The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (32 page)

“It’s beautiful,” Neal said, addressing himself specifically to Wu.

“Yes, it is,” Wu answered happily.

It was so beautiful that Neal forgot his skirmishing with Peng for a while and just took in the scenery. He hadn’t seen such open spaces since his days on the Yorkshire moor, days that seemed like a distant memory now. And while the moor was vast and lonely, the Sichuan Plain was vast and peopled. It wasn’t crowded, but it was definitely occupied. Lines of people moved slowly across rice paddies, children led buffalo along dikes, men in wide straw hats pushed wheelbarrows on narrow dirt roads. Old women, their heads wrapped in black turbans, sat beside the vegetable patches and smoked long-stemmed pipes as they scolded birds away. Younger women, often with babies slung on their backs, stacked piles of rice husks along the roadside. Just as every bit of land was used, thought Neal, every person on it was useful.

And where the moor was brown, southwest China was green. The paddies were green, the vegetable gardens were green, the hills of tea on the horizon were green. Here and there a metal rooftop shone silver, or a pond sparkled in blue, but they were like buttons on a gigantic emerald cloak.

“The rice in this area,” Wu said, “produces two crops a year, so the peasants are always busy planting, harvesting, or tending their fields. Two crops a year is wonderful! If we could ever find a way to grow three, there would be no growling stomachs in China ever!”

He laughed at what seemed to be an old joke.

“Three crops,” Peng muttered. “A typical Sichuanese dream. We do not need more harvests, we need more factories.”

After a couple of hours they came to a sharp bend in the road where a small teahouse and a few shacks were clustered.

“Do you need to use the toilet?” Wu asked Neal.

“Wouldn’t mind.”

Wu led him around the back of the teahouse. A bamboo fence screened the lavatory from view. The toilet was an open trench about three feet deep, graded so that the urine ran down a slope but the feces remained. Neal discovered the physics of the operation as he relieved himself of the morning’s coffee and Wu squatted down to do something more serious.

“What do they do?” Neal asked. “Burn it off every day?”

“Oh, no. The shit is valuable fertilizer. The night-soil removers come with buckets and carry it into the fields.”

“Is there a lot of competition for that job?”

“It is assigned by class.” Wu’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Very often, intellectuals or their families who were exiled from the city perform this job. My father was a night-soil remover after he was freed from prison.”

“Is it a punishment?”

“Not really. It is just that city people do not know the skills of farming, and this is something simple they can do. It is very hard work, though.”

So, after a few thousand years of taking shit from the gentry, Neal thought, the peasants are giving it back, literally.

“We cannot waste anything in China,” Wu said. “What do you do with shit in America?”

“Send it to Washington.”

“That is a joke.”

“You’re telling me.”

Wu stood up pulled his trousers up. “Yet you purged President Nixon and sent him to the countryside.”

“I don’t think he’s lugging around buckets of night soil, although it’s an appealing image.”

“President Nixon is a very great man. You should rehabilitate him.”

The stuff you hear in men’s rooms.

“Perhaps if he corrects his thinking,” Neal answered. “Does Peng ever have to piss, or is he really a robot?”

“You should not fight with Mr. Peng. He is an important man.”

“That’s why I’m fighting with him, Xiao Wu.”

“I do not understand.”

Neither do I, Wu, but I’m beginning to.

“Dwaizhou Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters,” Wu translated from the signpost at the road junction.

Neal didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters, just a long, straight dirt road that stretched through rice paddies and wheatfields and disappeared into some low hills on the horizon.

They drove down the road for about three miles before coming to an S-curve among a copse of trees. On the other side, the road dropped into a valley in which Neal could see several villages, a dozen concrete grain silos, and a group of larger buildings that resembled a town center: the Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters.

The car pulled into a parking lot in front of the largest building. A greeting committee of sorts had formed, and met Neal with broad smiles and an array of bows as he stepped out of the car.

“Mr. Frazier, please meet Mr. Zhu,” Wu said.

“Welcome, welcome,” said Zhu.

“Thank you very much,” Neal answered.
“Xie xie ni.”

Zhu smiled at Neal’s attempted Chinese, took him lightly by the wrist, and repeated, “Welcome, welcome.”

Let the games begin, Neal thought as he looked around at his new surroundings. The building in front of him was a concrete and brick structure, three stories tall, with a broad set of concrete steps and a front landing. To the left, about a hundred feet away, was a single-story brick building that looked like a dining hall. To his left, surrounded by a cement patio with several wrought-iron, umbrella-shaded tables, was a swimming pool.

“Does Mr. Zhu speak English?” Neal asked Wu.

“Only ‘welcome, welcome.’”

“Why is he holding my wrist?”

“He likes you. It is a traditional greeting in this part of the country.”

“Who is he?”

“The Production Brigade leader.”

“He looks too young.”

“Everyone calls him ‘Old Zhu.’”

Old Zhu led Neal over to the patio, reached into a barrel, and came out with a bamboo fishing pole, which he handed to Neal. He pointed to the swimming pool, which Neal then saw wasn’t a swimming pool at all, but a fishpond. A closer look revealed that it was crammed with carp; the whole bottom of the pond looked like it was moving.

Zhu took a pole of his own, fixed a large breadcrumb on the hook, and cast it into the middle of the pond. A carp hit it right away. Zhu dragged in the fish, unhooked it, and handed it to a young man who was standing by for just that purpose. The boy ran to the dining hall with the fish. Zhu gestured for Neal to do the same, and by the time Neal had baited his hook, Wu and Peng already had their lines in the water and were waiting intently for the carp to strike. Neal thought of asking for a rifle, so that it would be
exactly
like shooting fish in a barrel, but didn’t want to hurt Zhu’s feelings. So he dropped his hook in and watched it land on a carp’s head. The fish tapped at the bait with no great enthusiasm, and Neal watched Wu, whooping with delight, haul in his catch. Peng caught one too, and broke his wooden demeanor with a triumphant yell as the boy came running back from the dining hall to collect the catch of the day.

Just my luck to get a racist carp, Neal thought.

“Fresh fish for lunch!” Wu called to him.

“Wonderful!” Neal answered, fervently hoping they weren’t going to hunt their own fresh pork for dinner.

They repaired to the dining hall, a utilitarian rectangle with a linoleum floor and wooden tables. The fish was prepared quickly, and they ate it with some greens Neal didn’t recognize, along with bowls of sticky white rice. Some bottles of beer made a quick appearance and departed just as quickly in the midafternoon heat. Peng, who had announced only the night before that he did not drink beer, drained one with little difficulty. After lunch, the group went to a second-floor meeting room in the headquarters building so that Zhu could answer Mr. Frazier’s questions about the Dwaizhou Production Brigade.

Neal didn’t ask the only question he was really interested in: What am I doing here at the Dwaizhou Production Brigade? Instead he launched a battery of interrogatives and nodded sagely as if he understood or even cared about the answers that Wu worked so hard to translate. What is the annual rice yield? How many people work on the brigade? How many families are there? How is it organized? What crops besides rice do you grow? How many hogs? How many chickens? How is silk produced?

Zhu seemed particularly proud of his new fish-farming project, explaining that the pool out front was just for the recreation of party cadres; the real ponds were harvested with nets, and were an enormous success. Neal said that he would like to see them, and was rewarded with a huge smile and a promise that they would do so that very afternoon.

Even Peng was pleased with Neal’s performance, nodding and even smiling at Neal’s questions, then nodding vigorously at Zhu’s answers and listening intently to Wu’s translation. He apparently thought the whole dog-and-pony show was so wonderful that he passed cigarettes out to everybody. The three Chinese men smoked solemnly while Neal sucked on some hard candy.

Neal also thought that the show was pretty good, especially Mr. Zhu’s eloquent soliloquies on agriculture. The guy seemed to care passionately about farming in general and this farm in particular. His eyes shone with pleasure when he discussed gains in food production, and went dull and sad when he spoke about the lack of modern equipment and fertilizers. Neal figured that Zhu was either a terrific actor—sort of an Oriental Mr. Greenjeans—or that he wasn’t in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam.

Why should he be? Neal wondered. I’m not in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam, and I’m “Mr. Frazier.”

“I really want to see those fishponds!” Neal said before the boys could light up another round.

He saw the fishponds, which were actually huge, square, sunken concrete tanks with plank catwalks. He saw the rice paddies and learned how rice was planted, harvested, chaffed, packaged, and transported. He saw fields of wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers, and received instruction in the fine art of chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out the hulls. He saw chicken coops, duck ponds, and hog pens, and learned that pork was a major part of the Chinese diet. He saw water buffalo, petted water buffalo, and reluctantly rode on a buffalo while its little girl owner sobbed in anxiety for her pet. He saw a twenty-acre square of uncultivated land—woods and brush—and learned that it was set aside to encourage the rabbits that were a major game crop. He saw a party of hunters, armed with ancient, muzzle-loading, curve-stocked rifles, go into the wood and emerge with several rabbits. He saw the complicated, integrated, and enormous effort it took for the people of this area to feed themselves and try to get ahead a little bit at the end of the year. He saw the tranquil beauty of the countryside.

He saw a maintenance shop where mechanics cannibalized the older trucks and tractors for the benefit of the newer trucks and tractors. He saw a clinic where a “barefoot doctor”—a woman paraprofessional—dispensed a combination of acupuncture, traditional herbs, and rare Western pharmaceuticals. He saw a school where male and female teachers handled enormous groups of uniformed children without apparent strain. He saw the presentation that the elementary kids had cooked up for him, a charming montage of song, dance, and parade that left him laughing and touched at the same time.

He saw Li Lan.

She was in a classroom, bent over a little girl, guiding the girl’s hand and paintbrush over a sheet of white paper. She wore a plain, loose-fitting white blouse over blue “Mao” pants and rubber sandals. She wore no makeup, and her hair was tied into two braids with red ribbons. She looked up, saw Neal, and shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Neal moved on to the next classroom.

Because then he understood it. Not all of it, but enough. He sleepwalked his way through the rest of the tour, putting the whole thing together in his head. He didn’t know where everybody fit in, but at least he knew now what he had to do.

Nothing.

Nothing, he told himself. Do nothing and just shut up.

Which was something he had never done before.

Neal finally figured out how to work the kerosene lantern and then fell into bed. What did they call it? A
kang.
A straw mattress on a low platform covered with a cotton quilt and remarkably comfortable. Zhu had offered to put him up in the little recreational club the cadres used, but Neal opted to stay in a typical peasant house. So the boys drove him into the middle of the commune somewhere and left him with a nice family, whose house had an interior courtyard full of chickens and pigs, a big charcoal-burning stove, and about a dozen kids who played with him until the simple dinner was served and they went to bed. He had walked about a million miles over the commune, and his body wanted to drop right into the arms of Morpheus, but his mind still wanted to pace around.

So Li Lan had made it home, he thought. Home was in Sichuan, where she had learned to cook, not surprisingly, Sichuanese food. Home was on a farm, and that was why she’d taken Pendleton. Doctor Bob didn’t make herbicides, idiot. Simms’s story was a cover, which Pendleton mimicked perfectly. Neal thought back to his drunken evening at the Kendalls’, to Olivia’s request for Pendleton to kill the weeds. That’s not my line, he’d said.
I only know how to make stuff grow.
Like rice, maybe? Like three crops a year, maybe?
No more growling stomachs in China. The same old Sichuan dream.

But why have they brought me here? Why go to all that trouble and then bring me here where I can see her? And where is Doctor Bob? Why did Li Lan shake me off this afternoon? Was I supposed to see her and
not
see her? How do I resolve
that
contradiction? What the hell do they want?

Make up your mind, guys, he thought.

No, not “mind” …
minds.

Yeah.

He picked up
Random
and worked on it for an hour before crashing into sleep.

Peng squeezed the trigger. The pellet smacked into the paper target with a satisfying
thwack.
Along with the fishing pool, the BB gun range was his favorite part of visiting Dwaizhou. He had gotten the key from Zhu, opened up the big room, and liberated some beer and cigarettes from the locker. There were, after all, privileges that came with his high position and heavy responsibilities. He shot again, and the pellet hit the silhouette target right in the forehead.