Naked Earth (4 page)

“Conditions are never simple anywhere.—Why, have you heard anything or noticed anything?” Chang seemed interested. Liu heard the
kao-liang
stalks rustle as the other man groped around his pallet for cigarettes. A match rasped and Liu watched Chang light his cigarette. Chang held the match up. “You smoke?”

Coming over to get a cigarette Liu sat down beside Chang and told him about the villagers gathered around the truck, what they said about the Land Reform.

Chang laughed when he heard that at the Seven Mile Fort, the
kan-pu
had availed themselves of the landlord’s padded blankets before he was even struggled against. “Some of the
kan-pu
have gone corrupt—there’s no doubt of that. All they’re after is luxury, enjoyment of life. But we can’t carry out this work all by ourselves. Got to rely on the
kan-pu
. We must use this work to educate the
kan-pu
.”

His voice was firm and yet light-hearted. It did Liu good to listen to him in the dark.

“And the farmers. Ai!” Chang sighed, half laughing. “They’ve always been backward. You can’t imagine how foolish they are at heart. They don’t know good from bad. Often take the enemy of the people for a good man. All they ever see is the bit of material advantage right in front of them. Short sighted. They swing with the wind and it makes them unreliable. Full of Change-of-Weatherism, thinking that no government can last, everything passes away like a spell of good or bad weather. So they’re afraid to be active, afraid even to take things given to them free, in case the old government will come back and take revenge on them. They’re such cowards, when a leaf falls they’re scared it’ll crack their heads open.”

Liu was very much surprised at his low opinion of the farmers. “But if they’re like this, how are we going to work out this Land Reform? We can’t settle things arbitrarily. We’re supposed to Follow the Route of the Masses.”

“Follow the Route of the Masses means relying on them and stimulating them, helping them, starting Thought Mobilization. That’s our real job, to lead.”

Liu smoked silently. “Yes,” he finally said, and after a while he went back to his pallet and lay down, watching the red tip of his cigarette. The moonlight had crept close to his head. He reached out to it and looked at the dim, ancient milk-white coin in the flat of his palm. He closed his fist gently and then opened it again to look at what he had in his hand. He thought of Su Nan sleeping in the next room, perhaps with a jade coin of moonlight balanced on her forehead. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Chang spat and lay down, squeezing out his cigarette on the stone floor. “Now be careful you don’t set the
kao-liang
stalks on fire,” he said smiling.

EARLY
in the morning when the cicadas just started to sing, they sounded young, high-pitched and frail. Egg-yellow sunlight slanted down the yellow mud walls that lined the straight narrow lane. Heaps of human excrement dotted the ground near the walls. A group of uniformed men trudged down the lane—Land Reform Workers with knapsacks on their backs, still half asleep, with the local Party man, Go Forward Pao, leading the way. The dust under foot was dead silent, wet with dew.

They passed a small folding-door, its black paint whitened with age, that opened out of the smooth dirt wall. Pao beat on the door with the flat of his palm, shouting “T’ang Yü-hai” twice. Without waiting for an answer he pushed the door open and walked in. The others trailed in behind him into a square courtyard with a trellis climbed over by cucumber plants.

“Ai! T’ang! T’ang Yü-hai!” Pao shouted.

A worn-looking woman emerged from the house and stood smiling embarrassedly on the low stoop of beaten earth. She rolled down her sleeves and kept pulling at them and smoothing them.

“
T’a tieh
has gone down to the field, Comrade Pao,” she said, referring to her husband loosely as “his dad.”

Pao pointed out Liu Ch’üan to her. “This is Comrade Liu. He’ll stay with you as your guest. Remember that these comrades are here to help us. The least we can do is to look after them well.”

“That’s right. That’s as it should be,” the woman said smiling. “We know. The Farmers’ Association sent word last night.”

“Go in and look around, Comrade Liu. No need to stand on ceremony. You’re among your own people.” Pao hurried off with his other charges.

“Come in and sit down, comrade,” the woman said a bit uncertainly, adding “Have you eaten?” which was the usual phrase of greeting, any time of day.

“Not yet.”

“Yo!” She gave a small cry, expressing concern. “Then I’ll go and light the fire. Shall I steam some
mo
for you?”

“Don’t bother to steam them. I’ll just have them cold.”

“Come in and sit down,” she kept saying. As she led the way into the house she lifted her chin and yelled into space, “Erh Niu! Fetch some steamed bread—Better warm them, maybe?” she said to him.

“No, really. Don’t trouble.”

He followed her into a room almost entirely taken up by the
k’ang
, the bed of beaten earth with a stove built in underneath to keep it warm in winter. One or two empty baskets and earthen jars stood amidst a bedraggled heap of straw in the farthest corner of the vast bare
k’ang
. But the family seemed to be faring better than average. The uneven wall surface had been halfheartedly whitewashed. But Liu could see that the roof leaked; broad tearstains of dismal yellow ran all the way down the big white patches. The woman made Liu sit on the
k’ang
while she stood leaning against the doorway.

“How many children have you got?” Liu tried to make her talk. He must learn to get close to the Masses.

“Ai,” she sighed. “We had two boys but we’ve lost them early. There’s only a girl now. The older boy lived to eleven,” she said, wiping her eyes.

He asked her other questions about their family.

“The Tangs are not from this village, not in the beginning,” she said. Though she had been married for almost twenty years she still referred to her husband’s family as “the Tangs,” with a kind of maidenly reserve. “When Erh Niu’s father was in his teens he came here with his parents. They’d been refugees in a famine. They had a hard time getting on their feet. Now at least they have their own land to till.” With his prompting she prattled on some more about the old days but he noticed that she did not say much about present conditions.

A girl about sixteen or seventeen came in, wearing a faded purple blouse and pants and a black apron. Holding up the corners of her apron she walked up to the table and flung it up. A number of dark cup-loaves rolled clattering over the table. They sounded as hard as iron.

“Nothing nice to eat, comrade,” the mother said, pulling out a stool for Liu from under the table. “Really shameful. And the bread not even steamed.” Then she fussed, “Erh Niu, sweep the
k’ang
—look how messy it is.”

Erh Niu climbed on to the
k’ang
and swept it with a little broom made of
kao-liang
stalks bunched together. She moved about on her knees, sweeping with long dry rustles. Her pigtail had fallen forward, dragging along the hard smooth earth. She would snatch at it and toss it back over her shoulder. But in a moment it would slip over her shoulder again and sweep the
k’ang
ahead of the broom. Patiently she kept thrusting it back.

The woman had been looking at the girl’s slender back and her plump naked golden feet showing above low-cut blue cloth shoes. “Erh Niu,” she suddenly said, “go and get some salted turnips for the comrade. I’ll sweep the
k’ang
.”

The mother kept glancing back over her shoulder while she was kneeling and sweeping and did not relax until the girl had come back, put down the bowl of salted turnips and was finally gone.

Then she turned her worried eyes to Liu, watching him eat. “Can you get used to this kind of food?” she said smiling. “I heard you’re all students that came down this time.”

Liu smiled. “What if we’re students? Does that mean we can’t stand hardships?”

She also smiled. “I’ll get you something hot for lunch,” she said.

“Don’t trouble about lunch, Aunt T’ang. I’ll be going out in a minute.”

“I heard there’s going to be a meeting today. Are we in it?” She squinted at him with knitted brows.

“Are you members of the Farmers’ Association? Or the Women’s Association?”

“We weren’t in the Farmers’ Association because they said we’re Middling Farmers. But this spring there’s been all this talk of
chiu p’ien
, Correcting Deviation, and they tell us that Middling Farmers are also members.” She turned and shouted toward the door, “Erh Niu! Go and find your dad. Tell him to go to the meeting. You hear me, Niu? And you go and listen at the women’s meeting, see what they say. You hear?”

The bread tasted like it was full of sand. It crunched under Liu’s teeth and was hard to swallow. He asked for some water. The woman went to boil water but it wasn’t ready yet by the time Liu finished his breakfast.

“I’m going out now, Aunt T’ang!” he shouted on his way out. He passed Erh Niu hoeing the cucumber patch under the trellis. She wiped at her flushed perspiring face with the back of her hand but did not look up.

He was going back to the school. They were all supposed to meet there. But he was not sure he knew the way. He turned back at the gate after a moment’s hesitation. Seeing that the girl was so shy, he pulled a long face before he addressed her. “To get to the school, do I go straight towards the east?”

“Towards the east, bu
t..
.” She gestured inanely with her hoe, then she leaned on it, thinking. “Walk eastward, and turn when you come to that date tree. Then you walk on until you see that
lü
(green) bean patch. You go through that door in the village wall and there you are.” She came up to the gate and pointed as she talked. The wind had split her bangs, pushing them to the sides of her forehead, emphasizing the oval of her face. Her profile was classic, with straight long eyelashes shading the liquid black glow of her eyes.

“Erh Niu! Aren’t you gone yet?” Her mother called out from within when she heard her voice. “I told you to go and call your dad to the meeting.”

“What’s the hurry? They haven’t sounded the gong yet,” Erh Niu answered. Still, she leaned her hoe against the wall, took off her apron and dusted her clothes.

Liu was going to ask for more details about the landmarks but he thought better of it. Anyhow, he was sure to come across other students or villagers on the way. So he just thanked the girl and walked off. He wondered if Aunt T’ang always got so jittery whenever a comrade came near her daughter.

The village seemed deserted in the quiet of the forenoon. The cicadas’ loud eternal singing had become a ringing silence in his ears. The exact sameness of the dirt walls made it difficult to remember the way the little lanes went. He was pausing at a corner studying a tree leaning out of the wall when a voice spoke behind him.

“That’s not a date tree.”

He turned round, startled. It was Erh Niu. “Lucky that you’re going in the same direction,” he said smiling. “Otherwise I might really get lost.”

Erh Niu smiled and gave a small pull to the skirt of her blouse, straightening it, and as if checking it, turned away to look at her pale shadow on the sunlit mud wall.

The ground was extremely uneven, sloping upwards on both sides, and in the middle of the lane where it was lowest there was only room for one. So Liu continued to walk on a step ahead of her. If he turned to speak to her he wouldn’t be able to see where he was going. And besides, there really wasn’t anything to say. For a long while the only sound was the scuffing of loose earth under their feet.

“Have you joined the
hsüeh tzu pan
, the learn-to-read class?” He finally thought of something appropriate to say.

“Yes.”

“You must have learned quite a lot of characters, then.”

“Don’t know any.”

“No! You’re being modest, aren’t you?”

“Next turn is to the north.” Though she did not answer his question, there was laughter in her voice. She must be keeping it back with difficulty.

Vegetation flashed green through a rectangular opening in the high pale mud wall around the village.

“That’s a
lü
bean patch,” she pointed out.

“Oh. Those are
lü
beans,” he said.

“I knew you wouldn’t know,” she said with a half suppressed giggle. He had to laugh too.

Coming out of the doorway they stood under a big tree on a little hump by the wayside. The first thing he saw was the temple—a glimmer of red wall among the green trees on the rise of ground across the road. All around stretched the dark crimson swaying sea of ripening
kao-liang
and the bright green squares of wheat with chalky little ochre-yellow paths in between zig-zagging up to the horizon.

“Is your land dry land or watery land?” Liu asked. They called rice paddies “watery land” in this part of the country.

“That’s our land over there,” she pointed.

“Ai-yah, then we’ve passed it long ago,” he exclaimed.

“And this here is the school.” She pointed to the temple.

If he still couldn’t find the school at this point he must be an utter idiot, he thought. He thanked her and added, “I’m really sorry to make you go out of your way and come this far.”

“We’re used to walking,” she said carelessly, her eyes already straying to the busy scene across the road. Many students were climbing up the temple steps, uniformed boys and girls waving to one another and shouting messages. She seemed much interested in the goings-on.

Liu walked down the hump alone. He looked back from the road. She was still standing up there, pulling a tree branch down to her with one hand and swinging it idly. The sun was on her, turning her sun-bleached hair into the same shade of golden brown as her face and arms so that she was all one color like a figurine of polished wood. But the instant he turned to look, she swung round and disappeared through the doorway. The tree branch had been released so abruptly that it bounced up and down for a long time, green and leafy against the blue sky.