Naked Earth (19 page)

Nobody answered. They were cold and wet and very tired. The man with piles was the only one who muttered, “Hadn’t been giving me any trouble for some time now. Couldn’t even feel them—almost forgot them. I just knew something like this would happen!”

“Ah, cut it out! What’s the point—pulling my leg, and no end to it!” Ch’en said happily, obliviously. Nobody else’s wife had waylaid them with a raincoat. It had given him much face.

Liu looked at him. Liu could never get over the way life around him went on as usual, after what he had seen out in the country. These people here were hardly touched yet by the change of government. Maybe life was a bit harder with longer working hours and all the added chores, like meetings and parades; still they were able to carry on much as before and find comfort in the texture of life itself. Nothing as big and sweeping as Land Reform had swept over them yet. But how long would it be before it was their turn? Then Liu wondered if he wasn’t feeling sorry for them because he was envious. Even if their time was borrowed and running out, that did not make their lives any less real.

This was the season for sunny showers. The sun came out and the rain flashed silvery white against the blue sky for an incredibly long glorious moment. Then it stopped and the pavements quickly dried. Liu’s clothes dried on him. The sleepy pressure of the warm sun on his back was vaguely disagreeable and made him shiver. He knew he’d had this coming for a long time. Like all men who are seldom sick, he had just ignored it at first, then, when it didn’t go away, he suddenly grew panicky. He felt as heavy as a corpse as he dragged himself along, doubled up over the handbar of the cart. Hot needles of sweat pricked through the thick swollen numbness that coated him.

The long golden day seemed as endless as the road. In moving westward the procession had come to the residential districts. People began to sidle off and desert when they came near their homes. With typical Chinese logic they reasoned that it was not such a serious offense to desert now, since it was already late afternoon. And curiously enough, their unit leaders apparently shared this view and “kept one eye open and one eye closed,” as the saying went. The ranks gradually thinned out and the ground was strewn with discarded paper flags.

Liu said to the Communications Officer next to him, “I’m sick. I’m going back to the hostel. Tell the unit leader I’m sick.”

It was very quiet as soon as he turned down the side street. The noise of the gongs and cymbals and brass bands, already growing faint, emphasized the sunny silence. The only vehicle on the empty street was a big pushcart manned by soldiers of the Liberation Army, parked in the middle of the road. The chubby troopers looked more Japanese than Chinese except for their black cloth peasant shoes. They waited, leaning on the pile of sacks on the cart, their faces turned toward the main road. Liu had heard that they had been told to keep their distance with the local people in order to maintain their dignity. They never once glanced in his direction though he was the only moving object on the street.

He passed a steamed bread stand with no keeper in sight. The pyramid of cup-loaves was covered by a piece of grayish cloth. He was feeling better now. But somewhere inside himself he was holding still, waiting for the wave of sickness which he knew would soon return.

All the shops had hung flags out over the main road. Here on the side street only one shop, a cigarette-and-candy store, had two flags hung out above the signboard in the approved fashion. But between the crossed flags where the twin portraits of Stalin and Mao ought to be, they had hung—probably for reasons of economy—two identical portraits of the same girl, Lü Mei-yü, a one-time Peking Opera actress whose picture had been used as a trademark on Beauty cigarettes for the last thirty years. The familiar pink-and-white face smiled down from the large color prints, the kind that were given free to retailers. She wore a band around her head in the pre-war western style, and her hair made dipping waves in the center of her forehead.

The little shops huddled between gray brick houses and alleys which had fanciful names written in large faded gilt characters on the gray cement arched entrances. An occasional hanging room bridged the mouth of an alley. All the houses looked so secure in their protective dinginess and commonplaceness. Their air of permanence exasperated Liu.

The pushcart of a cloth vendor was parked by the roadside, making a more or less stationary stall. Nobody was around. A baby lay sleeping on the cart between two tall stacks of cotton prints. It was a lovely day. As he walked along a familiar feeling came over him, the sadness of youth swinging free, having nothing and nobody, and with nowhere to go.

WHEN HIS
temperature did not go down for three days Liu went to see the doctor. The Organization had a standing arrangement with one of the government hospitals for the medical care of its
kan-pu
. Liu stood in a long queue that filled the large hall-like waiting room with its coils and trailed into the corridor. When he finally got to see the doctor he was told to come again the next day to have his lungs fluoroscoped.

So it was his turn at last to get tuberculosis after seeing it happen to so many college students and young
kan-pu
.

After standing in the queue all day he could not get out of bed the next morning. Paradoxically, he thought he would not be able to go to the doctor until he got better. He was not too keen either to learn his fate. What if he had TB? Imported medicine was so expensive the Organization certainly hadn’t any to waste on the likes of him. The most he could expect was that they might try the new Soviet “cure by sleep” and “cure by exercise” on him.

He would be expected to carry on just as before. They were always telling people not to be overscrupulous about their health. The Organization would be willing to overlook his handicap if he himself would. His chances for getting ahead would be neither better nor worse than before. Unless of course, he had an acute breakdown. Then he would probably be sent back to Peking to his widowed stepmother, who could hardly make both ends meet as it was.

He remembered seeing in a newsreel a handsome new sanatorium they had up north—was it in Harbin?—but it was for model factory workers only. The film showed several patients, Stakhanovite heroes whose health had been broken by the new speed-up programs. They looked spruce and correct in their dark Liberation Suits walking up the flight of light-colored, broad cement steps, coming back to sleep at the sanatorium after a day’s work at the factory. They went upstairs to their ward and hung up their caps carefully on the wall above the row of white iron beds.

“The only thing cheap in this country is human lives,” Liu thought and then felt a quick start of guilt for letting the thought break through. And it does seem as if cheap things don’t last. Look at himself—hardly been put to use for a year and already heading for the rubbish heap.

He closed his fingers around one of the black iron rails on the bedstead. It cooled his palm deliciously. But almost immediately he became aware of a dim churning in the void that had floated up inside him, working up into a fit of nausea. He let go of the rail and abandoned himself to the burn of fever.

The strain of overwork and undernourishment had started from his last year at college, after the Liberation, when the students’ days suddenly become crammed full to bursting with heavy extracurricular activities while every month the food grew a little bit worse. He had not minded then, bolstered up as he was by faith and optimism. And perhaps he would not have broken down now if not for the change in his outlook.

But when your faith is your fortune, somehow you don’t lose it so easily. There is always something in you which takes good care of it and sees that you get your faith lifted. Liu was just beginning to get acquainted with that part of himself which was unbelievably resilient and persuasive and always had his best interests at heart.

Much as it pained him, now that the Land Reform had receded into a proper distance he felt he could understand it better. It was like stepping back from an oil painting. The rough savage daubs of color began to take on meaning and he could see what the picture represented. Has anything ever been accomplished on this vast scale without coercion and the destruction of blameless lives caught in the movement? Take the building of the Great Wall, which we are so proud of, he thought. No, perhaps that is not a good example. The tyrant Ch’in Shih Huang Ti had been in charge. But history must be full of such instances.

No, the Land Reform was a thing quite unprecedented in Chinese history. Good or bad, the fact remained that the landless farmers been given land. And land talks to them as money talks to other people. Then this was the first time anything had ever been done that affected the great stone heart of the peasantry. Before, no matter how many roads and railways had been built, they had always had to circumvent this gigantic boulder in the path of progress. The farmers might smile and nod and kowtow but from long experience they knew better than to believe a word you said.

Even now they were no different, he thought, but they would change. He had seen Li Hsiu-chung, a woman labor model from the old Communist areas, in a newsreel. She had come to Peking to be presented to Chairman Mao and attend a meeting. She was a lanky woman with bound feet. Her long, thin, careworn face looked over fifty though she might be younger. In her floppy jacket and baggy pants tied tight at the ankles she staggered briskly and efficiently on her tiny feet up the aisle of the meeting hall. They threw confetti on her. A close-up showed her startled, shyly laughing face. Liu could never forget the happiness on that face. Who had ever made a fuss over her in all her life? What if this sort of thing was just an empty gesture, as Liu knew it to be, the pat on the back which had proved to be so effective when it went with the whip hand, and was extracting superhuman efforts from an exhausted people? The thing was: who had ever bothered before? He found himself asking the question angrily, helplessly furious with the people who had been here before the Communists for landing his generation in the present fix. And once again he was back miserably at where he had started.

The hostel was deserted in the daytime. The room he shared with Chang smelled of sweaty canvas shoes, like a school dormitory. The window was open, its dirty glass panes misty white in the setting sun. Flies buzzed around the bowl of rice gruel on the table. The coolie had brought it in the morning and left it standing there all day. Liu turned over in bed to face the whitewashed wall dotted with crimson tadpole-shaped stains of bedbug blood.

He heard footsteps and voices on the creaky stairs. Turning around he was amazed to see Ts’ui P’ing, well-groomed as usual in black gabardine, entering the room, followed by Ho, his Culinary Officer, carrying a flour sack.

“No, lie down, lie down, Comrade Liu,” Ts’ui said when he tried to sit up. “How are you feeling? Better today?” Ts’ui drew up a chair and sat leaning forward, away from the wet face-towel hung on the chair back. He beamed at Liu with hands joined and arms resting on widely parted legs. The bedside manner did not come naturally to him but as an old Party campaigner and officer in the Communist Army, visiting the wounded and sick must be all in the day’s work and he had apparently developed a kind of competence in it. Liu knew he did not mean to stay long because he did not slip off a shoe or sock.

“Everybody misses you at the office,” Ts’ui said grinning. “They all want to come and see you. I said no, I’ll forward the message. Better get well quick. Here, I brought you half a sack of flour. Tell the cook to make something for you. Got to eat to get well.”

Liu knew it was customary for a superior to visit a sick staff member, bringing him Face and some flour instead of flowers. But he resented the man’s presence in the room, coming, as it were, as a part-owner of the world, breezily intruding upon the squalor and sickness of his own making. And yet all the same Liu felt his eyes smarting at Ts’ui’s comforting words. He had to swallow his tears angrily, wondering if it was his present frame of mind that made him so forlorn and abject, or if there was not a certain snobbishness in the most genuine feelings.

The next week he was well enough to go to the hospital. Consultations did not start until two in the afternoon but the queues were formed early in the morning. The women brought their knitting and carried on polite conversations about their ailments. There was the usual preoccupation with food. Almost every patient had a relation who would come and relieve him in the line at lunchtime. And when he came back from lunch he would tell the other person, a little reluctantly and mostly in grunts, but with an air of suppressed excitement, about what he’d had in one of the small restaurants he had found nearby—a minor adventure since he was not familiar with the locality.

Toward mid-afternoon when the line was moving up sluggishly, everybody was outraged to see a woman pushing her way briskly through the crowd, cutting across the queues. Liu saw that it was Ko Shan of the
Liberation Daily News
.

“Does she have priority?” he thought. “So undemocratic.”

“Ai-ya, you’re so late!” exclaimed a uniformed young man standing near the head of the queue. “Look, it’s almost your turn already!”

“My timing is perfect, isn’t it?” Ko Shan said smiling, fanning herself with a big brown envelope which looked as if it contained X-ray pictures. Probably she was also a TB case, Liu thought.

“Look what time it is!” the young man cried, baby-faced and plaintive, thrusting his wristwatch under her nose. “I’m really going to get it when I go back there.”

“Who told you to come?” she said. “Could have sent somebody.”

“Not those Service Officers. They can’t read—might get into the wrong queue,” the young man said, self-consciously jocular, aware of all the people listening. “Might get into the surgical queue or the Tissue Cure queue or the maternity queue.”

“Well, one thing about you, there’s no danger of your getting into the maternity queue,” she said lightly. “They’d kick you out.”