CHAPTER XXIV

Cars passed on the street outside- The headlights flashed high and white into the dark room and the shadows of the bars on the window flicked over the men sitting jammed tight on the floor. Twenty men had beencrowded into the small room.

The overhead light that used to be on all night had been turned of early this evening- Something was afoot, Liu thought.
No talking was allowed. Somebody was scratching, though. Alarmingly at first, the microphone high up on the wall also started scratching in long dry rustling strokes. Up until now it had just been a silent fixture on the wall, 'like an electric or gas meter- After a good bit of desultory -sandpapering, a man's voice came on- The low pleasant voice was little more than a breathy whisper
"T'an pai          ! " an- pai quick! T 'an- pai shih sheng-lu; k'an chu shih. T'an- pai is the road to life; resistance isthe road to death."
After a pause for two or three minutes it again whispered, "T'an-pai shih sheng-lu: k'an- chu chih ssu-lu." lt stopped after the seventh or eighth repetition, just when it was beginning to get mechanical and almost soothing.
Liu sat with arms. hugging his knees. Elbows and back encased in filthy, smell-absorbent Liberation Suits. pushed against him on all sides. Bones creaked when somebody tried to change his posture. A phlegmy cough was heard, half smothered. But the darkness and long silence was beginning to open up empty spaces overhead, room for whole lifetimes to hang brooding over them.
It must have been at least an hour later when there came a rattling of bolts and keys outside the door. The door was flung open, the lighted rectangle half blocked by silhouetted guards.. Torchlight swept over the crowd on the floor. The thick beam of wan yellow light swung around in careless arcs, a train of blind faces materializing in its wake. Liu felt it pause on his face, the numb-touch of that round white spot that was more a hand than an eye.
Then it switched away and he heard somebody shout,. "Yao Hsueh-fan! Stand up!"
The light was cutting across the room. It picked out a man huddled by the closed tin pail at the corner- By tacit agreement the man who came latest to the room occupied the space which smelled the worst.
Yao was trying to get up- But the guards, who were adept at making people appear cowards, had already waded in, stepping over hands and feet, to Seize him and drag him out of the room.
The door slammed shut and footsteps receded, down the corridor. Other doors were unbolted noisily and there were muffled shouts, presumably calling out the names of other prisoners. Quite a handful of men were marched down the corridor. Then they were out of hearing.
Darkness came back in a rush, enfolding Liu in its clumsy stifling embrace. It was as if more men had been thrown into the room, half piling on top of him, their padded uniforms gritty with dirt. They weighed like sandbags and were as reassuring,
Then he heard the sound of shots. Not loud, but distinct enough. Executions usually took place out in Kiang. wan, Liu thought. Not inside the compounds here. Had they really shot them? Maybe they were .doing this for theatrical effect. They always went in for psychological tactics. Like during the suppression of counter-revolutionaries last year, when they had had a loudspeaker radio in prison tuned in to the public trial in Yih Yuan, the former dog-track. The suspects in prison heard the voice of thousands roar out the verdict, "Slug! Sha! Kill! Kill!"
The electric light suddenly flicked on- A moment later the microphone started its scratchy noise- The spokesman's voice was loud and bright when it came on. "All the bigoted factors who resisted t'an-pai have been shot! Everybody t'an-pai, quick! Review your past sins once more in your mind, carefully. Then t'an-pai thoroughly. Tonight is your last chance! You will have your last chance to t' an-pai tonight."
The light went off once more. After a long pause the microphone again started whispering, "Tan-pai shih sheng-lu; k'an chu shih ssu-lu."
Liu did not know whether all his roommates were meditating on their past sins- They were supposed to be doing just that all along, night and day. Guards watching through cracks in the door saw to it that they all sat silent with bowed heads in a somewhat Buddhist posture of penitent introspection. They seldom risked talking but when Liu first came in here the man sitting next to him had whispered without turning toward him, "Na-li lai-te?
Where from?" Since then he had heard the same question asked of every new arrival. He supposed it was important to know who you were put in the same room with, as a means of gauging where you stood.
From their brief mumbled replies it would seem that many of them were high-ranking "retained personnel" of nationalized concerns — former bank or factory managers who had kept their old jobs after the government took over. Liu was familiar enough with such cases, having worked at the Three-Anti headquarters. Those men were invariably charged with corruption and required to, pay back enormous embezzled sums which were, in fact, ransoms. The other occupants of the cell, he decided, were non-Party member kan-pu like himself- One of the slogans of the Three-Anti was to "Tidy Up the Middle Layer." There were up to ten million non-Party member kan-pu in the country and they probably needed sorting out and tidying up. They were called "the middle layer" because they stood somewhere between the capitalist and proletarian class. Their standpoints were not clear and definite enough.
Liu himself had been taken out several times to be interrogated by police sergeants. Some of the questions seemed trivial, like "How old is your father, if alive? And your mother?" Then, much later, after a lot of other questions, suddenly thrusting this one on him, "Your father is older than your mother by how many years?" to see if he had been lying. But he could judge by the general drift of the questions that he had been incriminated on account of Tsui P'ing. He could tell also that whoever informed against him knew enough about his work and Tsui's to give the far-fetched accusations a certain plausibility.
Who else could it be but Chang? The man was almost a walking biography of Tsui, with the wealth of information supplied wittingly or unwittingly by Ho, the Culinary Officer,
He felt as certain about that as he did about anything these days, which was not saying much- It did something to a man to realize that the dull unfailing punctuality of tomorrows could no longer be counted upon. It was as upsetting as living in a world with no gravitational pull. Isolated thoughts and impressions were apt to jump at him, compressed to a hard pellet, out of a uniform grey numbness- Or sometimes it was like a fragment of a tune you could not get out of your head, droning on and on and on until it ground. itself into pulpy nonsense.
A car's headlights flashed into the window and were gone. To him it was the world going by — too fast. He felt for it a longing that was past resentment-
He had been thinking a lot of the past twenty odd years of his life. He thought of Su Nan most of the time because she stood for all his yearning and unfulfilled dreams. He thought of Ko Shan too. She had given him a good time — almost forced it on him. Only now it turned out that it was not free of charge- He had had it on credit and the price was rather steep, if he was to pay with his life.
He drew some comfort from the thought that if he was not to come out of this alive, nobody could guess the real cause. He couldn't bear thinking of Su Nan getting to know that he had died because he got mixed up with some other woman.
The light came on again. Guards opened the door and distributed paper and pencils.
"You have exactly two hours. to write your confessions. Remember this is your last chance. So be thorough. Write on one side of the paper only."
The floor space next to the tin pail, formerly shunned, now became the most coveted seat because the closed stool could serve as a desk. It was very hard to keep your pencil from piercing the paper spread over your lap or

over the floor, full of cracks. Liu was reminded of the stories his grandfather used to tell about the discomforts of imperial examinations, especially the highest one held in the presence of the emperor when you had to write kneeling down.
He pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. He knew that people undergoing the Three-Anti or Five Anti often said whatever was required of them, made up things if necessary, then tried to back out of it when it came to paying. They had probably argued, not without reason, that you should save your neck first and then, so long as there was breath in your body, you could always haggle and bargain and get off with a compromise. Liu had heard of countless cases in which kan-pu and businessmen had confessed to embezzling public funds in astronomical figures which later proved to be either untrue or greatly exaggerated. He had always thought it foolish as well as cowardly- And anyway in his case it was impracticable. Even if he was to "disgorge" only a fraction of his illegal gains, where was he to get the money?
After the guards had come and collected the confessions the light went of again. Liu had many misgivings about his paper but he felt reasonably certain that nothing more was going to happen tonight. There was even the possibility that the next few days would be uneventful. The examiners must have time to go over the papers, discuss and analyse them and look into the facts before they made any decisions.
A few people in the room were snoring, sitting up. But most of them were too excited. to sleep- Again footsteps sounded along the corridor. Not the pacing guard-- several of them. They came and stopped at the door, taking what seemed to be ages to open IL.
"Stand up, Liu Ch'uen!" one of the guards called out, holding a slip of paper in his hand. "Ch'u-lai! Ch'u-lai
Come-out, come-out!" he rapped, making one word of it.
Liu raised himself quickly on to his cramped feet and ploughed his way out, stumbling. He was aware of hands fumbling for his in the dark and holding it for an instant as he pushed past- A dim spasm of anger and hate ran through him at the touch of those hands. Right now he would like to feel that he was alone and unfettered, with nothing to keep him. Arid those hands were like life itself tugging at his heart.
Three guards trotted him down the passage, then down the stairs. He estimated it must be after midnight, which always seemed to be considered the best time for executions-
The corridor downstairs made a turn. The guards pushed open a door to a lighted room without knocking. He supposed there would be the usual procedure, identification, a few questions asked by an officer. He had expected a bare office but it looked more like the warden's living room, with upholstered chairs, little round glass-- topped tables and scrolls of paintings on the walls. He had already forgotten what an ordinary room looked like. It seemed so unreal, lighted by the lamp with its scalloped orange-pink paper shade-
A woman in civilian uniform was the only person in the room. It was Su Nan. They had let her in as a special favor to a condemned. man, he thought confusedly. But they no longer did things like that- That was False Humanitarianism. He walked slowly toward her, smiling a little shamefacedly.
"Fifteen minutes," one of the guards called out at the doorway.
"Are you all right?" Su Nan whispered. She put both hands on his arms, feeling him hesitantly, in case it would hurt if she should come to a wound.
"I'm very well," Liu answered quickly. "How did you

get here? I thought no visitors were allowed."
She did not answer at once- "It's not absolutely impossible- There are ways.," she said softly, glancing at the guards to remind him of their presence.
The men were discreetly looking the other way, hands locked behind their backs, standing on one foot in the usual sentry posture, the other foot stretched way out, toes pointing outward. The leniency and consideration shown them was nothing short of incredible- No bars or wire netting between them, no row of chairs as a barrier, as they sometimes had in the lax, good-natured old days. When Liu drew her to him the blurriness and padded thickness. of dreams closed around him- And like in a dream he seemed split into two persons and was both in and out of it, both the dazed actor and the dull observer standing a little way off, seeing many things that meant nothing to him at the moment. Su Nan seemed harassed, almost preoccupied, though he hardly felt it, realizing that she was actually here.
 "No, you've got to tell me how you could get here, or I'll think I'm dreaming," he whispered-
He could not understand why she looked, quite stricken at the question. But after a moment she whispered back, "It's Ko Shan, She's been very helpful."
That wasn't so surprising in itself. Ko Shan had helped him before- But he would never have thought that she would go to the extent of getting him the privilege of t' pieh chieh-chieng, "special interview," so he could see Su Nan- It was really very generous of her. He felt overwhelmed- Even if it was because of her that he had got into this trouble in the first place, she probably knew nothing about it. And it wasn't really her fault.
It appeared, then, that Ko Shan really knew people. She must have inside information about his case. "Have you heard anything?" he whispered to Su Nan-
"It's going to be all right." But her voice sounded unnatural and there was a bleakness in her face she could not hide
"No, tell me," he said after a pause. "I'd feel better if I knew."
"But it's true. It's really true. I wouldn't lie to you. I know there's no need to."
He did not say anything,
She was looking at him with a slight smile, squeezing his hand and wrist and trying to push her hand up his' sleeve with a kind of desperate concentration-
"I want to know you'll be all right, whatever happens," he said. "Promise me that."
"Nothing's going to happen. I know you're going to be all right."
Seeing that it was no use talking, he just pressed his• cheek against hers- So she had come to say goodbye. Somehow, he felt nothing- Perhaps the knowledge of death was part of death itself. She was not all there' either. She still had that curious look, both intense and preoccupied- They were both struggling to come alive' just for this minute and maybe they were trying too hard.
"This is all that matters, isn't it? What's between us,' she said. "Nothing else counts- No matter what happens-"
He thought at first that she meant death and separation. But she seemed suddenly frantic, her voice rising in a strange, hounded fury. She was staring at him but she didn't seem to hear him say yes. "Nothing else matters — no matter what. Isn't that so?" she demanded. "At least it's that way with me-"
Then she was crying. He did. not speak- It must be that she knew now about Ko Shan and him- What else could she mean? She had been seeing Ko Shan to get her'

help, and Ko Shan must have told her. He was truly, painfully remorseful but knowing that he was to die soon, it all seemed very remote. Even the feeling of pain and guilt had become a thing to linger over. He held on to it as he held on to her, not thinking much, fearful that it would pass away together with this moment-
He could feel time going in a small trickle down his back. So when the guard called out "Time up!" he expected it. He let go of Su Nan and went quickly toward the door, not wanting to be dragged out of the room,  least of all in front of her.
He did not look back and tried not to look at her when she came running after him sobbing, hanging on to him-
"Liu Ch'uen, I'll never forget you," she said.
He went out the door escorted by two guards- The other man was pushing Su Nan back into the room, saying, "All right, all right."
Liu felt her words going through him before he understood them, heavy, icy cold and small, each by itself, coursing through him. Didn't she tell him once she never wanted to hear him say he'd never forget her? Because that sounded like they were never going to see each other again, she had explained. And yet she was saying the same thing now-
He shouldn't take it so badly since he already knew. But he had not realized that until now he had still been hoping he was wrong-
Back in the dark room upstairs, when the door had closed after him there was a distinct murmuring rustle that marked the relaxation of tension. Evidently the inmates had expected that somebody would be taken out instead of put in.
"Na-li lai-te?" whispered the man sitting next to him. For a moment Liu did not say anything. Then he

answered, "I'm Liu."
"Ah — Liu." After some reflection the man asked again, "Na-li lai-te?"
"From the Resist-Aid Association," Liu said.
"Ah, it's you!" The man seemed embarrassed. "I thought you were a newcomer." Obviously he had not expected Liu to return. "How did it go? All right, eh?" he whispered, hastening to make amends.
"No. Just a matter of time."
But nothing happened to him the next day. Nor the day after. His roommates came and went. Just when he thought the authorities had forgotten him, he was taken out and interrogated on the, same lines as before. He took that as an encouraging sign- But then the days went by until he began to think once more they had forgotten him.