Naked Earth (15 page)

The thundering and clattering of the wheels were amplified, now that the solid ground had given way to the bridge. In the blackness outside the window, big diagonal crosses flashed jerkily past in succession—the silhouetted bridge rails. In a moment the last cross had disappeared and the thundering rattle of the wheels subsided back to normal. The soldier, though still watchful, lowered his gun. Liu forgot what he had wanted the handkerchief for. When he pulled it out of his pocket he just wiped the sweat off his forehead.

“Comrades!” the loudspeaker was again screeching girlishly. “The Express—has now—triumphantly—passed across—the Huang Ho—Iron Bridge!—Triumphantly—passed across—the Huang Ho—Iron Bridge!”

She sounded as if they had just won a battle. Liu began to wonder if there were very many accidents along this line. If the rails were blown up by guerillas or special agents and then repaired again, the newspapers would naturally neglect to mention it. The bridge must be a particularly crucial point.

But Liu did not really believe there was much of this kind of thing going on. More likely, the authorities were jittery because they believe in being perpetually on guard against everyone.

The Passenger-Affairs Officer had turned up with a soot-encrusted kettle, adding hot water to everybody’s tea, as if in celebration of their safe crossing of the bridge. The man wore a wrinkled dark blue Liberation Suit like everyone else, but with a white armband. He was lanky, young and dull, yawning in people’s faces as he leaned over their tables. Working his way down the aisle he weaved a little with the motion of the train, holding on to the back of seats.

In time he stood sleepily before Liu’s table, lifted the cover off Chang’s glass with one hand, his other hand holding the big kettle high, to shoot a foot-long arc of water into the glass. But he missed it and watered Chang’s leg instead.

“Ai-ya—ai-yo, ai-yo!
T’ung ssu le!
I die of pain!” Chang jumped up shouting, bumping the kettle out of the man’s hand, splashing the scalding water all over the feet and ankles of both of them. He yelled louder. The Passenger-Affairs Officer was also howling now.

“He’s done it on purpose!” Chang’s eyes were red with fury and tears. “
Hao chia-huo!
Boiling water—and he looks you in the eye and just pours it over you! I’ll be darned if he hasn’t done it on purpose! I’m going to speak to the comrade responsible for the train. There are saboteurs around!”

The Passenger-Affairs Officer just squatted on the floor moaning and wailing, unable to speak.

“
Ma-ti!
Must be a spy!” Chang shouted. “
Ma-ti!
Have you any idea who I am—who my father is? Why, you almost killed me! The Revolution still needs me—you know that?”

“Let it go, Comrade Chang, let it go!” Liu stood to help hold him up. “Better go to the medical room right now. Get the Hygiene Officer to put on some medicine and bandage it for you. The sooner the better. Delay might be dangerous—really. Let me handle this creature. Just leave him to me. Don’t worry, he can’t run away. If he jumps off the train it’s his funeral.”

Still shouting abuse, Chang hobbled toward the medical cubicle at the other end of the train. The two Hygiene Officers were women and not bad looking. After they had applied the medicine and bandaged his leg and both his feet, he stayed to chat and they asked him to be sure to come around again tomorrow to change the bandages. With another cozy chat in the clean-smelling little cubicle to look forward to, he was more or less pacified when he returned to the carriage.

Everybody was already in bed. The backs of the seats had been turned up to make upper berths. Liu had taken the upper to save Chang the trouble of climbing.

Unbuttoning his tunic, Chang sat down on the lower berth, crouching because there wasn’t room. The floor under his feet was glistening wet; it had probably been wiped with a mop. The air smelled of the dirty mop.

The railway authorities no longer took pains to segregate the sexes in the arrangement of sleeping berths. There weren’t any curtains over the berths either. This was one of the very few changes that had been made quietly, without any publicity. While it had occasioned some whispered complaints, it was perhaps not altogether unpopular. Chang glanced at the girl on the opposite berth. She had her face to the wall and her long hair fanned out over the pillow. She was muffled up to the neck in a woolen blanket. Spread out over the blanket, her padded, dark blue Liberation jacket looked enormous. Gray flannel trousers were spread next to it, in the right order. Still, she was not in her jacket and trousers but underneath them. It made a difference.

It would be still better after he had lain down, when the three-foot gap between their pillows could easily be bridged by his imagination. But part of his anger returned when he remembered that, by going away to have his leg attended to, he had missed seeing her undress.

“
Ma ti
, see if I don’t give the Railway Bureau a piece of my mind,” he said loudly to Liu, partly for the benefit of the other passengers. After what had happened to him, it would really be face-losing if he were to keep quiet about it. “All this Patriotic Overtime, Competitive Overtime and what not, extending the working hours on and on and on. Who’s to be responsible when there are accidents? The leaders—all they know is to ask for ‘
hsiao mieh shih-ku
, the extermination of accidents.’ How can they avoid accidents when they go at this rate? The passenger’s life and limbs have no protection at all, I tell you!”

Liu did not answer, pretending to be asleep.

The loudspeaker was silent at last. The monotonous click of the wheels was soothing in the unaccustomed quiet. Travelling light now without the music, the train rushed on, smooth, heavybodied and indifferent, occasionally with one of its segments pushed up a little as if shrugging. There were miles and miles of the same black night ahead.

LIU COULD
not remember who it was—some old Chinese writer—who had said about the unhappiness of leaving someone you cared for, “Even if I go to the ends of the earth, I will be sleepwalking.” There was an unseeing, unfeeling grayness in going among strangers. And in his case they would have to remain strangers because he dared not really talk to any one. The things he was experiencing in Shanghai now only became real to him when he pictured himself telling them to Su Nan. Not in his letters, of course, but some day, when he saw her again. It got so that sometimes right in the middle of an event, while it was still happening, he could hear his own voice telling her about it.

There was that time he had gone to the office of the
Liberation Daily News
, the biggest newspaper in Shanghai. His own office, the Resist-America Aid-Korea Association, had sent him there to ask for some photos of American atrocities in Korea. They had wanted the pictures for the
China Pictorial
. Comrade Ko Shan, the head of the Reference Department at the
Liberation Daily News
, had told him to wait while she went to look for them in the reference room.

A Chinese typewriter tapped slowly and hesitantly in the next room. Desk phones kept ringing. Employees rushed around, light on their feet, bending over to whisper to colleagues at other desks. The room was dark because it was so big. All the desk-lamps had already been turned on. On Comrade Ko’s desk the lamp under its green glass shade shone full on a bright pink blotter, a large pink rectangle as spotlessly clean as a woolen sample, only much larger.

“Looks like the Reference Department hasn’t got much work to do,” Liu told himself while waiting.

From what he had heard, there wasn’t much to do at any of the newspapers, though it was hard to believe that, when witnessing the scene of hushed activity around him. All the news was supplied by the Hsin Hua News Agency. It was easy for the editors; even the headlines were supplied. Reporters had become obsolete. They could not interview important personages and were not wanted at law courts and scenes of murders, rapes and robberies because the papers no longer carried such stories on the assumption that these things were just not done any more.

Liu supposed that it was the same in all the big organizations. He could not say he was exactly overworked even if the hours were long. Much of the time was spent in meetings and waiting around for meetings and in Self-Improvement. He had to start out for the office at six o’clock in the morning to attend the Newspaper-reading Class at seven, one hour before going to the office.

Liu had been sitting by the desk for a long time. He looked across the vast room. The green desk lamps seemed to float in the semi-darkness like lotus lanterns set drifting over water on the fifteenth night of the seventh moon, All Souls’ Eve. Then he saw Ko Shan coming in, walking among the green lamps. He was surprised that she reminded him strongly of some stage or film actress he had seen, though he could not place the actress at the moment. Perhaps it was just her carriage, the combination of self-possession and self-consciousness peculiar to actresses.

She had one of those pretty moon-faces hollowed out at the cheeks. Her eyes under half-closed lids had what was traditionally known as the smoky look—as if veiled by smoke or distance. Her hair had been permed but she had allowed it to grow long and straight and merely pushed it behind her ears. It fell over her shoulders in rumpled half curls. A green-striped shirt collar showed above her dark blue double-breasted Lenin Suit, slim and belted, with trousers.

She did not fit in with his idea of an old
kan-pu
. But she was certainly holding too responsible a position for a new recruit. Of course you could not tell. Sophistication in appearance could also be a mark of rank. Some of the men
kan-pu
above a certain rank had dropped their uniforms for foreign suits and the women had blossomed out with new perms and colorful Russian shawls. But he doubted that Ko Shan was that important.

After she sat down at the desk he realized why he had not thought she looked anything extraordinary when he first saw her. In the bright light of the table-lamp she looked rather faded and drawn and was only pretty on and off, in flashes, with a toss of her head, a smile or glance.

She sat looking over the photographs before she passed them to him. They were good clear snapshots, dark in tone, with an air of authenticity. The first picture showed a soldier standing with hands on hips beside a tree. He was visibly blond. A half-naked woman was tied to the tree. Another soldier was bending over, picking up twigs to pile at her feet, apparently to build a fire.

Liu turned the picture this way and that in the lamplight, examining it closely. If there were signs of faking he could not see them. “How in the world did they manage to get this picture? It’s very valuable—just what we need” he said.

“German soldiers. That’s all we’ve got here,” she said carelessly, without smiling.

“German soldiers?” He was slightly bewildered.

“During the War against Fascism— Yes. You’ll have to make the woman’s hair darker,” she pointed at it with her pencil. “It doesn’t look very black.”

The woman in the picture looked distinctly Caucasian. “Where was this? In Europe?” Liu asked, and at once realized the superfluity of his question when she just ignored it.

“The hair will have to be darkened. And you’ll have to make some small changes in the soldiers’ uniforms,” she said. “Here’s a picture from a foreign magazine of American soldiers drilling. The uniform is shown quite clearly. You can refer to it.”

“But—” He did not know what to say. “We haven’t got anybody who can retouch photos,” he finally said.

“It doesn’t take an expert,” Ko Shan said, smiling. “Even the professional retouch man at the photographer’s can only draw eyelashes on women’s eyes, one by one, like rays of the sun in children’s drawings. Not much use in this case.”

Liu was silent as he flipped through the half dozen pictures.

“Let’s see the first one again,” Ko Shan said. “Oh, yes—” she tapped on the woman’s breasts with her pencil eraser. “You can blacken this part to show that these have been cut off.”

“Blacken it—entirely?” Liu said uncertainly. He imagined it would look like a black brassiere he’d seen the lacquered girls wear in the ads in the second-hand American picture magazines he used to look at once in a while when he was a student. But he was too embarrassed to tell this to the woman officer he stood beside. He looked down at the part in her hair and saw the white skin underneath.

“Well, perhaps not entirely. In big blotches, maybe, so it will look like bleeding wounds. Use a bit of imagination.”

Seeing that he still looked troubled, she added reassuringly, “It really doesn’t matter how you do it. You know how our printing is at its present stage, making great strides but still room for improvement. The picture will probably come out blurred enough so that you won’t be able to tell what it’s all about. You’ll have to rely mainly on the caption. The caption has got to be arresting and to the point.”

“Yes, of course,” Liu murmured as he wrapped up the photos.

Ko Shan tilted her head back and looked at him with a half smile, her eyes pale and distant. “Maybe you think: what’s the difference between this and the lies and distortions of the imperialists?”

“Of course there’s a difference,” Liu said blushing.

“Well, what’s the difference?”

“A difference in the essential nature of the act.” Sometimes it was best to be brief with an air of finality.

She continued to look at him with a faint smile. He was beginning to think that he would have to do better than that. But then she dropped her eyes to the rubber tip of her pencil with which she was tapping the table. “Yes,” she said, adopting that flat casual tone which Liu found seasoned Communists often employed when they did not wish to sound preachy. “First of all, we definitely know that the atrocities of American soldiers in Korea are absolutely a fact. And when we publicize that fact, it’s not enough just to rely on verbal reports. The Masses demand that reports should be—you know—Concretized. Therefore photos are necessary.”