Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (9 page)

What a bewildering finish to a delightful evening
, she thought, and realized that she felt thoroughly jarred by this.
I don’t understand it
, she reflected,
and I don’t like it, It’s almost as if
— But she did not allow herself to complete that thought, and hastily drew out her pajamas.

“M
ay we see the sketches you did last evening in the park?” Mrs. Pollifax asked Malcolm at breakfast.

He said ruefully, “I ended up giving them all away to my audience. We certainly attract crowds, don’t we?”

He smiled across the table at Iris, who flushed as usual but managed one of her radiant smiles in return.

“Quite a schedule today,” commented Joe Forbes, spearing a peanut between his chopsticks.

“Yes indeed,” she said. Miss Bai had pinned to the dining room wall a calendar of events for their stay in Xian, presented in flawless calligraphy, but to Mrs. Pollifax the most important news was that after trips to the Bell Tower and to the Wild Goose Pagoda, they were going to visit the Drum Tower.

For the Drum Tower Mrs. Pollifax still had no plans. How very easy and natural the assignment had seemed to her when she was sitting in Carstairs’ office in Langley Field, Virginia, and how very different it looked now that she was in Xian! She had absolutely no idea what obstacles were going to greet her, or even whether she would be able to find Guo Musu’s barbershop. She dared not ask about a barbershop near the Drum Tower or she would be shown it—if it existed—in the company of Mr. Li or Miss Bai. She had finally accepted the fact that she could assemble no strategy whatever in advance, which was not the happiest way to approach such an important moment, or the Drum Tower either, or Guo Musu if he could be found, but Mrs. Pollifax had a great deal of faith: something would occur to her. A miracle would take place.

Yes, definitely a miracle, she told herself firmly.

In the meantime they were going to visit Ban Po Village this morning, which would please Iris, and a department store, which would please Jenny’s desire for Mao cap and jacket, and Mrs. Pollifax tried to pretend that it pleased her too, that this was a perfectly normal day with the afternoon of no particular significance, and that her suitcase had not been searched the night before.

At Ban Po Village they were ushered into a briefing room and seated at a long table with a tea cup placed squarely in front of each chair, and while they sipped hot tea the resident guide delivered facts to them, translated into English by Miss Bai … the site discovered accidentally in 1953 … the foundations of forty-five houses with remarkably preserved pottery and tools … in existence from 6080
B
.
C
. to 5600
B
.
C
. … evidence of its being a matriarchal society …

Released from the tyranny of the briefing, Mrs. Pollifax considered those facts. She decided that facts could not possibly describe the drama of workmen starting to build a
factory here and discovering instead the remains of an eight-thousand-year-old village. Strolling along the walk-ways of the building that sheltered the excavation, she tried to come to grips with eight thousand years of time and failed. Eight thousand was only a number, there was simply no way to cope with such aeons, but what did come to her—like a lingering fragrance across the years—was the intelligence at work here: the intricately worked out trenches between the houses, the playful designs etched into pottery, the burial of dead children in huge egg-shaped pottery urns, as if to return them, she thought, to the embryo from which they’d entered life. It gave her a pleasant feeling of pride in the human race. She wondered what archaeologists in the year
A
.
D
. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or only vestiges of folly and violence?

On the drive back to Xian she began to feel oppressively hungry. Miss Bai was explaining to Peter and Jenny the government’s current Five Stresses—civilization, morality, order, cleanliness, and manners, and the Four Beautifications—of thought, language, heart, and environment—and Mrs. Pollifax was ashamed of herself for yawning. “Why do I get hungry so early?” she complained to Joe Forbes, sitting next to her.

“Peanuts for breakfast?” he quipped amiably.

“But I also had a hard-boiled egg,” she protested.

Malcolm called across the aisle, “I’d say it’s the chopsticks. You may
think
you eat a lot—”

Iris turned around in the seat ahead and said, “But she’s the most expert of us all, haven’t you noticed?” She beamed at Mrs. Pollifax. “Wasn’t Ban Po Village tremendous? I hope I didn’t monopolize the guide, but honestly—eight thousand years! I mean the Qin Shi Huang Tombs we see tomorrow are only 210
B
.
C
.”

“Practically contemporary,” put in Malcolm mischievously. “Possibly it’s culture that’s giving us an appetite?”

But Mrs. Pollifax’s eyes were on George Westrum who was seated next to Iris, and who had turned now to give Iris a glance that startled Mrs. Pollifax. She thought:
George is on his way to adoring this woman
 … It was a peculiar word to choose but it was the word that had slid into her head:
adoration
, she mused.
Devotion. Worship
.

The alliances that were beginning to form had already begun to interest her. The infants, for instance—as Malcolm continued to call Peter and Jenny—had at once formed a twosome. Iris talked to everyone, but Mrs. Pollifax noticed how often George Westrum managed to sit next to her, his face inscrutable, his eyes watching every play of expression across her vivid face. When Malcolm joined them George’s eyes shifted to Malcolm’s face, again without expression. Iris appeared to regard Malcolm with some caution and blushed a great deal, but Mrs. Pollifax wasn’t sure whether it was his charm or his book writing that dazzled her.

As for Joe Forbes, Mrs. Pollifax admitted that she’d not yet fathomed him at all. He was always with them—smiling and amiable—and often contributing a brief comment or wisecrack, but he was oddly
not
there somehow. She wondered if anyone else had noticed this. Not consciously, she decided, but his personality had so little impact that once or twice she’d caught someone adding, “Oh yes, and Joe too.”

She wondered if this meant that he was the agent who would eventually approach her after her attempt this afternoon at the Drum Tower. Her knowledge of professional agents was limited and theatrical, but she had heard that certain full-time agents took great pains to rub out their personalities and achieve anonymity; perhaps this became habitual, and the loss of personality irreversible.
Except, of
course, for John Sebastian Farrell
, she thought with a smile,
who only heaped new layers of personality on his own to gloriously and cheekily distract
.

She was still smiling, still thinking of Farrell, when they drew up to the department store in Xian.

“A
real
department store?” asked Jenny skeptically.

Mr. Li assured her that yes this was a real one, where the Chinese people shopped. “But they will also take your tourist script here, and you have forty minutes to look.”

“Forty minutes!” wailed Jenny. “To find a Mao cap and jacket? Peter wants to buy them, too. Oh yes, and Joe,” she added.

“Miss Bai—?”

Miss Bai nodded. “I’ll go with them.”

“Anyone else?”

No one else had any pressing needs. They entered the store together to immediately veer off in different directions. The first floor was high-ceilinged and large and struck Mrs. Pollifax as curiously empty, which was puzzling to her because throngs of people lined the counters. She realized she was associating it with American department stores, which were all color, movement, and glamorous displays, and at once felt penitent. Turning right she began a tour of the broad and dusty aisles, hungering for color to relieve the dull greens and grays and blues, and was suddenly brought to a standstill by a wall that blazed with color.

“Books,” she whispered in delight: books placed side by side against the wall so that their jackets bloomed like flowers. She moved toward them, and the people crowding around the counter made room for her.
“Xiexie,”
she said quietly, taking her place.

But she was a foreigner, after all, and the clerk hurried to her, smiling. Mrs. Pollifax thought,
I’ll buy one, I’ll buy a book as my souvenir here
. She pointed to a paper-back
with a jacket design that stood out from the others because it did not have an illustration of a soldier, or a girl and a boy. “That one,” she said, drawn by its black and white lines splashed with abstract yellows and scarlets.

The girl’s hands hovered, then dropped. She picked out a cream-colored book next to Mrs. Pollifax’s choice and placed it in her hands.

“No,” said Mrs. Pollifax politely. “No, not this one,” She shook her head and then glanced down at the book and opened it to see what it was. She found maps inside: it was a purse-sized atlas of China, the cities and towns marked in Chinese with not a single English word to be seen, and therefore incomprehensible and useless to her. On the other hand, she mused, it could make a lovely souvenir for her grandson, who would be pleased and amused by it. “I’ll take it,” she said, nodding, “but I’d also like—” and she pointed again to the charming cover that had originally caught her eye. Several more books were picked up and put down before the one she wanted was achieved. It turned out to be a recipe book, also in Chinese, but with lavish color photos at the back.

“I’ll take both,” she said, holding up two fingers and smiling. Reaching for her purse the crowd drew closer while she and the salesgirl sorted through her Chinese currency for the
yuan
that would purchase one recipe book and one book of maps.

And then—suddenly jarred—she thought,
“Maps?”

Maps, she repeated, the word tugging at her mind, and she picked up the atlas and looked again at its competently waterproof cream jacket. This time she opened it more thoughtfully. On page one she found a map of the entire country, with each province in a different color. She could recognize the Xinjiang Autonomous Region because of its size—enormous—and its location in the northwest corner.
After studying the shape of it she turned the pages until she found the identical shape on page thirty-eight.

Which means
, she thought in amazement,
that I’m actually staring at a map of Xinjiang Province with all its roads laid out in front of me and marked, and all its towns and villages identified, even if their names are written in Chinese, which I can’t read
.

But Guo Musu—if she found him—could read them.

And standing there in the middle of China, in a department store in Shaanxi Province surrounded by eavesdroppers and interested spectators, Mrs. Pollifax began to laugh. Her laugh began as a chuckle that traveled up from her toes and emerged as a luxurious, Cheshire-cat smile that lighted up her face.

Her miracle had just happened.

“I’ll buy two of these,” she told the clerk, holding up the atlas, and reached into her purse for another
yuan
.

To the others, back in the bus, she showed only her recipe book. Peter, Jenny, and Joe Forbes were happily wearing their new Mao caps and jackets (“show and tell time,” laughed Jenny); Iris had bought a bright enameled mug, Malcolm an ink stick, and George a handkerchief with Xian printed on it.

“A taste of the consumer life,” commented Malcolm dryly, “to keep us from suffering withdrawal pangs.”

They lunched. They visited a cloisonné factory where they had a long tea-and-briefing, due mainly to Iris asking far too many questions about workers’ hours and wages; they were led through dark and dusty halls to watch cloisonné jewelry intricately crafted, and then to a Friendship Store for purchases. They visited the Bell Tower, and the Wild Goose Pagoda, except that by midafternoon it was so hot that only Jenny and Peter climbed the eight stories to its peak.

And then in late afternoon they came to the Drum Tower, and Mrs. Pollifax’s moment of truth had arrived.