Chapter 16

WONG'S QUARTERS IN THE TEMPLE WAS A dreary place but to Ku, after staying with the
peasants, its aura of literacy made it almost like home. The room was long and enormous, formerly the chamber of some minor god. The shrines and idols had been cleared away but not the age-old dust and cobwebs. An oil lamp lit up the only furnished corner, where a bed and a littered table and some chairs and benches made up the combined sleeping quarters and office. This small area was pervaded by an odor that country people call "the old widower's smell," caused by loneliness, dirt, and general neglect. It hung all the more heavily in the in-tense cold of the night.
Ku sat on the bed nervously plucking hairs off his upper lip. Outside in the great hall of the temple they were torturing the men arrested for the riot.
"Ai-yah! Ai-yaw!" came the rhythmic groans. "Uh-ee-ee-yah!" The voice would weaken and trail off, then sud-dently turn into a straight, bestial howl, tremendously strong.
This could not be true, Ku thought. It was like a trav-eler in one of those ghost stories taking shelter in the porches of a temple at night and being wakened by the sound of the gods holding court over the dead. Peeping at the brightly lit scene, the man in the story recognized a dead relative undergoing cruel tortures. He screamed. And everything went black and all was quiet in the temple.
Scream, and perhaps it would all vanish. In the city it had always been asserted that the Communists never used torture. All the stories of the torture of land-lords and suspected spies were lies spread by enemy agents.
But what he found hardest to take was that these men groaning on the "tiger stool" were plain farmers. He knew that Wong knew they could not be tools of spies and saboteurs, as he had told the village. Of course it would sound better in a report to put it that way and would save face for Wong. But if he was that unscrupu-lous, Ku had better start to worry for his own life.
"Don't imagine things," he said to himself. He had a desperate need to believe in Wong and what he stood for. For the thousandth time since the Communists came, Ku told himself, "Believe-for your own good." It had become like opium for the intellectuals, this faith which would enable them to suffer privations cheerfully, deaden all disquieting thoughts and feelings, still the conscience, and generally make life bearable.
He was facing a severe test, Ku told himself. He would have to overcome his petty-bourgeois Tender Emotional-ism. Of course this riot of hungry peasants was a mere accident, an isolated instance which had no place in the general picture. Represented in all its distressing aspects, it would be detrimental to government prestige and would, in the long run, work against the good of The People. Therefore it was important to show The People that it was an incident engineered by enemy agents. Wong had to be thorough about it. He had to get some kind of story out of the rioters, hammer it into shape and see that they all said more or less the same thing by the time they were delivered to the district headquarters.
But he found it hard to reason along such lines when he thought of Moon Scent. He could not help feeling concerned over her fate. If she had been captured and was crying out right now under torture, he doubted that he could keep his head.
A door creaked open in the far end of the room, be-yond the reach of the lamplight. Ku looked up, half-expecting to see Moon Scent entering with his nightly warming basket which was at once his comfort and his shame.
It was Comrade Small Chang, the militiaman, coming to get some cigarettes for Comrade Wong. He looked for them under Wong's pillow.
"It looks like nobody is going to get any sleep tonight," he complained, yawning. "Comrade Wong works too hard."
"Yes, he really should rest," Ku said, smiling politely. "Especially when he's been hurt."
been caught yet. Small Chang replied that he had not heard anything about it.
It must have been very late when Wong turned in. Half-asleep, Ku was aware of the boards creaking on the bed and the sound of spitting. The light went out. Then the snoring woke him up completely. The man sounded as if he was drinking-gulping down the dense black night in huge draughts, pausing now and then to let out a small, contented sigh.
Ku did not realize it, but he must have managed to drift off to sleep again, for he woke up with a start. A deafening volley of shots still clattered in the hills. The next thing he knew, Comrade Small Chang was in the room, an oil lamp in his hand.
"The storehouse is on fire, Comrade Wong!" shouted Small Chang.
Struggling into his padded uniform, Wong barked, "Blow out that lamp!"
But Small Chang, not having had any combat experi-ence, could see no sense in the order and did not know whether he had heard aright. In the confusion Ku re-membered seeing Wong's sleep-swollen face under his bandaged forehead; it had an orange glow in the flicker-ing lamplight. And he thought he saw a gleam in Wong's eyes that was almost like joy. It must have eased his con-science-the realization that it was actually the National-ist underground who were at the back of all this.
For some reason the firing had ceased by the time Wong rushed outdoors. But dogs were barking, while militiamen ran beating gongs wildly from one end of the village to the other, giving the fire alarm. Off in the distance they could hear shouts of "Fire! Help stop the fire!"
Wong, with his bandaged head, was rushing to and fro shouting himself hoarse. "Kinsmen! Everybody help stop the fire! Save the storehouse! It's the People's Grain!'
But the crowd hung back, mindful of the gunfire a while ago, until somebody suddenly exclaimed, "Why, that was the firecrackers in the storehouse! Firecrackers set off by the fire!"
The word was spread around, and when it reached Ku inside the temple he took heart and ventured outdoors to do his share of fire fighting.
People scurried from all sides toward the stream with buckets and containers of all sorts. Some worked doggedly. They loved with an impersonal, unthinking affection the rice that was the fruit of their labor, and their hearts ached more than any miser's to see the great hoard going up in flames. Others were gleeful at this unforeseen turn of events which avenged their own people killed in the riot. However, they put up a creditable display of enthusiasm, yelling at others to "stop the fire," dashing down the banks for water, only to spill most of it on the way.
The spilt water froze instantly, making the ground very slippery. Ku was splashing along with a brimming bucket when he slipped and fell, emptying the icy water over himself with the staggering impact of a blow. His chin dug into the cloth-covered surface of a padded hardness which for a sharp, frightful instant he took for his own leg. Then to his horror he discovered that he had fallen over one of the corpses left lying in this vicinity. His hands flew to the glasses on his face, feeling for them and straightening them as he scrambled to his feet. They might well have been broken. And it was this last awful thought that demoralized him completely. He retired from the scene to become the sole onlooker, shivering as the water soaked through his jacket.
They were still beating away at the gongs. The cease-less clanging awakened an ancient terror, as if the village was being invaded by bandits. Across the grounds bathed in the wild crimson glow militiamen dashed away brand-ishing their red-tufted lances. One of them claimed he had seen a woman sneaking away when the blaze first started and he had chased her right into the fire.
As he watched, the gongs and the soaring flames roused a wild, primitive exultation in Ku. "But this is just what I am looking for," he thought. "A splendid and stirring spectacle for the climax of my film. Just move the story a few years back. Recount how the peasants under the old regime were driven by hunger to rob and burn the storehouse."
Then he remembered that there had been explicit in-structions in the leading magazines for literary people. Writers were not to dwell on the unsavory past as if with a lingering relish, but to turn to the bright, new, con-structive side. "Rather than curse the darkness, praise the light!"
He cursed anyway, watching the dying fire. The store-house had been picked clean to the bones. The frame stood out clear in the brilliant sheet of flames. Giant black cinders perched birdlike on the beams. Aptly called "fire magpies and fire crows," those evil birds sat in a row, turning their heads this way and that with dreadful tranquillity in the softening golden light.