Naked Earth (24 page)

Lin decided that it was not Shen himself, or he would not be defending her so openly. Besides, Shen’s preference for young girls was well-known. Chao Yen-hsia was young for an opera singer of repute but perhaps too full-blown and earthy for his taste. Then her patron must be somebody higher up. He never got to hear about anything these days, he thought irritably, feeling as if his paper had been scooped. There was a lot of rivalry between the Party newspaper and the Hsin Hua News Agency since many of their functions overlapped.

Ko Shan was just about to slip away inobtrusively, but Shen stopped her with a gesture. “I’m going,” he said, heaving himself up from his seat. “I’ve wasted enough of your time, Old Lin. Now you can attend to Comrade Ko.”

“No, I can come in later. Nothing important,” she said.

“What is this?” Shen asked, reaching for the old newspaper she had in her hand. “Let’s have a look.”

“It’s about Riberi,” she said.

Lin came over at once and peered at it over Shen’s shoulder.

Shen ran his eyes hurriedly through the item and read the letter of state twice. He gave his glasses a little upward thrust. “That’s very interesting,” he murmured. “He’s sure pledged his allegiance to old Chiang in no uncertain terms.”

“Let me see,” Lin tried to snatch it away, smiling.

Shen was too quick for him, having already folded up the sheet and thrust in into his breast pocket. Making a double chin in the effort to look down while buttoning up his pocket, he said, “This is a nation-wide campaign, so this item ought to be issued by the Hsin Hua News Agency for nation-wide distribution.”

“Not so fast!” Lin protested, forcing a laugh. “At least let us copy it down to save you the trouble of sending us a mimeograph.”

“Huh, you know how Peking will scream if you print it ahead of the
People’s Daily
, ‘
for quotation marks,’” Shen said over his shoulder.

Lin saw him out the door into the outer office. Ko Shan tried to sneak out after him but Lin blocked her way. He jerked his head at her curtly and she had to follow him into his room.

He returned to his desk and sat down without speaking. Having allowed the pause to drag on to a sufficient length to get her nervous, he said loudly. “I thought you’d know enough not to intrude when I have visitors.”

“Yes, I should have found out before I knocked,” she smiled apologetically. “It just slipped my mind. I was half dizzy burrowing into the archives digging this up and—”

Lin looked pained and cut her short with a cold nod of dis- missal.

She walked out swiftly, knowing it was no use talking when his anger was at its peak. Another unpleasant jar was due her as she went round the corner of the hall-like outer office. A new desk had been placed there and Liu Ch’üan was sitting at it reading the papers.

“The Resist-America Aid-Korea Association has sent somebody here as liaison officer. Going to be stationed here permanently,” an editor told her.

“Of all people!” Ko Shan muttered to herself.

Liu never once looked in her direction. She also ignored him, though she took to strolling past him on some errand or other. Once she wrote a note to a colleague, crumpled it into a little ball and tossed it to the other man’s desk but it hit Liu on his shoulder. He paid no attention.

In the next few days when all members of the staff went to movies or exhibitions together on Group Attendance tickets, Liu always managed to get out of it. On temporary detail with Ko Shan’s office, he had the ready excuse that he had already promised to go with his own unit. On the few occasions when he had to speak to her on business he was brief and wooden while she was cold and snappish. But she did not want to be too obvious. The one inexcusable thing is to let your passions interfere with your work and make a public show of yourself before the Masses, which means all non-Party members, she reminded herself. She had enemies in the office like everybody else. They could do a lot to hurt her if they were to go and tell Old Lin, especially as Lin was angry with her just now.

One day the telephone rang on her desk. “
Liberation Daily News
,” she said. “Who do you want
?....
What’s your unit?
Wen Hui Pao?
” That was another newspaper. She put the receiver down on the desk and called out bad-temperedly to the room in general, “Telephone for Liu Ch’üan,” as if she were not quite sure who he was.

But when he came over to her desk and picked up the receiver, she glanced at him from the corner of her eyes and said softly, “Big shot now, with reporters after you! No wonder you’re so stuck-up now.”

“Wai?” Liu said into the phone. “Ai, yes, I’m Liu Ch’üa
n...
Why, this is very unexpected.” he said. “When did you arrive?”

He leaned on the desk with his back to Ko Shan. She sat there reading some papers. Absentmindedly she wound the telephone wire over her hand and wrist in snaky loops. The wire became shorter and shorter. He was finally forced to turn round to face her, and had to stoop slightly to keep up with the retreating mouthpiece. She smiled up at him, one eyebrow going up a little with a questioning wistfulness.

For a moment he stared into her face. It was Su Nan on the phone. She was in Shanghai. The New Democracy Youth Corps had transferred her here to work for
Wen Hui Pao
, the Corps newspaper. She had not had time to write him before she arrived. Listening to her unexpected and forgotten, familiar voice, it seemed to Liu that both his past and present worlds were going on thunderously at the same time in all their complexities. He was standing nowhere, suspended in black space while the two worlds spun toward each other ominously. Or was it his present and future worlds? It all depended.

Su Nan’s excited voice was as devoid of meaning to him as Ko Shan’s smile. But he was achingly aware of the slick non-committal quality of his brief polite answers, anticipating hurt when he just said, “I’m afraid I can’t get away just now. I’ll be there in an hour and hal
f...
All right, see you later.”

He hung up and went back to his own desk. Ko Shan coiled the telephone wire further up her arm, straightening out the stubbornly kinky places. She turned and said something to the man at the next desk about the unit meeting the next day.

THE TWO
of them sat together in the dark watching colored lantern slides advertising pills and knitting wool flash on the screen. A girl’s voice on the amplifier had just finished giving a news broadcast in two dialects. Now she was telling the audience about the theatre’s newly installed nursery and drinking fountain and the loan of paper fans free of charge.

The ushers went around in their Liberation Suits, distinguished from the audience by white armbands. Another man with a white armband made his rounds holding up a white enamel basin covered by a steaming, gray towel. “Five-spiced mushroom-flavored beancurd cakes!” he chanted in a steady whisper. The introduction of hot beancurd cakes into movie theatres was another innovation where only popcorn, ice cream and lemonade could be had before. The man peddling it looked a bit self-conscious, even furtive. The dull beany smell, faintly spicy, filled the auditorium.

The chatty voice over the microphone made a tolerable substitute for conversation. Both Liu and Su Nan were straining their eyes reading the synopsis of the feature film in the dim light. There was really no excuse now for feeling awkward with each other, since this was the fourth time they had been out together since she arrived. At first she must have thought it amusing—it seemed they were only accustomed to meet in cramped moments, and felt lost when they had whole hours and afternoons to themselves. Then he could see that she was beginning to feel puzzled at his attitude. He was not sure that he understood it himself. The other thing was over and she need never hear of it. After all it did not matter, it was different with men. But she would not think so. Double standards were a thing of the past. And he agreed with her entirely. At least he had always thought he did.

He stole a quick look at her lowered profile, clear-cut and pale in the brownish half-light of the auditorium. Her dark blue cotton uniform had faded into a light mauve from much washing. His blue uniform had also become mauve, only it did not suit him as it did her. She wore her hair longer now and absolutely straight, parted in the middle. She looked different from what he remembered, and much more beautiful. His memory had been tempered by common sense and worn out by incessant running. It was like writing the same word two thousand times until you no longer knew it.

It was funny how big a difference it made when a person was actually there in front of you. It made a bigger difference than it should. As soon as he had seen her, he knew that she had not let anything happen to her. She was just the same as before, if a little hardened by the struggle to stay innocent. And she obviously took for granted it was the same with him, except that he must have had an easier time, not being a girl. Apparently she had never seen any need to find out more about him. When she was with him she was quietly, blissfully absorbed, which frightened him more than inquisitiveness.

Another thing that scared him was how much he wanted her. That was nothing new, but he had never wanted her in such an explicit manner. Somehow the explicitness was very shocking when applied to her, of all women.

Perhaps a vague, halting imagination is as strong a barrier between the sexes as any moral force. He felt doubly guilty and disgusted with himself. He had not kissed her since she came. Not that there had been much opportunity but he could have managed it, and she probably expected him to. But to him the ultimate, time-stopping sense of eternity in a kiss was gone forever. Instead it was merely a beginning that led to other very definite things.

The lights went down in a burst of music. It was a Russian film. Stalin appeared in it briefly as he did in most films. The audience had learned to recognize him and there was scattered applause. It showed him in his days of exile in Siberia. The handsome actor in the role, dashingly mustachioed, with beautiful eyes crinkling at the outer ends, lay on his side on the frozen waste, propped up on an elbow. A comrade sat near him listening raptly as Stalin recited long passages of Pushkin by heart, in a deep voice that descended thrillingly into a stage lover’s whisper.

“Every time I see Stalin in a film he’s grown younger and taller. They’re getting bolder and bolder with practice,” Liu said to Su Nan in a low voice. “Here he must be at least five-feet-eight or -nine. I think they’ll get him up to six feet before the year is over.”

Su Nan looked round nervously. Lately it seemed to her that he was always making this sort of remark, although he knew she did not like it. They had both heard stories of movie-goers who had been overheard making counter-revolutionary comments and at the end of the show had been followed by strangers to their homes and then arrested.

Probably just rumors but she preferred to be over-cautious because, unlike him, she still believed they had a future. In any case it was silly to talk like that, he knew. But she was the only person in the world he could say such things to. If he could not make love to her at least he could have the satisfaction of airing some of his pent-up opinions to her. Whenever she asked him about his work he always spoke in a mocking, disparaging way. Maybe he was making himself out to be even more embittered than he actually was. Because at last here was somebody to complain to, and because he was half consciously building up an excuse for his misdemeanor, justifying it even if she should never find him out.

“There really are bugs on this seat,” Su Nan said, examining her wrist in the white glare of snow on the screen.

“It’s all the same, front stalls and back stalls, upstairs and downstairs—all the theatres have them.” Liu said, also scratching. “That’s why they’re called Revolution Bugs” he said with a nervous laugh.

She did not answer, but jerked back her head, irritatedly scanning the half-filled row behind them and the line of ushers leaning against the wall, arms crossed over their chests. Abruptly she said, “Let’s move over to the other side.”

They moved clear to the other end of the theatre. Liu was silent after they settled down again. After a long while she began to wonder if he could be feeling a bit hurt. “You still bitten?” she whispered, leaning over so he could hear her, and instantly got the impression that her closeness made him feel uncomfortable. She drew back quickly before he answered.

When they came out after the show there was a new chill in the air. It was raining, so she said she would be going straight home to her hostel.

He knew a short cut through an alley. Nobody was taking this rain seriously. The cobbler of the alley was still at work at his open-air stall. The bamboo poles stretched across the lane from one upstairs window to another were hung full of washing that had not been taken in. A little briquette stove stood outside a back door. Yellow tongues of flame licked all around the pot that sat burbling on the stove. The rain came down quietly, wetting nothing, it seemed, almost like the flickering white lines vertically darting through old films. It was all so quiet when they entered the alley, it did seem as if they had walked into a silent film, in which nobody could possibly open his mouth and speak.

The blackboard newspaper of the alley stood on its stilt frame at the first turning. Two unpainted slats nailed together at an angle formed a little roof over the blackboard.

“Let’s stand here for a while,” Liu said. It was pouring by then. They stood under the narrow eaves over the blackboard, reading the summary of important news taken from that day’s newspaper. It was carefully written with white and colored chalk with a decorative pink and blue border.

“It was raining that day we went down to Han Chia T’o for the Land Reform,” Su Nan said a little sadly, turning to look to the drenched cement-paved alley.

“Yes,” Liu said smiling. That was the day they had first met. “Remember that saying that people who meet on a rainy day always become friends,” he said. Then he realized a second too late that she would feel hurt at the word “friend.”