Inheritance (25 page)

“What’s this?” said Mao, behind him. “Keep going.”

Li Ang turned sideways to make a path around the mother and son.

“Over there,” Mao shouted. He pointed to their right, where the crowd had eddied. Li Ang struggled toward the pocket of empty space.

“We have to blow it up,” Mao shouted. He spat and waited for Li Ang’s reply. “We have to wait until the enemy has arrived—perhaps even while they’re crossing—and dynamite it: blow it up.”

Li Ang said, “But the bridge will still be crowded with civilians.”

“You think we can invite them to cross first? Send for Chang.”

Chang was a very small man—Li Ang could barely see him approaching in the crowd—but he was quick and good with guns and explosives. He sent his men to dynamite the bridge, putting the trigger at the checkpoint on the Chinese side.

Time passed. The crowd moved slowly, hushed and anxious. He watched Chang’s men rigging the supports with dynamite from the Burma side. Then, when all was finished, they made their way over the bridge. The two of them— Li Ang and General Mao—were among the last in their group to cross.

Safe on the China side, Li Ang heard the faraway sound of gunfire. He stood at the checkpoint with Chang and stared at the sun-brightened cliffs, at the dark river that moved below in shadow. He couldn’t stop thinking about the boy and his mother. The boy’s thin lips, long chin, and big ears had been uncannily familiar; he resembled Li Ang’s brother at that age.

“Hey,” said Chang, “look at that guy over there.”

“What guy?” Li Ang took Chang’s binoculars.

“That guy in the blue smock.”

Li Ang searched the crowd. Then it stood out to him: a small man crossing the bridge. It was something in the walk, he thought, that had alerted Chang. Within the peasant’s clothing, he made out the stiff, implacable rhythm of the enemy.

“Japanese dressed as peasants,” Chang said. “They’re crossing. They’re already here.”

Without another word, he plunged the lever. Later, Li Ang remembered a sort of pause—a moment when nothing happened—and then a sharp explosion. For a moment the bridge appeared to float, weightless in the air. Then the middle section buckled—wood swaying, breaking, falling sideways—and a thousand screams filled their ears. Through Chang’s binoculars, Li Ang watched the blue-clad man take one more stiff step, then tilt, fall to his knees, and slide off of the bridge. Around him, flailing, men and women dropped, some head-first and others at odd angles. A woman in an indigo blouse, clinging to a sliding timber, dropped her bundle—a child—and jumped after it into the water.

Near the Chinese side and close to safety, the small figure of the woman in a pink kerchief slipped, fell back, dangled over the edge. Her full bag, harnessed to her waist and shoulders, dragged her down. But she was tied to something on the bridge—another figure, straining, holding to the wooden railing. Then slowly, as Li Ang watched, the son’s grip failed. He slipped and hurtled after his mother.

On the Chinese side, the crowd surged off the road. Shouts rang out as people were trampled, separated.

Li Ang stayed where he was. He was one of the few who’d been protected by the knowledge of what was about to happen. This fact weighed upon him, rendering him unable to take a step. He understood that there was nothing lucky about him. There had never been. He would survive to old age, and he would remember everything that he had ever done.

LATER, ONE OF
the men picked up a straggling dog and refused to let it go. He fed it scraps of food, gave it precious water, petted it. Li Ang and Pu Sijian argued privately about whether General Kwang should leave the dog behind. There were twenty-eight survivors, including four wounded, all of them suffering in various degrees from exhaustion, terror, and malarial fever. They had shed all but the essentials. How could they be wasting precious food upon a dog?

The roads were terrible. Around him Li Ang saw the detritus of an empire: washbasins, clothing, birdcages still containing expired cockatoos and parrots. Empty marmite jars. A teddy bear face down in the dust. Discarded, bloodstained bandages. Dust. Abandoned shells of vehicles lying like fossils in the road, burned out by those who’d reached this place before them and were trying to ensure that they stayed ahead of the enemy. Behind them were the Japanese, moving, someone said, more than twenty miles a day. Li Ang and Pu Sijian were assigned rearguard duty and the care of stragglers. Two of the wounded men died after a few days. Two more held on, limping. Li Ang went back repeatedly to round them up. He couldn’t bear to let them go. But apathy, fright, and disappointment humbled him. Somehow he had cut his left foot. The toes were red and swollen and would not bend.

Mao had been trampled by the crowd rushing off the bridge. Pu Sijian was thin and shaking from malaria. Then General Kwang was bitten by a snake. Li Ang was the only officer fit enough to take his place. He struggled to hold on to the remaining men, but almost every morning someone was dead or missing. Men died of chills, bundled in rags despite the balmy weather. Or men wandered off in search of privacy, only to find themselves surrendering amid the dripping trees, the elephants and monkeys, flies, mosquitoes, termites, and ants. They gave in to swollen, dripping, pus-filled wounds, scabies, dysentery, and beriberi. One evening, the dog’s caretaker disappeared. Another soldier shot the dog and roasted it.

Red streaks ran up Li Ang’s foot. He scanned the corpses as they passed, searching for a larger boot. Meanwhile, Pu Sijian sank deeper into fever. He fell and lay with his Bible tucked into his jacket, his thin hands twitching in delirium. Before the fever took his mind, he reminded Li Ang to look after his wife and son, and Li Ang promised that he would. He tried to keep his friend alive, taking turns with the twelve remaining men to carry him on the makeshift pallet of bamboo and rags. The fever stammered Pu’s bones, shaking him so hard the bamboo pallet poles rattled in their hands.

In his last days, waves of delirium overwhelmed Pu’s orderly mind. He believed he had been captured and was being hauled away by the enemy. He believed he would soon be ransomed, traded for an airplane. He stopped quoting the Bible and began to cry out for Li Ang to rescue him, struggling powerfully against his captors. However there came a time when this manic power faded. He shrank tight against his bones, and he grew tiny in his pallet.

“Li Ang!” he called, hoarse and high and haunted.

“I’m here.”

Pu gave no sign of having heard him. “Li Ang! Come after me!” Then he took one last great shiver and departed.

LI ANG WAS
brought to a hospital in Kunming where he knew nobody. There, four of his toes were amputated and the nurses treated him as if he’d had his testicles removed, chanting silly rhymes as they spooned gruel into his mouth and turned him over on the cot. His friend had died; his brother was lost. He couldn’t sleep. His missing toes throbbed, then itched, then throbbed again. Although he was given quinine, his malaria lingered, and he floated in his bed like a leaf on water, wobbling around a spout of images. He saw a child’s crying face. A snaggle-haired woman nursed a baby at her breast. A mother and son, roped together, fell over a bridge.

“Li Ang!”

It was Hu Mudan. Her small face floated in front of his.

“Go away,” he said.

“Li Ang! I know you’re awake.”

“Leave me alone. I’m taking quinine. “

“Listen to me, you fool—”

She didn’t like him. Never had.

“Do you hear me, Li Ang? You must see Yinan when you come back to Chongqing.”

The whirling stopped upon her name. “Yinan,” he said.

“It is important.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “We have an agreement.”

Finally she left. She did not return, and he grew sorry he had wished her gone.

His feet ached and itched. His fever broke and receded, leaving him light-headed and glazed with weakness. Echoes sounded in his mind. Every night he dreamed. He and Li Bing stood on the bridge. Around them, the world was shattering. Then the bridge cracked open between them and Li Bing vanished.

Junan came to visit him in Kunming. She set a framed photograph of his daughters beside the bed. She refused to bring the newspaper, but read him poetry and kung fu novels. Whenever his fever returned, she was always sitting by the bed, calm and strong, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth.

One afternoon, he tried to tell her. “It’s as if something is missing.”

“Your foot will heal soon. They’ll put a cushion in your shoe and you should walk quite normally.”

He didn’t mention it again.

The winds of history passed over him. The American general Joseph Stilwell took command of the regiments that had escaped to India. There, he and General Sun planned a new push through the Japanese line in a startling offensive from the west. Meanwhile, the Japanese approached from the east. Once again they had tanks, artillery, and supplies. The Chinese foot soldiers had no vehicles and a mishmash of weapons of indeterminate age and origin. Each soldier marched with a rice ration tied around his neck. Refugees crowded the trains; they clung to cowcatchers and slept upon the roofs of cars. When Guilin fell, the boarded doors of empty buildings were pasted with black and red strips of paper calling for resistance.

He was training troops in Kunming when the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the Japanese surrender, he was promoted to general and rewarded for extraordinary valor. But there was little time to celebrate. With the defeat of the Japanese, a new war had begun. Li Bing and his comrades had done well in the countryside, and the country lay on the verge of falling to the Communists. Li Ang was given a job training Nationalist troops. They would try to hold the country for as long as they could. But the possibility of defeat, of flight, became inevitable. In the spring of 1948, Li Ang was transferred, “temporarily,” to Taiwan. There he had regular messages from Junan and sometimes from his daughters. There was no word from Yinan or from his brother.

IT WAS WHILE STATIONED IN TAIWAN THAT HE GREW CERTAIN
some part of him was missing. No crisis brought on this clarity. It was more like a calming period, with the world growing clear and light, his perceptions gradually more lucid. He became aware once more of his singular dilemma. He didn’t miss his old belief that he would escape the world unscathed. This had gone away with his sure step and unthinking vigor. Those gifts had never belonged to him. Something else, something more essential, had been stolen.

When he remembered Chongqing, with its heat and its steep, crowded steps, the houses and streets so quickly built and rapidly destroyed, those memories were more distinct and vivid than the world outside his door. In that time he had been present and alive, in the possession of some understanding that was now withheld from him. He remembered Chongqing day and night; his memories were like an illness that caused everything around him to fade into the world of a dream.

She had said she was in love with him. He had known that this was true, but her artlessness, her candor, had unsettled him. Once she had made her declaration, there was no way to disregard what had happened.

“You musn’t come to see me,” she had said, and he had not gone after her; and yet his soul had followed her, somehow faithful to a bond he hadn’t recognized. He didn’t know exactly when she had begun to haunt his mind. It was simply that he’d come, over the years, to think of the time following his affair with Wang Yinan—when he’d left Chongqing and gone into the field and everything that followed—as a kind of aftermath. Nothing of those years was worth his interest, not even his promotion to general. Only a certain time held power: those months when he and Yinan had been together in Chongqing.

He wrote to Junan, “Have you had word from your sister?” It was as far as he dared go. Her replies were blithe and filled with news—news of her house, of their two growing daughters, of Pu’s widow—but there was no mention of Yinan. There had been no reconciliation.

Most likely Yinan had found another man. He hoped she’d done so. Even so, he wondered, and his wondering was like a phantom pain. He was a boy again, marked proudly with his shallow scars, anticipating some quick cash at the paigao game of a local merchant. He was a young man on his wedding night, with his watertight confidence and high hopes, his heart beating rapidly, peering in at windows. In the next room awaited his fate dressed in a shimmering bridal robe. Instead, he found himself looking through the window at a young girl wearing moth-colored pajamas.