Chapter 6

SISTER-IN-LAW GOLD HAVE GOT HUNG HEE washing on the pock-marked boundary stone,a stone tablet with inscriptions on it, standing about a foot above the ground, outside the house. The limp gray rags flapped a little in the breeze.
"Ai! Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got, had your rice?"
She was flustered when she looked up and saw it was Comrade Wong coming this way with a stranger, also in uniform. She was always nervous around Comrade Wong so that he, too, felt apprehensive, never sure that she would say the right thing, though it happened that she did this time.
"Ai," she smiled and greeted him back, "you had your rice, too, Comrade Wong?"
But he did not hear her. He hastily covered up what-ever it was that she said by calling out loudly, "Very good, very good. And is your father-in-law at home?"
She made her exit hurriedly, shouting, "Comrade Wong has come."
Big Uncle and Big Aunt came out beaming. Wong introduced to them the man in uniform he had brought with him. "This is Comrade Ku," he said. "He has come from Shanghai to study conditions in the country. He wants to lodge with you and live as you live."
They greeted Comrade Ku effusively. Ku was gaunt and thirtyish, wearing dark-rimmed glasses that made his black brows look redundant. He explained that he was a director-writer sent down by the Literary and Artistic Workers' Association to Experience Life and collect ma-terial for his next film.
Comrade Small Chang, the militiaman who served as Wong's orderly, panted up from behind them carrying Ku's luggage on a flat-pole. Ku fought with him for the load, trying to take it into the house himself, but Com-rade Small Chang refused to part with it. It was his job to deliver the bedroll to the house and he was going to do it. This man from the city, Comrade Ku, had wrestled him all the way, trying to carry his own luggage. In fact, he had almost been tempted to tell this man with the glasses, "Please, Comrade, you stick to your own job, and let me do mine."
Like most villagers, Big Uncle and Big had had intellectuals staying with them during the Land Reform, so they took it with comparative calm. They were careful not to apologize for the food or the living conditions, or to say, "Did the Comrade come down from Shanghai?" as that would imply that the country was lower than the city.
They showed their guest the room where they kept the millstone and farming implements. These could be cleared out and the door removed from its hinges and set up on two benches to make a bed at night. Ku said it was fine. Then they all returned to the main room and admired the dark blue vase the family had won in the lottery when the landlord's possessions were divided among them.
At Comrade Wong's request, someone ran to fetch Gold Root and his wife. Gold Root was the Labor Model and his wife had only recently returned to the country to join in the productive work. Ku was impressed; these country girls, he thought, could be very pretty. Big Aunt did most of the talking. The others confined themselves to smiling and murmuring, "It is fine now in the coun-try," or "Things are different now." But Big Aunt cried out with gusto, "Without Chairman Mao we would never have this day." And she always referred to him as "Chairman Mao t'a lao jen chia," adding on the suffix "big old man of the house," which showed familiarity and affectionate respect, as one might speak of an elder in one's own family.
Ku could see that she was Comrade Wong's prize exhibit. Probably that was why he made him board with her family. When Comrade Wong was leaving, Ku walked him down the road and listened to him talk indulgently of the old woman. "One thing about her-she is very frank and outspoken."
Comrade Wong had already mentioned the Winter School to him and suggested that he go to teach there so as to mingle more with the people. Now he said, "Have a good rest, Comrade. You must be tired after the journey. Tomorrow I'll take you around to the school and introduce you to the class."
Again he enlarged on the importance of teaching the villagers to read and write as a means of Elevating their Political Awareness. To listen to him one would think that this job he was asking Ku to undertake, working in shifts with the schoolboys from the village town, to teach a few characters to illiterate peasants, was the greatest and most challenging work in the whole nation. He was a good propagandist, Ku thought. Wong's "party age" was quite long and he had seen action in northern Kiangsu. He certainly deserved a better post than the one he was holding. Probably it was the infighting between cliques that had kept him down. Perhaps Wong was a follower of some important personage who had been purged by Mao. In that case he would be a dangerous character to associate with. Ku became more wary and withdrawn in his manner.
Comrade Wong walked back alone to his quarters in the Village Public Office, which had formerly been the Temple of the Militant Sage. It wasn't until after he left Ku that he realized he had talked rather a lot about his past—doing underground work during the Japanese occupation, and when things grew too hot for him, run-ning off to join the New Fourth Army. He hadn't meant to bring up all this, not to someone he was meeting for the first time. Ing-hsiung pu tao tang niun yung. "Heroes do not boast of their past prowess." It depressed him to think that he was behaving like a garrulous old man living on his memories.
It was the hint of condescension in Ku's attitude to ward him that had egged him on. He did not like the way Ku talked about national and world affairs for his information, perhaps with the best of intentions, assum-ing that he was totally ignorant of what was happening outside the village and must be hungry for news.
He had never heard of this Ku. But he gathered from the letter of introduction from the head of the Literary and Artistic Workers' Association that he was a new recruit to The Cause after the Liberation.
"After my twenty years of service to The Party, always in the thick of the struggle," Wong thought, "here I am playing host to this miserable turncoat, and being patron-ized by him-the two-faced, chicken-hearted intellec-tual-the running dog of the old regime."
He shouldn't lose his temper like this, he knew. And he was probably being unfair to Ku. The mood hung heavy over him. He hoped that on returning to the temple he would find some peasants waiting in his office, wanting to settle some dispute. It might dispel the gloom. He knew how to handle peasants and there was always pleasure in doing a thing well. To the peasants, he was the government. They made him feel he was a vital cog in the machine instead of an outmoded tool tucked away in a dark corner.
Usually he was kept busy from morning till night, but it looked when he got back to the temple as if he was going to have this afternoon to himself. After sitting at his desk for a while, he got up and strolled outside, his hands folded at his back. Comrade Small Chang, who kept house for him, was sitting outside the door on a p'u euan, the round cushion on which monks sat out their endless hours of meditation. The monks of this temple had long been disbanded. And Small Chang was not meditating; he was peeling garlic. The p'u t'uan was very old; the straw showed through the torn blue cloth.
Small Chang had their washing hung up to dry on a string drawn across the intricately carved latticed win-dow. A patch of sunlight lay motionless on the dismal, faded pink of the temple wall.
It occurred to Wong that he seemed to be always living in temples, in the semi-darkness of vast, empty halls still haunted by the evicted gods. He was living in a temple when he married Shah Ming. He knew what was coming-whenever he started remembering, that was the part that came most readily to mind.
He had first seen her in a mass meeting of kan pu when he was with the New Fourth Army in northern Kiansu. All the kan pu gathered in a small town to sheng ta ké, attend big class. They made use of the house of an absentee landlord. The great pillared hall was bleak and draughty like the outdoors on a dark day. They sat on the stone-paved floor during the lecture, taking notes on paper pads balanced on their knees. The lecture ended with the shouting of slogans, as all their speeches in-variably did. Everybody stood up and repeated after the lecturer, "Long live Chairman Mao!" and tossed his cap into the air, hurling it as high as he could. But not every-body could manage to catch his own headgear when it came down. There was a feverish scrambling for caps as the lecturer again shot up an arm, with his voice strain-ing after it. "Long live Ss Ta-lin!" he shrieked.
"Long live Ss Ta-lin!" echoed the crowd in a deafening yell, and again the caps sailed into the air.
After the meeting broke up, Wong noticed a woman kan pu standing there, cap in hand, looking distressed. She had picked up the wrong cap. She was very young. Instead of cutting her hair short like the other women and letting it hang over her cheeks in greasy, stringy locks, she wore it in two braids tucked out of sight under her cap, so that, at first glance, one would have taken her for a boy, with her rather thin, bloodless face and wide-set eyes. But now, with the cap off and the braids showing, she looked very schoolgirlish, fragile, and a bit droopy in the uniform that was too large for her.
Wong took off his frayed and battered cap. It was so obviously his own that he had to dismiss the idea of going up to her and asking her if that was her cap he had picked up by mistake, as some of the other men were doing. None of them had her cap, but on looking around they discovered a cap poised high above on a rafter. A young man named Yu fetched a ladder with great alac-rity and retrieved it for her. He was standing there talk-ing to her when Wong left the room. Even the knowl-edge that Comrade Yu was low in rank and not qualified to marry was small comfort to Wong.
"Who was that girl who lost her cap just now?" he asked another kan pu somewhat peevishly. "Such a lot of fuss."
"I've never seen her before. A newcomer. Why, are you interested in her?"
"Don't talk nonsense."
He tried somebody else later on. "That one with the pigtails-is her husband's name Chen?"
don't think she is married. You mean Shah Ming, don't you? She came here less than a year ago. Works in the telegraph branch."
"I thought I knew her husband. A Comrade Chen, he mumbled. "I must be mistaken."
The women kan pu were lodged for the night in the co-operative store. He went there early next morning and asked for Comrade Shah Ming.
As was the usual arrangement in Chinese shops, there stood on each side of the room a row of carved blackwood chairs with small tables in between, for receiving visitors and important customers. He took a chair. Red scrolls hung on the wall at the back, congratulating the co-operative on its opening.
"A good omen," thought Wong, "proposing to her in a co-operative store. It ought to be the beginning of a lifetime of co-operation in our revolutionary work."
The morning sun streamed in through the door, light-ing up the baskets of rice and red beans at his feet, the mounds of dusty mushrooms and mu ehr, a kind of fungus like furled black ears, and the large brown peels of bamboo shoots with their dry, sweetish smell. The women kan pu chattered loudly at the counter, rolling up their bedding. They had slept on the counter during the night.
Then he saw Shah Ming hurrying toward him. Wong introduced himself. "I want to have a talk with you," he said.
She sat down, smiling, visibly bracing herself. After-ward she told him that she had felt sure he had come to speak to her about her braids, which had occasioned much criticism.
"I heard that you are not married," Wong said. "Neither am I. What do you say if we ask the organiza-tion for permission to marry?"
Shah Ming took it very calmly, he thought, though of course she seemed a bit taken aback. She answered, smiling, "K'ao-liu, ao-hu ha! Let's think it over."
"As far as I am concerned, there is no need to recon-sider. My mind is made up."
Still she said, smiling, "It is a grave step. K'ao-liu, k'ao-liu-ba!"
He did not press her for an immediate decision. It affected him strangely to see her in the sunlight-she had the quality of a yellowed photograph, looking so young and yet faded. He felt as though he must be careful not to touch the picture with his finger, lest it would fade more.
Two weeks later he visited her at her post. She had to wake up a colleague on the night shift to do her work for her while she came out to talk to him.
"Let's send in the petition," he suggested. "If either of us is unfit to marry, you can depend on it that the organization will tell us so. We can safely leave that to the organization."
She kept putting him off with her "K'ao-liu, ao-liu bar But the second time he came to see her at her post she gave in and said reluctantly, "All right." So they sent in the petition and were granted permission to marry. One evening Wong dispatched an orderly to fetch her on horseback.
The clockety-clock of the horse's hoofs sounded sharp and clear in the evening quiet. He waited on the stone steps outside the temple until the sound had faded away in the distance, then he went in. The hall was dark except for the lamplight coming from his room. He could just distinguish the blue faces and red faces of a row of minor gods down one side, and their gilded draperies. Gusts of wind made the tattered paper on the windows flap loudly. He crossed the hall and went into the eastern chamber, which was his room. Today the room had been swept and tidied up, so that it looked very empty.
The war years had been a period of compromise for The Party, so the idols had been left intact in this temple they occupied and the nuns allowed to remain, though the young ones had all run away. An old nun who stayed on was "doing her lessons" at the back of the temple, beating a wooden mu yu. It went on and on, an even flow of "toc toc toc toc," like water dripping from an ancient water clock, marking time for a dead world.
Wong felt the spell come over him as he paced about his room, waiting for the girl. She came that night, and left at dawn on the same horse, with the orderly holding the reins for her. After that he sent for her every week. Invariably she came at night and left at dawn, like a ghost mistress in those old stories.
At times he almost struggled against the spell. He would have liked to think of her as a part of his everyday life, like other men's wives. The only time he ever felt really married to her was when there was an emergency meeting of the kan pu in the country town where he was stationed. The Communists had always placed great importance on the decoration of places where meetings were going to be held. A high-ranking official would in-spect the room personally before the meeting and rage at the kan pu in charge if the vase of flowers on the table on the platform was not just so. But in this devastated area there were no flowers to be had, or flags and streamers and suitable lighting effects. Wong had failed even to obtain a large portrait of Mao Tze-tung, which was essential.
Shah Ming solved the problem by pasting a large sheet of red paper in the center of the wail, with "Long live Chairman Mao" written on it in big black characters. Then she took two brass basins, the kind that everybody used around here, filled them with cooking oil, and set them on the table, one on each side. During the meeting, when the oil was lit, it made a most impressive scene, with the huge, pulsating orange flames, the light and shadows playing on the red paper in the background, and all the kan pu holding up an arm, swearing alle-giance to The Party.
Wong was immensely proud of his wife, feeling just as if they had given a successful party. Afterward he enjoyed talking over everything with her, the mishaps as well as the amusing incidents. It was wonderful when all the guests departed and she did not leave with them, but stayed with him for the night.
She told him how she had come to join the New Fourth Army. During her senior year in high school she had been befriended by a woman teacher who was a Communist. It was most exciting, the whispered mid-night talks, the surreptitious reading of propaganda lit-erature by the light of a candle, behind the padded blanket. The teacher told her Russia was the only country who really helped China to fight the Japanese invaders. She kept her informed of the newest victories Yenan scored against the Japanese. Shah Ming became a con-vert along with several other girls and the teacher took them with her when she escaped from the Japanese-held areas into northern Kiangsu, where the New Fourth Army operated.
Shah Ming, Bright Sand, was a name she adopted after she came here. It was mannish and smart, rather like a fashionable pen name or stage name.
She told him about the last house they were stationed in. The four telegraphers, one young man and three girls, occupied the living room in a peasant's house. At night they slept on the tables they worked at in the daytime. There was no door—it had been cut up for firewood by marauding soldiers. The north wind blew straight in, making it extremely difficult to keep the oil lamp alight. But even then it was warmer indoors than in the cow-shed, so the farmer always took his buffalo into the living room at night and tied it to the window frame. Whenever the buffalo started to urinate, one of the telegraphers on the night shift had to jump up from her seat, dash over, and set the pail under it, then return to her work. Again, when it had finished, one of them had to go over and remove the pail immediately, otherwise the beast was sure to kick it over and flood the floor.
In a way it was a blessing to have the buffalo in the room. She could recall freezing nights when the three girls cuddled up to sleep under the buffalo's belly, like calves.
She told him all this a bit shamefacedly, and together they laughed at her predicaments.
"It is a painful experience," he admitted, "the petty bourgeois throwing himself into the furnace of revolu-tion. But this is how we are remade."
He felt sorry for her, but the most he allowed himself to say was, "You'll be able to stand it better if you have better health. But don't worry, your health will improve."
In early summer she fell ill from a miscarriage and was laid on an unhinged door, the only kind of stretcher available in the countryside, and carried to the temple, where there was a medical-aid station for wounded sol-diers. Wong was glad to have her with him, though he had no time to nurse her. They were suffering military reverses, and the day came when they had to evacuate the place in a hurry.
The order came in the small hours before dawn, throwing everybody into a frenzy of activity. The sol-diers had to return everything they borrowed from the peasants, since their slogan was "Not a needle, not a thread from the people." They could be heard every-where noisily pounding on doors and shouting, "Ta niung! Ta niung! Aunt! Aunt!" An old peasant woman, roused from her sleep, would open the door fearfully. The soldier would hand over a battered rice pot with a hole at the bottom, or a broken chair, and thank her for lending it to them for the past six months.
"We are leaving now. But don't worry, ta niung," he would say soothingly, "we are coming back."
Wong had a million things to attend to. Hurrying back to their quarters, he found that Shah Ming had forced herself to sit up in bed and pack her belongings into a small bundle. For a moment he felt distressed, not knowing how to tell her that she was not going with him.
"It's going to be a rough trip." He sat down on the bed and turned to face her, his palms on his knees, au-thoritatively. "It's better for your health if you don't come along. I have arranged with Comrade Fang to have you stay with his parents for the time being." Comrade Fang was his orderly. Wong knew he could count on the loyalty of the parents so long as he had the son with him as hostage.
She went on slowly with her packing, though eventu-ally she stopped and bent forward as if exhausted, pressing her face against the bundle in her lap. He knew she was crying.
"It's a very common thing," he said. "Comrades often have to stay in enemy territory and go under cover." "I want to come with you," she sobbed.
"But there aren't enough stretchers," he blurted out, "or stretcher-bearers. And we have to take all the wounded soldiers with us. You can easily escape notice. But what chance has a wounded man got?"
He had his own packing to do. Presently, when he turned to her again, he saw that she had stopped crying and had continued with her packing. The cocks were crowing and the yellow light of the oil lamp grew bleak, diluted by the gray daylight. He felt as if they were catch-ing an early train.
Comrade Fang's father and brother came, carrying an unhinged door. They helped her onto it and covered her up with a padded blanket, though it was June. Sick people were always supposed to keep warm. Wong bent down to tuck in the blanket around her neck and whis-pered, "You'll be all right. But be careful all the same. And get well quick. We'll be back here soon." She nodded slightly on the pillow, her face damp and pale.
"Don't worry, Comrade. Everything will be all right," the old man said loudly, though he was obviously heavy-hearted in anticipation of the troubles and danger thus thrust upon him. The forced cheerfulness in his tone struck a chilly note in Wong's heart as he watched them carrying her across the rice paddies, under the morning stars.
The army moved to another district. This was toward the end of the war, when all sides had grown tired and cynical. When any one side girded itself for a fresh effort and surged forward, the other side simply surrendered en masse, only to break away at the first opportunity. The situation became positively farcical, with whole battalions being pushed back and forth between the opposing com-manders like big piles of chips on a gambling table.
Under the circumstances there was always consider-able traffic across the borders. But as time went on, it became apparent that Shah Ming had lost touch with the New Fourth Army. Lots of things could have hap-pened. She might have been discovered or betrayed, and she could have died from her illness or the lack of medi-cal care.
Once Wong managed to send somebody to the Fangs to deliver a letter from their son, asking them about Shah Ming. According to the Fangs, they had sent her away to stay with a relative of theirs in another village some distance away, because she was known in this district and was in danger of being identified. But they heard that she had already left there of her own free will.
Finally Wong had an opportunity to go there himself to investigate. Disguised as a small tradesman, he went to the village indicated by the Fangs and asked for their relative, known as Chow Pa-ke, Eighth Brother Chow.
Chow Pa-ke was a short little man around forty with protuberant eyes and closely shaved, greenish scalp. His head, perfectly round to begin with, somehow looked battered and out of shape. And he was chinless out of self-defense, so that nobody could deal him a knockout blow on the chin.
Poised and well-mannered in his long gown of blue cotton, he was no ordinary farmer but had often dabbled in business and knew all about lumber, silkworms, salt, tea, and taxes. Wong pretended that he was interested in lumber and had been directed by the Fangs to ask for information from Chow Pa-ke, since he was on the way here. Chow turned out to be so eloquent that Wong thought his name Pa-ke must be a nickname, as pa-kg is also Chinese for parakeet, a kind of bird which could learn to talk with great facility and was known for its cleverness. But in time Chow's wife appeared and was addressed by others as "Eighth Sister-in-Law." So Pa-kd stood for Eighth Brother, after all.
Chow pressed him to stay for lunch. During the meal, his host initiated him into the complexities of taxation, the various authorities along the way who had to be appeased, and the soldiers he was likely to come across. This was one of those unfortunate areas which were alternately raided by the Japanese, the Communists, the Peace Army of the puppet government, and all sorts of nondescript troops who owed nominal allegiance to the government in Chungking.
They had a few cups of wine together and Chow told him about "that time the Japanese came down from Tungchow.'
'Walked right into the house," he said. "The officer who headed the party asked me, 'You are lao-pai-shing, common civilian?' And I said 'Yes.' So then he asked me, 'You like Chinese soldiers or Japanese soldiers?' I didn't know what was the best way to answer the question. I didn't know whether he was Chinese or Japanese. He was speaking Chinese all right."
"But surely you can tell by the accent," said Wong. Then he remembered that, to the peasants, soldiers all sounded alike, just as outlandish, whether it was a Japan-ese speaking Chinese or a Chinese northerner speaking Mandarin.
"Ai," said Chow, without pausing, "you can't tell by the accent either. The only way to tell is by their boots. Ai! Quite different. But I didn't dare look." He made as if he was standing at attention, raising his head a little and stiffening his neck. Then with a smile and a slight shake of his head, he said, "Didn't dare look downward."
Wong said patiently, "Yes, I suppose it seems rude to look people up and down."
"So then how did I answer him? I sighed and said, 'Ai-yah, hsien-hseng, mister! We lao-pai-shing really have a hard life! Whenever we see soldiers, whether they are Chinese or Japanese, it's all the same to us. All we want is some peace-it's best for everybody all round.' And he said, 'You are right.' So then I knew he was a Japanese," he concluded, well pleased with himself.
After lunch Wong got up to leave. Having made sure that Wong was setting out immediately for a neighboring town and had to be there before nightfall, Chow ex-pressed his regrets that he could not lodge with them for a few days.
"Your generosity overwhelms me," said Wong. "Though I've already heard a lot about your hospitality. That reminds me—I have a relative, a young lady, I heard she also lodged with you when she passed this place. I forgot even to thank you."
"Which young lady?" Chow asked after a slight pause. "She was staying with the Fangs," said Wong, regard-ing him intently.
Chow went quite blank. "You must be mistaken. We didn't have any young lady visiting us."
She could have disguised her age. "Well, I've always thought of her as being young," Wong said, laughing, ((maybe because when I last saw her she was a mere chit of a girl. Actually, she must be getting on. Middle-aged, you might say."
"No, Chow said, "no middle-aged lady came to my house."
"I heard she has aged terribly with her illness. She must look quite old."
"No old lady either," Chow said firmly.
Wong was well aware that the other's reticence might be due to the fear that he was an agent from any of the other sides on the track of a woman Communist. So Wong did a reckless thing and revealed himself.
"Don't be afraid to speak the truth," he said. "I repre-sent the New Fourth Army. You can safely tell me exactly what happened. If you hide anything, it is at your own peril."
Chow was in a quandary. The man pronounced him-self a Communist but there was no telling which side he really belonged to. This time it wouldn't help even to look at his boots, as he wore none, being in civilian clothes.
Chow fenced for time and continued to deny having seen a lady of any age cross his threshold.
"The Fangs said they sent her to you. What have you done to her? Turned her over the gendarmes?" pressed Wong.
"Lao-tien-yae, Old Lord Heaven, I know nothing about this! The Fangs are lying, if that's what they said. Ai-yah, why do they do this to me?"
"You've sent one of our people to her death and you'll pay for it," said Wong.
After a lot of threatening, Chow finally broke down and admitted that he had given shelter to a girl who was ill. If in the end Wong turned out to be an agent from another side, he could always say he had been forced to make up the story, seeing that was the only way to get rid of the man.
"Where is she now?" Wong asked.
"She left us in the eighth moon. She said she was going to Chinkiang to get into a hospital. She had relatives there, she said."
"She went by herself?"
"She was much better when she left. She said she could make the trip alone."
Wong asked other questions but that was about all he could get out of Chow. He was inclined to believe him, because the girl did have an uncle in Chinkiang.
Wong went back to his post reasonably happy. But soon other doubts assailed him. Why hadn't she com-municated with him or any of their associates if she was in a city like Chinkiang where it was comparatively easy to make contacts?
Later there had been rumors of her being seen in Chinkiang. As her defection from The Cause became increasingly evident, her name sometimes came up in dis-cussions, and all Wong could say was, "It's a pity her standing ground is not firm. But then the petty bourgeois as a class has always been vacillating and unreliable. I am sorry I haven't been able to influence her."
He wondered for the first time whether she had been happy with him. Since their union was not recognized by the outside world, there was every possibility that she had married somebody else and settled down to the hum-drum life of a small-town housewife. And Wong told himself that, personal feelings aside, he wished fervently that she would return to The Revolution, for her own sake. In those times of stress, the organization was not over-particular. Deserters were always taken back, after the proper show of repentance.
Wong was with the troops when they were marching into a town at nightfall. The town had changed bands many times and had been the scene of many battles. Passing the water front, the straggly column stepped onto a deserted, pebble-paved street flanked on both sides by jagged white ruins. They were very tall for two-storied houses, being high-ceilinged. Wong happened to glance up as he marched past a roofless house with eyeless black holes for windows. It gave him quite a jolt to see a girl looking down at him from a window on the second floor. He had no idea those houses were still habitable.
Though the girl's face was little more than a white blur in the deepening dusk, it could be seen that she was pretty, and, to his astonishment, she seemed to be smiling at him. He looked away, thinking that he knew what kind of house this was; but these sluts should have known that they couldn't do business with the New Fourth Army. Then, with a start, he looked up again when an inner voice shouted, "Shah Ming! Why, it's Shah Ming!" But the face had vanished, almost as if the sudden clamor within him had reached her ears and had frightened her away.
Stepping out of the ranks, he stood staring up at the window. Was she avoiding him? But she was smiling at him just now. She must be hurrying down the pitch-black, rickety staircase. She would stumble and fall and break her neck. He found a rectangular opening that had once been the door and stepped quickly inside.
For a moment he felt confused, not knowing what had happened. A cool breeze fanned his cheeks. Black shapes loomed around him but there was a dim, mauvish blue light overhead. There seemed to be crickets singing squeakily underfoot. He was standing outdoors. The whole house had been blown up except the facade, behind which there was nothing but rubble.
His eyes sought the second-story window where he had seen the girl, the first window from the left-that would be the first window from the right, in reverse. It was merely a rectangular hole in the lonely white wall that stood jagged against the evening sky. His scalp felt cold and tightly drawn as he looked into the dusky void of the window, where the stars were beginning to appear.
He could hear the rhythmical thud-thud of the soldiers marching far down the empty street. At the sound of those retreating footsteps, Wong suddenly went wild with fear. He tore into the street and ran all the way to catch up with them.
While it had been a shattering experience, it also filled him with a kind of elation. He was convinced that she had appeared to him because she wanted him to know that she was dead. She did not want him to think that she had been unfaithful to him.
Then his training stepped in and told him that that was mere superstition. And he was forced to the conclu-sion that, on top of losing her, he was losing his sanity.
Years passed before he heard anything definite about her. In the course of being shifted about after the Com-munist occupation of the whole of China, he came across an old colleague who used to know them both. The man told him that he had seen Shah Ming in Soochow. She showed no recognition of him when they met, so he did not greet her. But later he had made inquiries and had learned that she was now married, had two children, and
8o

owned a shop selling wicker furniture and straw slippers. Wong wasn't much affected by the news. Emotional ex-haustion had long reconciled him to the thought that she was still alive, bearing children and growing old in another man's house.
He had an opportunity to visit his home village for the first time in nineteen years. His mother still lived but they no longer had anything in common. All she had to tell him was endless tales of woe, of losses and privations, and all his assurances of better days to come failed to cheer her. His family had previously made arrangements for his marriage, taking the girl into their house when they were both children. They worked her harder than a slave girl throughout the years and she had become quite a hag. Wong did the right thing by her and married her. But every time he went home for a visit, which was very seldom, he felt lonelier than ever.
While he had no close friends, he had always got on well enough with everybody, with the exception of his superiors. Consequently, he was always the one who got criticized and blamed whenever anything went wrong. During meetings, even when he came out well in an argument, the summing up by the presiding official would twist things to his disadvantage. There was no promotion for him after the Communists took over the country. Instead, he was labeled "unable to keep pace with changing situations." Being a kan pu was a lifetime job, however, so like many other veteran kan pu he was pensioned off with a small post in the country.
He had no quarrel with the over-all policy of The Party. He had been trained to accept it unquestioningly. It was the small things that jarred him-the officials' wives holding sinecures; the importance of knowing the right people, of chao kuan hsi, finding connections. And he was appalled by what seemed to him to be rank ex-travagance, like rebuilding the temples in all their splendor in Peking and Shanghai, just to impress Tibetan delegates on a visit. He knew where all this money came from. He personally had to get it out of the peasants.
He often got angry, but his was the helpless fury of lonely old people slighted by their only friends. He never sulked for long, but always came round of his own ac-cord. The Party was all he had left in the world.