Naked Earth (12 page)

He was tired out by the long hike in the morning and by the rough ride home. His body ached all over as if he had taken a beating. He felt dazed and numb, holding off events he did not want to think about. He pushed his way out of the crowded courtyard, thinking that he would go back to the school and lie down for a while.

Han T’ing-pang’s house was the only brick house along the lane. He could see T’ang’s house as he turned the corner. He understood that two other families had moved in there but Erh Niu and her mother had been allowed to stay on in the shed. He wondered if Erh Niu was badly hurt from being beaten by the militia the other day. As he passed by the house he saw that the worn black-painted folding doors were wide open and two new mud stoves had risen from the levelled earth of the courtyard. The afternoon sun lay warm and still on the two mud steps that led into the blackness within the house. Nobody was around. Of course, everybody must have gone to see the Distribution of Floating Riches, except Erh Niu and her mother. If he should slip in and see them now, maybe nobody would know.

A yellow hen emerged into view, lifting its feet high to step across the cucumber creepers trailing on the ground. Poking its head suspiciously left and right to make sure that it was alone, it finally mounted the steps and with infinite caution, walked into the house.

He must go in and ask about Erh Niu. For all he knew she might be dead. “You should care,” he told himself. “You’ve just killed her father.” Because he knew the man he killed had been T’ang Yü-hai, though he hadn’t admitted it to himself.

He turned abruptly from the door and quickly walked away, nervous at the thought that he might run into Erh Niu or her mother if they should be coming out or going home just now.

The school office was littered with makeshift beds, just boards set on benches. He lay down on his bed. Nobody was in. They were all helping at the distribution.

The room darkened long before dusk, so that the paper windows seemed to grow steadily brighter. He watched the dirty yellowed paper gradually turn pale. He felt as if he had been ill all day as he lay without moving in the unlit room, with the whole courtyard to himself. Darkness descended on him in downy black flakes.

Then he saw a shadow pass across the whiteness of the paper window. A moment later somebody was standing at the door. Though the person had her back to the light he could tell it was Su Nan. He sat up.

“You’re back,” she said with a small smile.

He stood up. “Do come in. Sit down.”

“I heard them say you’ll be going back to Peking in a day or two. I want to ask you to mail a letter for me.”

He took the sealed envelope from her. It was addressed to a Mrs. Su in Peking. “Is that your home address?” Liu said.

“Yes.”

He went on studying the envelope. “May I write to you?”

“Of course. And come and see us when you have time.”

“I won’t be staying in Peking. Chang and I are going to Shanghai.”

She seemed startled. “You’re going to Shanghai?”

“To do Resist-America Aid-Korea work. I don’t know yet just what we’ll be doing.”

After a moment of silence he stepped across another bed to get to the table. He poured out a cup of tea from the pot in a tea cozy woven of greasy yellow split rattan. “Better have some tea.”

Su Nan stood leaning on a corner of the decrepit table. She pulled out an empty drawer, closed it and rattled it open again, looking into it.

Liu said, “I wanted to tell you as soon as I came back this afternoon.” Then he said, “I’ve wanted to talk to you all this time. There’re so many things that I feel I have to talk about.”

“Me too. I’m so bottled up. The way things are done—I, I just can’t get used to them,” she said bitterly.

She did not see the shadow of a man that had appeared on the window behind her. Liu tugged at her sleeve to stop her from speaking. In his haste his own sleeve tipped over the teacup. He caught hold of the cup but the tea ran all over the table.

The shadow moved slowly past the window, carrying with it a misty yellow fuzz of light. It turned out to be Old Han, the school janitor, bringing a candle on a clay candlestick.

Liu snatched up Su Nan’s letter from the wet table and looked at it in the candlelight. The ink had run, blurring the characters on the envelope.

“That’s all right,” Su Nan said. “Just change the envelope.”

“I’ve got one here.” He found an envelope and a pen for her. “You better take the letter out first and see if it’s wet.”

She tore open the soaked envelope, took the piece of folded paper out and read it. Liu was surprised to notice that the paper was almost blank, with only one or two lines of writing on it, and that a sprawling scribble, obviously written in a great hurry. For a moment he suspected that her purpose in writing this letter was just to let him know her home address.

She wrote on the other envelope and wetted her finger tip in the spilled tea to seal it up. Then she carefully peeled the stamp off the old envelope and stuck it on the carved window frame to dry.

“I wonder where you’ll be working. Maybe not in Peking either,” Liu said. “But if I write to your home, you’ll always get the letter, won’t you?”

“Yes, they’ll forward it to me.” Crumpling the spoiled envelope into a ball she used it to wipe the table. But first she moved his cake of soap and packet of toothpowder to a dry place. “Did you buy these in town today? I forgot to ask you to get me a piece of soap.”

“The fact is, I won’t need any of those things, since I won’t be here. I wish you’d make use of them.”

She took the toothpowder and rolled over the top of the paper packet, crimping it up until the paper became too thick and stiff a wad to be turned over. Printed on the packet was the trademark, the full view of a large multi-colored butterfly crudely painted but warm with color in the candlelight.

There were voices and footsteps out in the courtyard. “Where’s Old Han? Hurry up with supper, Old Han. We have a meeting after supper.” Several Land Reform Workers came into the room.

“What meeting?” Liu asked.

“The Farmers’ Association meets tonight,” one of them told him. “Probably because Comrade Chang is leaving and some things will have to be settled ahead of schedule.”

“Hey, Liu Ch’üan, exactly when do you expect to leave? And where are you being sent to?” The others crowded around him, full of envy and a new respect.

“I better go and get my supper,” Su Nan said and hurried off, taking the toothpowder and soap with her.

THE MEETING
that night mainly concerned reporting to the District Government about the Fruits of Struggle. Most of the Land Reform Workers, without quite knowing what it was all about, had caught on to the idea that the report would be a delicate matter, hedged about by the hidden strife and tension among their leaders.

It all started with the grain discovered in the hollow wall of Han T’ing-pang’s house. The Hans had a hired man, Miao Yung-so, who went to the Land Reform Workers’ Corps with the information that one of the walls in Han’s bedroom was hollow, with bags of rice, wheat, and
kao-liang
flour and maize stored inside. A search proved him to be right and the foodstuffs were confiscated.

This find was made just as the Land Reform Workers and the
kan-pu
were in the midst of reclassifying the village population as part of the preparatory work before the division of land. Miao, the hired man, belonged to the Destitute Class, one grade below a Poor Farmer, and therefore entitled to get more land. As an informer he should have been promoted another grade, which would make him Special Class, equivalent to the Soldiers’ Families, even better than a Destitute. But Go Forward Pao bore Miao a grudge because once they had quarrelled while gambling during the New Year. Now he said Miao had never been Positive and seldom came to meetings. So although he was Destitute, he was not a Respectable Destitute. So in the end Miao barely made the grade as a Poor Farmer.

Chang naturally considered this confiscated grain as Fruits of the Struggle, to be entered in the Fruits Account and reported to the District Government. But Go Forward Pao kept putting it off, saying the villagers insisted that, instead of handing it all over to the government, it should be split up among them. He persuaded several Positive Elements in the village to go around stirring people up, clamoring for their share. If the grain was divided among the villagers, the amount everybody received would of course remain under Pao’s control. He needed something too, just then, to sweeten up the Positive Elements. They were the only ones who ever made any noise. Once their mouths were stuffed with food, there would be no danger of anybody complaining of unfairness when the land was divided among them in another week or two—the great event everybody was waiting for.

Chang didn’t let on he had guessed all along this was what Pao had in mind. But now when he came back from the
hsien
, knowing he would be leaving, he called a meeting of the
kan-pu
at once. At the meeting he told them, “For us who work among the Masses, the first requirement is that we must have the power of discrimination. Without judgment, Comrades, we cannot fulfill the tasks Chairman Mao Tse-tung has entrusted to us. We ought to listen carefully to all the kinds of voices that come from the Masses and be able to tell the difference. This time, for instance, there’s a lot of talk about concealing the grain, not reporting it. Now it seems to me this chatter is not the real opinion of the Masses. It’s just one or two Bad Elements trying to make trouble, taking advantage of the Backward Thought of the Masses. Comrades, we’ll have to find out the real source of this opinion and expose the Bad Elements before the Masses, show them up for what they really are.”

Pao rightly took this as a threat directed at him. He felt a bit nervous and decided to sacrifice the two Positive Elements who had made the most noise, to identify them as Bad Elements.

During the meeting of the Farmers’ Association that night, Chang pointed out to the villagers that it would be wrong not to report the confiscation. At the same time he cleared the Masses of all blame, insisting it was not their idea but the conspiracy of a few Bad Elements among them.

Pao took an active part in tracing the talk back to the Bad Elements who had supposedly started everything. The two men dared not mention Pao, fearing his revenge. The Land Reform Workers’ Corps would soon be gone, but Pao would be here the rest of their lives. There was nothing they could do except bow their heads and admit their guilt. The Masses of course said nothing. In fact some of them were quite pleased to see these Positive Elements get their comeuppance. A resolution was passed by unanimous vote that the Bad Elements were to be tied up and beaten with sticks.

Chang was set on having this business attended to before he left. Pao also was anxious to dispose of another matter while Chang was still here. It concerned the landlord, Han T’ing-pang, and his wife, who were still detained in the school. The
kan-pu
had patiently waited for Han’s father-in-law to ransom him. But aside from the small sum of money in response to his first letter, further entreaties had produced no results. Sooner or later the couple had to be disposed of.

Pao had scruples, however. Being an extremely clever and observant man, even if uneducated, he knew the way the Government usually did things. At the beginning of a new movement they always encouraged the
kan-pu
to go at it with abandon, giving them a free hand. But as soon as there were enough signs of discontent among the Masses, the Government took measures to
Chiu P’ien
, Correct the Deviation. The slogan would be: “A cook can reboil half raw rice; a horse can turn round and eat the grass behind it.” But in making redresses they could not resurrect any of the men they had shot, nor would they give back any of the confiscated property. The only remedy left was to punish the “over-leftist”
kan-pu
. The imprisonment or demotion of a few low-ranking
kan-pu
was a small price to pay for bolstering the Government’s support. Pao did not worry much about the promotion of the Rich Farmers and Middling Farmers to the rank of Landlords, and their subsequent execution. Chang had been in charge here when this took place. If Han T’ing-pang and his wife were to die, it had better happen while Chang was still around. Then it could be blamed on Chang if there should be any trouble later on.

So Go Forward Pao secretly approached Han’s tenants and told them to go and make a row outside the jail. They were to complain that all the other landlords had been executed while Han alone had been spared and they remained unavenged. Everybody in the village knew about Pao turning against his own accomplices, and Han’s tenants were afraid of falling into the same trap. But they dared not try hedging or bargaining. Their spirits were broken when they saw with their own eyes T’ang Yü-hai and the others being taken to town to be shot.

The next afternoon while Chang was in the school office checking over the accounts of the Fruits of the Struggle, he heard people shouting in the back courtyard.

“
Ma ti
, that bastard son of a dog is certainly getting off light!”

“So unfair! Everybody’s had their revenge except us! We—want—our—revenge!”

“Drag the turtle’s egg out of there and do him in right now!”

“Kinsmen, kinsmen!” It was Go Forward Pao’s voice pleading with them, smooth as silk. “You go home first and wait a few days. Wait till I Reflect your Opinion Upward. Anyhow, you can rest assured that the Government’s opinion will be the same as yours, because yours is the opinion of the Masses. Don’t you worry!”

The more he pleaded, the louder they yelled.

“
Pu hsing!
Won’t do! The Government is too generous! The dog’s bastard has been having an easy time!”

“We’ve waited long enough! When is he going to pay back the money he owes us?”

“Get him out of there and let us do the questioning! If we aren’t paid at once, we’ll string the turtle’s egg up!”

Pao rushed to the front courtyard to get help from Chang. “What shall we do? Han T’ing-pang’s tenants are kicking up a row. They want to take the two of them out and
ta li kan t’a-men
, do them in with great force.”