Naked Earth (32 page)

The man walking in front of her had come up from the country with wild ducks to sell for the New Year. To leave his hands free he carried the dead ducks on his back, their necks bunched together and sewn on his worn old padded jacket of chalk-striped gray cloth. The ducks’ bills pressed flatly and snugly against the back of his thin shoulder. Their bodies, a glossy black-green with touches of light blue and copper on the wings, made a little feather cape that swung a bit as he walked. Su Nan tried not to look at it, the way it swung heavy and bright, a few steps ahead of her.

There must have been a market here earlier on in the day. The road was wet and littered. Frozen, spoilt cabbage leaves lay pasted on the sidewalk in big green patches, the rotted spots turned transparent in the pale green.

It seemed to her that the most he could do was refuse to help her. Would he go to the extent of damaging Liu’s case? And what would that get him if she were to remain stubborn? He wouldn’t want to risk a scandal at a time like this, with the Three Antis on. Though the fact that the Three Antis was going on did make it much less trouble to destroy a person than to save him—perhaps no trouble at all for one in Shen’s position.

She had often had this feeling as a child when she had done something disastrous, smashing a treasured vase, losing her coat or her school fees. Nothing could be helped—but there must be something she could do, something that just eluded her, something she had to reach for with desperate need.

It could be that Shen had been telling the truth when he said Liu’s situation was critical, and was merely withholding his help unless she proved more tractable. It would make no difference actually. But at least that would mean that Liu was in danger for his life. It wasn’t as if he would have been all right but for her meddling.

Sickening, she thought—the deviousness and cunning of the way her mind worked. But she would rather die than think that if anything was to happen to Liu, it was she who had killed him.

The little dark green cape of duck feathers swayed a little from side to side, thick and slow, always suspended in front of her. A grocery shop along the way was sunning
fen ssu
on the sidewalk, big coils of thin brittle silver wire, magnificent nests of some fairy bird. Su Nan stepped around them with exaggerated, drunken care.

She felt the sun through her hair. Her hair felt thin with the sun on it. At this moment she hated and despised the self-contained integrity of her being, the mild, unthinking pleasure she took in the consciousness of her person, the movements of her limbs inside her padded uniform.

But what guarantee would she get—even if Liu was immediately set free, it meant nothing. She had a relative who had been arrested on suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities. He had been released after several months and arrested again within two weeks. Since then he had been in and out of jail several times, travelling in a well-greased rut. It was not like in the days of the warlords when the country was split and it was possible to flee from one sphere of influence to another. Nowadays the whole country lay stretched out like an open palm, ready to close around any one person at any minute.

She had thought she was prepared to throw herself into the breach, damming the darkness flooding over Liu. And yet, now that the sacrifice had turned into mere atonement, she found herself running away from it, outraged and resentful. Running away, crying out for Liu.

CARS PASSED
on the street outside. The headlights flashed high and white into the dark room and the shadows of the bars on the window flicked over the men sitting jammed tight on the floor. Twenty men had been crowded into the small room.

The overhead light that used to be on all night had been turned off early this evening. Something was afoot, Liu thought.

No talking was allowed. Somebody was scratching, though. Alarmingly at first, the microphone high up on the wall also started scratching in long dry rustling strokes. Up until now it had just been a silent fixture on the wall, like an electric or gas meter. After a good bit of desultory sandpapering, a man’s voice came on. The low pleasant voice was little more than a breathy whisper “
T’an-pai! T’an-pai
quick!
T’an-pai shih sheng-lu; k’ang chü shih ssu-lu. T’an-pai
is the road to life; resistance is the road to death.”

After a pause for two or three minutes it again whispered,
T’an-pai shih sheng-lu; k’ang chü shih ssu-lu
.” It stopped after the seventh or eighth repetition, just when it was beginning to get mechanical and almost soothing.

Liu sat with arms hugging his knees. Elbows and back encased in filthy, smell-absorbent Liberation Suits pushed against him on all sides. Bones creaked when somebody tried to change his posture. A phlegmy cough was heard, half smothered. But the darkness and long silence were beginning to open up empty spaces overhead, room for whole lifetimes to hang brooding over them.

It must have been at least an hour later when there came a rattling of bolts and keys outside the door. The door was flung open, the lighted rectangle half blocked by silhouetted guards. Torchlight swept over the crowd on the floor. The thick beam of wan yellow light swung around in careless arcs, a train of blind faces materializing in its wake. Liu felt it pause on his face, the numb-touch of that round white spot that was more a hand than an eye.

Then it switched away and he heard somebody shout, “Yao Hsüeh-fan! Stand up!”

The light was cutting across the room. It picked out a man huddled by the closed tin pail at the corner. By tacit agreement the man who came latest to the room occupied the space which smelled the worst.

Yao was trying to get up. But the guards, who were adept at making people appear cowards, had already waded in, stepping over hands and feet, to seize him and drag him out of the room.

The door slammed shut and footsteps receded down the corridor. Other doors were unbolted noisily and there were muffled shouts, presumably calling out the names of other prisoners. Quite a handful of men were marched down the corridor. Then they were out of hearing.

Darkness came back in a rush, enfolding Liu in its clumsy stifling embrace. It was as if more men had been thrown into the room, half piling on top of him, their padded uniforms gritty with dirt. They weighed like sandbags and were as reassuring.

Then he heard the sound of shots. Not loud, but distinct enough. Executions usually took place out in Kiang wan, Liu thought. Not inside the compounds here. Had they really shot them? Maybe they were doing this for theatrical effect. They always went in for psychological tactics. Like during the suppression of counter-revolutionaries last year, when they had had a loudspeaker radio in prison tuned in to the public trial in I Yuan, the former dog-track. The suspects in prison heard the voice of thousands roar out the verdict, “
Sha! Sha!
Kill! Kill!”

The electric light suddenly flicked on. A moment later the microphone started its scratchy noise. The spokesman’s voice was loud and bright when it came on. “All the bigoted factors who resisted
t’an-pai
have been shot! Everybody
t’an-pai
, quick! Review your past sins once more in your mind, carefully. Then
t’an-pai
thoroughly. Tonight is your last chance! You will have your last chance to
t’ an-pai
tonight.”

The light went off once more. After a long pause the microphone again started whispering, “
T’an-pai shih sheng-lu; k’ang chü shih ssu-lu
.”

Liu did not know whether all his roommates were meditating on their past sins. They were supposed to be doing just that all along, night and day. Guards watching through cracks in the door saw to it that they all sat silent with bowed heads in a somewhat Buddhist posture of penitent introspection. They seldom risked talking but when Liu first came in here the man sitting next to him had whispered without turning toward him “
Na-li lai-te
? Where from?” Since then he had heard the same question asked of every new arrival. He supposed it was important to know who you were put in the same room with, as a means of gauging where you stood.

From their brief mumbled replies it would seem that many of them were high-ranking “retained personnel” of nationalized concerns—former bank or factory managers who had kept their old jobs after the government took over. Liu was familiar enough with such cases, having worked at the Three-Anti headquarters. Those men were invariably charged with corruption and required to pay back enormous embezzled sums which were, in fact, ransoms. The other occupants of the cell, he decided, were non-Party member
kan-pu
like himself. One of the slogans of the Three Antis was to “Tidy Up the Middle Layer.” There were up to ten million non-Party member
kan-pu
in the country and they probably needed sorting out and tidying up. They were called “the middle layer” because they stood somewhere between the capitalist and proletarian class. Their standpoints were not clear and definite enough.

Liu himself had been taken out several times to be interrogated by police sergeants. Some of the questions seemed trivial, like “How old is your father, if alive? And your mother?” Then, much later, after a lot of other questions, suddenly thrusting this one on him, “Your father is older than your mother by how many years?” to see if he had been lying. But he could judge by the general drift of the questions that he had been incriminated on account of Ts’ui P’ing. He could tell also that whoever informed against him knew enough about his work and Ts’ui’s to give the far-fetched accusations a certain plausibility.

Who else could it be but Chang? The man was almost a walking biography of Ts’ui, with the wealth of information supplied wittingly or unwittingly by Ho, the Culinary Officer.

He felt as certain about that as he did about anything these days, which was not saying much. It did something to a man to realize that the dull unfailing punctuality of tomorrows could no longer be counted upon. It was as upsetting as living in a world with no gravitational pull. Isolated thoughts and impressions were apt to jump at him, compressed to a hard pellet, out of a uniform gray numbness. Or sometimes it was like a fragment of a tune you could not get out of your head, droning on and on and on until it ground itself into pulpy nonsense.

A car’s headlights flashed into the window and were gone. To him it was the world going by—too fast. He felt for it a longing that was past resentment.

He had been thinking a lot of the past twenty-odd years of his life. He thought of Su Nan most of the time because she stood for all his yearning and unfulfilled dreams. He thought of Ko Shan too. She had given him a good time—almost forced it on him. Only now it turned out that it was not free of charge. He had had it on credit and the price was rather steep, if he was to pay with his life.

He drew some comfort from the thought that if he was not to come out of this alive, nobody could guess the real cause. He couldn’t bear thinking of Su Nan getting to know that he had died because he got mixed up with some other woman.

The light came on again. Guards opened the door and distributed paper and pencils.

“You have exactly two hours to write your confessions. Remember this is your last chance. So be thorough. Write on one side of the paper only.”

The floor space next to the tin pail, formerly shunned, now became the most coveted seat because the closed stool could serve as a desk. It was very hard to keep your pencil from piercing the paper spread over your lap or over the floor, full of cracks. Liu was reminded of the stories his grandfather used to tell about the discomforts of imperial examinations, especially the highest one held in the presence of the emperor when you had to write kneeling down.

He pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. He knew that people undergoing the Three Antis or Five Antis often said whatever was required of them, made up things if necessary, then tried to back out of it when it came to paying. They had probably argued, not without reason, that you should save your neck first and then, so long as there was breath in your body, you could always haggle and bargain and get off with a compromise. Liu had heard of countless cases in which
kan-pu
and businessmen had confessed to embezzling public funds in astronomical figures which later proved to be either untrue or greatly exaggerated. He had always thought it foolish as well as cowardly. And anyway in his case it was impracticable. Even if he was to “disgorge” only a fraction of his illegal gains, where was he to get the money?

After the guards had come and collected the confessions the light went off again. Liu had many misgivings about his paper but he felt reasonably certain that nothing more was going to happen tonight. There was even the possibility that the next few days would be uneventful. The examiners must have time to go over the papers, discuss and analyze them and look into the facts before they made any decisions.

A few people in the room were snoring, sitting up. But most of them were too excited to sleep. Again footsteps sounded along the corridor. Not the pacing guard—several of them. They came and stopped at the door, taking what seemed to be ages to open it.

“Stand up, Liu Ch’üan!” one of the guards called out, holding a slip of paper in his hand. “
Ch’u-lai! Ch’u-lai!
Come-out, come-out!” he rapped, making one word of it.

Liu raised himself quickly on to his cramped feet and ploughed his way out, stumbling. He was aware of hands fumbling for his in the dark and holding it for an instant as he pushed past. A dim spasm of anger and hate ran through him at the touch of those hands. Right now he would like to feel that he was alone and unfettered, with nothing to keep him. And those hands were like life itself tugging at his heart.

Three guards trotted him down the passage, then down the stairs. He estimated it must be after midnight, which always seemed to be considered the best time for executions.

The corridor downstairs made a turn. The guards pushed open a door to a lighted room without knocking. He supposed there would be the usual procedure, identification, a few questions asked by an officer. He had expected a bare office but it looked more like the warden’s living room, with upholstered chairs, little round glass-topped tables and scrolls of paintings on the walls. He had already forgotten what an ordinary room looked like. It seemed so unreal, lighted by the lamp with its scalloped orange-pink paper shade.