The Communist's Daughter (30 page)

We commemorated the occasion with a photograph. Before the doorway of my mud-brick house we set up a small knee-high table and my straw-backed chair. I sat and leaned into my egg like a king over his banquet. Ho stood to my left, holding a magazine that had been sitting on the chair I now occupied. Why he picked up a year-old English-language magazine I cannot say. Perhaps this was some small bridge into my life. Perhaps there was more relief on his face than pride.

“This is a memento,” I said. “There, translate. Please tell him this is a perfect egg.” The man with the camera, Mr. Tung, addressed the boy holding the magazine.

I said, “Tell him I'm leaving. Tell him I'm leaving but that I'll be back. I'll be back in six months.”

“Will he go with you?” he said.

“He will not,” I said. “He stays. Let him go back to his village if he likes.”

*

September. I have taken some time off from writing. You will forgive me, I hope. Over the last month we have toured the aid stations in the surrounding villages and instructed the local staff. We travelled by horse and mule, and there was a fair bit of walking, too. My old Japanese animal came in handy, though his torn and battered hooves have seen better days. The poor beast isn't quite cut out for this terrain of mountain trail and rock slides, and I almost think a lowly burro might be better suited for my purposes.

Yes, of late I have been occupied, mind, spirit and body. There is no rest to be had here. Along with my travels I have also just completed the final draft of a book that will not, alas, provoke literary controversy. It's called
Organization and Technique for Division Field Hospitals in Guerrilla Warfare,
and the good Mr. Tung is now working on the translation full bore. When he's finished it will be printed and widely distributed in under a month by the Regional Government. So you see, busy in body and mind. There simply hasn't been time. My writing, my surgeries, my teaching at the hospital that was once, not so long ago, the Buddhist temple of this polite and desecrated village, threatened to consume me entirely. (We have displaced a large number of hapless monks, by the way—obsequious, soft and annoying men who are certainly not lacking in time, a remarkably aimless lot.)

But now there is at least a break in my routine, and I can return to these pages. Here I sit in this small grey mud-and-brick town of Shin Pei, so similar to the other villages I've occupied over these last twelve or fourteen months, again back at this account of life, war and memory. Patience, please. But the war, the deprivation, the heat, these are factors that send my imagination in all directions. I would be a different man strolling along the Champs-Elysées, with bowler hat and cane. Or bathing at Sunnyside Beach in Toronto. Or boating on that small lake in the Retiro Park. Perhaps one day you will jump into the great Lake Ontario from your father's shoulders. You, a pink little thing, shrieking with all the world's delight. How my heart explodes at the thought! The month is September, somewhere around the sixteenth or seventeenth, I think. With the completion of that witless textbook, basic illustrations included, a space now opens before me at this typewriter, a space I may now fill with thoughts of you, and all I can think about is going home, of meeting you, holding your wiggling body up to the sun.

What is happening back there? I am desperate for news. All I see are San Francisco papers and magazines, a year or two old, used by merchants as wrapping for sugar, tea and cakes. And not even political pages but reviews of Frances Farmer and Cary Grant in
The Toast of New York
and the new Terraplane Coupe automobile. Perhaps one day we shall have such an automobile, you and I, and I shall spirit you about grandly, blowing the horn to the wind.

*

Tonight the world is consumed by these ravenous mountains. So many are waiting to die. The Japanese noose tightens. Colours drain from the courtyard, from these flowers in their clay pots. The night in her mercy erases all evidence of men. Only voices carry through the dark, but now, hushed, they seem more animal than human. Staring at this page, lost in thought, it's as if I'm looking through my one last window to the world.

*

Last night, Mr. Tung appeared at my door and said, “If you release the boy from your service he will die.”

I stood. “Why do you think that?”

“If he returns to his village, he will die there. Do you know what a House of Consolation is?”

“No,” I said. “Not precisely.”

“One of these places was set up in his town after the Japanese came. The rest of his family was captured, his mother and two sisters. He lived in the hills outside his town for months, waiting for the Japanese to leave, but sneaked back in at night. He knew it well. It was not so difficult. The Japanese soldiers were easy to fool. He knew enough not to venture out under a moonlit sky. By then the enemy believed they owned the town and had grown complacent. Often the boy went to his house. His father was dead, taken away by the Nationalists years before. He never saw any sign that his mother and sisters had been there looking for him, as he was looking for them, but he left notes in case they came, saying that he was safe and not to worry.

“One night he slipped past a store where an old man had sold goods from faraway cities like Shanghai and Sian. Teas and herbs and medicines. But the storefront had been altered. It had been taken over by the Japanese, like everything else in the village. He did not know its purpose. The sign, in Chinese, said: HALL FOR JAPAN-CHINA FRIENDSHIP. He told me he looked in the window. It was very late at night, almost morning, in fact. But if the hall required guards, none were stationed here. He imagined it could not be such an important place. And why would a Friendship Hall require guards? He climbed through a window.

“At first he heard nothing. Then the sound of weeping drew him through two rooms to a large warehouse without windows where the old man was said to have stored a car, but the boy had never seen it. It was very dark in the warehouse and he waited for his eyes to adjust. Before long he could see many women tied to their beds, simple boards covered in straw. The women stretched out on them were of different ages, but mostly young, some younger than the boy. There were twenty-two women in all. The boy's mother and two sisters occupied the last three beds to the right. He ran to them and kneeled at his mother's bedside. ‘I am here, I can take you away,' he said, ‘all of you.' His mother kissed him and began to weep. She told her son to leave. ‘They will come soon, at first light,' she said. ‘Any minute now. Go quickly.' The men would come with red ticket stubs, she told her son, checked for each visit, allowing them to enter here and choose anyone of them. ‘Go, please. You cannot see this.'”

Mr. Tung paused.

“He tried to free her. He struggled with the ropes lashing her wrists, but it was no use. He was too frightened and so young. He was fifteen years old. His younger sister began to cry. His mother shushed her. The other women were quiet. They were straining their heads, watching to see what the boy would do. His mother said, ‘Listen to me. Go now. Go as far away from this war as you can. Do not return for us. They will capture you. They will think nothing of killing you. Go away from this place.'

“He heard the first men enter the front room of the old man's store. Everyone's head turned. Their loud boots stomped against the wooden floor. Their two voices were businesslike and unrushed. These were the military keepers of the Friendship Hall preparing for a new day. Soon after the morning meal the soldiers bearing their red tickets would stroll over and strip down to their loincloths and wait patiently for the administrators to take their tickets, check the small box that indicated another visit had been made and then admit them through the last door into the warehouse of women.

“The boy begged his mother to let him help her and his sisters, but she said, ‘You cannot help us. We are already dead.'

“The sound of soldiers walking and talking began to fill the streets. The occupied town was awake now. The loud voices of the men approached. As the door to the warehouse opened, the boy slipped under his mother's bed and the men began their selection. He remained frozen under his mother's bed until night fell.”

We sat quietly for some time. Afterward, I let Mr. Tung out the door, then lay down on my cot and stared out into the night.

I will come to you. You shall see.

I have just now
been studying my hands, which scarcely resemble the ones I started this journey with. They are more skilled, yes, and as steady as they have always been. Determined, yes. But even if they've aged into the claws of a monster, how could they send this boy back to certain death?

I am exhausted. Sick. My teeth rotten. My eyesight blurred and uncertain. I'm skin and bone, my ribs showing through as clearly as if in an anatomical drawing. If the left ear isn't ringing with the sound of distant artillery, it is completely silent.

I have been thinking about the boy.

Why am I going back? To find out what is happening. To investigate the dithering and procrastinating ways of spineless bureaucrats in New York and Toronto. To rip off some heads, if I must. I was promised funding that is nowhere to be seen. I have received no word from the China Aid Councilor the American League for Peace and Democracy. Resolutely, I am off to whip up some trouble and give them a piece of my mind. Despite my bony chest I am ready for a fight. In response to my repeated requests for updates on the absent funding I have received not a word, not a postcard, not a kiss blown to the wind. So I mean to go and find out myself. I shall cross to the other side of Shensi and go down on foot to Yan'an, some five hundred miles. I estimate it will take six weeks; then I'll go on to Chungking and Yunan by way of French Indochina, jump a boat for Hong Kong and buy my way onto a freighter laden with tea and rice bound for Hawaii, the land of my father's timid embrace. Two weeks later, sometime in late February 1940, I will make landfall in San Francisco. A triumphant return. A walk along the beach, perhaps, a bottle and a pretty girl. All innocent, nothing untoward. That is the least they can afford me, an hour or two to gaze back over the bay at sunset. Perhaps I'll become drunk on champagne and sleep till noon in clean sheets up to my chin, smothered by a harem of pillows, and enjoy a three o'clock luncheon at the bar in the near presence of beautiful women and their enterprising young men.

I have already made preparations. I am leaving within two to three weeks. Of course, it will be difficult to abandon this place. And to abandon him, my faithful servant. I am his best hope for surviving this war. I know it and he knows it. But his vulnerability cannot dictate the arc of history. Without me they will likely put a rifle in his hands. The partisans will take him; he'll go of his own accord. A hundred-pound soldier off to protect the Motherland. Last month we celebrated his eighteenth birthday. He is a man now. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but his voice cracked long ago and is oddly deep, even in this nasal language—and so much more incongruous issued from that weak chest. He puffed himself up and recited a poem composed for the occasion. I clapped when everyone else did, then Mr. Tung whispered into my ear, “It tells of the Great Bethune's struggle.”

Clever boy, I thought. But which struggle? What would he think of the Great Bethune if he knew of my excitement about returning to America, and without him? Am I allowed such thoughts? Since making my decision I am rejuvenated, helium-inflated, drunk with joy. But is this joy purely for the good work I shall do there? My aim is to raise for this war effort $1,000 per month in gold, and yet the promise of clean sheets, hot roast beef and French wine crowd my heart. What do you think of that, poor Ho? Have I deceived you? What he does not know of me! Yes, a starved man must replenish himself. But there is more. Of course there is. More than anything else, what awaits is you. And it is to you I shall pass this irregular, green-typed stack of petroleum- and lavender-scented archaeology, so that you will have the truth in your hands, come what may. This is my great optimism. This is the calm silence that now greets these eager peasants as I attempt to impart to them the basic laws and practice of sanitation, physiology and biology. This is the joy that fills me as I walk silently to my brick-and-mud shack after sixteen hours of surgery, rest my aching elbows on this desk and roll another sheet into the machine—the first clack, the ringing imprint upon the refreshed ribbon, like a small stinging bullet. Is life so good that I am to be provided a second chance? Will I find you? Will you love me as a child loves her father? Can I love you, an unknown existence so close to my own? Does a family await, after all? I must finish this story before I can know.

*

But now, you ask, am I too happy dreaming of a homecoming and champagne to remember the festering wounds and lice and horror of this place? Am I too enamoured of thunderous, admiring applause to step back into the lion's jaws? No. With my joy comes renewed energies. I step back into it. You see, you power my heart. You enliven me. By now, what is it I have left to prove?

We returned to the front, at Hua Ta, on the banks of the T'ang River, and there set up shop, our workhouse of small miracles, in an old farmhouse that had been cleared out and prepared for our arrival on the orders of an intellectual-looking regimental commander by the name of Jao, He was a small man who wore a pair of round black-rimmed glasses on his small nose and walked with an untidy rolling limp in his left leg, making it seem as if he'd been caught in an invisible surge of water that pulled forever to the left. When I received word of an impending attack I decided that this would be the last of my daredevil overland crossings before setting out for the other side of Shensi and Yunan and my glorious homecoming.

When our team arrived, poor Ho by then dragging his feet, I conducted an inspection of the building and surrounding facilities, then presented myself to the hobbled commander to pass along a list of our requirements. He read through the list, the good man, and handed it to his assistant with instructions that I be provided with all we needed. He then informed me to expect casualties within six hours. I returned to the farmhouse-aid station to oversee the preparations and quickly ate a bowl of rice provided by Ho, along with a pot of tea. On the stone wall of the house, sitting over my emptied plate, I studied the formal portrait of the family that had once lived here, or so I supposed. They were a hungry-looking lot, a mother and father and three small children smiling with rehearsed conviction and dressed in their Sunday village best. I wondered what foods they could have put in their mouths for the price of that professional photograph and those crisply pleated fabrics. They were, unfortunately, nowhere to be seen in the village. Like so many others they had been pushed from their home and now, very likely, were more skeletal than ever.

When the wounded began to arrive I believed the flow might never stop. It was a large assault consisting of three regiments. For three days we did not rest, the wounded coming in a steady torrent. We ate standing as the next casualty was laid before us. The sharp autumn air, this high up, tingled on my fingertips. My nose, ever active, always alert to the morbid fecal smells of a nicked bowel, rejoiced in the mountain breeze that lifted the curtain of that refugee family's home. We worked. We ate. We slept in ten-minute intervals. As time moved forward it began, too, to move backward. I stumbled. I began to dream. In these waking dreams I imagined this family. When I saw a small girl's head encased in the stone wall, unconscious though smiling, a syringe held like a rose in her teeth, I put my own head in a bucket of ice water.

On the second day, treating a badly broken leg, I was using a chisel that had been taken from a farmhouse near Chi Huei two or three months back. Imagine the creator of, among other instruments, the Bethune Rib Shears humbling himself with a lowly carpenter's chisel. But I—always adapting, innovating—had discovered certain properties in its construction that proved beneficial for my work. It was nicely weighted and its hardwood handle could withstand long and frequent bouts of boiling, for disinfecting. Primarily, though, it was the tempered steel, forged in Belgium, that made it so useful in cutting through and shaving off bone. How this tool had travelled so far I couldn't say, but I am glad it did. When I get out of this war you will not find it in my black bag of doctor's instruments, yet it has proved highly useful over the months. On that particular day, however, this chisel that had sat so comfortably in my hand for so long jumped off the splintered femur of the unconscious man beneath me and dug into the middle finger of my left hand.

One of the nurses quickly disinfected and wrapped the cut. Hindered, but not grievously so, I tidied up the amputation, put my head in a refreshed bucket of cold water and then, an hour later, had a second nurse re-dress the wound. As she did so I sent Ho for a candle and had him melt it down. He presented the melted wax to me in a rice bowl which, oddly enough, bore a small illustration of a flamingo, and I bathed the wrapped finger in the wax so as to seal it against infection. Another inspiration, really. Luxury of luxuries. This was as close as I'd come to wearing rubber gloves in longer than I could remember. Bandaged like a lollipop, the waxed finger was awkward and heavy, and for the rest of the day I might as well have worked with only the right hand. The following day, after three hours' rest, when I examined my wound, the cut looked fine. But halfway through the morning I decided I couldn't continue like this. I peeled the wax off the finger and got back to work.

*

This morning I awoke from a dream. It was of the morning the
Empress
set sail. From the height of the promenade deck, Jean and Charles had been enjoying the view of the dockyards and the city beyond, leaning over the rails, I suppose pretending they had their own send-off party down there, smiling and waving. I attempted to push myself forward into the excitement of the moment but I felt a weight on my chest. After a minute or two I excused myself and went below decks to find my cabin. But when I inserted my key and pushed the door open, the room was occupied.

Your mother, in the form of the painting I'd made of her at the Santander, was sitting on the bed. In it her shoulders were covered by a blanket, and she smiled.

I touched my hand to the painting. When I did, her face began to disappear, the paint coming off like dust under my hand until only the canvas remained.

*

When I awoke in the pre-dawn morning of the fourth day, only two days ago, Ho looked at me with concern. My body was trembling from lack of sleep. He himself looked unwell in the struggling light of the small stove-fire he'd set in the far corner of that one-room house to warm my tea. Then Mr. Tung stepped inside.

“What news have you heard?” I asked. Ho handed me my tea. I sat sipping, both hands shaking.

“Only that they're near,” Mr. Tung said.

“How near?” The tea spilled. “Another cup, Ho.”

“They will be here soon,” Mr. Tung said. “Before midday. We are falling back.”

The limp-footed regimental commander summoned me to his quarters and said the line had collapsed. He praised our work, thanking me personally, and then ordered our return to the Base Hospital at Yang Chia Chuang. He saluted, turned and parted, that leftward tide pulling at his body more strongly than ever. Straight-backed, I returned along the dirt path to the farmhouse-aid station. As the rose-coloured sunlight began to warm the western face of the distant Mo-t'ien Mountains, I felt an unusual buoyancy take hold. I felt almost euphoric. Then, entering the building I again saw, and for the last time, the strange face of that dead child framed by the perfect construction of fallen stone that contained her. I stopped to study her. She made a lovely picture. But now she was dead. What Capa might have done with her! I thought. What lasting images he could have produced, those hardened veins reanimated with silver nitrate and mercury, bathed in his alchemist's bath and introduced to the world as another anthemic tribute to the horror of war. Yes, he was a famous man. Relentless. Driven by the beauty of conviction. “You,” I said. “Yes, you.”

The dead girl opened her eyes. “Me?” she said.

Visions of children bricked into standing walls notwithstanding, I am well. Do you doubt my sanity? These spells shall pass. It is overwork, my dear. Physical exhaustion, nothing more. So what do I do in the meantime, as I wait out these small hallucinations? They are no more than a dizzy inconvenience. What do I do? I wonder about you. I wonder what might have been. I wonder what you will make of this history. Will you permit me the idea, the fantasy, that one day, as an older woman perhaps, you will turn these pages with forgiving sighs? The very name, the Border Regions, for all its portent, for all its distant mystery, connotes ambiguity, possibility, breadth. Will I benefit in this undeclared realm? Where certainty fades can there be rejuvenation? Does forgiveness live here in this unknowable terrain? Yet this wide landscape is really only the one small chair that holds me, this one small house. This could be anywhere. Can you see the bejewelled monster that crawls into my dreams as I sleep? Do you share the same monsters? Mornings aboard the
Empress,
those distant brief mornings with small Alicia, that lovely child, and the poems her aunt read to us while I painted return to me often:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

I wonder now if there could be a more desolate poem, or a quieter life, than that of a poet who brings silence down so absolutely upon an entire mountain range with fourteen simple words. Perhaps this is why I find it comforting, this illusion of company that writing to you now affords me. These words, though hacked and banged out on this old machine, though so crude compared to those of an artist, bring you here to these Border Regions, where I no longer own my past but instead offer it to you. You see, these words mark you as present. With them I can place, see and touch you. You are whole. And in some ways, as I write this I, too, am whole. I find wonder and warmth, and if this world I now occupy lacks anything it is those two dreams of wonder and warmth. You are my last opportunity; you are the moving eye of the blackbird.