Peking Story (16 page)

Although the dying girl had been packed away out of sight, she was still very much with us, because we could hear her groaning inside the coffin. Her groans grew weaker, until they could barely be heard beneath the sobbing of the girls, when suddenly the murky, underworld air was rent, from offstage, by an unsteady rooty-toot-toot, presumably meant to be the clarion call of an army bugle. It was the People's Liberation Army, of course, arrived in the nick of time. The hag cowered, knocking against the scenery. And, in a very short time, what with more bugles and some soldiers (actually, more prostitutes in soldier's uniforms) everyone (except the old hag, who got dragged off) was beside herself with happiness, enlightened by a transcendental understanding of Marxian creed, miraculously cured of a host of diseases, and off to the button factory.

Elder Sister kept telling us that it hadn't happened that way, at all. The only thing she recognized, she said, was one of her girls on the stage, a girl who was not Lily, I was disappointed to see.

The acting of the girls was sadly unconvincing, except for the astonishment on the face of the old hag when she leaped aside to avoid a rock that had been hurled at her from out of the audience. For what purpose a rock came to be brought into the theater in the first place, I couldn't guess, but it clattered noisily across stage, causing the dying girl to forget her next lines, while the hag glared indignantly at the audience.

I had previously heard that the villains in the new drama theaters were often physically assaulted by audiences so infuriated that they had, in one instance, clambered over the foot-lights and seriously injured an actor.

But even the rock was not enough to distract me from the real performance taking place in the middle rows of the theater across the aisle to our right, which were occupied by some thirty or forty serious-looking young students, all members apparently, since they had come together, of the same discussion group.

At the time they first trooped into the theater, I had felt in them that extra intensity of dedication, a poised-on-the-brink, arid, unlovely soulfulness distinguishing those initiated to the giddy spiritual heights of socialistic perfection. The symbols of this new elite, the compressed lips, the knitted brow, the searching look in the eyes, were becoming more and more the vogue in Peking and, fortunately for the ambitious, could be easily imitated.

The boys in the aisle across from me were not pretending, I was sure. They breathed a thinner, rarer air than the rest of us, it seemed to me, and as the play progressed they proved me right.

While the hag went through her paces on the stage, cursing and beating the girls, the boys across from me seemed to be reacting not so much to the play as struggling with their own inner demons. Tears streamed from their eyes, and their faces were contorted in agonies of fury and uncontrollable despair. They writhed in their seats, cried out unintelligible guttural sounds, and gasped for breath. I had not expected so much genuine emotion, and turned completely around in my seat to watch them. One of the boys on the row nearest to me began to tremble violently, as if a current of electricity were passing through his body, and his eyes rolled back, leaving only the whites staring at the stage. Suddenly, as if the voltage had been turned full on, he arched out of his seat and toppled over into the aisle, where he lay absolutely rigid, although apparently still alive, since his heels clattered on the floor and foam bubbled from the corner of his mouth.

This created a certain commotion, but ushers quickly rushed down the aisle and carried him out as easily as if he had been a plank of wood. His groaning, twisting companions, immersed, it seemed, in the interior ecstasies of their own souls, had paid no attention at all. They were beyond noticing anything, I soon discovered, because in a few minutes, fits and convulsions spread through the whole group. To my amazement, no sooner did one keel over in his seat, foaming at the mouth, to be carried away, than another followed suit. Some three or four of them had passed into convulsions and had been carried out, when an older man, sitting in the first row of the balcony, got up and addressed the audience. “Comrades!” he called out, “restrain yourselves! This is only a play!” The play practically stopped. The sobbing girls dropped their handkerchiefs and frankly stared, open-mouthed, into the audience. Only the offstage bugler, on cue, and unaware evidently of all that was going on out front, rescued the performance and the audience, from helpless chaos.

“Really,” Elder Sister said as we left the theater, “it didn't happen that way at all. Why have they changed everything? Everyone knows the brothels were closed this year. How can they show the Communist army liberating them the year before last?” No one answered.

We all took pedicabs. Ninth Sister had hired her pedicab separately a little ahead of the rest of us and, although we could see it in the distance, her pedicab was traveling much faster than ours and, after a while, passed out of sight. When we arrived home, however, Ninth Sister, excited and flushed, was waiting at the gate. “I know now, Fourth Sister,” she said to Aimee, “why those pedicab men demanded more money the other night.” We walked into the house together, while Ninth Sister breathlessly told her story. The pedicab man she had hired at the theater had thought she was alone and, just before he got to Crooked Hair Family Lane, had said, “You see, I'm a fast pedaller. I go everywhere. If you promise me a commission, I can bring you first-class customers.”

Ninth Sister had been too astounded to speak. Besides, she told us, she was curious and decided to keep quiet. When the pedicab man arrived at Crooked Hair Family Lane, instead of asking where she lived, he passed the Yu family gate and continued on down the street.

“Can you guess? He took me straight to the door of one of those rented houses opposite the Wang mansion!” Ninth Sister exclaimed. “He was very surprised when I told him I didn't live there, and he was even more surprised when I told him to come back and stop in front of this gate. ‘But this is the mansion of old Justice Yu!' he said.

“ ‘Yes, of course it is,' I told him, ‘and I'm his daughter, and I want to know what you meant by those things you said to me, and I want to know who lives in that other house you took me to?'

“ ‘I can't tell such things to a young lady like you,' he said.

“Our gateman had come out, so I said, ‘Then tell it to him. He's not a young lady,' and I went inside to wait.” She paused for breath. “You should
hear
what he told our gateman!”

“What
did
he tell him?” Aimee asked.

“He said that the other house was a house of black gates!” she told us, with the air of one who expects to produce a sensation.

“A house of black gates?” I asked.

“And furthermore,” Ninth Sister went on triumphantly, “most of the pedicab men know there are black gates on this street somewhere, even if they don't know exactly where. As far as they're concerned it
could
be our house. After all, a lot of women live here.”

“What are black gates?” I asked again.

“A red gate today can be a black gate tomorrow,” someone said mysteriously. “One never knows.” It was Aimee who finally explained to me that a “black gate” was the name given to any house, usually situated in a residential area, where an independent woman sets herself up in business as a prostitute.

“Do you mean they paint their gates black as a sign?” I asked.

“I think it's just a name,” Aimee told me. “After all, even respectable people might paint their gates black and it wouldn't mean anything.”

Ninth Sister was still going breathlessly on, “And there are black gates all over the city now. There always were a few, the pedicab man said, but since the closing of the brothels they have sprung up everywhere.”

“Don't the police know about it?” someone asked.

“Perhaps they do and perhaps they don't,” Ninth Sister answered. “He didn't know.”

It struck me as unbelievable that the police, who had complete control over the comings and goings of even the most humble and inconspicuous of Peking's citizens, should know nothing about the black gates. It seemed more reasonable to suppose that the whole business of closing the brothels had been to remove any possible hint that the authorities tolerated prostitution, in even a semiofficial form. Afterward, whether prostitution continued underground or not, it was of no more concern to them, since they had already made their point and extracted every ounce of favorable propaganda. As a matter of fact, I could guess the local police probably welcomed the black gates as a providential source of squeeze, all too scarce in the New China. But an even better reason for the apparent unconcern of the police, it occurred to me, was that it would have been imprudent, if not foolhardy of them, to continue to suppress, at that time, a vice so recently and so loudly proclaimed by the government to be nonexistent.

Whatever the reason, the house of black gates was undeniably there, and it seemed to me to be the final insult to Elder Sister. She had performed an unpleasant duty sincerely and as best she knew how and, as thanks, had not only been publicly betrayed in the theater, but was now being required to play the fool in her own backyard by a government that had never had, it now appeared, any discernible motive beyond its own aggrandizement.

We had been proud of Elder Sister and pleased to see her so proud of herself. We could have wished, therefore, that Ninth Sister had been a little less joyful about being the harbinger of such disillusioning news and, when Elder Sister said good night and went off to bed, looking confused and unhappy, we felt embarrassed and out of sorts.

The truth was that we had all been made fools of, and, in the following days, we tried to put the whole episode of the prostitutes out of mind. I might have forgotten the whole thing had I not gone with Aimee the following spring to a pleasure garden called the North Sea Public Park to watch a fireworks display over what had, in the past, been one of Peking's three imperial lakes.

We found a bench situated at the end of a dark, unfrequented path on a remote part of the shore, and had been sitting there for some time, watching cascades of stars and fiery flowers exploding overhead when, during a lull in the performance, I decided to go and buy some ice cream at the main gate.

I bought two ice cream cups, being careful to get two wooden spoons to go with them, and had come halfway back along the darkest part of the path, when there was a rustling in the bushes slightly ahead of me and a girl stepped out. “
Wai!
Hey!” she called softly in Chinese. “Why are you hurrying so? Wait a while.” There was a light a little way ahead on a pole beside the path and, hurrying along, I quickly came out under it. The girl, still beside me, grabbed my arm. “Wait,” she said. I stopped in the comparative safety of the light and looked at her. Although she was dressed in pants and her hair was uncurled and short, she had the big lips and impish eyes I remembered in Lily.

Under the light she looked me up and down. Until then, she hadn't realized that I was not Chinese. “Jeezus” she said in English. “A Russian! I very no like Russian,” and disappeared back into the bushes. Holding out my cups of melting ice cream, I hurried on down the dark path, while overhead a sudden burst of huge purple and white flowers filled the black sky.

F
OR A TIME
, after I moved into the Yu family mansion, the local police seemed content to let me come and go as I pleased, even though I was an American. Then, in the spring of 1950, my life, as well as that of almost everyone else in Peking, came under stringent control. Restrictions were placed on travel, new taxes were imposed, and all Chinese citizens were required to register with the police. Foreigners living in Peking not only had to register but had to submit to a police interview, in which they were asked who their friends were, what books they read, what kind of radio they had, what kind of camera, what kind of weapon (if they had no gun, then did they, perhaps, have a sword?), and what they thought of Marxism.

The government harassed foreigners as a matter of policy, and seemed to enjoy it. I was certain, however, that I had done everything officially required of me by the new laws. I had registered with the Central Department of Public Safety, where I declared that I had no camera or weapon of any kind, that my radio was a six-tube long-wave General Electric that gave me a shock whenever I touched two control knobs at the same time, and that, not having read Marx, I was unqualified to give an opinion of Marxism. After I had turned in new photographs of myself, along with my passport and various official documents dating from the time before the Communists came to power, the police issued me a residence permit, on the understanding that I was to leave China, with my wife, as soon as her family affairs were settled. In the meantime, I was fortunate, I felt, to be living in her house.

Behind the high walls of the Yu mansion, I felt little apprehension, despite the fact that the United States had closed its consulate, and all American citizens still remaining in Peking had been made charges of the British. On the contrary, when I was inside the mansion's quiet, book-filled studies, or in the stately reception halls, or in the garden, where we sat through the hot summer afternoons on rattan chairs under the trees, sipping synthetic lemonade and beguiled by the screech of cicadas and the murmur of our own voices, what went on outside the walls had almost no effect on my sense of well-being. If anything, the days were too uneventful.

Luckily, old Aunt Chin was there. She slept badly, and could be found at almost any hour of the day or night sitting up with a cat or two in her lap, and puffing on an asthma cigarette while she played complicated variations of solitaire with herself or rummy with Auntie Hu. My wife and I often joined them in their suite of rooms and would play Russian poker or auction bridge with them far into the warm summer nights while the great house slept.