Travels with Myself and Another (7 page)

The General looked puzzled, Mr Ma agape. He had never heard U.C. speak like that. He was used to U.C. droning, “Tell the General we greatly appreciate . . . Tell the General we deeply admire . . . Tell the General his Division is unrivalled in the world.”

“Speak slower again, sir,” Mr Ma said.

“No, no, don’t bother, Mr Ma. It was only technical stuff to help M. with her piece on the Canton Front.”

At night, a further entertainment had been arranged: plays presented by the Political Department. Wind blew over the parade ground; six bonfires were lighted around the edges. The troops, eighteen hundred of them, squatted on the damp ground while we sat in the place of honour on chairs beside the General. After three quarters of an hour, they got an acetylene lamp to work and light the stage. First there were speeches. Mr Ma pretended to translate but mumbled gibberish. Three piercing blasts on a whistle heralded the producer who stepped before the blue denim curtains on the small stage and announced the name of the play, “Group of Devils.”

The curtains jerked open, like all school plays, revealing the cast of characters, a Chinese workman, a painted Chinese lady (a girl political worker), and three Japanese officers. The workman was the lady’s husband, masquerading as the janitor. The plot was uncomplicated. The lady, a loyal Chinese spy, lured the Japanese officers to give away secrets. The Japanese officers wore paper hats like Japanese military headgear and moustaches of lamp black. The Japanese officers desired the painted lady with lewd explicit energy. The husband-janitor slyly ridiculed and insulted the Japanese officers. This went on for some time and at last all three Japanese officers were shot on stage. The audience adored it, roaring with laughter and applauding like thunder.

The second play, “Cross Section of Canton,” performed by the same actors, was not such a smash hit. Evidently I missed its finer points. The audience responded with gloom until the old father bit the Japanese soldier and was hauled off to be buried alive. After which his son collared the bitten Japanese soldier and kicked him round the stage, preparatory to slicing him in two. The audience then laughed happily. The curtain fell on the son with upraised sword, the Japanese soldier on his knees fearfully begging for his life. This was greeted with warm applause and laughter and cheerful cries, no doubt Chinese for
“Bravo.”

We laughed too, partly from pleasure to hear others laughing, partly from relief, after three hours in the wind. Mr Ma said, “All these plays are true. It cuts the General deeply in his feelings to see these plays.”

U.C. said, “Remember, M., when you come to China next time, bring your long underwear.”

“I’d rather jump off the Empire State building in long underwear than come to China again.”

“I put nothing past you,” U.C. said sombrely. “Nothing.”

The Japanese had been shown as loud, rude, ridiculous, tactless, and bullying: they were grotesque joke figures. Yet this audience was not green troops; they had been here the year before during the successful Japanese advance; they knew the Japanese. I couldn’t imagine any audience of European or American soldiers laughing its head off at a play about the antics of Germans, those clumsy, noisy, nasty, comical cowards. What did it mean? A profound difference between the Oriental and the Occidental mind?

On his best day, in a country he liked, with plenty to drink, U.C. wasn’t the man to sit still for such waffling speculation. I must have emerged from behind my fixed smile to ask the General about this odd attitude to the Japanese; otherwise I cannot account for my notes: “the General told atrocity stories.” If the General told us atrocity stories, he at least didn’t think the Japanese a big laugh. Mr Ma chipped in with a tale of eight village girls. “Since village girls are very particular about their virginity, they resisted furiously. But they were nuded and very seriously raped.” Dear Mr Ma, he could make anything shine with foolishness.

And so the Representatives of Righteousness and Peace turned back for the return trip to the river. Mr Ho broke his silence on a cold three-hour ride in mist and rain. I wonder if my notes are translated literally from his alleged French or whether Mr Ma intervened. “Bad territory” (the field of politics). “The civils are taking up all the money from the poor people . . . I did not want to be military either. Look. I kill you. You kill me. At once. Necessary. That is very bad also . . . The world is stupid . . . Perhaps our God is angry.” Mr Ho was a Catholic. He earned 120 Chinese dollars a month, fake money anyhow, but a pair of shoes cost $200. He had a wife and eight children in Macao.

I have no memory of what U.C. was doing. I rode with my head down like the horse, nodding wearily like the horse. We passed again the rice paddies and the awful straining work of the peasants. “Mr Ma,” I am sure I sounded half crazed. “What fun do people have in China?”

“Chinese people are very serious. Just work. For pleasure only talk and eat.”

War isn’t funny after all, not a time to dance in the streets. But there wasn’t any war here, there was an undeclared truce. I was sure this China had always been drowning in hopeless poverty and disease, war only made the normal state somewhat worse.

We slumped in to Wongshek and the 189th Division, where solemn blue-clad soldiers stood in the rain and U.C. had to make a speech, gagging over the words. School children greeted us with pennants, cheers and a song. Then there was another speech to villagers. We inspected a training camp, a barracks, classrooms. The signs said: “Warm Welcome to American News Reporters.” U.C. was outraged: he didn’t care what they called me but he was
not
a News Reporter. “Welcome American Friends Directing our Defective Points.” “It is good for closer relations of China and America, honoured visitors coming to see our country.” No other news reporters or foreigners had ever been here, nor had any of the military brass from Chungking. U.C. and I agreed that this was due to their good sense. Unlike us, they must have known about travel conditions in China and also how this war worked. Chiang’s armies served as a defensive rearguard but were nowhere engaged in driving the Japanese out of China. Without air support, there wasn’t much they could do even if the Japanese had been Chiang’s major concern.

U.C. said, “Cheer up, M. You saw the Chinese army, you can’t be blamed if there’s no action.”

The Chinese army settled down to live permanently wherever stationed. The soldiers got no home leave; how could they get home to begin with? They built their barracks and schools, they trained, they stayed. They would stay as long as the Japanese stayed. Two years now in the same place for the men we’d seen. Illiterate peasant families could not write to their illiterate soldier sons, and we saw no system for transporting mail and couldn’t imagine one. Nobody bothered with this lost corner of the land. Perhaps U.C. pitied that neglect, and from kindness, in the daily grind of his speeches and toasts, tried to give these forgotten people a sense of importance. I just kept moaning “God help them all” but was hardly able to maintain a polite smile.

The farewell luncheon was sensational. Generals and colonels clustered around a long table. Dish followed dish; when you lost count, the grandeur was out of sight. Chopsticks had a life of their own in my hands so I had to use a tin fork and spoon which I carried in my pocket. I was stuffing in the welcome food and failed to observe that the party had turned into a booze battle. U.C. alone against fourteen Chinese officers. One of them rose and made a toast to which U.C. replied; then he and U.C. drank bottoms up. The grisly yellow rice wine, Chinese vodka. While one toaster rested another rose, obliging U.C. to spout fancy words and again drink bottoms up. When all fourteen had finished the first round, they returned to the fray. U.C., breathing rather hard, looked like a man who is winning in a brawl against overwhelming odds.

Slowly officers grew scarlet in the face and slid beneath the table; others went green-white and fell as if shot. U.C. was planted on his feet like Atlas. I mumbled that he would have a seizure, was it worth it, patriotism is not enough, remember Nurse Cavell. But he was gleaming with the pride of combat. No question now about the honour of the United States, his personal honour was at stake, he was ready to drink them down if he died in the process. General Wong became purple and his eyes watered and he had trouble focusing so that when he tottered upright he directed his toast to the wall rather than to U.C. Mr Ma was so drunk that he was unable to translate U.C.’s most beautiful toast to the Generalissimo’s glorious and heroic armies. Half the company lay under the table, most of the remainder rested their heads upon it. U.C. towered above us, swaying but triumphant. General Wong, in whose power lay reprieve, apologized for the disgrace of having no more rice wine to offer his honoured guests.

U.C. walked with care. “I guess that showed ’em, eh M.?”

“How do you feel?”

“Like a man who is never going to make a speech or a toast again.”

This orgy began at the peculiar lunch hour of ten-thirty in the morning. We were aboard the Chriscraft by one o’clock. We made a ceremonial departure, chugging a hundred yards upriver to anchor and wait for a soldier who had vanished in the village. It was raining. I don’t know why I harp on the rain; there was only one day without rain. The cabin of the Chriscraft seven days before (days like years) had seemed to me unfit for human habitation. It reeked from the toilet, the two short bunks were covered in cloth that was dark and greasy with age-old dirt. I sprinkled Keatings Powder on the bunks and we roosted there like homing pigeons. U.C. had a nap. By three o’clock the missing soldier was found and we moved out into the river. U.C. read.

I shouted above the clanging of the Chriscraft motor, “The worst is over!”

U.C. glanced at me and returned to his book.

“Mr Ma says we’ll be at Shaokwan by noon tomorrow. More or less. Then we’ll catch the train to Kweilin. He says we can get anything we want to eat on the train and we’ll have a first class compartment to ourselves. It ought to be interesting, really, it’s the only train in the whole Republic of China. Don’t you think so?”

U.C., reading, had begun to wag his head like a pendulum.

“And the CNAC boys will pick us up in Kweilin and it’s nothing from there to Chungking. I figure we’ll be in Chungking by late afternoon, day after tomorrow.”

U.C. went on reading and head-wagging.

“And in Chungking it
has
to be all right. After all, Whatchumacallit is rich and he’s lived in the U.S. and Europe, he must have a good house. He gave me the impression of a man who liked his comforts.” I was talking about a Chinese potentate, perhaps Chiang’s ambassador in Washington, I’ve forgotten his exact position, who offered me his Chungking house because I had Connections. I accepted with thanks, knowing he thought my Connections would be useful to him, knowing myself that they wouldn’t. My Connections were the Roosevelts. I loved Mrs Roosevelt and since the President could charm the birds off the trees he could easily charm me. In those days, the White House had not become an imperial palace and was also definitely not a Nixon bazaar for buying and selling favours. Loaning his house to me was the Chinese potentate’s miscalculation.

“Baths and sheets and real beds and dry clean clothes and no more mosquito nets. Dear God, I can hardly wait.”

U.C. looked at me. “You go on hoping, M. They say hope is a natural human emotion. I’ll read.”

The night was routine, no way to lie on the short bunks, cramps in the legs, cold: nothing special. By noon we were ready to disembark. By three o’clock we had reached the original embarkation point on the river bank but the road back to Shaokwan was impassable due to rain. It was impassable enough before, now it was flooded out. We got off the boat and strolled through the mud to a village where we bought firecrackers and wine in a stone jug. A runner was sent four kilometres to fetch more gasoline for the Chriscraft, because we had to proceed afloat to Shaokwan.

We sat on the Chriscraft roof in a light drizzle and set off the anaemic firecrackers, not up to U.C.’s standards, and drank the wine. In the thermos cup, the wine was a menacing pink colour, thickish, slimy; it looked like hair oil and perhaps tasted like hair oil though I cannot say having never tried hair oil not even in China. All I hoped for was alcoholic warmth and numbing. We were still drinking at six o’clock when the runner returned. Holding the stone jug to pour, I heard something scrape inside.

“What’s in here?” I said, shaking the jug.

“It’s called spring wine,” U.C. said evasively. “It was all Mr Ma could get. Considered very high class, the Chinese drink it as an aphrodisiac.”

“What’s in this jug?”

“M., are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, snakes. But
dead.
M., if you throw up, I swear I’ll hold it against you.”

While we were in the depths of Kwantung Province, the Chriscraft pilot had improved his property; instead of the thin tow-rope, he now possessed a stout steel cable. At eight o’clock, in midstream in the black night, this cable wrapped around the propeller, all thirty feet of it. The Chinese talked between themselves very loudly and at length. The tiny boy looked miserable. No one wanted to dive into the river and try to file off the cable. U.C. had never uttered a word of complaint, like a Resistance hero who refuses to speak under torture. He simply sank into deeper silences. I complain more than I eat usually, but on this journey did not dare to, being the guilty party, and limited myself to groaning and sighing and calling upon God. The situation was so hopeless now that I too sank into silence, indifferent, numb from despair rather than from snake wine.

We ate dinner on the sampan, rice and tea. We went back to the Chriscraft. As there were no lights we couldn’t read. We waited. At nine-thirty, we piled on to the sampan which was hitched to a paddle-wheel river steamer. The river steamer was a modern version of nineteenth-century steerage travel, the Chinese packed in like cattle. Mr Ma, Mr Ho, the mute Mr Tong, U.C., and I slept in the small rear section of the sampan on the floor. Forward, the rest of our unlucky world: the baby crying, the adults coughing, hawking, spitting, farting, belching through the long night.