Naked Earth (20 page)

The young man colored slightly when he heard people giggle. He forced a laugh and was about to speak when she cut him short.

“Why aren’t you going if you’re in such a hurry? Get out, get out!” She swung her big envelope at him once or twice as if driving away flies.

Then she saw Liu. The long queue made several turns in the hall so that he stood quite close to her though he was far behind. She came over immediately and shook hands. “Haven’t seen you for some time, Comrade Liu,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you. I telephoned your office.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Liu said. “I haven’t been in for days. I’ve been ill.”

“Not serious, is it?”

“No, I’m much better now.”

When she came over the young man again had to stand in her place in the queue. “Hey, I really have to be going!” he shouted.

“We’re thinking of putting out some pamphlets,” she lowered her voice slightly and spoke fast so that not everybody could hear. “The people over in your place are interested too, so it’s going to be a joint project. Can you come over to our office, say tomorrow?—Ought to be a Shock Attack job really.”

“Yes, sure, I’ll come over—if I’m back on the job tomorrow, that is,” Liu said. “But if they want to Shock Attack, maybe we can send you somebody else—”

“Ko Shan, I’ve got to go now!” the young man yelled lividly.

“All right, go!” she flung at him, then turned to Liu. “Yes, they want it done as soon as possible. But the fact is, we’re still behind on the research part of the work,” she said with a sudden confidential smile. “You come when you can. I’m always there after six in the evening.”

She strode back to her place in the queue. The young man was already gone, having stomped out in a huff when she told him to go. But the others had got the idea by now that she was somebody. The gap had not closed up when she stepped in.

She must be married to the boy, Liu thought, the way she treated him. At least they were living together. Liu supposed he was also a
kan-pu
. It was difficult to tell with everybody wearing the same Liberation suits and Lenin suits. But if he was a
kan-pu
he must be a new one on the bottom rung of the ladder, otherwise he wouldn’t be so scared of being late for work. But she must be pretty important, Liu thought, to have this kind of a semi-dependent “little lover.”

From where he stood he could see the fanning movements of her big yellowish brown envelope jutting out into view. She did not look around. Soon the door to the consultation room opened and she went in while another patient pushed his way out into the crowd, ducking his head like a cabinet minister avoiding cameras, secretive and important looking.

After a few minutes the door opened again. Ko Shan came out, buttoning her tunic. For a brief instant she stood darkened against the whiteness of the frosted glass pane on the door. She was the kind of woman who looked best in silhouette, like some flowers, plum blossoms for instance, with their posturing, leaning branches. She twisted around and lifted her big brown envelope at him in an abbreviated wave. Then she disappeared into the crowd, creating a slight stir which he could feel washing pleasantly over him for long moments later. The sense of pleasure—or amusement as he preferred to call it—frothed thinly over the stone that weighed on his heart as he waited to see the doctor.

THE NEXT
evening he sat waiting for Ko Shan by her desk, staring down at her unstained bright pink blotter. In this work you learn to appreciate waiting, he thought. It’s the only rest you ever get during the day.

He looked at the copy of the
Liberation Daily News
on her desk. The X-ray had found nothing wrong with his lungs, so he was very happy and easily amused. He read through the news story of some Italian priest who had just been arrested for espionage. There were two photos, one showing the lethal weapon in the priest’s possession, a long bread-knife, and the other showing his “planned means of escape,” a swimming suit and a life belt. Was he going to jump into the Whampoo River when things got too hot for him, swim out to sea and follow the Chechiang Fuchien coast down south to Hong Kong? Liu’s own unit could have made a better job of it.

Ko Shan was a long time in the reference room. She had told him when he first came that they were planning a pamphlet tentatively titled “A History of the Aggression Against China by the American Imperialists,” the first in a series.

“It’ll be a sort of summary of all the national disasters of the last century,” she had explained. “And you trace them to the one country that’s been at the back of it all the time. The facts are all there, but it’ll take some analysis to dig them out. The American imperialists always have their clams tucked out of sight. Not like Japanese and Germans.”

Together they ploughed through the material she had finally brought out, sheafs of yellowed newspapers and thin, old, virginal copies of gray-covered pamphlets no one had ever opened. It was a lot of work but it appeared to Liu that they were not really pertinent to the subject and would not be much use to him. “Maybe we ought to do a little more research on the subject,” he suggested.

“This is the best we can do for you,” she said smiling. “As I said, it’s all a matter of having the right viewpoint and keeping to it. The facts are all there.”

“I guess I’ll take some of this home and go over it again,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Sure, take it along. There’s another book; I’ve got it at home. You might find it useful. It’s about Chiang’s betrayal of the Revolution. You know how the Anglo-American group had a hand in it all. We better go and get it right now. This has been held up long enough.”

On their way out she looked at her watch and said, “It’s almost nine. You haven’t had supper yet, have you?”

“That’s all right. I’m not hungry,” Liu said smiling.

“Let’s go and get something to eat. I didn’t have supper either.”

Liu hesitated, doing a swift calculation of the amount of money he had in his pocket. It was an embarrassing business to be a
kan-pu
in a backward city, living under the Communist system while the world around him was still operating on a capitalistic basis.

“It’s on me this time,” she said smiling. “I want to try the Park Hotel grill room. Haven’t been there since they started to serve
ta ping, yu t’iao
and bean milk.” (
Ta ping
, big cakes, and
yu t’iao
, long fritters, are the classic combination that makes up a coolie’s breakfast. And bean milk is the cheapest drink.)

“Yes, I’ve also heard that they’ve Turned to Face the Masses,” Liu said with a laugh.

They walked the few blocks to the towering Park Hotel with its ground floor of black glass. The grill room was practically deserted. It looked like a mausoleum under the few remote fluorescent light tubes on the high ceiling supported by huge square pillars. There were dusty potted palms.

“Sorry, we only have
ta ping, yu t’iao
in the morning. You’ll have to order from the supper menu tonight,” the waiter told them.

So they both ordered noodles. Liu said, looking around, “I’m sure they do better business than this in the mornings. Lots of people must come just for the novelty.”

“Oh, I don’t know—when they can get the same
ta ping, yu t’iao
at the corner stall,” Ko Shan said.

“But it’s more comfortable here, you can sit and talk.”

“Not many people have time to talk over breakfast. And if they come for the atmosphere, it seems to me rather oppressive. Too many ghosts.”

“Yes, this is really the tomb chamber of an era,” Liu said, rather pleased with his neat turn of phrase even if it probably was not original.

They had a table by the window. The limp white tablecloth was stained brown by soya sauce. A warm strong breeze blew in from the black space of the Race Course across the road. A chattering movie-going crowd streamed past the window against a background of flitting, blinking lights made by passing pedicabs.

“How do you like Shanghai?” She offered him a cigarette.

“Most backward part of the country,” Liu said smiling.

From the way she smiled he knew it was not quite the right thing to say. She made him feel that it was bad form to protest too much. Besides, he shouldn’t talk as if he thought she was trying to Comprehend his State of Thought, gauging the degree of his Progressiveness or Backwardness, as the case might be. He felt reasonably sure that was not why she was having supper with him—although that would not prevent her from having a quick look at his State of Thought, as long as they were here.

“Nice picture they’re showing here,” she said, indicating the Grand Theatre next door with a slight movement of her head. “The color is very good.”

“Yes, I like Soviet colored films,” Liu said. Reddish brown tints predominated as in the paintings of old masters. “They’re very artistic,” he said. “Not loud or cheap.” He refrained from adding “like American technicolor.”

“You didn’t see this one?”

“No, I didn’t get to see it.”

“Is Old Ts’ui driving you too hard?” she said smiling. But she did not pursue the subject. It was a rare experience for Liu to be talking to someone who was not pumping him about his superior and his superior’s wife, nor interested in what he really thought of them, in order to tell on him. Still, Liu felt less at ease here than in the newspaper office where there were lots of people around. Even their new privacy was only assumed, with the idly watching waiters as invisible as the ever-present stagehands on the stage of a Peking Opera.

He told himself that it was ridiculous to think that she was after him. Did he fancy himself the beautiful maiden in melodramas who invited rape and seduction at every turn, he jeered. He had snuffed out his flicker of suspicion hastily, though he had also suspected—and had dismissed the thought just as hastily—that he had done so in order to be able to go on with a clear conscience. Then again he would argue that if he had wanted to go on, it was just to see what all this was leading to—if anywhere. Perhaps it’s wise to “rein in your horse at the edge of a cliff.” But to do that, he told himself, you have to get to the cliff first.

She was talking about the Native Products Exhibition that was going to open next month in the Race Course but she stopped and was smiling at him. The smile was out of context. Did she think that it was he who had put his knee against hers on purpose? Or was she smiling because he had not been encouraged by her gesture to put his hand on her leg? He told himself that she was probably unaware of it, but would notice if he was to move away from her, and would then think that he was a young man of enormous conceit and tainted imagination.

He carefully took a deep puff on his cigarette and flicked off the ashes before he shifted his knee away, so that enough time had elapsed to show that he thought nothing of it.

The noodles came. When she called the waiter after they had finished eating and told him “
Chung tan
, close the account,” the waiter seemed unsure of to whom to bring the bill. Liu did not like to see Ko Shan do the paying. He knew he ought not be affected by the conventions of the old society which always expected a man to pay, but he had a bad moment wondering if the waiter might think he was a kept man, especially as she was older than he.

He had thought she might be a little angry with him. But when they came out into the street and passed a billboard advertising a coming Korean film, she had turned and said, half-laughing, “You must see it and give it a nice write-up. I’ll let you know when they show it in the projection room. They’re getting the subtitles translated.”

She called a pedicab and he climbed in after her. The open cab slid with a silent flowing motion down the grayly lit flat broad road, facing the night wind. The back of the pedicab driver’s blouse bellied out like a full sail.

“It gets quiet very early now,” Liu said. There were few lights on and practically no neon signs.

“You should see what it’s like after midnight. That’s when I usually get home,” she said. “Quite eerie.”

“That’s the trouble with newspaper work. You keep such late hours,” Liu said, conscious of the slight contact of her slim hips. He caught himself half wishing that she were fatter so that there would be less room.

With a slight bump over the rise, the pedicab sailed into a dark lane lined with old foreign-style brick houses with high stoops. Ko Shan used a flashlight going up the steps. She pushed open the door and they stepped into the dimly lit hallway.

“It’s an apartment house,” she told him as they went up the stairs together. It seemed to be one of those old houses sublet as furnished rooms. That must be the caretaker speaking on the telephone somewhere along the corridor and calling raucously, “Number five, Miss Tung!” Then there was the high-pitched loud slap-slap of leather slippers, Miss Tung coming to the phone and the caretaker going away from it. After a shrill, enquiring “Wei-ei?” the talk over the phone quickly degenerated into cabaret girl baby talk.

Ko Shan had a large room on the second floor. The walls were painted a medium shade of bluish green that somehow suggested a hospital ward. The few pieces of dark furniture were ill-assorted and nondescript. Clothes and towels and stockings were hung carelessly over the brown-painted bed-ends. A stack of folded blankets ran along the side of the bed against the wall in Chinese fashion. There were covers; the stale white sheet was bared, somewhat disconcertingly, to the light of the hanging bulb. Used glasses stood everywhere, on the floor too, several in saucers with cigarette ashes in them. Liu saw something rather touching in the sloppy anonymity of the room. It spoke of the experienced Party member who was psychologically conditioned to the hazards of the underground days, when she and her comrades never used to stay long anywhere and had to clear out at a moment’s notice, leaving nothing of themselves behind. They were the ones who had really discarded all their luggage, whether material or sentimental, he thought with envy.

Ko Shan asked him to sit down and poured him a cup of tea. Then she found him the book. “You might as well look through it right now, so if there’s any question we can have it out now, instead of waiting another day.”