Naked Earth (31 page)

“If I’d known where you live, I would have gone to see you at your house. I shouldn’t have come to your office.”

“No, that’s perfectly all right, really. Only I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to do anything.”

That seemed final enough. But there were no pedicabs around, so Ko Shan continued to walk by her side. Probably wondering how to shake her off, Su Nan thought.

There was perhaps no place as quiet and deserted as the business and shopping center at night. It had the feel of an evacuated city waiting to be bombed by moonlight. Old whitewashed office buildings with Moorish lacework over the arched entrances stood silent, their windows black and gaping. Gray shadows of mongrel-Gothic concrete turrets loomed over the big stores, the old silversmiths and herbal dispensaries. Not a human being was astir for miles around, or a dog or cock. Their aloneness in the illumined dead quiet was getting to be embarrassing under the circumstances.

They passed a big textile shop, the only shop that had left its neon light on after closing time. The big neon-bordered shop sign ran the length of the whole front. The glowing green line framed the long dark blank of the signboard, making a mystery of it as if they had on sale here something unspeakable and terrifying. A considerable stretch of shiny wet sidewalk was bathed in the green lunar glare.

“It’s going to be troublesome if it has anything to do with Ts’ui P’ing,” Ko Shan suddenly said reflectively.

For once she was being frank and she had obviously been thinking about Liu’s case since she had been told. And there was real concern in her face in the green neon light. “Yes, that’s what I was afraid of,” Su Nan said gratefully. Then she burst out after a moment of hesitation, “Comrade Ko, Liu Ch’üan would never take bribes or anything like that. I can guarantee that for him. I know all about him. He tells me everything.”

“So you know everything about him,” Ko Shan thought bitterly. “But you don’t know about us—or do you? Is that why you seem so sure I’m going to help get him out? No, if you knew, you’d act quite differently toward me. You can’t be such a good actress.” Aloud she drawled, “Ai, who’s qualified to guarantee anybody these days! You never know if you yourself aren’t a bit questionable too.”

She sounded as if she did not want to have anything to do with this, and just now Su Nan had thought she had turned warm and friendly. She did not know what she had said to have offended her. “Yes, that’s silly of me,” she said desperately. “And Comrade Ko, I really shouldn’t be bothering you like this when you hardly even know me. But I really don’t know what to do.” Her voice hardened with the lump rising in her throat. She turned away quickly to wipe her tears. “I don’t know anybody. If only you could tell me whom to go to.”

After a long pause Ko Shan said evenly, “I don’t know anybody either. Unless you want to try Shen K’ai-fu. He deals with culture and propaganda, but I heard he’s in close connection with the Political Defense Department.” She dropped her voice as everybody did at the mention of the name which stood for secret police.

“Do you think he’d see me?” Su Nan said eagerly.

“No harm in trying. If you want, I can telephone his office and see if I can arrange an interview for you.”

“That’s awfully kind of you.” Su Nan hesitated before she added, “If you can go with me it’ll be even better.” She felt that she was greedily “advancing a foot when granted an inch.”

“No, I don’t think that’ll be any help,” Ko Shan said immediately. “You see, if I telephone him I’ll just ask if I may send a comrade around who’s working on the
Wen Hui Pao
and wants to consult him about a certain case. But if I accompany you, it might look as if I’m trying to Pull Personal Relations. It wouldn’t look well in a time like this.”

“Yes. Sure! Sure!” Su Nan said hastily.

“Besides, I don’t know him well enough myself. I don’t even know if he’ll grant the interview. Hey, pedicab! Pedicab!” she shouted, half running toward a flitting shadow way off on the other side of the road.

“Shall I—ring you up in a day or two?” Su Nan called out uncertainly, rushing after her.

“No, I’ll ring you up.” Meeting the pedicab half way she hopped onto it, gave the driver curt directions and glided away without once turning around, paying no attention to Su Nan’s stream of thanks.

She was annoyed with herself for yielding to a generous impulse, Su Nan thought. As who wouldn’t be nowadays. Perhaps there was no need to be so rude. But Su Nan was ready to put up with any amount of eccentricity in old
kan-pu
. Up north there was the saying, “Out of five old
kan-pu
, two have tuberculosis and two are insane.” It always made her smile to hear it quoted but right now the thought of it seemed almost a sacrilege, because she was counting a lot on Ko Shan.

Walking back slowly she passed the little temple again. She looked up to see if the incense stick she set upright was still there, erect and burning in the snow. There it was, the red dot aglow in the dark. She felt a little pleased, as if that might have something to do with the fact that she had had luck with the first person she had tackled.

KO SHAN
telephoned her two days later and told her to go to a certain address the next afternoon. It was a large, quiet house set on a lawn in an expensive residential district in the old French Quarter. Converted into an office but not labeled with official signboards, it had soldiers standing guard outside the wrought-iron gate. After being interviewed first by a secretary and searched by a guard, she was admitted into Shen K’ai-fu’s presence.

Afterwards she wondered if she ought to ring Ko Shan up to tell her how the interview went and to thank her again. Perhaps it would be expected of her. It would be common politeness. But Ko Shan had made it quite plain that she did not welcome telephone calls.

Then something happened which made any further contact with Ko Shan quite out of the question. The
Liberation Daily News
got into trouble. Ko Shan’s chief, Lin I-ch’ün, had been arrested for corruption. Su Nan heard a lot about it over in her office although the newspapers withheld the news until weeks later when he was openly charged with “embezzling JMP$220,000,000; engaging in speculations with businessmen as partners and receiving gifts from subordinates that amounted to over JMP$10,000,000.” Furthermore, “he is connected with the landlord class through a thousand fibers and ten thousand filaments,” the papers said grimly. (Lin came out of this unscathed, was merely transferred.)

The lunar New Year was drawing near. The Kuomintang had prohibited its celebration in an effort to enforce the solar calendar. And during the war years the permanent curfew outlawed the lighting of firecrackers because they sounded too much like gunfire. But now it was considered all right again, since the holiday had been renamed the Farmers’ New Year. And yet somehow fewer firecrackers were heard than when setting them off had been illegal. Especially this year, when all the shops and most families were in the throes of the Five Antis. Still, the New Year was the New Year. Toward the middle twentieth of the twelfth moon there was often heard at night the spatter of explosives sending the kitchen god to heaven in style for his annual report on the establishment. Su Nan felt jumpy at every volley, trying not to think of Ts’ui P’ing, who had been shot.

The sound of firecrackers also made her feel more alone than ever in the strange city. If this thing had happened to Liu in Peking she wouldn’t feel that she had nobody to turn to. She had her family and relatives, and the professors in her university used to be very generous to the students, going to great lengths to help them. Then there were the professors of Peita under whom Liu had studied. Of course it was different now. Families and relatives were no longer quite so willing to take your troubles upon their shoulders. And the professors were frightened people who had to be more careful than anybody else. This would be precisely the kind of thing they would avoid like the plague. Still she wished she was in Peking.

The imminence of the New Year was almost threatening. The last days of the year had a way of crowding upon you. Because there was not much time left and because it was so cold, people scurried on the road, laden with big and small parcels wrapped with coarse yellow paper tied with straw, bringing home ingredients for the New Year feast—salted pork, mushrooms,
fen ssu
, thin silvery noodles. The sight of them isolated her in her distress.

She had come to know this part of town quite well, travelling back and forth from Shen K’ai-fu’s office and the bus station almost every day. It was very much like going to see a fashionable doctor, she thought the first time she went there. Shen had seemed so preoccupied, she remembered, sitting at his desk listening to her account of the case. Telephone calls kept interrupting her. When he was talking on the phone, she sat very still, trying to efface herself completely, because what was being said might be important secrets which he wouldn’t want anybody to hear. She stared at the glass of tea on his desk. Imprisoned under the glass lid a white jasmine was drifting very slowly down through the yellowish green twilight of the tea and another flower was rising, both with the utter purposelessness and unconcern of clouds. As he talked into the phone his eyes rested on her, vacant and unwavering. When she finally made a slight uneasy movement to look back at him, he shifted his vacant stare to a piece of furniture beyond her.

He promised to make inquiries for her and shook hands without rising when she was leaving. Just then the telephone rang again. Picking it up and speaking into it, he seemed to have forgotten to release her hand. She stood awkwardly by his desk looking down at the oily separate strands of thin hair on the balding top of his head, each strand distinct over the greenish pallor of scalp. The thick black rim of his glasses came out from under the black wings of long hair over his ears. She felt stifled with her hand buried in the warm padded softness of his fat hand as if she was standing neck-deep in mud. It took all her will power to keep smiling and to wait a while before she pulled away.

She came back the next day as she had been instructed. But he seemed very vague. She wondered if he had remembered to make inquiries. He asked her the same questions all over again—she was sure he had never got them straight the first time. She told him she was engaged to Liu and he asked her about her past history, family background, the schools and university she had gone to, how she had been admitted into the Corps and the jobs she had held. It was understandable that she too was under suspicion. In any case, the more questions asked, the more hopeful it seemed.

When she apologized for the amount of time he had wasted on her, the third or fourth time she called, he said smiling, “I always have time for young people. It’s a sad thing for a revolutionary worker to lose touch with young people. After all, the Revolution is more for the benefit of your generation than for anybody else. Mustn’t forget that.”

That was the day he had told her he had made arrangements for her to meet a Comrade Li. He seemed unwilling to describe Li as being in charge of the Three-Anti cases. “He has a better grasp of the Three-Anti material than I do,” he said warily. “You’ll have a chance to tell him about Liu. And he might be able to give you some information. I’m asking him down for dinner this evening so you can talk to him.”

“This evening?” She heard herself saying almost automatically, without the slightest tell-tale pause, “But I won’t be able to get away this evening. There’s a special meeting.” She knew from experience that to be convincing, quickness counted more than the perfection of the excuse.

But he laughed cynically, with justifiable annoyance, “Aah, surely you have to take time out to eat? It won’t take long—Li is a busy man too.”

“Can I go and see him at his office, do you think?” she asked miserably. “Perhaps if I say you sent me—”

“I don’t think he has time for visitors just now,” Shen said brusquely. “He’s terribly rushed.”

After she left she was tormented by self-reproach. When she came again the next day after a sleepless night, she felt a little incredulous that he received her as usual.

“I had a talk with Li yesterday,” he told her. “About your friend’s case.” He looked reflectively at the glass of tea in front of him, twirling the glass lid around slightly, holding it by its knob. The broken squeak of glass scraping against glass grated on her in the sudden stillness.

“He’s definitely mixed up with Ts’ui P’ing. Acted as Ts’ui’s claws and teeth in several instances,” Shen said. “And so far he’s refused to confess. You know, of course, that makes it more serious.”

She did not really hear what else he said. She listened with frightful concentration, spongily absorbing every word and intonation, only to have it all spread and run into each other. Something about his special concern for her. He had been treating her as a special case, he said. But when she begged again for help, he sipped his tea, lapsed back into his relaxed absentmindedness.

Coming out into the street she wondered if she ought to telephone Ko Shan—defy for once the tacit quarantine imposed on all employees of the
Liberation Daily News
. Numbly she turned down the idea. It soon popped up again in her dazed mind as if she had never thought of it before. Again she turned it down. But even if there wasn’t anything Ko Shan could do, she wanted to tell her what had happened. She had a great need to tell somebody—anybody. Only the facts, which were simple enough: Shen hadn’t got anything definite for her until today, when he had told her the bad news. She wanted to hear herself tell the story straight, unembellished by all the details about Shen’s tones and expressions which might be pure imagination on her part.

If it was nothing, why had she refused to have dinner with him and that Comrade Li she was to meet?—when she had known how important that was and how offended he would feel. She had regretted it bitterly afterwards. But if she had gone to dinner, would Li have turned up? Was there a Li in the first place? Would it be at Shen’s house or one of the apartments he had taken over?—The trouble with her was that she had an inflamed, hyper-sensitive ego from dealing with the men who had made passes at her, she told herself. The first time she came into contact with anyone high up enough to be referred to as a
shou chang
, head leader, and she thought he was up to the same tricks.