale dough of his good-natured plump face, which closed up again smoothly after it. He was tall and stout, wearing a summer suit and fashionable rimmed glasses. His hair was balding at the back and worn long at the sides, probably from a sense of compensation.

“Have you been to see Chao Yen-hsia, Comrade Ko?” he said lightly, graciously including her in the conversation but not really expecting an answer. They had apparently been discussing the Peking Opera actress who was the latest hit in town. With Chairman Mao a Peking Opera fan, going to the opera was the thing to do among persons of rank.

“You’ve seen her in
Yu T’ang Ch’un
, haven’t you? That’s the limit,” Lin said chortling to Shen. “When she’s singing about her husband being poisoned by his other wife—you know that line: ‘All seven holes bleeding, he went to Hades’—she points quickly to her two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and one mouth, one after the other, quick as lightning. Then when she comes to ‘he went to Hades’ she sticks out her tongue quickly, between notes, as if he’d been strangled and his tongue left hanging out. Never a single line without hamming it up with gestures. When she sings ‘I’ she must point to her nose.”

Shen smiled. “Well, don’t you think this is also one of her good points?” he said mildly, but with an unmistakable gentle firmness in his tone which showed that he was applying some principle of Marx-Leninism to the subject at hand. A short, marked silence followed, the hush that always came with the invocation of the dogma. Shen seemed to be nodding his head inwardly over his line of reasoning, which he did not care to go into just now, perhaps because the occasion did not call for such sententiousness.

Lin said quickly, collecting himself, “Of course those gestures do help to make things clear.” He wondered if Shen was having an affair with the girl. Or had she become the favorite of somebody still higher up? “The gallery likes it,” he said half laughing, though his eyes were watchful. “And the gallery represents the Labor Masses of the city, even if it contains many impure elements, not quite up to the
kung-nung-ping
, worker, farmer, soldier standard. Anyhow, this Chao Yen-hsia is on the right road.”

Shen nodded slightly. “Chao Yen-hsia is not bad,” he said abstractedly. He still seemed to be teetering on the edge of some profound ideological truth which was to remain unvoiced.