Naked Earth (14 page)

“That’s your letter,” he told her. “I really don’t feel like posting it. Once it’s sent off there won’t be any.”

“Then take it with you to Shanghai and mail it from there.”

“Won’t your family think it’s queer if they get a letter from you and it’s postmarked Shanghai?”

She smiled. “Well, you’re going to get some mail yourself. Don’t worry.”

“But you can’t write me until I’ve written to tell you my new address, after I’ve got there. Figure out how long that will take. At least three weeks.”

It was impossible to kiss and have a good look at each other at the same time. With an effort he drew back to look at her, holding her at arm’s length. “The first time I saw you, we were all singing on the truck, remember? I listened hard, trying to tell your voice from the others!”

“My voice is no good.”

“Your singing voice is higher than your ordinary voice, but it’s beautiful, too.”

Su Nan looked down and started to laugh, leaning her forehead against his chest.

“Why do you laugh?”

When he had asked for the third or fourth time she said, “I never sang that day. I just opened my mouth and pretended.”

They both laughed a long time, unable to stop.

“I guess we’re both a bit hysterical right now,” Liu said.

Abruptly they stopped laughing and leaned their heads back against the wall. They turned to look at each other. Liu could not help thinking that if the smooth mud wall were to tilt back to become the
k’ang
, and he were to see her face like this every night and every morning, his days would be safely locked in happiness at both ends and it would not matter what happened in between.

So he made a resolution which was so simple he felt it was ridiculous. He must do a good job from now on in the hope of getting promoted step by step in the hierarchy of
kan-pu
. When he had attained a rank equivalent to that of a regiment commander he would be allowed to marry. What he had seen in the village had been brutal. But there had to be excesses during a Revolution.

“I may come back from the south very soon,” he said to Su Nan. “And then of course, it may take a long time. But in any case, within a few years I think I can manage to arrange for both of us to work in the same place, then we’ll always be together.” He tried to turn her face toward him. “Say something. Say it’s all right.”

At his insistence he felt her nod slightly against his shoulder. After that she seemed unable to face him. He had to force his mouth on hers. There was nothing left except the small sound of the wind in the grass, stirring uneasily on the edge of their consciousness. Someone might come any moment. The long withered grass made a chill rustle like a crusty old centipede crawling, dragging its rows of legs along the ground.

“You had a haircut,” Su Nan said. “I was wondering what made you look different.”

“Yes, I had it cut in town yesterday.”

“No wonder you look like a country bumpkin.” She reached up to stroke his hair. The next moment they were apart, walking side by side along the wall at a respectable distance from each other. Footsteps and voices had turned the corner behind them. It sounded like Sun Fu-kuei and one of the Positive Elements.

Liu and Su Nan thought they might go somewhere else and talk. When they reached the end of the wall and hesitated before turning into the main road, they saw that the lamp had been lit at the co-operative store. They had not realized until then it was getting dark.

Somebody waved at them from the window of the co-operative. “Liu Ch’üan! Comrade Liu! Comrade Chang is looking for you! Something about the Fruits Accounts.”

Liu had to go inside. And once there he could not get away. That evening he was entitled to retire early, since he and Chang would be leaving early next morning. But he displayed what Chang extolled before the others as “matchless passion for work” and sat up half the night in the co-operative with Su Nan and the others, clicking an abacus.

Returning to the school he packed up and then went to sleep with his clothes on. He had scarcely fallen asleep when he was awakened by Chang. It was still pitch dark. The school janitor brought in a lamp and their breakfasts. Go Forward Pao, Sun Fu-kuei, Hsia Feng-ch’un and several other
kan-pu
came to see them off, fighting for the right to carry their packs.

“We feel so bad that you have to leave in such a hurry,” Pao said with all the wistfulness he could muster. “Just when we’ve really got acquainted.”

“We hate to leave too,” Chang said, wringing his hand. “Everybody has been so affectionate. Real comrades!”

“It’s too bad you can’t stay to see the finish of the Reform,” Sun said. “We were planning a big celebration. A lion dance and a show and stilt walking.”

“We have Feng T’ien-you,” Hsia pointed out. “Best stilt walker in these parts.”

Again Chang experienced the urge to slap the man’s stupid face. Ignoring Hsia, he clapped Pao and Sun on the shoulders. “Better turn back now, all of you. You still have lots of important work to do.”

“No, don’t send us back,” Pao begged. “Give us a few more pointers. We’ll feel so lost without you.”

“No! Don’t be so modest,” Chang said. “It’s we who have learned a lot from you.”

“We feel like walking you to the
hsien
.” Sun said.

“Well, ‘Even if you walk with us a thousand miles, in the end we still have to say goodbye,’” Chang quoted sentimentally.

After more such exchanges, they finally parted outside the village.

“Hope you come back. Drop in on us any time!” Pao shouted, waving.

The sun had not yet risen. Pink and orange clouds striped the sky. The dark earth beneath the high heavens looked even flatter than usual. The thin, wavering sounds of distant cockcrows rose like smoke all along the horizon.

As he walked Liu kept peering into the fields in the half light. The sight of the short stumps of felled trees made him feel jumpy. The birds were chirping loudly with the coming of dawn. If there had been anything like what he’d seen yesterday sticking to the stumps, it would be picked clean by the birds.

Looking away from Chang’s back ahead of him, he noticed a shadow squatting in a waste field. It looked vaguely like a woman digging for sweet potatoes. Something made him look back when he had gone on for a short distance. In the increasing light he was almost sure now that it was Erh Niu.

As they went on walking and the cart track gradually sank, the rising dirt banks on either side blocked off the view. The earth smelled wet with dew. Liu found himself walking along a passage filled with the faint dull fragrance of soil, slightly suffocating. The terrifying countryside was at last shut out. Maybe he was never to see it again.

He suddenly said to Chang, “You go on ahead. I have to stop and relieve myself.”

Walking in the ditch Chang wouldn’t be able to see him unless he specially spied on him.

Liu ran back onto the plain and went behind a tree. From there he peered down the road to make sure nobody was looking.

Erh Niu seemed frightened when she saw a man in uniform racing toward her. Pulling her tattered blouse across her breast she half stood up as if getting ready to run.

“Erh Niu! It’s me!” Liu called her name for the first time. “How are you? You all right? I’ve been wondering how you were.”

Erh Niu squatted down again indifferently, digging into the ground with her bare fingers.

He stopped in front of her under a tree waiting to get his breath back. Then he said to her. “I’m going away right now. I won’t be coming back.”

While she still said nothing, she raised a hand and poking her fingers into her matted hair, gray with dust, tried to comb it with her fingers. Much of her hair had come loose from her pigtail, falling about her face and onto her shoulders. Combing it, she suddenly seemed to realize that all the mud and dirt on her fingers had got into her hair. She dropped her hand quickly.

“I’m worried about you,” Liu said.

She seemed to have forgotten again and started to comb her hair with all ten fingers.

“Erh Niu—” He was going to say how sorry he was and now he hoped she did not think too badly of him. “Tell your mother that I’ve left,” he went on to say. “Tell her I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you. I feel very bad about it.”

The sun had risen. On the yellow-lit tree top and all over the branches, hard little green dates stood out against the light amidst the sparse foliage. The dates were pointed at both ends and the green was just beginning to be flushed with an orange tint. She had laughed at him before for not knowing what date trees looked like. He still wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for the dates.

He stood under the tree not knowing what else to say. “Erh Niu. You’re still very young,” he finally said. “Young people should never give up.”

She shook her head slightly. It could mean that she would not give up. But then two lines of tears coursed down her cheeks and she rubbed at her face with the back of her grimy hand.

For a long time he did not speak. Then he said without moving, “I’ve got to go now. Take care of yourself.’

She lifted her head, looking at him for the first time and, with a smile, nodded slightly in quick dismissal. With her front teeth knocked out her grin was at once childlike and shocking.

He turned round and walked off at a brisk pace, overtaking the leaves of the date tree that fell off and skidded rustling ahead of him.

IT WAS
like being shut inside a gramophone cabinet, cooped up with the pounding, grinding rhythm. Loudspeakers on the train blared out Liberation songs and Soviet music from morning till night without intermission. No matter how fast the train hurtled on, it could not shake off the envelope of music, could not throw off the strong sweet gummy strands of sound. Loose ends of melodies flapped outside the windows and over the top of the cars. The train sped across the dreary sallow flatness of north and central China in a flash of strident song.

When it was getting dark and the lights were turned on, a girl’s high silvery voice called through the loudspeaker, punctuating her speech with rhetorical pauses, “Supper—is now—beginning—to be served.—Supper—is now—beginning—to be served.”

Next she rattled off a series of seat numbers. Passengers in
juan hsi
, soft seats—a new term to substitute for the bourgeois-sounding “first class”—were to go to the dining car in shifts according to their seat numbers. Passengers in
ying hsi
, hard seats—equivalent to the second or third class of the old days—would eat later.

Chang Li and Liu Ch’üan were in hard seats. They had not had dinner yet when the train stopped at one of the smaller stations and the peddlers walked past the carriage windows, tempting them with cold donkey meat, mutton jelly, hard-boiled eggs and cartwheels of inch-thick flat-cakes. Not many peddlers were allowed in the stations nowadays and they were made to wear special aprons, for fear there might be enemy agents among them.

“Look,” Chang said to Liu, pointing at a “blackboard newspaper” that stood on its wooden stand in the dimly lit station, facing the train. They could barely make out the chalked bulletins, windblown and faint, on the shiny black-painted board. “It’s praising the railway workers.” Chang said. Leaning forward he read out with relish, “‘In the past few days workers on this line have been clamoring for Patriotic Overtime in addition to the old Shock Attack Overtime and Competitive Overtime which have, in themselves, already achieved spectacular results. Our Passenger-Affairs Officers think nothing of working 27 hours at a stretch. Since the beginning of this month there have been three cases who worked over 30 hours at a stretch, and two cases more than 35 hours. There have even been cases of over 39 hours.’ Isn’t it great?”

“I don’t think it’s right just to go after efficiency alone. The workers’ health should also be taken into consideration,” Liu said.

“I dare say the leaders don’t approve either. But what can they do about it?” Chang said. “This is just the workers’ voluntary, spontaneous passion for work, I tell you. I understand it’s like that now in factories all over the country. Isn’t it great? You can’t imagine what a difference it makes to the worker’s morale, to know that he’s Liberated now and his own master.”

Liu murmured agreement. He wondered how much of this Chang believed. The train started to pull out of the lighted station. The stationmaster and all the porters and peddlers, white-aproned men and women with baskets on their arms, were lined up in a row, standing at attention to salute the departing train. This was another new custom, probably adopted from the Russians. Chang thought it was a rather touching little ceremony. “See how devoted they look,” he said. “It’s right that all workers should learn to respect the machines under their care.”

When they returned from their dinner, the other passengers were either napping or trying to read newspapers under the weak yellow overhead lights. The music was more deafening than ever. Fortunately, Chinese are not too susceptible to noise.

The girl on the loudspeaker suddenly screamed. “The great—Huang Ho—Iron Bridge—is ahead!—is ahead!—The great—Huang Ho—Iron Bridge—is ahead!—Let’s heighten—our watchfulness!—Let’s close—all the windows!—Let’s defend—the Express!—Defend—the Huang Ho—Iron Bridge!”

Everybody stood up and all the windows were banged shut. But Liu’s window stuck. Chang, who sat near the aisle, leaned over to help him and when it was no use, shouted for the porter. “Passenger-Affairs Officer! Comrade Passenger-Affairs Officer!”

The porter was not in sight. But a soldier of the Liberation Army had appeared, shouldering his rifle, pacing slowly down the aisle and back again.

Liu continued to wrestle with the window. The wind was very strong because of the train’s speed. The man in the seat ahead spat out into space while attending to the window next to his, and the spittle was blown right back, drops of it sprinkling on Liu’s face. He frowned and felt for the handkerchief in his pocket.

His hand froze inside his pocket. He had noticed that the soldier had stopped by his seat, holding his rifle tensely. He dared not take his hand out. The soldier was obviously afraid he was reaching for a hand grenade which he was going to hurl at the bridge.