Naked Earth (27 page)

Even Ko Shan was beginning to look a bit nervous standing up there. She was still smiling but her eyes were shifting around uncertainly, slightly out of focus. Was she having difficulty making up her mind which one of her lovers she should give up? Because to name him was to break with him. It would be impossible to continue man-woman relations afterwards with everybody watching them, spying for the Organization. But it would cost her nothing publicly to sever relations with somebody she already had broken off with. It would be a great convenience, Liu suddenly realized with a sinking heart.

He knew from his own experience just now that you could not distinguish between the faces amassed below the platform. But he kept feeling Ko Shan’s glance brushing over his face. Nobody had ever been executed for improper man-woman relations, he reminded himself. But Su Nan would soon hear of this. What would she think? Perhaps he could have made her understand if he had been smart enough to have told her about it himself. It was an entirely different matter with all the sordid details dragged out in a mass meeting and with everybody talking about it afterwards, laughing over it. She might forgive him, but it would never be the same again between them. He should have told her. Now he had lost the opportunity forever.

“Let’s have it! Your lover’s name! Your lover’s name!” As Chinese nouns have no plural form, they could have meant either “lover” or “lovers.” But Liu knew they would never be satisfied with one. They always clamored for more, always taking for granted that you were keeping something back.

“All right, I’ll
t’an-pa
i
!
” Ko Shan suddenly shouted, her voice harsh and tight with the effort of speaking loud enough to be heard. Her face was slightly flushed and still faintly smiling. “It’s Chang Li.” The shouted words hung suspended awkwardly in the sudden hush.

The name meant nothing to many of those present. There was a hubbub of mistrustful questioning.

“Chang Li of the Resist-Aid Association,” Ko Shan said very loudly in that forcibly raised voice that did not sound like her own.

Liu turned and looked back, vaguely searching, as lots of other people were doing. Chang had substituted for him as liaison officer when he left to study for the Three Antis, so Chang was also at the meeting. With astonishment he saw Chang stood up, looking grave.

“Comrades,” Chang said, “I admit I have Perpetrated an Error.”

“Make him go up and
t’an-pa
i
!
” people were shouting. “Give a thorough account of it!”

Chang’s self-criticism was dramatic. Like repentant sinners at revivalist meetings he spared no effort to paint himself black to show up his momentous about-face. He had first seen Ko Shan in the middle of August at an evening meeting. A bestial impulse and weakness of will prompted him to make advances at her when he saw her home that evening. The advances, he was ashamed to say, had been successful. He tried to break himself of the habit of visiting her but had succumbed every time to the temptation of the flesh. He gave a full, colorful account, pausing only to lash himself with his tongue.

Somebody spotted Ko Shan trying to leave the platform while he was holding his audience enthralled. “Hey, just a minute! We’re not through with you yet! Who’re your other lovers? The names! The names!”

“There’s nobody else,” she called out loudly, smiling and trying visibly to check her exasperation.

Everybody yelled at her but she insisted.

Then the chairman came to her aid, probably because both she and Chang were Party members and he thought enough was enough. “You seem very sure that Comrade Chang Li was the only one,” he said to Ko Shan severely. “Now you think back carefully after you go home. Both of you will report to your respective Party unit at nine o’clock this evening.” He turned briskly to the audience. “The records of their confessions will be sent over to the Party Branch Office right after this meeting. We will now go on with the next case.”

Liu swallowed a sigh of relief. When the next man, a Culinary Officer named T’ang, was called to the platform, he tried to bury the memory of his fear by joining in the chorus of charges. Hooting and jeering with the rest at the cook’s stumbling effort to explain a discrepancy in his rice account, Liu felt a strange exultation as if, after holding out against a whirlwind, he had let go and had joined it to tear at the roofs and walls of the familiar world.

But when Chang did not come home to the dormitory all night, he began to feel uneasy again. What had happened? Was it that serious? Even if Ko Shan would not mention him, wouldn’t Chang drag him into it under pressure? Chang certainly knew something about him and Ko Shan—the way he warned him off her. That was at the end of August, two weeks after Chang started going with her himself.

The mass meeting continued the next day. They had not yet gone through half the personnel. Liu was surprised to find that Ko Shan was present at the meeting and quite active too, making accusations and shouting out questions. Later he heard from other people that she had got off lightly, had merely been told to submit a full confession in written form.

Chang did not come back to the hostel that second night either. It turned out that he had been temporarily detained in a spare room in the office building. The Party unit was conducting an investigation into his other depravities. He went under discussion every evening until late at night. He was required to contribute to those discussions with interminable self-criticism. In the daytime he was shut in his cell for Isolated Retrospection.

Liu thought he was extremely lucky to be out of it. “I really ought to go and see Ko Shan and thank her,” he thought guiltily.

There seemed to be a curfew on during the Three Antis. Everybody stayed home after the office and kept himself to himself. In times like these you never could tell what would happen to somebody who had seemed perfectly all right a minute ago. Even a telephone call might implicate you. When Liu came to the house where Ko Shan lived, he felt he was sneaking through a blockade.

“What’re you here for?” she said at once when she opened the door. She looked very annoyed. “You’ll get me into more trouble if someone should see you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m leaving in a minute.”

“Even if you leave right now there’s still a chance of your being seen.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

It was so cold in the unheated room that she was dressed as if to go out, wearing fur-lined suede boots and a plaid muffler over her padded uniform. She returned to her chair and took up her knitting. There were sheets of paper covered with writing on the table next to her. She had been working on her confession, pondering some changes while she knitted.

The room had such a chastened air, Liu almost felt like laughing. It seemed emptier and tidier than he ever remembered it and was everywhere covered with clean-looking undisturbed dust. Ko Shan could very well be a college senior staying behind in the deserted dormitory working on her thesis while everybody was away during the winter vacation. These Party members, he could not help thinking, how they do change their lives with the policy of the moment, so quickly and with a kind of nonchalant docility—you would think only children could carry it off.

“I’ve got to thank you for what happened yesterday,” he said. “For leaving me out, I mean.”

Her scarlet piece of knitting was warm and bright on her lap. Without looking up she lifted her eyebrows slightly instead of shrugging. “There’s no need to.”

“No, but I’m really grateful.”

“To be quite frank with you,” she said, “I mentioned Chang instead of you because I could trust him not to get me into a bigger mess than what I’m in already. Which is more than I can say for you.”

Liu smiled, ashamed. “Yes, I know.” After a pause he said, “Chang is undergoing Isolated Retrospection. Looks quite serious. The Party unit has been discussing and criticizing him for several nights running. Up to three o’clock, I heard.”

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Ko Shan said, smiling. “Chang’s all right. Since when has a Party member been afraid of criticism? Even being penalized means nothing. Our Chairman Mao has been penalized six times, you know that? The same sentence each time: Membership retained but under observation. All but expelled from the Party.”

Liu smiled again, saying nothing. Then he asked, “Does Chang know about us?”

“Of course he knows something about it. He’s no fool. And he’s not crazed with jealousy—he’s not that kind of person. So there’s no point in keeping things from him.”

Liu was silent. “He didn’t mention me yesterday,” he said eventually.

“Of course. What good would that do him? He’ll just make an enemy without making things any easier for himself. Sorry, I want that chair.” She was untying a new bunch of wool. Liu stood up awkwardly and she pulled his chair near her, stretched out the wool on the chair back and started to pull it out, winding it into a ball.

“I’m going,” Liu said smiling, taking the hint.

She did not say goodbye. Sitting there alone winding wool she suddenly lifted both hands, first one then the other, to wipe tears from her face. With dye-reddened hands she continued to wind the wool.

YA-MEI
rushed out into the corridor with her husband’s knitted pullover. They were taking him away for questioning.

They were waiting for the lift, Ts’ui standing between two policemen, two soldiers of the Liberation Army armed with rifles behind him. The old-fashioned elevator was slowly chugchugging up somewhere deep down in the building. Against the whitewashed wall of the shaft the heavy black iron chain swam downward perpendicularly, swinging a little from its own weight, in what seemed to be an endless flow. Then the deliberate swimming motion was stopped. The grill-door on another floor was slammed open and shut with two rattling clangs as nerve-wracking as acid eating into teeth. The chain continued its downward flow while the lift came slowly up.

Ya-mei pushed the brown knitted pullover into Ts’ui’s hands. “Better take this along. It’s so cold,” she said loudly, not so much talking to him as excusing herself to his guards.

“All right,” one of the policemen said politely, taking the sweater away from Ts’ui and carrying it for him. “Now that’s that. He’s got all he needs.”

When she tried to get into the lift with them, they pushed her away. “No room. No room,” they said.

The grill clanged shut in her face and she turned and ran, past one or two closed doors and the Culinary Officer’s cubicle with its bright flash of wall pasted over with colored comics. She clattered down the cement staircase, for decades the back alley used by shroffs and barefoot coolies the foreign masters had not allowed to use the lift. The lofty cobwebbed gray-white ceiling pressed down on the quiet stale air of winter and disuse. Ya-mei tore down the last steps into the corridor of the floor below. The old lift was so slow that she arrived in time to catch a glimpse of Ts’ui’s face behind the iron grill in the lighted cage as it gradually sank below the floor level. She could not tell if he had seen her.

Her flood of sadness seemed to be a kind of fulfilment, so that she suddenly had no strength left to race the lift any more. It went down, slowly pumping through the heart of the building. She stood outside the grill looking at the enormous black iron chain swimming upward, indolent with its great weight. She waited to hear the chilling clang of grill-door when the elevator touched bottom. Then she pressed the button.

The lift came up empty. The liftman in his padded Liberation Suit glanced at her curiously. He was half smiling with fright and excitement but he refrained from asking questions. On the way down she looked at the back of his bowed head silhouetted against the alternating solid darkness and daylight behind bars.

She went at once to find Liang Po, Ts’ui’s best friend. Like Ts’ui he had been an officer in the Liberation Army, but now he was the head of the Lu Chia Wan police station. He was not in his office when she called. But she wasted no time and went all over town seeing other friends. Both she and Ts’ui P’ing had had long Revolutionary Histories, so they knew quite a lot of people.

By the end of that day she had not found out anything. She went back to see Liang at his quarters. She had never liked Liang because her husband had almost got killed in battle several time saving Liang’s life. That Liang had also saved Ts’ui’s life more than once was another matter. She heard no end of it at home.

She had the idea Liang did not like her very much either. He probably thought her too capable and unwomanly, always pushing to the forefront of things. Though the truth was that she was too much a woman, always expecting all men to be a little attracted to her and resenting it if they weren’t. But this evening as soon as she saw him and told him about Ts’ui, she broke down and cried as if he were her own flesh and blood.

“Don’t worry. Don’t worry,” the stocky, ochre-colored little man said awkwardly. “It may be nothing. So long as there is a single letter informing against you, they catch you and try to scare the truth out of you. Otherwise it’ll seem undemocratic and they are afraid it will affect the enthusiasm of the Masses and the Masses won’t come forward with charges. Why, that’s one of the basic principles of the Three Antis!”

She did not answer, gulping her sobs.

“Where have they taken him, do you know?” he asked.

“I’ve been all over town but I haven’t found out a thing.”

“Who did you see?” He looked at her mistrustfully from under knitted brows.

“Comrade Tseng of the People’s Supervisory Committee. You used to know him too, didn’t you? I also went to Old Fei of the Public Security Department.”

“You know, you shouldn’t be running round like this,” Liang said nervously. “Could be interpreted as a breach of discipline, you know—going round asking for special favors. And people might not like it, in a time like this when everybody has his own troubles. In the end it might do more harm than good.”

Ya-mei stared at him, anger suddenly flaring up in her. “You’re quite right. Everybody has his own troubles. Who can you count on to help in a time like this? Not a single soul,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “That’s why Ts’ui P’ing is such a fool. Friends always come first with him. Ready to give up his own life even. Really not worth it!”