The Season of the Stranger (37 page)

“I will not go from you,” he said. His hands tightened on her face. They stood in silence, trying to say what could not be said, until she pulled him toward her and laid her temple against his lips.

The crowd in the dining hall had grown. It looked the way it did at mealtime. When they walked in a man asked Cheng where they had been and Cheng said, “At the wall,” and the man asked something else and Cheng said, “No.” They worked their way through to the radio table.

“Has anything happened?” Girard asked.

“Not yet,” the telephone man said. “Except that there seems to be hard fighting at the airfield.”

He nodded. Li-ling had found a stool and was sitting beside the radio man, perplexed by the knobs and dials. She looked up at Girard and he smiled, telling her a story with the smile. She blushed and he laughed. The voices were loud and steady. The windows had been closed and the smoke was blue again.

Briefly the voices became sharp and quickly they faded into a hard vigilant tension. Girard turned. The door had swung open. A soldier had walked in.

The soldier looked almost frightened in the sudden silence. He spoke immediately and rapidly and from the sound of his voice he seemed to know that he would get no answer.

“We need men to help with the barbed wire and sandbags.”

No one moved.

“It is important,” he said. “It is not an order. It is a request.”

His eyes moved quickly, searching. He was young and pale. He brought one hand to the level of his chest and then let it drop. He looked helpless and worried. His mouth twisted then. “I wish it had been an order,” he said. He went on sneering and looking at them. No one but Girard was watching him now. They stared at their hands, at their clothes, at other people, at the radio, at the light bulbs. The soldier said, “Ya. Cowards.”

Cigarette smoke blurred upward into the darkness above the suspended lights. He was alone in the room with it. He jerked his head once rapidly from side to side, seeking a motion from someone. None came. “Ya,” he said again. He waited with a bitterly rigid face, and with a quick defeated movement he turned. He walked out the door, leaving it open.

The radio man touched a knob and the hum of electricity flooded back into the room. A man closed the door. Another laughed happily. The man next to him leaned toward him and spoke in a low voice and the laughter stopped. People moved without speaking. A man rose with his teacup to go to the kitchen. The sound of his unhappy steps loosed their voices.

“So they will come,” the telephone man said.

They nodded. “Unless they enter the City by another way before they reach us,” the radio man said.

“They will not,” Cheng said.

“They may,” the radio man said.

“They will be here in two or three hours,” Cheng said.

The radio man shrugged. “You are probably right.” He turned a knob.

Abruptly the sound of mortars died, as though the radio man's turning of the knob had been the signal. He frowned. He twisted the knob. He drummed with his left hand in soft puzzlement on the hard wood of the table. The hand stopped its motion and his head moved slowly upward as his eyes changed. The wrinkles left his forehead and settled in his cheeks. “The Tsungchia-ts'un radio is out,” he smiled. “Not destroyed, but out.” He chuckled. He dropped the earphones on the table and stood on his chair. “Attention,” he called, and when he had it he looked around him once, his eyes flashing, and repeated what he had said, orating it now in the chesty bitter voice of a man in triumph.

There was a quick beat of silence while his words fell away into their minds, and after it a young growing roar of satisfaction, and in the roar shouted and spoken talk, sentences, words: “railway railway … safety … perhaps … airfield soon … coming no … concentration … tomorrow … surrender always surrender never they are not generals … guns but yes administration food no trains planes herelatetoolate tomorrow …” and her hand and all through the words one feeling: reprieve: Perhaps the railway line will be left open, let the railway line be left open, leave open the railway line, it must be left open, bypass, bypass, railway, tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.

And the radio man leaping again from his place at the table, to hold his hands as if in benediction, to shout, “Tsungchia-ts'un has fallen,” and when he could be heard again, “They are driving down the railway line,” and then the roar again, then laughter, the clatter of touching clinking teacups, men on tables, and songs and overturned stools and telephone bells, and her hand, and through it all the words: bypass, railway, tomorrow.

Now it was all over. Suddenly in the snap of a switch and the turn of a dial it was all over.

From the doorway they waved to Cheng. He would call them when they had to be called. Now they wanted sleep. Soon enough it would be tomorrow.

24

The house is trembling, he thought. The house is trembling and there is nothing I can do about it. My arms will not move. “Andrew,” she whispered. “Andrew.” He opened his eyes. He sat up in quick panic. He looked at her and at the bed and at the curtained window, seeing only the dim shapes, and the fear washed away from him. “Someone is calling you,” she said. He brought his watch close to his face. It was four-thirty. “Answer him,” she said.

He called into the living room: “What is it?”

“They want you at the gate,” the man said.

Girard held the curtain away from the window and saw that it was still dark. “Wait for me,” he called. “I will dress.” He swung himself out of bed. He was stiff and his head hurt. Without turning on the light he found his clothes and put them on. He dressed slowly. With every movement he felt the sleepy ache of his body. One shoe was under the bed and he had to reach for it. When he was dressed he rubbed his face and pushed his hair back with his fingers. He took a comb from the bureau and slipped it into his pocket. With it he put some money and then feeling that he had forgotten something he stared around into the darkness until he remembered to take a handkerchief. Comb, handkerchief, money. “I will be out immediately,” he called.

He sat on the bed and leaned over her. He whispered softly: “Are you asleep?”

“No,” she breathed.

He found her shoulder and left his hand on it. “Poor lost Li-ling,” he whispered. “She never gets a chance to sleep.” She brought her arm up and pulled his face down to hers. He rubbed his forehead against her cheek. He could feel the warmth of her against his chest. She turned her head and kissed his eye. He patted her hip. “Sometime soon an entire day in bed,” he said. She stroked the back of his head with her hand, and then she turned his face and softly put her warm mouth against his lips. He squeezed her lightly and stood up. “I will be back soon.”

“Hurry.”

He went into the living room and closed the curtained doorway to the bedroom. The man was standing dimly against the glass of the front door. He was tall and in uniform. “It would be better to hurry,” he said.

“Yes,” Girard said. “I am ready.” He took a package of cigarettes from the bookcase. The man opened the door and Girard followed him outside.

As they crossed the courtyard Wen-li's door opened and Wen-li looked out. “I will be back soon,” Girard said to him. “They want me at the gate.” Wen-li nodded and stood there watching him leave the court. The soldier was already at the road.

When Girard reached him, the soldier pointed. “I left the automobile down the road. I did not want to wake anyone unnecessarily.”

“It was polite of you,” Girard said. “But an automobile seems luxurious.”

The soldier chuckled briefly. “We will not have the use of them for too long. It is better to exhaust the fuel while we can.”

At the automobile the soldier held the door for him. When Girard was in the soldier closed the door quietly and walked around to the driving side. He got in and closed his own door just as quietly. He started the motor and drove without lights until they had passed the library. Then he felt along the dashboard and turned a knob. The road and dashboard lights went on. In the dashboard light Girard could see that the soldier was a captain and that he was young and stronglooking. Girard opened the package of cigarettes and offered him one. The captain shook his head. When Girard had lit his own he asked, “What has happened since one-thirty?”

“The western airfield has fallen,” the captain said, “although the airfield in the City remains in use.” Off to the left now Girard could hear distant slow rifle fire. “And the university is almost surrounded. There is one road left open to the City. It is like a triangle with its base at the City and its point at the university.”

“I am surprised that you remain here,” Girard said. “Have you orders to hold out to the end?”

“No,” the captain said. “We will leave soon. But there may be negotiations at the gate. They want you for that. They think that the presence of a foreigner will make it look more like a real truce.”

“I am flattered,” Girard said. The captain turned to him and smiled and then looked back at the road. Girard saw something like a sabre scar on his far cheek. He thought that the captain was very calm for a man in this kind of trouble. There had been no bitterness in the captain's voice.

“I must report to the command post at the south gate,” the captain said. “We will go from there to the main gate.”

“All right,” Girard said.

He was fully awake now and remembering last night. His headache was disappearing and his body felt looser. They had all been excited last night. He had been excited too. Now another hour and the sun would be up and it would be all over and he was no longer excited. He was neither tense nor happy. He was not the way he had exepcted to be. But it was an important day.

He thought
it took a long time to get to today. Probably take a longer time to get past it. But it's a step and all you can ever take is a step. Like walking in a fog
.

The houses and trees loomed quickly into the headlight and faded strangely, falling away to the side quietly and darkly. He watched them.

The fog clears for a moment and it looks like the right direction so you take the step, always trying to see a little further. You never reach the end
,
though. All you can do is go on looking for the clear moments and taking the small steps. If you could see beyond the fog
.

Watching the houses and trees he felt some of the excitement coming back into him, as at the edge of a cliff or the entrance to a tunnel.

Someday I will. Maybe I can now. But if I can't now, someday I will; see beyond it, know tomorrow today. It takes a while. You have to keep looking and learning and taking steps. Someday, though. You just have to stay with it, never leave it, never forget it
.

The automobile moved swiftly along the road. The first trace of dawn was in the east. The dust of the road was stirring in a light spring breeze.

25

Shortly after six o'clock the armies marched in. The sun was on their left and glinted from cartridge belts and rifle barrels. The uniforms were unimpressive patchworks, the jacket and trousers padded heavily, bulky, more bulky when the cartridge belts had been slung sometimes three and four at a time over the padded shoulders, the caps dusty and streaked and wet, occasionally a pair of boots, more often cloth shoes, rarely a man with no shoes at all, but the left shoes hit the earth together and the right shoes hit the earth together and the dust rose in thin even puffs all along the line. The slung rifles were grimed, the stocks cracked, often a bolt handle or the side of a barrel catching the slant sunlight.

What the watchers watched was the faces. Faces like their own, but some of them bearded now, muddy, the eyes bleared, the hair hanging clotted with dirt. Faces so weary that the first watchers, seeing them enter, thought almost together
it is impossible that they walk
, but when they had entered further, the soldiers, and seen that it was theirs, that no one was waiting, that scouts were not necessary, when they had seen that, some of the weariness left them; and when they passed the last of the watchers near the main gate some of the soldiers were smiling.

They marched, some of them still in step, others not caring now that the gate was behind them. They marched to the square of buildings, past the administrative offices where old men with filmy beards stared down in fascination, past the low outlandish class buildings, past the sparking remains of a bonfire, past the auditorium (whose porch was lined with students of both sexes; and that was when the cheering began, when the female students saw it, saw the faces and the dirty rifles and sometimes the bare feet and more often now the smiles), and out onto the soccer field, where they stopped. The officers stepped forward (and now the watchers felt the real surprise: that one with the dirty bandage and that one with no shoes and that one with the broken rifle stock and the young, unbelievably young one with the torn boots and the deeply carved scratches on the shining stock of his rifle, he too, these were the officers; later they found out that the young one was twenty and not fifteen as they had believed, but they were to find too that he had been killing men for eight years, and that was why he was an officer, he could do that better than the others could) and gave commands. The men straightened and one of the officers spoke; and when he was through speaking he gave them another command. They relaxed then, completely, some leaning on their rifles, some dropping as though only now giving in to wounds, some sitting slowly and searching for cigarettes. Then the watchers would not be restrained and came running; the teams came with tea and cigarettes, too excited and too solicitous but it did not matter much that day; most of them were women because the men were embarrassed now, but the men stayed, too, at the fringes of the mass of soldiers, until the soldiers called them over to drink with them. When they were all drinking, spread across the soccer field like a moving many-colored carpet, the noise began, the talking and laughing, sometimes the shouting, the stories of battles and riots and how it was over now and later the stories of what tomorrow would be.