A Drop of Chinese Blood (18 page)

“Come on, uncle,” I said. “There’s our ride to the airport.”

5

The first person we recognized at the air terminal was Jang. He was leaning against a pillar like rich people in Shanghai do in the slick picture magazines, scanning the departure hall. It was obvious he was looking for me. I stepped into a large tour group that from their attire seemed prepared to leave on a vacation to someplace warm, maneuvered my way behind the pillar, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Little Jang, going on a trip? I didn’t realize you had accumulated enough vacation time already.”

If his legs had been up to it, he would have hit his head on the ceiling as he leaped like a rat that has suddenly discovered a cobra behind him.

“Nice surprise,” he said when he could talk.

“Sure. I’m full of nice surprises. Aren’t you supposed to be at the duty desk? Don’t tell me you’ve left it unmanned again. Or isn’t that where you are supposed to be anymore? Could someone have changed your orders and reassigned you to airport departures? Who would have done that?”

He gulped, recovered, and gave me a nasty stare. “Why would you think that, sir?”

“Let me ask you something. In Shanghai, when your splendid chief of office is about to go on a trip, does a mere duty officer scurry out to the airport to bid him farewell? Or is it a family tradition?”

“You must be mistaken, sir.”

“Careful, little Jang, don’t make me do what I want to do, which is exceedingly ugly and would attract a crowd. Let’s try something else.”

“Such as?” He was getting back a touch of verve.

“Such as, you go back to the office and fire off an immediate cable to whoever sent you here that you didn’t see me. Yes, that would work, it would prevent a lot of needless violence creeping up on us at this very minute.”

Jang’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly. His verve had a short half-life.

“Something the matter?” I asked. “Because if you have a problem, you should speak up. Isn’t that how things work in Shanghai? Free expression by all ranks! Let me ask you a mundane question, just to clarify things. Assuming you live that long, who is going to write your fitness report?”

“You?”

“Very good. Me. And if I write you a bad report, a very bad one—you know what I mean, subtly bad, nothing blatant, but filled with slow poison and rusty nails—do you think anyone else in the whole country will be interested when you put in for transfer? A young pup such as yourself may not know it, but every bureau in the Ministry lives by personnel evaluations. Trust me, if I put my mind to it, even your relatives will blanch when that report appears under their gilded front door. Veteran bureaucrats in the Headquarters review process will seek shelter lest you file an appeal and they have to soil their hands dealing with such an enormous piece of shit, as you will by then be known throughout the system. The tiniest, poorest village in Gansu will not even consider you fit to feed chemically adulterated grain to their half-crazed chickens. Am I clear, or would you like me to go on?”

“As it happens, I didn’t see you,” Jang said coolly. Watching him trot away, I wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got back to the office. The odds were slightly against his loyalty to whoever sent him after me outweighing his desire to get out of Yanji as soon as he could. That was the sort of bet Old Gao would never take.

“He’s a mouse turd.” My uncle appeared from behind the pillar. “Whom does he work for?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Because you don’t know. Are you sure about your number two?”

“Lieutenant Li?” I laughed. “Sometimes, uncle, you have a lurid sense of reality. No, I don’t think my number two is selling me out.” It was ridiculous even to contemplate. Li and I had worked together for years. “He’s solid, I trust him completely. If I can’t rely on Li Bo-ting, then I can’t rely on anyone.”

“Good point. Keep it in mind.”

The loudspeaker called our plane and gate.

“Can you get through the security scan, uncle? I hope you don’t have anything odd in your suitcase. Maybe you should double-check. You may have something in there, nails or something, from your last trip to Harbin.”

“If that nice lady with the white gloves gives me a good pat-down, they can confiscate everything in here for all I care. You should have been around when Mei-lin was going through security. She could have been carrying an atom bomb and they wouldn’t have noticed. The boys were stepping on their tongues.”

“You traveled with her? Someplace nice, I hope, with white sands and warm breezes.”

He smiled to the woman at the security checkpoint as he passed through the metal detector. “No, I’m not taking off my belt,” he said as she patted him down. “Nor am I going to remove the stainless steel rod in my leg.”

When we were finally on the plane and safely airborne, I tapped him on the shoulder. “You never told me you had a stainless steel rod in your leg.”

“I don’t approve of all this probing and rooting around in my luggage.”

“So you don’t have a steel rod in your leg.”

“Why would I?”

“Do you remember what the phony cook said the other day as he left?”

“That he wanted a cup of tea?”

“No, that you were the most annoying person in the world.”

PART II

Chapter One

The airport at Ulan Bator had a rough-and-ready feel that I found instantly appealing. On the taxiway in to the terminal, we passed several biplanes sitting in high grass off the tarmac. My uncle nudged me as he looked over my shoulder. “Tell me we aren’t going up in one of those.”

“I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. It looks like it could be fun.”

This seemed to fill him with gloom, but as soon as we stepped into the terminal building, he brightened noticeably.

“Just like home,” he said, meaning the airport in Pyongyang. “It’s what an airport should be, not so busy that you can’t catch up with yourself when you get there.” He looked around. “I like it.”

Once through the immigration check, I picked up my bag. Then we ambled past a small crowd waiting for arriving passengers and headed out the door. My uncle breathed deeply as soon as he stepped outside.

“The first breath you take in a new place is the most important.”

“I didn’t know you were superstitious. Anything else we should do, sacrifice a bullock or something?”

He gave me a cold smile. “It’s not superstition. It’s ritual. They’re not the same. You have to mark things off in life. Otherwise, every place blurs with every other place. There’s nothing wrong with ritual, nephew. It’s what keeps us sane as a species.”

At least we were off to a good start.

2

As we stood around, searching the parking lot for whoever was supposed to drive us into town, a short man popped out from behind a knot of bushes at the edge of the asphalt and headed straight toward us. He moved like a torpedo propelled by an erratic engine shifting him slightly from side to side. His shoes were mud caked, trousers filthy, beard unkempt. He wore a hat that looked like a smaller version of what everyone wore in American cowboy movies. It looked so greasy that I was sure it would catch fire if it sat too long in the sun. The man stopped a whisker or two away. My uncle took a step back; the man took a step forward.

“Buy some postcards?” A packet of cards appeared from somewhere under a leather coat that no cow would want to claim. “Cheaper than in a hotel. Where you staying? Buy several. My house burned down yesterday.”

“Terrible news,” my uncle said. He seemed to be warming to the man. “Show me the cards.”

“We’re in a hurry, uncle,” I shook my head. “Sorry about your house,” I said to the man. “Tough luck.”

“How about a map?” One appeared from somewhere else under the jacket. “Pretty good, 1:20,000 survey map, genuinely left by a Soviet army officer. Mine fields, everything.”

“How much?” I took the map and started to unfold it.

“You! Leave them alone!” Another man emerged from the terminal and hurried over. He had a testy exchange with the postcard salesman in a language I took to be Mongolian. He turned to us. “I’ve told him over and over not to bother arriving guests. Are you Mr. O?” He looked from me to my uncle and then back again. “I apologize for being late, but the traffic is terrible. You got your bags already? What luck, not a moment to lose. Come, I’ve got to get you into town. You can talk in the car.”

As we rode from the airport, I was amazed to see my uncle still enjoying himself. He smiled broadly as we drove along the bumpy, narrow road, past the smooth, low hills that formed one edge of the basin where the city of Ulan Bator had grown up. He smiled at the city’s skyline in the distance, nothing more than a higgledy-piggledy collection of rooftops that barely rose above the dusty earth. He smiled at the round white tents dotting the landscape. Once we entered the city, he grinned at the clotted traffic, at the girls in their miniskirts, at the broken pavement, at anything and everything we passed.

To my disappointment, the light mood disappeared like duck fat in a furnace once we secured our car and were out of the city onto the empty plain that stretched as far as the eye could see under an enormous and perfectly blue sky.

“There’s something about this landscape,” my uncle said ominously.

“Yes, there is,” I replied.

“It sets my teeth on edge.”

“Unlike you, I can’t find anything wrong with it,” I said, rolling down my window and letting the air rush in. “It’s a good change of scenery from Yanji. Very refreshing in its own way.”

“In its own way,” my uncle said firmly, “it’s lifeless. There are no trees. The place is barren.”

“Some might call it pastoral. Look at all the grass. And the air, when was the last time you could actually use the word ‘pellucid’ in a sentence?”

“It’s barren.” He closed his eyes tightly. “What can grass do but sough in the wind? That’s it! The word I wanted—sough.” He said it in English again. “Why can I never come up with the word I need when I need it?” He opened his eyes and stared mournfully out the window. “Barren.”

I had to admit, the Mongolian landscape, at least in this part of the country, was not particularly well treed. There were rolling hills in the distance off to the north and west. Otherwise, as I will probably mention several more times, there was an abundance of sky; sky and little else. It was the sort of scene that greatly appeals to many people. My uncle wasn’t one of them.

Scenery wasn’t uppermost in my mind, however. In less than an hour, it would be dusk. From then until all traces of sunlight disappeared—probably into a moonless night with my luck—I figured it would take another twenty minutes. The darkness of an unfamiliar place was bearing down on us, and I didn’t know where the hell we were or where we were headed. The map I lifted from the little man at the airport was useless. If we weren’t at camp drinking some form of liquor with this Ding character pretty soon, my uncle would complain ceaselessly until we were. Already he was checking his watch every few minutes.

“Sunset isn’t far off,” he said. “Dusk might put a little color in the picture. A normal person can have too much of this.” He waved his hand across the landscape. “I already do.” From the corner of my eye, I could see he had sunk into thought. After a few minutes, he broke his silence, but only to say, “No wonder.”

I waited for the rest of it, but there was no more. The trip had been long, and my shoulders had a dull ache from trying to keep us on a dirt track that kept disappearing in the fading light. Lack of judgment gets the jump on me at such times. “No wonder what?” I asked.

“I was thinking aloud. My grandfather would say a place without trees is a place that can’t be read. I never understood what he meant. Now I do. Who knows what this place has in mind? Too much sky. Everything is so far apart, nothing has any idea how it relates to anything else. We might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons.”

“Maybe not. There’s a tree right up ahead. Look! You want me to pull over and let you admire it?” We were in a vividly red four-wheel-drive vehicle, a big clumsy thing that my uncle had refused at first to enter.

“Reminds me of a tank,” he had said as the man at the rental agency pointed it out. “Why don’t we get a tracked vehicle with a machine gun on the back? That way we can take care of bandits and terrain at the same time. Do you have something in an olive drab camouflage? This red will stand out as a target a kilometer away.”

I had pulled him aside. “The orders are for us to rent a four-wheel-drive car. It’s probably a good idea in case we get stuck. There aren’t any bandits in this country. It’s perfectly safe. Let’s not worry about the color. Red is fine. I’d be more concerned about the roads. They didn’t look all that good from the air. Did you notice as we were coming in for a landing, most of them aren’t paved? Save your complaints. You’ll need all of them for later.”

Just as I’d been warned, the rental agency man said he couldn’t let us drive by ourselves outside of the city and that he’d find us a driver. I told him my uncle didn’t trust anyone to drive but me, which wasn’t true, but no one in Mongolia could contradict me on the point, and for once, my uncle backed me up by nodding in agreement.

The streets getting out of the city were jammed. For a place in the middle of nowhere, there were lot of people who seemed to think they were needed somewhere else.

“This is ridiculous,” my uncle said, though at that point he still seemed to be enjoying the scene. “These people drive like they are in camel caravans.”

I almost said, “When were you ever in a camel caravan?” Except he might have been, and that would have ignited a story I didn’t want to hear.

3

The tree was about five hundred meters away. It didn’t look very big, but I didn’t see why that made much difference. “You want me to get closer?”

“No, leave the poor thing to its misery. If it has survived this long in solitude it doesn’t want any company, certainly not this flaming red car.”

“That’s fine with me. We’ll keep going, unless you want to stop and stretch your legs.”

“What you mean is that you want to stop and look at that worthless map. Let’s get to Ding’s camp. All we have to do is follow this so-called road; sooner or later it leads somewhere. All roads do.”