Naked Earth (16 page)

“Right. I agree with you completely.” Putting the pictures away quickly, Liu stood up to go.

She remained seated, eyeing him in a half-smiling appraisal. Liu again wondered how she stood in the Party, whether she was in a position to comment on him to his superiors, adding some damaging remark to his record.

Quite abruptly she held out a hand across her desk, half rising, flashing at him a Party-mannered smile, wide, bright and warm, clean to the point of being sterilized “We’ll keep in touch,” she said.

“COMRADE
Liu! You’re wanted in the meeting-room!”

Liu turned from his desk and saw Comrade Ho, the Culinary Officer, standing at the door of the front office holding a baby in his arms, the two-year old boy of Ts’ui P’ing, Liu’s superior. Ho had been an army cook and had been with Ts’ui for years. Because his Revolutionary History was long, although he still did a cook’s work after the Victory on All Fronts, he now enjoyed the living allowance of a battalion commander, eating well and drawing more pocket money.

“Warm day, isn’t it?” Chang Li looked up from the papers he was working on. He always made a point of being friendly with Ho.

“Sticky as hell. Nothing like this up north,” he grunted. Summer uniforms had not yet been issued. Ho had unbuttoned his lumpy padded uniform of soiled light yellow cloth all the way down the front, showing his bare chest. Jolting the baby up and down, he walked up to the tall window. They were high up in one of the few skyscrapers in Shanghai. The city below was a sea of gray and red bricks, mostly gray, in a tumbled-down, widespread heap. Chimneys and boxy little Western-style buildings pushed up darkly here and there.

“Living so high up,” Ho muttered. “Bad for a person. No wonder my feet get all swollen. They’re hanging in mid-air all the time.”

“Must be awful for you to be cooped up here all day,” Chang said sympathetically. “But when you go to the market you can stretch your legs a bit, huh?”

He snorted. “That’s only a few steps away. Not enough to get the smell of earth back on your shoes.”

Liu put away the blurry snapshots he had been retouching with a Chinese brush. Taking a writing pad he hurried off to the meeting-room at the other end of the corridor. He had heard that some Democratic Personages were coming down for a meeting this afternoon. He would be acting as recorder.

Ts’ui P’ing’s wife was already there to play hostess. She was talking to the only woman among the Democratic Personages, and probably the only woman lawyer in Shanghai. Ts’ui’s wife headed the secretarial department and was known by her maiden name Chu Ya-mei. It was no secret around the office that Ya-mei had been a peasant girl in the old Communist area in Shantung while Ts’ui had been a college student when he joined the Revolution. She was a blooming young woman, a little thickset but otherwise attractive, with bobbed hair that swept forward from behind her ears making a thin black crescent on each of her wide pink cheeks.

The guests were drinking tea. Nobody was looking when a small door opened on the far side of the sofa and Ts’ui and two of his aides trooped into the room. All the guests stood up in some confusion. After a round of hand shaking the three newcomers sat down by themselves on the sofa, rather stiffly and evenly spaced, with Ts’ui in the center. Ts’ui was young looking in his immaculate black woolen uniform. According to the unwritten rules his position did not as yet warrant his wearing foreign suits, although he was already expected to wrap himself in a certain amount of mystery and drama, like making surprise entrances.

After chatting for a while, everybody went over to the long table and the meeting got down to business. Liu took the humblest corner seat at the far end of the table.

The guests did all the speaking. It was understood that Ts’ui and his wife were only sitting in on the meeting, and were not to speak unless the situation called for a little steering. Ts’ui took a little brocade box out of his pocket and got out a seal of chicken-blood stone, which looked something like soapstone but had deep crimson blotches. He looked it over and then fumbled for a toothpick to clean the engraved lines, which were clotted with the dry vermillion ink. He was not being inattentive. Attending meetings was something like breathing; Ts’ui had learned to take it easy. His face was pale and oblong, with three-cornered long black eyebrows. He was irritable, even querulous at times, but Liu thought, looking at him from across the table, that there were worse bosses.

Seals were the newest craze among the
kan-pu
. When Liu had first come to Shanghai last winter, Ts’ui had used wooden chops on documents subjected to his approval. Now he had a collection of seals of good stone or ivory to choose from. The fad was started by a Shanghai businessman who hit on the idea of giving his
kan-pu
friends something other than Parker pens and wrist-watches—something really distinguished and personal. No matter how jittery about taking bribes a person might be he need have no qualms in accepting a seal with his own name beautifully carved on it.

The speakers droned on. Once when Liu looked up from his notes he saw that Ts’ui had put away his seal and was blowing his nose with what appeared to be a striped handkerchief. He must have stared, because Ts’ui hurriedly thrust it back into his pocket, and Liu realized that it had been a sock. Lately, as the weather warmed up, Ts’ui was in the habit of removing his shoes and stockings as soon as he sat down anywhere, and scratching between his toes. Long ago he had contracted athlete’s foot from long marches and life in the country. Most of the old
kan-pu
suffered from the same thing, and when they sat down they invariably drew up one of their legs, to scratch their toes.

Ts’ui’s drawn-up knee showed above the edge of the table. His face, leaning against the black-trousered knee, looked absorbed. But it seemed to Liu that somewhere about him there was a mocking swagger that showed he was not totally unconscious of offending petit-bourgeois fastidiousness. Liu felt he ought be ashamed of himself. After all, athlete’s foot was as much an occupational disease of the Revolutionist as tuberculosis was.

Ts’ui’s hand appeared above the table, reaching for the glass of tea in front of him. Liu was also drinking his tea. At the sight of Ts’ui’s pale fingers curled around the glass, somehow the tinny smell of the weak tepid tea revolted him. He put down his glass hastily and never touched it again.

At the end of the meeting Ts’ui and his wife and his aides stayed behind to talk to the Democratic Personages while Liu left the room with his notes.

There was nobody in the front office. His mind still on the meeting, he returned to his desk. But this was not his desk. His desk was a big dark one designed for two people to sit face to face across it. Now a small orange-tan one stood in its place. A wide crack ran all the way across the top and there were grains of sesame in the dusty split.

The desk-lamp, paste jar and ink-stand and some of his things and Chang’s had been moved to the windowsill. He pulled open all the desk drawers a little wildly. Where were the photographs he had been working on? Those were probably the only copies in the whole country. He did not like the idea of having to tell Comrade Ko Shan at the
Liberation Daily News
that he had lost them.

He dashed out into the hall. He knew where to find Chang. He would be in Comrade Ho’s cubicle down the hall, sitting on the Culinary Officer’s bunk smoking and chatting away. Ho liked to talk about the old days and gossip about his superiors. And Chang, probably believing that knowledge is power, was always interested in Tsui’s doings, his wife, his favorite dishes and general likes and dislikes.

“Found a bit of ink from his new carved seal on his shirt. Thought it was lip-rouge,” Ho was saying when Liu came to his door. “
Haugh!
Such a big row! Talked about divorce. Such a row! The Organization had to send a Big Old Sister to talk her out of it—”

He stopped when he saw Liu. He had no use for a non-Party member. He did not ask Liu to come in—not that there was enough room for three persons. He had a cheerful little place. An office boy had slept here when it had been the office of a foreign firm. The lower half of the peeling whitewashed wall had been pasted over with foreign Sunday comic sheets—
Donald Duck
,
Bringing Up Father
and
Terry and the Pirates
. He had put his padded military coat on a hanger, hooked on a nail above his bunk. Then he had hung his spare cap on the nail. The coat and cap blocked off part of the gaily colored horizontal strips of comics. The clothes looked like a giant lumbering across fairyland, his head dipping forward between his shoulders.

“Comrade Chang, what’s happened to our desk?” Liu asked.

“What do you mean—something happen to our desk?” Chang asked fuzzily.

It seemed to take a lot of explanation for Chang to understand what had happened. Liu could tell from his vagueness that Chang sensed trouble and was trying to keep out of it.

“No, I have no idea,” he said. “That’s funny. Better ask Comrade Ts’ui or Comrade Chu—I suppose they want it somewhere else. Did you see them anywhere?”

Of course he knew very well they had been at the meeting. Otherwise he wouldn’t be playing truant. Chang had been sort of letting himself go lately. Liu knew that it was because their job here was as much a disappointment to Chang as it was to him. In the beginning they couldn’t help but let it go to their heads a little, to be singled out in the country and sent down to Shanghai to work at Resist-America Aid-Korea, when there was already a vast organization there doing just that—but evidently not to Peking’s satisfaction. True, they had not been charged with any secret mission. But the summons had spoken for itself. It had looked as if they both had bright careers in front of them.

When they first came, the Shanghai office must have wondered whether they were
kan-pu
low in rank but in direct contact with High Places and had been planted here as spies. Liu felt ashamed recalling he had been surreptitiously pleased at their attitude, half suspecting they were right—after all, they ought to know more about such things than he did. But the staff had obviously changed their minds and now did not hesitate to show the two of them exactly where they stood. Liu had read that “The ranks of our propaganda workers are one and a half million strong.” A very depressing statement. How on earth could he ever hope to win distinction and get ahead?

Liu went to look for the coolies. Some of them must have helped to move the desk. He hoped that nobody had cleaned out the drawers yet.

He passed the office of Comrade Ma, whose husband was in charge of personnel. The door was open and he thought he saw his desk inside.

“Excuse me, Comrade Ma,” he looked in and said to the woman, who was walking up and down nursing a baby through a pocket that could be conveniently opened by unbuttoning a button. She was one of those women
kan-pu
who look like little Eskimos. Even a light uniform looked thickly padded on her. “Is this the desk we had in the front office?” Liu asked.

“Yes, I had it moved to this room,” she snapped at him, tossing back a strand of short bobbed hair from her oily dish face.

“Excuse me, I’ve left some important documents in the drawer.”

She asked loudly, as Liu hurried toward the desk, “If they’re so important why didn’t you lock them up? Who’s going to be responsible if they’re lost?”

“Well, I always lock up before I leave, but just now I was only out of the room for a while, “Liu explained, “I didn’t know the desk would—”

“You’d better be more careful next time,” she said severely. “Working in an Organization, the most important thing is
pao mi
, Security Measures.”

She continued to pace around as if unruffled, feeding her baby. But when he left the room with his photos he could sense her stopping by the desk for a moment, watching him. She probably thought he would have tried to get the desk back if she hadn’t scared him off.

Comrade Ho was hovering at the door of the front office. Chu Ya-mei was in the room talking loudly when Liu came in. “All this talk of regularizing, regularizing. And here they’re getting more guerilla-style everyday! It’s grab and run all the time. And in broad daylight!—Look at this!”

She looked at the little desk. She was gnawing the tips of her bobbed hair as a man might chew the ends of his moustache. “How can we put this here with people visiting all the time! And there might be international friends dropping in any moment!” She had been talking a lot about international friends lately, ever since it had been known that her husband was to help entertain the World Youth Delegates who were on their way from Peking.

Chang was over at the window sorting out their belongings on the windowsill.

“Seems we only have dead people here—all dead!” Ya-mei went on to say. “What have you been doing, old Ho? What are you here for, anyway? One day the roof will be lifted from above your head and you won’t even notice. All you ever do is to sit there and
la, la; la, la
.” She always said “pull” instead of “chat,” meaning pulling the thread of conversation to lengthen it.

She was very good at “pointing at the mulberry tree while scolding the
huai
tree,” a folk-art practiced mainly among women, especially country women. The
huai
tree was Chang in this case. Liu was certainly glad he had been over in the meeting room when this had happened, or he would have been blamed for it too.

Just then a Communications Officer, or messenger boy, came in and said to her, “All sold out, Comrade Chu.
Haugh!
Never saw such a crowd! Such a long queue, it had to make three turns on the curb.”

“I knew it—I knew there was going to be a big crush.” Ya-mei was furious. “That’s why I sent Old Ho there early yesterday afternoon. And the fool couldn’t find the place.”

“I waited for three hours,” the Communications Officer said. “I was moving up to the door when the man came out and said there were no more. All sold out.”

“Been here over a year now and can’t even find his way about,” Ya-mei turned and said to Liu. “I heard yesterday the government has put a batch of pickled pigs’ feet out on sale, so I sent him to get some. Comrade Ts’ui has always liked pickled things.—Couldn’t find the China Products Company! You don’t know how many times I’ve told him: ‘Old Ho, the city is the basic point of study now. At least get to know the roads. Learn to read the signs.’”