Naked Earth (41 page)

The man kept everybody awake at night screaming, “I want my leg back! You butchers! Executioners! Give me back my leg!” He sounded like the ghost of the beheaded man in so many old stories, wanting his head back. The soldier shrieked on and on, stopped only by fits of violent sobbing. He wouldn’t be taking it this way if they only explained to him that they had to remove his leg to save his life, Liu thought. But he supposed that with the shortage of interpreters it was impossible to prepare every POW who was to be operated on. And the doctors were so rushed, they really could not be expected to worry about what was, after all, beyond the call of their duty. Liu felt a certain guilt himself because he could easily have explained to the man and was afraid to.

But it was just common sense. One day everybody would be going home. And there would always be enough unpleasantness back there without making trouble for yourself. The war prisoners would be going home; so would their keepers. He wasn’t the only one to look at it that way. So what if your captors were humane? Their goodness only saddened you because it had nothing to do with you.

The doctor and nurses made their rounds early every morning. After them came the sun. Liu noticed that lately it had been coming deeper into the wooden shack. The summer sun looked so bored on its duty calls, it apparently knew that its coming and going did not mean anything to these men. They no longer did anything with their days and nights.

Breakfast often interfered with the doctor’s morning round. While a patient was having his wound treated and his bandages changed, his bowl of rice would be cooling on his night table. Sometimes a man would eat while he was being attended to, twisting his head around between mouthfuls to look at his wound. The comforting warm white rice must taste a bit funny, mixed with the pain.

A young soldier had just arrived from the Chinese POW camp on Koje Island. He had been sent to the hospital in Seoul to have shrapnel removed from his thigh, and then brought back here to rest up after the operation. He seemed to be doing very well. The first day he arrived he sang to himself while lying in bed. Liu had often heard soldiers humming
shan ko
, hill songs, but had never heard them sung out loud. All hill songs were love songs and would meet with jeering disapproval in the Communist army. But now the young man was singing one about bamboos which seemed to be a little girl’s ditty:

The singer’s face, turned sideways on the pillow, was unsmiling. He had rather long cheeks, a hard, good profile and slightly protuberant eyelids that looked a little sullen. He sang in a high voice, but quite a falsetto, with lots of little extra “ai’s” thrown in to give it bounce. The singing sounded strange in the afternoon silence. Outside the row of windows the compound was one large, smooth cake of dust in the glare. Three wooden watchtowers were in view, boxlike and unpainted, set wide apart. Trucks roared and puffed in and out. In the ward the few men who were not asleep constantly gave out little groans that got to be perfunctory and annoying, less like groans than the pointless sighs of old folks as they moved about or sat down, expressive of mild exertion or contentment.

Another song he sang was wistful as well as a little hypocritical:

It could not be more Chinese. Listening, Liu could see the undulating hills, the plains blanketed by paddies, the mud hut by the peach tree in bloom, thin black branches standing skeletal in the ball of mauvish pink mist. The whole familiar landscape unrolled before him, oppressive in its vastness.

The man gave his name and outfit when somebody tried to talk to him. His name was Chiao. He answered questions with peasant shortness.

“What’s it like in camp?”

“Food not bad,” he said. “Not so good as what you have here.” Then he had started to sing.

Supper was early, before sunset. After supper a nurse came to give Chiao a rubdown. A slight ripple of excitement and consternation ran across the ward when he turned over to lie face downward. Not everybody saw at once what was on his back. The electric light had just been turned on but it was a time of day when it was not much brighter with the light on. The long room was a tobacco-colored box with windows cut out showing rectangles of bright blue-green sky. The tattoo on Chiao’s naked back was crudely done and the strokes were too thin and spiky for the large characters. The four characters in a vertical row read, “
Fan-Kung, k’ang o
; anti-Communist, resist Russia.”

After the nurse was gone, a man asked, “What’s that on your back?”

“I got it in camp. Everybody’s got one,” Chiao said, buttoning up his pajama top. Then he corrected himself. “Some had it different. Some had ‘
Shih ssu fan-Kung
; vow to destroy Communism till death.’ Also four characters.”

“You mean they forced everybody to be tattooed?” the man asked incredulously.

“No, nobody forced me. Why?” Chiao rolled over to look at the man. “I wanted it. What’s there to be scared of now? Nobody can clap ‘reactionary hats’ on you now and get you shot.”

“Traitor!” the man flung at him. Somebody else called out, “Imperialist spy! Are you a Chinese or aren’t you?”

“I’m as Chinese as you! I’m against the Russian big-noses and their running dogs who fight their war for them—send us here to
tso t’i ssu kuei
, be the ghost to take their place.” He was talking about the common belief that the ghosts of suicides are doomed to haunt the places where they died and are not freed for reincarnation unless they can entice other men to take their own lives in a similar manner, filling their places.

“Where did you pick up this sort of talk, comrade? In camp?” another man asked pityingly.

“I know what I’m talking about.
Ma ti
, a man ought at least to know good from bad. Look what they did here for my leg wound. I’ve been wounded before—you ever been to a Volunteers hospital? You lie on the ground—in the open air when the caves are full up. All the nurses ever do is to feed you rice gruel three times a day. I don’t blame those that refuse to be disarmed. That’s the only way to get any attention in a Volunteers hospital—threaten them with grenades.”

“He’s bought,” several people cried out at once. “Imperialist spy!
T’a! T’a!
Beat him! Beat him!
T’a-ah! T’a-ah!

Liu had been following the conversation closely. But violence always came too fast for him, catching him unawares. It gave him quite a turn to see two men hobbling on their crutches toward Chiao’s bed. Somebody tossed a kidney dish in Chiao’s direction, yelling encouragingly, “
T’a! T’a-ah!
”

“Comrades! Now just a minute, comrades,” Liu heard Instructor Hsi’s voice call out. “We mustn’t forget we’re all prisoners here. We may belong to different parties and factions, it makes no difference. As long as we’re prisoners we have to observe the rules.”

Chiao had sat up tense and pale in bed. “Come on,
T’a and T’a ma ti
, where do you think you are?” He waited, but the men on crutches returned muttering to their beds. Liu saw them exchange looks and wondered what it meant.

Bed check had always seemed a funny institution to Liu—two stalwart UN military policemen marching shoulder to shoulder into a roomful of sick and wounded people. Eyes watchful under their steel helmets, with their guns on their hips, they looked as if they were ready for anything. Tonight he felt differently. He was on the verge of speaking to them when they came to his bed. The only thing that stopped him was his certain knowledge that whatever he warned them of would not happen. The others would have guessed what he was saying, even if they did not understand. They would merely put it off—that and their revenge on him which was bound to come sooner or later. Meanwhile the hospital staff would not like him for telling false tales. The last thing they would want to do was to take sides in the patients’ brawls. Pro-Communist, or anti-Communist, these POWs were not going to be with them long.

The guards were gone. The nurses had made their last rounds. In the dimmed-out ward the rows of beds looked inhumanly tidy. Liu had never realized how quiet it was here at night. The staff’s quarters were on the other side of the compound. Liu had read quite a few detective stories. Nearly all of them were translations. The few Chinese attempts at detective fiction just did not sound real at all. He supposed it was because murder mysteries were basically impossible in a Chinese environment. Murders there were, but never mysteries. There was never any question of who had dropped in on the deceased from eleven at night to quarter past twelve. Just pump the houseful of servants who were on duty twenty-four hours a day. In the absence of servants the deceased must be so poor that he would be living cheek by jowl with several other families. The neighbors would supply all necessary information. Liu had often envied the westerners their privacy which the Chinese never have and probably never would now, with the coming of the Communists and their Group Life. But now he thought bitterly that you could always depend on the westerners to arrange things so that the prisoners would have here the neat and cozy, air-tight isolation on the night of the murder.

There were some whisperings at Instructor Hsi’s end of the room, but they did not start anything until hours later. Liu stiffened at the patter of running feet and the sound of scuffling. He lifted his head to look. Several men were dragging Chiao, struggling and kicking, into the aisle. He wondered why Chiao did not cry out. Then he saw dimly the white beard of a towel trailing down his chin. He supposed the first thing they did was to gag him.

They had Chiao pinned down flat now. Somebody was pounding on him with a big stick. Liu had a glimpse of the crosspiece on top of the stick, so it must be a crutch. It came down with the regularity of a pestle, with dulled, light thuds. For a moment he speculated if he was strong enough to get up, climb out the window and get help. They would grab him before he had gone far. Anyhow there was no time for anything like that. They were hitting the man on his chest.

He caught hold of the water bottle on his night-table and smashed it against the window-pane. There seemed a perceptible pause before it crashed on the ground, a shower of splinters tinkling in its wake. Without turning round he knew that the small knot of “operators” had stopped to look at him in amazement. He did not know what to do next unless it was to crash out the window after the bottle. They would be upon him in a second.

Then a broad beam of blue-white light swooped in the window. The big jagged hole in the glass stood out clear. It was the searchlight from one of the watchtowers. It swerved round briefly, then returned to the broken window. Liu almost felt like giggling to see the strong light contemplating seriously the foot of his cot, an edge of the night-table and his slippers on the floor. His feet were out of sight because he was sitting up. He could not see the men very well. The blinding light had cut the dark room in two. They are probably trying to make up their minds whether they should spring at him across the moat of light.

When the guards rushed in and all the lights were turned on, the rioters were all back in bed. Only Chiao was left, lying on the floor, still gagged. Liu told the story in his stiff, rusty English. He supposed he did not do it very well.

Chiao was whisked away for medical examination. The questioning lasted a good part of the night. The rioters were reprimanded and warned through interpreters. But evidently the affair was not taken too seriously. Chiao’s bafflingly strong constitution was partly to blame. He was sent back to the ward a few days later, apparently none the worse for his chest injuries.

Liu had thought he wouldn’t survive another night in the same ward with the Positive Elements after this. But aside from some muttered threats to traitors, Instructor Hsi had kept them under control. Of course they would want to wait a while before doing anything to him.

Chiao’s cot had its head pushed against a wooden post half encased in the wall. After Chiao came back he always lay with his head propped up against the pillar, the better to observe in case anyone should sneak up on him. He looked funny with his neck at right angles to his body. His face seemed carved on a totem pole, it merged so well with the unpainted wood. Liu often caught Chiao watching him, though Liu was the one man in the room he need not guard against.

Their beds were too far apart for conversation and anyhow it was inadvisable to talk. They hardly exchanged glances. Liu could understand the man’s embarrassment. Circumstances had thrust them into a relationship too close for comfort. Still, they did come to a tacit understanding that they would take turns sleeping at night. When Liu had turned and tossed and coughed long enough, he noticed that the shaved head with its yellow wooden luster had slipped off the post on to the pillow, asleep.

The day Chiao was going to be discharged from the hospital, he stopped by Liu’s bed on his way to the latrine just before dawn. Liu woke up with a slight start.

“You are a light sleeper,” Chiao said. He seemed pleased.

“Well, you’ve got to be one around here,” Liu murmured.

“Sure. Just like a ‘black inn.’” He meant the inns that figured so much in old stories, where the innkeeper robbed and murdered all travellers who stopped there. “That was a near thing—the other night,” he said grinning and repeated several times, “a near thing.” Liu guessed that he was being thanked.

“You’re lucky to be leaving,” Liu said smiling.

“What about you? When can you get out of here?”