Naked Earth (40 page)

There were sounds of an altercation in the cab ahead and presently the truck screeched to a stop. Other trucks were pulling up sharply behind them.

“
Ya ch’e t’ung-chih!
Comrade Car-guard!” some of the men called out.

They heard the door of the truck cab clicking open, then the patter of running steps.

“What’s happened? Comrade Driver! Comrade Car-guard!” Then somebody wailed, “The sons of bitches—they’ve run away! Just left us in the middle of the road.”

Somebody else cursed, “Those mongrel bastards! I’ve always known they aren’t men. Those guards are the worst. When the truck carries supplies they always force the driver to break through. Now they just don’t care. Our lives aren’t worth anything. They just stick to the driver and see that he doesn’t go over the hill—that’s all they care.”

Others were still screaming for the driver and the two guards to come back. The pitch-dark truck-bed could scarcely hold the alarm and clamor. But already an all-pervading stillness and brilliance was closing in around them. The sound of the planes seemed part of the silence, like the scraping hiss of an old silent film.

“Where are the sons of bitches? I’ll get them. I’ll throw a grenade at all three of them. You just watch.” The man who had kept his grenade belt had a big hole in his stomach but he struggled to sit up. Liu knew he would not be able to go after the three, though he was quite capable of tossing off a grenade inside here, blowing up the truck before the bombs could get at it.

Liu found himself climbing down the rear of the truck. He did not know about the others but he was crawling away from the truck that stood brilliantly lit in the black puddle of its own shadow. The imprisoned furor inside seemed to reach out after him. More flares burst and a green-lit heaven bore down on him in intensive, microscopic scrutiny. Doomsday would dawn like this, if it ever came. He felt like a beetle and seemed to cover as little ground as a beetle going at full speed. It took so long to get to the side of the road and off into the field.

His wound hurt like fire. The field was wide but wherever he crawled there was a path of fire in front of him. He crept along like a wisp of flame in the blackened stubble. It would seem to die out and then, after a long moment, suddenly leap up again, the golden red tongue thinned and diffused as it swelled out, going up with a faint hum. But it finally went out altogether.

He did not hear the explosion of the first bomb.

THE SOLDIER
carrying him said something in an abrupt grunt to someone else. He was slung over the man’s shoulder. Seen upside down, the yellow-brown earth hung wobbling over him, a heavy sky perilously close, as if about to fall. The man was not big and was staggering under his weight. They seemed to be talking Korean. Liu dimly remembered shouting for help as the two of them passed by.

They were heading for the road. Trucks and jeeps were moving along the roadway again. The purr of traffic were strange, civilized sounds, Liu thought. The man carrying him gave another grunt in answer to something his companion said. He stopped and slowly bending his knees, squatted and lowered Liu to the ground. The other man came around to pick him up under the shoulders while the man who had been carrying him picked him up by the legs. They started off again, carrying Liu between them. During the reshuffling Liu got a chance to take a good look at them and realized for the first time that they were wearing South Korean uniforms. In his feebleness it only gave him a small shock, which, if anything, helped to clear his head.

They must have picked him up because he was dressed like a
kan-pu
and could very well be an officer of some importance. They had no way of telling, since no badges of rank were worn by the People’s Volunteers in Korea.

Were these men a patrol? He listened for the thump of distant guns. There didn’t seem to be any. But then there came an absentminded peal or two, like summer thunder, as if it was raining in another part of the country, though the sun was shining here. The line must have shifted. Have we been cut off? he wondered. He couldn’t have been unconscious for long. But things happen so fast out here with everything motorized. The long smooth run of traffic unimpeded by horse-carts and pack-mules sounded ominous now, telling him that he was well inside enemy territory.

His wound had wakened before he had. It was screaming in his ears without a break, sometimes like a hungry infant, sometimes like a forest full of cicadas on a hot day. He tried not to cry out when the men stumbled over rough spots. After they climbed to the road they passed wrecked trucks, blackened husks all burned out inside. The cheap tin-can bareness within the cab made him shiver. Was one of those trucks the one he had escaped from? There had been four. He forgot to count.

The enemy soldiers finally brought him to a big cave at the foot of the ridge. He guessed it was a South Korean first-aid station. A Chinese interpreter asked him his name, rank and outfit. He answered as best he could but he did not expect to be believed. It was a common practice for captured officers to give a lower rank than their real one. A Korean nurse snipped away parts of his blood-encrusted uniform and a Korean doctor looked over his wound. The examination was so painful that he lost consciousness again.

He came to at the back of a jeep. They must be taking him to the headquarters for questioning. It turned out to be a long journey. It was dark when they drove into a large city in semi-blackout and they woke him again by lifting him out of the jeep.

The next morning when he roused himself from drugged sleep, the UN hospital in Seoul struck him as a fantastic thing. It floated shiplike and almost palatial on the gray sea of war. They must be pretty anxious that he should live, so they could get information out of him. They evidently still had the wrong idea about his identity; it wasn’t a real officer they’d captured, just a disillusioned ex-student whose career was finished anyway. A lot of stories had been circulated about the Americans using torture on war prisoners. He had not believed all that he had heard. But after all, war is war. He hadn’t the least idea of what was coming, so that the modest comfort of clean pajamas and snow white sheets and the foreign nurses in attendance took on sultanic and sinister splendor.

All the doctors and nurses were foreigners. To him that was nothing unusual. But all the wounded men were westerners too. He had never seen so many foreigners. His contact with such people had been limited to books and films and a college professor at his university, to him they always seemed to talk like books and behave like film characters and were quite unreal. It stunned him to see the two rows of sun-baked faces, pink or meaty red, very much flesh-and-blood against the chill white of beds and wall. It was rather careless and slipshod of the people in charge to put a Chinese captive together with their own wounded. This went to show that their security measures were very lax, he thought weakly with a habit-taught flicker of disapproval.

He had been re-examined, had his dressings changed, and was given a blood transfusion upon arrival at the hospital. They were giving him penicillin injections and vitamin pills and made him eat beef and liver. But they did not let him have enough water to drink. A nurse brought him chewing gum and showed him by gestures that he was to chew it when he felt thirsty. Out of caution he did not speak English to them, not wishing to call attention to himself in any way. The nurses laughed and joked with the other patients. To him they were brisk and unsmiling. If their eyes were not pale blue they seemed to turn that color when they looked at him. Blue eyes, remote—and somehow empty when he thought suddenly of Su Nan. In their weariness and their rumpled uniforms they were not as pretty as the nurses in the movies. Liu had gone to foreign movies often before he had learned to condemn them.

They gave him sedatives again so he had a good night’s sleep the second day. Waking up he was astounded to find a Chinese in the bed next to his. The man had just had an operation. Liu waited hours in feverish suspense before the effects of the anesthetics wore off and the man could talk a little. He said he was a soldier from the 33rd Section. He spoke with a Szechuan accent. Liu saw that he had a head wound and another in his thigh.

So Liu was not the only Chinese war prisoner brought here for treatment. Then they had not singled him out, expecting to extract information from him. His heart throbbed with sudden hope. But it was inconceivable that these people should run the war like a charity. The little Szechuanese was getting several vitamin and penicillin injections a day, more than any westerner in the ward got, because his condition was critical.

They had to give the Szechuanese one blood transfusion after another. Then the nurses put up a screen around his bed and Liu knew that he was dying. When Liu was wheeled back into the ward after his own operation, the screen was gone and so was the Szechuanese. The few words they had exchanged had felt like a family reunion on New Year’s Eve, and made Liu more acutely conscious of being lost and adrift among strangers in a foreign country, an outlaw and an invalid.

Liu’s operation turned out well. The incredible days repeated themselves. He never could get over waking up from a nap and finding tea or milk and biscuits by his pillow. His astonishment was almost resentful. No wonder that over on the other side they called American soldiers
shao-yeh ping
, young-master soldiers. They were that pampered.

These people lived in such a state of plenty, they could afford to give in to humanitarian impulses, whimsically overwhelming the recipients of their charity with kingly gestures. It means little or nothing to them to lavish medical care on their captives, Liu thought. It did not pledge them to anything. What was to happen to him next remained yet to be seen. He remembered some detective thriller he had read, translated from English. The cornered murderer was riddled with bullets and finally caught. He was rushed to a hospital where they did their best to save his life and nurse him back to health just so that he could stand trial and be hanged. They do things like that. For three weeks, prey to these thoughts, he lay in the ward, served with impersonal kindness by the blue-eyed nurses.

His mind was not at rest until he got transferred to the POW hospital in Pusan. A hospital train took him there as soon as he was in condition to travel. It was reassuring to be back among his own countrymen once more. And it seemed to him that they lived in circumstances somewhat more appropriate to their station as prisoners of war. The large wards were a series of wooden shacks set in a compound surrounded by barbed wire. The Chinese food was all right but nothing fancy and without the perpetual round of little snacks.

The austerity and rigidity of routine pleased him. The change was like going to boarding school from a sumptuous boyhood home where he had felt insecure.

Many of the patients here were also on their way to recovery, which he thought rather a pleasant thing, at first. He soon found that prudence returned with health. Here it was not like it was with the little Szechuanese who died, when they could have said anything to each other so long as they had the strength.

The prevalent sentiment here seemed to be pro-Communist. Liu was first aware of it when the word went round: “Better stay here as long as you can. They’re starving over at the camp.” This news was supposed to come from another ward where a recent arrival from the North Korean POW camp had brought the news.

“That means the American imperialists are running out of supplies,” somebody said. “Let’s step up the eating. We’ll exhaust the Paper Tigers.”

A Grab Rice Movement was proposed. If anyone in the room objected, he wisely held his tongue. Liu managed to keep out of the conversation by pretending he had not yet recovered from the fatigue of his trip here. But at supper that evening the Szechuanese in the next bed to his snatched his rice bowl and turned it upside down over his own, pressing the rice together. “
Mao-je fan
, hot rice,” he said, giggling. The white dome of rice stuck out of the bowl like a round cap.

“Ai, ai—no teasing.” Liu reached out for the bowl, trying to make a joke of it.

“You yell for more if you want to eat. Just say I took your share. What of it? Your dad’s hungry. Not enough rice to go round.”

There were arguments and remonstrations when the nurse came. An interpreter had to be called in. Liu was glad they didn’t know he spoke English. The Positive Elements in the ward would always be wondering what he had actually said if he ever spoke to the hospital staff in English; if anything went wrong it must be because he had informed on them.

Later he spotted the one who must be the man behind the scene here, in charge of “Mutual Consolidation”—that is, mutual watching. Liu did not recognize him at first—an Instructor Hsi, a Party member. Here he had given his name as Wu P’ei and his rank as mess sergeant.

The Grab Rice Movement did not go very far for the lack of active participation. But heartening messages were always being passed around, news of the Volunteers’ latest victories and of fallings out among the members of the United Nations who had sent troops to Korea. The news was supposed to be brought by recent arrivals in other wards.

Liu was hardly surprised to find himself subject to the extra-territorial rule of the Party. To begin with he had never consciously felt that he had passed beyond the boundary line. He wondered if anybody who had lived under Communist rule could ever feel unwatched again.

A new man in the ward had just had an operation. He had a bad shock waking up to find that he had lost a leg. He wept and screamed, “Give me back my leg! I’d rather die! At least die with a whole carcass!”

“
T’a ma ti
, those imperialist executioners!” a Positive Element exclaimed in sympathy. “Feel like cutting off your arm today, or sawing off your leg tomorrow—just as they please. And drug you so you can’t struggle. Ai, comrade.
Ma ti
—worse than sitting on tiger benches.” He referred to the most common instrument of torture back home. “Just sawed the leg right off!”