Peking Story (17 page)

I enjoyed those evenings. Aunt Chin, her thick, straight-bobbed gray hair swept back and held behind her ears by two tortoiseshell combs, would keep up an amazing flow of chatter. It was a point of pride with her, as with many recluses, to know better than anyone else what was going on in the world. On one such night, she got off on the subject of mah-jongg.

“I'd like to know what business it is of
theirs
,” she said, meaning the new government, “if I want to play mah-jongg. I've played mah-jongg all my life, and no one ever told me before that it was a crime.” Plainly visible under a table in a corner of the room were two mah-jongg sets in blockwood boxes. A few weeks earlier, the Communists had banned the game throughout China as a waste of labor hours. Although Aunt Chin had stopped playing the game, she evidently saw no reason to hide the sets. Besides, none of us knew just what the penalty was for playing mah-jongg. And, for that matter, we weren't absolutely sure that the authorities didn't also disapprove of card playing.

“Imagine those black devils up there,” Aunt Chin went on, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, “sneaking over the rooftops and listening at the eaves.” Aunt Chin might have been talking about the bogeymen in some fairy tale, but she was in fact talking about figures in real life, the Night People — black-clad ex-burglars and acrobats who, so we had all heard, were employed by the police to scale the walls of private houses and detect from the rooftops the giveaway clatter of mah-jongg tiles or the equally telltale odor of opium. (Opium smoking was, of course, also prohibited, unless addiction could be proved, in which case an opium ration was supposed to be issued. Not many people, though, had the courage to try to prove themselves addicts.) It was rumored, further, that the Night People, with the help of the police, had marked off the city in sections and, working over one section each night, could cover the whole of Peking in less than a month.

“Moonlit nights and dogs are the only things that stop them,” Aunt Chin said. “I've never liked dogs,” she added, “but I admit I feel safer these days knowing old Baldy is around somewhere.”

Baldy was our house dog, who, as a result of old age, or possibly a disease, had lost much of his hair. Occasionally, I would hear him give a shaky bark or two in the middle of the night, but he slept most of the time. Still, Aunt Chin was convinced that Baldy was our greatest single protection against the Night People, and she may have been right, because it was true that the Communist authorities hated dogs to the extent of instituting a citywide anti-dog campaign. Dogs were unproductive, they said, and ate an unearned share of the food raised by that paragon of all virtues, the Chinese peasant. I think the Communists really hated dogs because in a very tangible way the dog, loyal to individuals and not to beliefs, represented the last defense of the private citizen against the increasing nosiness of the police, the community, and the state. As a result, the Communists, besides insisting on the licensing of dogs, investigated and taxed the owners. How, the owners were asked, could they afford to feed a dog? Had they no shame about feeding dogs while human beings starved? Where did they get the money to keep a dog? And so on. In the end, the owner usually found it easier (as the authorities had expected he would) to quietly get rid of his dog, while the dogs kept by stubborn owners would often mysteriously disappear or be found poisoned.

The dogs of Peking had thus grown scarce, and precious to those few who still had them, so it was not just a dog that Aunt Chin was talking about but the only protector, halt and old though he was, of our right to smoke opium and play mah-jongg, to beat our children and keep secrets, to stand on our heads in the morning if we wanted to, and sleep in green and purple pajamas at night. Although Aunt Chin claimed not to like dogs, she had begun to feed this one from her own hands, and Baldy had come to love her more than anyone else in the family, looking at her with sad moist eyes, in a way her cats never did. Then, one morning a few days after Aunt Chin's remarks about the Night People, old Baldy was nowhere to be found, and when, at the end of a week, he still had not been located, the family felt that it had lost something of great value, as indeed it had.

On an especially hot evening, a week or so after Baldy's disappearance, Aimee and I joined Aunt Chin and her companion in their sitting room and found a guest — old Mme. Wang, another zealous mah-jongg and card player, who lived near us down the street. I had met her before, and had been impressed by her thin plucked eyebrows arching in almost perfect semicircles over a soft powdered face that sagged gently, like slowly melting wax. That night, her face, powdered even more than usual, was compressed in a look of intense concentration as she and Aunt Chin sat at the card table apparently playing dice. “Up-up,” Mme. Wang was saying as we moved our chairs to the table. “Seven,” called Aunt Chin as the dice rolled to a stop. “Down-up,” said Mme. Wang, who, I now noticed, was reading from a small and worn blue book. “Ten,” Aunt Chin called. “Middle-down,” the other old lady answered, and flipped to the back of the book, saying to herself, “Up-up, down-up, middle-down. Ah, here it is. ‘The hidden is disclosed,' it says. ‘The known concealed.' ”

“Read the counter-reference again,” Aunt Chin said.

Mme. Wang turned a few pages and read, “ ‘Rise and walk; disturb the dew.”'

Aimee explained to me that they were telling a kind of fortune with the book and dice, which Mme. Wang had brought over. First a question would be asked. Then the dice would be rolled several times, and the numbers obtained would lead to two quotations from the book. The way the quotations fitted together was supposed to indicate the answer, in somewhat the same way, it seemed, that the intersecting of latitude and longitude gives location.

Aimee asked what the question had been, and Aunt Chin told us that they had asked where to find old Baldy.

“What is the answer?” I asked.

“I have to think about it,” Aunt Chin said. “It takes time.”

In a short while, Mme. Wang left, after carefully wrapping her book and dice in a square of faded blue silk, and we started a game of bridge. During our second rubber, Aunt Chin, whose partner was her companion, appeared to be thinking hard about the fortune; she actually fluffed a trick and lost a little slam. Looking cross, she leaned back and lit an asthma cigarette. It was her deal but no one mentioned it, and we had sat in silence for some time when she suddenly said, in a burst of weedy-smelling smoke, “The dog may be in the garden.”

“Why?” I asked, relieved that she had spoken at last.

“The fortune says, ‘Disturb the dew.' And the only dew around here is in the garden.”

This sounded to me like an unnecessarily literal interpretation, but I didn't say so, and we continued the game. Aunt Chin and her companion rapidly improved their score, and Aimee and I were far behind when we stopped playing, around eleven o'clock. This was early for us, but it was too hot to sit still any longer, and Aimee and I decided, quite apart from what Aunt Chin had said, to take a stroll in the relative coolness of the garden before going to bed.

We followed a white pebble path, just visible in the faint starlight, to a terrace on the edge of one of the garden's two empty pools, where we sat for a while on a stone slab, still warm from the heat of the day, and watched the fireflies appear and disappear in the long, damp grass. East of the garden towered the huge, upcurling roofs of the outbuildings of the sprawling Yu home. I could clearly see the silhouettes of the ridgepoles, surmounted at either end by great decorative tiles in the shape of fish, their tails turned up against the starlit sky. Aimee and I had not spoken for some time, and I was idly looking at the shadow of the nearest fish when I saw, just as clearly, another shadow. I pressed Aimee's arm, and she, too, looked toward the rooftops. Surreptitiously the shadow of a man had joined that of the fish on the rooftop nearest us. Then we saw the man's shadow glide up and across the ridge and disappear down the far side. We waited, but he did not return.

Indisputably, we had seen one of the Night People, but when, a few minutes later, we told the family, they said there wasn't much that anyone could do about it. Aunt Chin said there was no doubt now that old Baldy was dead, because otherwise the Night People wouldn't have dared to come. I lay in bed that night listening into the silence — aware, for the first time, that in our own house and in all the houses surrounding us no dogs were barking and that above us, over the sleeping mansion, the heavy eaves, soaring like protective wings outward and upward into the night sky, concealed in their ponderous grace the deceit and betrayal that I felt would ultimately defeat us all.

It seemed much later in the night when Aimee woke me, saying, “Something is happening outside. Listen!” I sat up and listened for a few moments, hearing nothing. Then, abruptly, in the blackness of the courtyard outside our bedroom window I saw the swift movement of a light. Slipping out of bed, I made my way, without turning on a lamp, to our sitting room, where the only door to our suite, a partly glass one, opened onto a tiled terrace. I was standing with my face pressed against the glass, trying to see into the darkness outside, when I felt the knob gently turn.

Nothing happened. The door was locked, and I wondered what I should do next — or, rather, what the person outside was going to do next. It suddenly occurred to me that the terrace light was controlled by a switch just inside the door, and I snapped it on, almost as a reflex action, without considering whether or not it was the wise thing to do.

As in a flash photo of a nocturnal animal that has tripped the mechanism of a camera, some ten men were illuminated on the terrace in a weird tableau — frozen for a moment in a parody of stealth, embarrassed and confused by the light. The fact that half of them were carrying carbines made them appear — at that moment, anyway — no less foolish. Our gatekeeper was in the middle of them, looking very unhappy, and I could guess what had happened. Later on, Aimee and I were able to piece out the events of the entire night.

Members of the military police, together with the local police — all of whom represented the People's Soldiers of China — had made a surprise raid on our section of the city after it had first been reconnoitred by the Night People (who, no doubt, had themselves been preceded by the dog exterminators), and were systematically checking all residents, house by house. Admitted by our helpless gateman, the soldiers had, of course, not allowed him to give warning, and, wherever possible, had contrived to enter our bedrooms without waking us beforehand. Several of the members of our household had been roused out of a sound sleep by the cold touch of a carbine muzzle at the back of the neck, and Aunt Chin's companion actually succumbed to hysterics. After awakening the sleepers, the police had demanded to see their registration papers.

At the moment I surprised the soldiers by turning on the terrace light that night, they were obviously trying to get into the sitting room of our suite, and just as I was beginning to feel that perhaps I had not done the most tactful thing, Aimee switched on the overhead light behind me, destroying my advantage, and unfastened the door. One by one, the soldiers entered the room, looking as if they expected a grenade to be tossed at them. Aimee, who had already put on a dress, was busy turning on the floor lamps when I left the room to put something on over my pajamas.

Perhaps it was because a carbine-armed soldier followed me to the bedroom that I chose to wear an enormous blue-brocaded dressing gown Aimee had made for me from a robe that had been worn at the imperial court by one of her ancestors. It expressed my feelings toward the People's Soldiers at that moment. If I could have found the sable hat topped with peacock feathers that originally went with it, I might have put that on, too, but even without it my splendor was impossible to overlook, and when I re-entered the sitting room, the soldiers seemed startled and moved uneasily aside.

One of them, a grim-looking officer, asked for my papers — all of them, those written in English as well as those in Chinese — and I gave them to him. He appeared to read each of them very thoroughly, but, since he read them all at the same speed, it wasn't hard for me to guess that he didn't understand a word of English. Then he asked for my police registration. I pointed to my residence permit, which he held, and said that I had registered with the police in the Central Department of Public Safety in order to get it.

“But this is not a
police
registration,” he said. “Do you mean that you have not registered with the local police?”

I explained that the Central Police Bureau had told me that that was unnecessary.

His face became grimmer. “As far as we can see,” he said, “you have no proper papers explaining your presence in this house.”

“But he is my husband,” Aimee said, “and this is
my
house” — an observation that, of course, represented a hopelessly old-fashioned way of looking at the situation. No one even bothered to answer her.

“Can't you telephone the central police?” I asked. “They know I live here.”

“The Central Police Bureau does not open until seven in the morning,” he said.

Aimee, in a last effort to save the day, said, “My husband doesn't speak Chinese very well. I'll go with him the first thing in the morning to see that he registers with the local police.”

Considering that we had all along been speaking Chinese and that I felt I had spoken rather well, I was a bit put out. Then my interrogator said, “He will have to come with us now,” and I suddenly realized what Aimee had been trying to forestall.

Turning to her, I said very loudly in English, “What did he say?”

“He said…”

“I
know
what he said. What do I do now?” I continued, in English.