The Blue-Eyed Shan (27 page)

Well, he could remember heroes too. Whole companies that stood fast, died in their tracks, sacrificing themselves for regiments, divisions, passes, towns.

He dozed in the saddle. He wondered whether Greenwood had reached Pawlu, whether even one of the half-dozen letters had ever found its way to that honorable, engaging and naive American.

… I shall be leaving China for good, with luck by way of Kunming and through Pawlu sometime around the New Year. I prefer not to leave Asia at once, or to deal directly with any government; governments, even yours, have a way of appropriating the goods and clapping the merchant into jail. Meet me. There will be rewards for you beyond simple academic distinction or publicity, and I cannot do this alone; I need you, for verification and to lend a bit more integrity to the enterprise than a Nationalist Chinese general can inspire alone.

Remember the world we share, the world of men who
do
. If you cannot meet me I shall proceed warily toward some understanding with the British, who may consider it a coup. Not, God knows, the Burmese or Indians or Pakistanis.

Dear old Greenwood: I owe you much. Allow me the opportunity to balance the books, as we Chinese traditionally do (or did) at the New Year. I have thought of you often during the recent descent into Hell.

Your friend and debtor,

Yang Yu-lin

Now on the trail Yang dreamed of Switzerland. A small chalet overlooking a lake. Red shutters. Time to read, and to paint. An honorable retirement, earned, God knows.

There was also a place called Riverdale, near New York City. Many of his friends recommended it: stretches of lawn, trees, parks and views of a broad river, with the metropolis only minutes away, museums and galleries.

He remembered the Louvre, and a funny old painting of two patrician women naked to the waist, one tweaking the other's nipple. Odd people, foreigners. Paris, Paris.

He was a foreigner himself now, forever.

If Olevskoy's past life was more present to him than his present life, he was nonetheless aware of, and grateful for, a future. His considerations were at first encyclopedic, a new climate, language, cuisine, and then geopolitical: how would an out-of-practice prince govern a small province? He recalled Semenov out by Irkutsk, ruling his ephemeral quicksilver state by cruelty alone, shooting, flogging, raping, burning, yet surviving. An image resurged: raped Red women tied to the tracks to derail a Red train. Another: Reds burned alive in a church and Semenov growling, “They deserve worse! That's sacrilege!” Men, women and children, screaming and bellowing, and the stench afterward sickening. Semenov! A monster, really. And then to let himself be taken, just like that, as if weary of it all, by Russian troops dashing through Manchuria in 1945! After persisting so long! Even the devil grows old. He had been executed almost on the spot.

And the reoccupation of Peking, ah what a city! And this crazy General Yang with his footlockers. Three years' worth of footlockers, and the general wriggling his way in and out of battles, ambushes, disguises, provinces, now the motherland itself. “Shall we turn coat, Nicky?” But always with that broad grin; Yang would never join them.

Nor would Olevskoy, to be shot at dawn or strangled in a cell. No, far better this jaunt to the tropics, to a broad-leafed new world of slim and acquiescent women, half-naked, a sparkle in the eye, betel juice all over your—

With a despairing laugh at himself he settled into his reverie. Here in the south girls would mature more rapidly, so he had heard, more rapidly than Varya and Katya. He daydreamed a tropical variation of the theme with which he habitually beguiled tedious hours on horseback: at what age a young paramour's pupilage might commence.

“Smoke,” said General Yang, peering off to the south.

“Wild Wa?” It was a single faint tendril.

“Too soon. Push on.”

“Yessir.” Major Wei inhaled vast quantities of mountain air.

General Yang rallied him: “I believe you're enjoying yourself.”

“I am, General, I am. New places, new ways! How many travel to the ends of the earth to achieve their heart's desire?”

“Few indeed. And what is this heart's desire?”

“How can I know until I arrive?” Wei laughed, a deep boom.

General Yang awaited an echo; none came. He was blue, gloomy. Not because his army had now been pared to thirty-three; they were superfluous in any case. Not because he had, when all was said and done, been chased ignominiously from the homeland he had spent his life defending; it was no longer his China. He was not hungry or cold or lonely; just blue.

Reminiscing does it, he reflected. The memory of Taierhchuang obsessed him like an erotic fantasy, and Taierhchuang would never come again. Hand to hand, they had fought! Chinese troops, trained to withdraw, retreat, flee, desert, had stood their ground with bayonets. Not Colonel Yang himself; he was commanding a regiment of the old 31st Division—ah, by the gods, the 31st! General Chih, furious with these monkeys, and three-fourths of the rural Shantung town in Japanese hands, and Yang's regiment holding the rest, inspired or resigned, awaiting—hoping for—the “flanking and encircling movement of high-speed motorized battalions”; incredulous when these units did move at high speed, did flank, did encircle; dizzy, almost hysterical, when the Japanese 5th Division, diverted from another action, was driven back and dispersed; and all but insane with pride when the whole Chinese force merged,
obeying orders
, and cut the invaders to pieces.

Sergeant Chang and Corporal Pao were by now good friends; the matter of the corporal's medal had become a joke, and as the story made the rounds—a chestful of Orders of the Tripod—Pao even admitted sheepish embarrassment. Like their fellows—privates first, second and third class; corporals; sergeants; master sergeants—they now viewed life with wide eyes, happy to be alive, appalled to be leaving China, jittery about the Communist flying columns, fearing the future yet excited by the adventure of it. Their stride was brisker, their eye sharper. As their number dwindled, they seemed to become General Yang's intimate friends. “I think I like this,” the sergeant confided. “It is better than war,” the corporal agreed. “How do you suppose it will end?” the sergeant asked. “Well, I am a farm boy,” the corporal said, “and may find myself a nice piece of land somewhere.”

“A fine idea in this climate,” Sergeant Chang approved. “I am a Manchurian, you know, and I can remember fields too hard to plow as late as May.”

The corporal shivered theatrically. “I am a Cantonese myself, and accustomed to sunny skies.”

“That is why you talk so oddly.”

“No, no: it is
you
who talk oddly.”

They shared a cigarette, and agreed that they would be learning a new language shortly. They also agreed that there had never, at least in modern times, been as good a general as Yang Yu-lin; that the colonel was a martinet but trustworthy in combat; and that the general would never desert them in time of danger but the colonel just might.

His back pains alarmed the general. He recalled a kidney stone, excruciating, and here he was at the back of beyond. A long day's ride. Winding into the hills they had traveled some thirty miles, by his guess, and covered half that or less as the crow flew. They seemed to be at four thousand feet or so. Would his old lungs wheeze, his old heart pump painfully at nine thousand?

The pack mule had plodded its steady way. The general held it in affection. Now at night the footlockers were off-loaded and flanked his head as he lay in aching repose. The stars were innumerable, a thick white carpet.

Major Wei approached, bearing rice, chicken, dried plums and hot tea. Groaning, the general sat up.

“How awful to make this journey in monsoon time,” the major observed.

Up, and up. Yang's heart did not labor; it leapt at vista after gorgeous vista. He had traveled these hills in 1944, but under distracting pressure; their majesty had escaped him. Now he was awed. Range upon range of black, purple, pink, green hillsides and crests. Nothing over ten thousand feet, he knew that from his maps; yet this was surely enough, and the fetch of them, the infinity, stopped his breath. Could the Alps surpass them? He imagined them clad in snow.

The downward prospect also stopped his breath. The trail was for the most part a good two paces wide, and wound undemandingly through shallower slopes; but now and then he found himself at the edge of a true declivity, peering down into the abyss of a deep valley and suppressing a shiver.

Late one afternoon they reached the crest, some ninety-five hundred feet, and General Yang Yu-lin was rewarded by a sixty-mile panorama. South of him rolled range after range again, gorge after gorge. Through one of those gorges wound the great Salween. He judged that he was still in China, but it would not be long now. Exile. All downhill hereafter to the Salween. Twenty miles more? Southwest, then west.

He instructed Major Wei to make camp here, on the crest, that the men might contemplate the world's grandeur. Do not forget, however, fodder for beast and soldier alike. Tell the men to bundle up. This night will be frosty.

To the south, another tendril of smoke.

Olevskoy's pedagogical speculations had been supplanted by a sudden nostalgia for blond women. The trouble with being a lord in the Orient was the eternal sameness: black hair, probably bangs, high cheekbones, epicanthic fold, unvarying submission. The demands of survival: do as the foreign lord wishes. In retrospect blond women seemed to him fiery, rebellious, self-assertive and delightfully cruel. European. They drove autos and bore arms and voted; they smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails; some were aggressive in bed. Faint after-images of his youth fleeted across his memory—Katya, Varya—a third of a century and more.

He tried to recapture the imagined face of his fledgling Burmese mistress, but her features had blurred.

The winding descent, the dizzying spiral to the river, was horrific, a nightmare. Yang thanked his gods that the weather held fair and dry; one good rain and they must all have perished ignobly, cart-wheeling off slick trails down soggy slopes, piling together in the valley; bones indeed, in great heaps. The animals pawed cautiously, halted to sniff and whicker, proceeded with resigned deliberation, or so it seemed. Yang watched his footlockers bob and sway before him and tried to calculate how many miles they had traveled, and wondered what he would do if they were suddenly cast off, if the mule stumbled.

Well, he would surely proceed to the floor of the valley and retrieve what he could. Imagine a paleontologist, next century, finding those bones in a gorge near the Salween! History's tricks. Two fiercely contending schools, one (the Patriots) contending that these bones represented an early southwest China civilization; the other (the Cosmopolites) insisting that because these were identical to the bones of Peking Man, to the measurements, the plaster casts, the photographs, and were indeed and indubitably the bones of Peking Man, either they had arrived at the Salween by some process of deep mystery and teleportation or Peking Man had
walked
the whole way.

Yang laughed aloud. Suppose, he speculated, suppose these bones were carried to Peking by some holy man a thousand years ago. From Africa, from South America, from anywhere. Suppose Peking Man was Japanese!

“Many a time I have carried them,” Olevskoy told Major Ho. “You know what the old man has been through—dressing as a woman, passing across the lines, wearing tatters and claiming to be my coolie. More than once I have helped him shift a load, and those chests are extremely light. He has carried them both himself, many times, slung fore and aft, or on a yoke, or one in either hand.”

“Diamonds, it must be diamonds.”

Olevskoy shook his head certainly. “Of course not. So many gems would weigh a hundred catties. A fortune in diamonds covers the palm of a hand; a sockful of diamonds is uncountable wealth. Well, surely not gold, and if objets d'art—”

“What is that?”

“What did I say?” Olevskoy was amused; he would no longer be sure what language he spoke.

“Ob-zay da.”

“Valuable pieces of ancient art. But the lockers have been dropped and flung; swaying from the yoke, they have banged walls and wagons. Let me tell you, there is a streak of the elf in our general. When he spoke of the bones of his ancestors, he was telling the truth, in some obscure way.”

“Bones?” Ho was stunned.

“In some obscure way,” Olevskoy repeated.

Wei came racing back up the trail, overwhelming his mount, a huge mule. “What a moment! I want to ride with you around this bend.” He backed his mule, swung downhill again.

Yang said, “Ah,” and was too moved even to smile. They were rounding a bluff, the trail comfortable, a few old washouts but always room to skirt danger. He followed Wei. Four o'clock, and the sun westering fast in these mountains. Yang was hungry. A good sign. Sick men lost appetite. He rounded the last outcropping.

The Salween was majestic. Even from a thousand feet up, its white fury challenged the heart: it leapt and boiled, frothed and raced, deep in its purple gorge. It defied the wanderer: you are only man, I am river.

After a time Wei said dubiously, “I suppose it can be forded.”

“That is what trails are for,” Yang confirmed. “There will be a bowl, a little floodplain, a flattening, and the stream will slow.” Yang twisted in the saddle. Behind him the mule stood, cloudy of intellect, unbowed by its easy burden.

“You must remember,” Olevskoy said to Ho, “he is an old man now. Not even a general; we are all refugees.”

“Then you are not a colonel.”

“No. I am once more a prince.”

“He keeps them always in sight,” Ho said, “or leaves Wei to stand guard. Never me. And there are ropes and locks.”

“An occasion will present itself.” Olevskoy squinted, scanning hillsides. “Do you know what I might want if I were General Yang?”