Ocean of Words (20 page)

“Guards Company get up” … who is yelling — “Guards Company get up.”

I jumped to my feet and picked up my rifle. Kneading my arms, I felt numbing pains in the elbows. My knees went shaky too, and I slapped my legs to wake them up. What a dream! I had dreamed of so many good things, but everything was messed up. How could so many people get to one place — my home village? Terrible, I even dreamed that Lev was our friend. All gathered in Fox Valley.

Oh how I miss home! Home, the place that is always warm and safe, where you can sleep a whole day and a whole night when you’re so dog tired. Mom will bring a bowl of millet porridge, hot and delicious, to the side of your pillow
when you open your eyes in the morning, and there will be four poached eggs in the porridge. Oh Mom and Dad, how I miss you! —

My thoughts were interrupted by some people’s swearing. They cursed Lev again, wishing him to be crushed to death and licked to a skeleton by bears.

It was almost dawn. A thin curtain of fog surrounded the oak woods and spread above the fields. Every blade of grass was heavy with dew. The air smelled grassy, but everybody seemed to lack the strength to breathe in the fresh air. We spread out along the slope quietly, forming a long line at the edge of the woods. I felt dizzy, and my forehead was still numb. A woodpecker was hammering at a tree trunk, and the sound seemed to shake the entire mountain as we started moving.

When we got out of the fog, suddenly the dawn was opening and the east turned pink and bright. Beneath the eastern sky, we saw people running down along a winding path on the hillside. Somebody guessed they must have caught Lev. Commander Yan raised his field glasses to watch while we were gathering around him.

“No,” he said. “It looks like another injured militiaman. They’re carrying a stretcher on their shoulders.”

“This is not war yet,” Platoon Leader Fang said, “but there’s already a depletion of numbers.”

“Attention, everybody.” Commander Yan turned to us. “We are going ahead through the thicket in front of us now. When we’re out of it, we’ll have breakfast.”

We set off again, thinking of warm porridge and steaming bread for breakfast. The night before it was reported that two militiamen had been injured. Some of the militia had forgotten to lock the safety catches on their guns.

The thicket was very small. Soon we sat down for breakfast, which was hardtack and cold water. The biscuits were
not bad, but we’d like to have drunk some hot water, still shivering with cold. No fire was allowed, because the smoke might show Lev where we were. Though there had been no shadow of Lev, we had to act as if he was within our range.

After breakfast we rested for an hour. No one knew what place should be searched more thoroughly than anywhere else. Walking aimlessly like this, we could not find any trace of Lev, so it was better to take it easy.

At ten o’clock our squad was sent to search around a slaughterhouse in a valley. We were told not to wander far away, just stay within that area. By this time every pass and every juncture, from Longmen to Hutou and to the border, had been occupied by troops, militia, and villagers. Lev had already fallen into the boundless ocean of people’s war.

Slowly we moved through the millet field east of the slaughterhouse. Everybody tried to relax a little while his legs were dragging him forward. The two squad leaders had already made up. It was always like that: They quarreled, looking as if a melee was about to break out, but an hour later they would become pals again. All of us were in a better mood now, except that everybody swore whenever Lev came to his mind.

The slaughterhouse butchered oxen in the daytime. After the first search through the millet and the soybean fields nearby, we went to the slaughter hall to see how they killed oxen. Ma Lin said that the folk in his hometown would trip the animal to the ground first, than stab its heart with a long knife, but Vice Squad Leader Hsu said, “Nonsense, you have to use a sledgehammer to knock out the ox first. Who can trip up an ox!”

We all went to see. In the large hall hung a few headless oxen that had been disemboweled but not yet skinned. Probably because it was lunchtime, there were only two men in
there. One of them looked like a master and the other an apprentice. They nodded at us and didn’t seem to mind our presence. The master was tall and stout. The flesh on his cheeks was thick and squeezed his eyes into two tiny triangles. The apprentice was also tall but thin and narrow shouldered. His big jaw had grown sideways, his chin almost in a vertical line with his left cheek. He looked brain-damaged. Wang Min asked them to show us how they butchered an ox, and they agreed. I was wondering how just the two of them could kill such a large animal.

They placed a piece of rope into a sort of groove on the floor, forming a chain of four nooses. A small knife, about five inches long, dangled on the master’s hip. Then they went into the cattle pen behind a green gate and pulled in a large ox. The animal saw the carcasses in the air and refused to move forward. Around its shoulders there were hairless patches, so it must have done a lot of work. Its eyes looked dim. Tears, I saw tears rolling down its cheeks. The two men were pulling hard.

As soon as the ox’s hooves were in the trap, they hauled at the ends of the rope. With a bang the ox fell to the floor. Its four legs were tied up struggling in the air. The young man hit its forehead with a sledgehammer, and the ox instantly stopped moving. The master jerked out the short knife and started cutting the ox’s head. Beneath the blade whitish flesh flared and then turned ruddy. With three strokes the head was slashed off. The whole process took no more than twenty seconds. On the floor, a foamy crimson pool extended, and the hall at once filled with an odor of compost.

I walked away, my chest and stomach twinging inside. In front of me, small stars were jumping about on the wormwood. I felt like vomiting but could not bring anything up. They killed an ox like a chicken. Grandma was right: The
most wicked creature on earth is man. That ox had worked for its master till it was old; when it couldn’t work well, the master sold it to the slaughterhouse for money. The ox had wept just now, begging the fat butcher in silence for its life, but people wanted to eat beef, so they ignored its tears and butchered it. Man is a true beast.

When I rejoined my comrades at the edge of a soybean field, they were having a lunch break, still talking about the scene in the slaughter hall. Everybody had been impressed; nobody had expected that a big ox could be killed without any noise. Lunch was hardtack too. At breakfast each of us had been given two extra pieces for noon. I was hungry and forced myself to eat, but I felt sick and couldn’t eat as fast as the others. Our squad leader told me to take my time. Meanwhile, those who had finished lunch lay on the grass, smoking tobacco.

The news came at three o’clock that Lev had been caught. Rejoining our company, our platoon took a truck to the Divisional Headquarters to wait for him. Everybody was talking about how to handle Lev once we had him in our hands again.

It turned out that Lev had never known what city he was in, nor had he been able to tell in what direction Russia was. All night he ran inland, but he covered only thirty
li
. He had been totally spoiled by us. Contrary to our fears, he simply couldn’t eat anything in the fields. He had eaten too much of the delicate food and the best candies, and had smoked too many of the expensive cigarettes, so for a whole night he didn’t eat anything, no matter how hungry he was. By noon he couldn’t endure the hunger anymore; he got out of the cornfield where he had hidden himself, went over to an old peasant who was passing by, and asked him for food and cigarettes. The old man knew who he was, brought him home,
and gave him a pipe, then told his wife to cook. In the meantime his daughter ran to the office of their production brigade to tell the militia. When the militiamen arrived, Lev was eating scallion cake, scrambled eggs, and bean sprouts. They surrounded the house but didn’t disturb him. Then a jeep from Chaoyang County’s Military Department came and picked him up.

Now we were ready to receive him. The militia, the police, and the people on the streets all knew we had recaptured the “Russian agent.” Standing in two lines at the entrance of the Divisional Headquarters, we kept the militiamen and the people away from the front sentry post. Some of them carried guns and many held carrying poles and spades. They declared they wanted to teach the “Russian agent” an unforgettable lesson. Everyone was angry, having not slept for a night and having trudged around for twenty hours. Besides, so many crops had been trampled. Even some policemen said they wanted to beat the Big Nose too.

Our squad was told to accompany him back to the Eastern Airport. From now on, all the privileges Lev had enjoyed were taken away, and his daily meal expenses would be the same as ours. He was to eat with us.

Here came the jeep. The moment it stopped, Lev got out with a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Some people were rushing to him. Lev could tell they wanted to beat him, so he hurried to us but then paused, probably noticing us all fully armed. We hated him — because of him we were notorious now, and every one of us would have to do self-criticism for several days.

Seeing the few men around him holding only carrying poles, we didn’t seriously intervene but merely shouted, “Don’t beat him. Don’t use force.” We thought a few strokes wouldn’t hurt him much and would give him enough of a warning not to escape again.

“Ouch!” Lev slumped down and started screaming. His body spun around on the gravel road and fell into the roadside ditch. There he lay on his back, and the green uniform on him turned mottled. His arms circled his head, wriggling to loosen the handcuffs, while his legs stretched motionless.

“Halt, halt!” We all ran over and pushed the wild people away. We had not expected they would beat him as if they wanted to kill him. A young man was still struggling along in the crowd, waving a carrying pole in the air and crying, “Let me go! I’ll get even with him, the Russian Tartar.” He was the one who had broken Lev’s right leg. We caught him, together with his pole, and brought him into the headquarters. Later we came to know that his elder brother, a platoon leader in the militia, had been shot by a carbine going off accidentally that morning.

Meanwhile Lev was moved into the Office of Mail and Information. He smelled like a goat, and his body was quivering on the cement floor. He was moaning in a choked voice and kept his eyes closed, as if he were a dumb animal that couldn’t speak a human word, although Interpreter Jiao was standing by. Some parts of his clothes were soaked with sweat. Squad Leader Shi held up Lev’s neck and raised a glass of cold water to his mouth. Lev drank it up without opening his eyes. It seemed he didn’t care whether we gave him water or poison.

Doctor Cai came with an ambulance. We carried Lev out and put him into the van. Immediately the siren started and the ambulance sped to the Twenty-third Field Hospital.

That night we packed up and returned from the airport to our billet in the Company Headquarters. It was the last time we saw Lev, whose identity was clarified after his escape, since he had no one to meet and even fled toward Beijing to get back to Russia.

We were told two months later that he was returned to his country in exchange for a defector from the Fourth Regiment. Though we knew who Lev Petrovich was now, I guess, it would not be easy for him to prove who he was to the Russians. They would suspect him of being either a traitor or a Chinese agent. Lucky for him, he had a broken leg.

After lunch I was lying on the bed and reading a novel,
The Boundless Snow and Forest
. Scribe Hsu Fang came in and said, “Instructor Chen, there’s a man outside from your hometown. He wants to see you.”

“Really, who is he? Are you sure he is my fellow townsman?” I got up and put the book on the bedside table.

“Yes, he said he wanted to see you.”

I went out to the drill ground. The sun was scorching. The barracks were quiet since the men of my company were taking a nap.

Hmm, Chu Tian, of course he was my townsman. Although he wore civvies, I recognized him at first sight. If he had shed his skin and flesh, I could have identified his bones. Strange to say, he was carrying on his back a sleeping child, from whose gaping mouth was dripping a thread of saliva. He smiled at me awkwardly, his bony face stretching sideways and his cupped ears sticking out of unkempt hair.

“Why do you want to see me?” I asked, wondering how he had fallen into such a state. How did he come to be like a beggar, wearing blue rags and reeking of ram urine? He reminded me of a pig in a muddy pen.

“Chen Jun, I — I wouldn’t trouble you, if I had a way out. My boy is sick, pneumonia, so we came to you for help.” His thick nose twitched.

“Why me? Aren’t you a doctor yourself?”

“I don’t know anybody here but you. Please forget the hard feelings between us for the moment. He’s dying. Save the child, please!”

What could I do? I led him into my room in the Company Headquarters and then sent for the medic, Ren Ming. The boy seemed very sick and hardly made any noise.

Ren told me we had plenty of penicillin. Being a doctor himself, Chu sterilized a syringe with a cotton ball and injected a large dose into his son’s rump. He lay the boy on my bed. “There, there, have a good sleep.” He covered him with a dirty jacket.

Damn, allowed into my room, he took my bed.

Chu turned to me. “The pneumonia was caused by measles. But as long as we have penicillin, I can cure him.” He sighed. “We’ve traveled for over a month, sometime sleeping in train stations at night and sometimes in the open air. I’m lucky that I haven’t fallen ill myself. He’s too young to stand this kind of life.”

I didn’t make any comment, but his last few sentences aroused my interest. Scribe Hsu Fang brought in a thermos bottle and three mugs. He placed them on my desk and went out.

“I have a lot of things to do this afternoon,” I said, ready to leave. “You can stay here with the boy.”

As I was walking out, Chu stood up. The rascal, at least he didn’t forget to be respectful here.