Naked Earth (21 page)

She went to open the window and draw the curtains of plain light green cloth. A strong breeze washed into the stale stillness of the room and the curtain passed softly over Liu’s head and face, coming from behind his chair, muffling him for an instant in its fusty, ample folds, cool and limp from the dampness.

“Your hair is all mussed,” Ko Shan said. She straightened it for him, sitting perched on the arm of his chair.

“It doesn’t matter,” Liu said absently, his eyes on the book. He half-raised his hand toward his head, then dropped it because hers was still there, smoothing back his hair. He felt her eyes on him, as tangible as the hand. Then she also looked down at the book, bending to see how far he’d read.

The curtains again licked toward them with the wind. In warding them off she had to steady herself with her other arm stretched along the chair back. Liu could feel through his clothes the veiled glow of two half globes of light, warm against his back where her tunic touched him. The book began to talk nonsense. He saw his hand on her bare arm and heard her laugh. Her low laugh was so close it was no more than a warm breath brushing against his face and yet it seemed to tinkle far away in a mist.

He half turned as if he wanted to look at her. But instead he just watched his own hand slowly stroking her arm, moving upward. In spite of everything, he would not have been surprised to meet some kind of opposition. He was a bit startled though, by the vigor of her giggling resistance. But the more she struggled, the more points of contact.

Liu gave her arm a tug, not hard, but it seemed enough to dislodge her from her perch and she slid onto his lap. Even then his cursedly stubborn sense of incredulity hung heavy over him, blunting and befogging all his sensations. She sat in his lap laughing, with her head bowed, one arm around his neck. She apparently wore nothing under her Lenin suit. He found himself looking down into the deep V collar, where the skin turned markedly from pale tan to white where he could see her breasts start.

“It’s late. It’s too late.” He found it necessary to speak in short sentences.

“Why must you go?”

“It’s late. And I live in a hostel,” he said. She could not have helped noticing him swelling and his pulse throbbing against her. It was so embarrassing that he felt quite angry with himself and with her. He pushed her off him, stood up and went over to the table, gathering his notes and newspapers and pamphlets. She came over and picked up his cap from the table and watched him smiling, whirling the cap round and round on fingers held erect and close together.

“Why must you go?” she asked again.

Liu reached for his cap but she hid it behind her. He was smiling tensely, angrily, feeling ridiculous as he snatched at it again, reaching around her. She had passed it to her other hand. Then they heard somebody knocking at the door.

She went swiftly toward it. Pulling himself together with an effort, he half turned from where he stood to see who it was. But instead of opening the door she turned the key softly in its lock, leaving it there. The click of the lock must have been audible on the other side of the door. After a pause the knocking was resumed with louder, more insistent raps.

She tiptoed back, whispering to him, probably feeling the need for an explanation, “You better wait till the person is gone, whoever it is, if you don’t want to be seen.”

She spoke conversationally, with a pleasantly conspiratorial air. But it became clear to him in a flash how far he would be implicated merely to be seen in her room at this hour of night. The conventions of the old society still held good, it seemed. Sickeningly, the rule against “getting up man-woman relations” came to his mind.

He remained standing by the table, stacking up his books and papers. The knocking stopped and the room filled with a strained, listening silence.

She came close to him to whisper “Don’t talk unnecessarily.”

Liu suddenly grinned at her and asked in a low voice, “Who is it?”

“How should I know? I’m inside the room as much as you are.”

“Is it the man at the hospital?—who stood in line for you?”

“What?” she said vaguely. Then she laughed. “Could be. You open the door and look, if you want to know so much. I can’t tell you. I can’t see through wood.”

“Well, I can see from the window when he goes out the front door,” Liu said, going to the window. Suddenly it became very important to him to know whether there were many or just one.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You want to be seen?”

“It’s all right, he can’t see me,” Liu said half laughing. He leaned out the window, pulling the curtains taut behind him to block off the light in the room.

“Stand back, you devil! What is there to see?” Ko Shan kept laughing and tugging at him.

Looking down he saw a dark figure step out on to the faintly illumined high stoop. He could just make out that is was a man in uniform, and probably a young man. The figure paused going down the steps. Liu thought he was about to turn and look up, and show his face. Then Liu blinked and shied away from a beam of light that hit him across his eyes. For a confused second he had the idea that the man down there had trained a searchlight on him. But it was Ko Shan’s flashlight. She was turning it straight on his face, almost pressing it to his cheek.

“Well, don’t move!” she said laughing. “You want to be seen, don’t you? Don’t you?”

In his keyed-up state the probing warm white light in his face, intimate and physical, was more than he could bear. He tussled with her for the flashlight, first bending it back to avert the beam from his face. The next moment he was holding her in his arms and kissing her. He did not realize he was holding her too tight. It seemed to him she was a beautiful and horrible nightmare, sitting heavy on his chest so he could not breathe.

The curtains flew high into the room behind them and returning, were sucked tight for a long moment against the window frame and against the bodies of the two of them at the window, hemming them in a private one dimensional blackout. Then with a deliberate sweep the hood of darkness was lifted off them. The curtains were up and Liu was aware of the two of them standing framed in the lighted window. He looked down into the lane, then he quickly took a step back, still holding her against him. “He’s still there,” he whispered. “He can see us.”

“Turn out the light then, if you’re really afraid of being seen. But I thought you didn’t mind,” she taunted.

Liu went immediately to the light switch. It did not occur to him that after the light went out she would not be anywhere near and he had to grope through the unfamiliar room, tripping over things. In his unreasoning, tearing impatience, mingled with a lingering disbelief, he thought it not impossible that she had slipped out of the room at the last minute. When he had caught her, he ran his hand hastily up and down over her clothes, scarcely pausing at the satisfying round weights of her breasts, to make sure that all of her was there. She kept writhing and making little protesting noises. Stupidly, he tried to thrust a rough hand through her belt and trouser band. It was fortunate that she wore exactly the same clothes as he did, so that in spite of the fumbling and tussling he did not have much trouble with the hooks and buttons. He had never been very enthusiastic about putting women in uniforms, whenever he gave the matter any thought at all, but now he could see a point to it.

Putting out the light seemed to have been a signal that immediately summoned the watcher in the lane. There was now a furious banging on the door.

“Ai, is the house on fire?” Liu whispered. They both broke out laughing.

“Maybe,” she said.

Feeling childishly, innocently united with her in their laughter and the ridiculous but no less real sense of danger, Liu asked again in a new confidential tone, “Who is it anyway?”

“Why do you keep asking? You scared?”

“Why should I be scared,” he answered, briefly considering the possibility of the old door giving way or being cut open by an axe.

“Maybe just now when you were turning off the light you pressed the wrong button and rang the bell for the servants,” she joked.

“I’m not that dumb,” he said, slightly indignant.

“No, you’re not dumb. You’re smart. You know everything. Everything,” she teased, because by now it was evident that he did not know everything, as she had already guessed. She liked that. It was always a good feeling to be the first woman in the world to somebody. It was to be re-made once again in all her mysteries and perfections.

The hammerings and kicks on the door sounded especially loud and close in the dark. In the besieged blackness of the room, which had grown small and thin-shelled under the thundering blows, it was like being shut in a trunk adrift over the booming heaving sea. But for Liu, once he had muddled through his first moments of confusion into some workable arrangement, the din had faded away and he alone was the sea, as he was the trunk riding on its waves and as he was also the man squeezed inside the velvet-lined case, luxuriously and deliciously stifled, tortuously titillated by the soft fleshy suffocating narrowness that was the only world he had ever known, in which he had ever lived and moved.

Very soon he was at the end of his endurance and went helplessly frenzied with the joy of total abandonment as all his feeling and urgency drained out of him quickly in a warm flood. He was dying and in dying was flying away a Taoist spirit, rising lightly so that the grave could not hold him and fell away, sucking the last flesh off him and he saw with a helpless detachment his soaring self dwindling in the sky.

Then there was nothing left but his nakedness perspiring against hers, and against the folds of his pushed-up tunic. But he did not want to move off her. He slid his hand with incurious unquestioning content along the side of her body, past the delicate hip-bone and roundness of thigh. Then her body moved restlessly and hunched under him; she turned her face away and seemed to be fumbling under the pillow for something. There was the rustle of tinsel. Then the sound of a striking match grated on his drowsiness. The frustrated scraping was repeated several times on a matchbox slightly damp from the weather. A small yellow flame rimmed with blue mist leaped into being, lighting up her half-averted face with a cigarette between her lips. In its brief moment of materialization, her face with its fragile shallow curves of cheek and profile looked so untouched, it shamed and outraged him. And when it was dark again, after the match had been thrown away, he could see the faint gleam of her wakeful eyes, as steady as the glow of the cigarette tip.

He put childishly demanding lips on hers to keep her from smoking. When she kissed him back he could feel her mouth smiling. She stroked him soothingly, not wanting to get him all excited again just yet, not when they had all night before them. She knew it was early yet because she could still hear the trams and busses going. The knocking had stopped now.

Night passed slowly outside the window, tram bells tingling on her ankles, her pale full skirt the curtains billowing into the darkness of the room.

HE DROPPED
in on her whenever he could, usually in the mornings or early in the afternoon. She got up late because of her late working hours, so when he came she was invariably sleeping, and was usually asleep too when he left. He began to feel that he was an erotic figure that existed only in her dreams. And it was true too that the time he spent away from her became shadowy and unreal and he only came to life between her legs.

Parts of her loomed constantly in his mind. It seemed that he could only think of her anatomically. He had never known he could be like this and was quite unnerved by the discovery of this new side to his character. Perhaps this disgust with himself had something to do with that other passionate need he felt to read something else into their relationship. And perhaps it had been there all along—the feeling that he was sleeping with a doctrine, a way of life, and was in communion at last with what had always been unattainable to him through faults in his background and character—an exacting god, a perversely tormenting destiny whose significance eluded him.

Seeing Ko Shan in that light, sometimes he wished that her
tang hsing
, Party characteristic, was stronger, that she would spout Marx-Leninism even in bed. It was ridiculous to expect that of her since old Party members almost never talked “theory” on the Ma-Eng-Le-Ssu (short for Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin) level, to avoid making mistakes. She never talked about her work to him, either, when they were alone together. Not that there was ever time for anything but making love on these occasions, or that Liu would have it otherwise at the time. But when he was away from her and got to brooding, he rather resented being shut off from that part of her life, as if his rightful place was only in bed.

He had no way of knowing just how much she believed, how much she retained of the first young ideals which had prompted her to join up. He wondered whether doubts and disillusionments were things that were beyond her, and she was just a very ordinary woman committed to a hazardous and unrewarding career by her girlish enthusiasms, using the Communist vocabulary slickly as she would any other kind of fashionable jargon.

While she told him very little about herself, she did say how she came to join the Revolution when he asked her one day. “I chucked college and went into the interior with one of those amateur theatrical companies. We circulated from village to village, doing Anti-Japanese Propaganda plays. That was during the war. The company was flat broke half the time. The hardships we went through just to keep things going! But it finally broke up, after two years. We were all college students, but there were one or two who had connections with the Organization. That’s how some of us got absorbed into the Party.”

Liu could imagine her as she had been then, with long curls bunched into two short thick braids swinging stiffly over her shoulders. She must have been the prettiest girl in the company, and therefore would always be playing the screaming, heaven-invoking heroines who got raped and had their families butchered by the Japanese and their houses burned down. Liu knew something about those wandering amateur theatrical groups though they had been before his time. Some were just patriotic student organizations. Others were secretly sponsored by Communist plants in the universities, often without the knowledge of the other members. The city-bred young people, as stagestruck as they were patriotic, faced up heroically to the hard life, though of course, in time, there were gripes and bickerings, a great deal of grasping selfishness and random love-making, with the sick gray feeling of rootlessness setting in.