Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Did my husband tell you to say that?” said Hope.

  The young man looked offended. “But it is the truth.”

  “Why couldn’t he come himself?”

  He winced. Hope looked past him and signaled Yen to move the children inside. They went reluctantly, and the soldier forced a smile, assuring them he would see them tomorrow. Hope moved to the far end of the porch and glared at the police chief to keep him out of earshot.

  “What’s happened?” she insisted, lowering her voice to a near-whisper.

  At last the emissary let down his mask. He kept his voice in a quiet monotone, his body in regimental posture. “He has been placed under house arrest. Borodin has denounced him as a counterrevolutionary and threatened to seize your husband’s property. He insisted I should not tell you, but…”

  Hope looked away. Darkness had fallen across the valley. Every now and then a low white light shivered behind the mountains. After the usual interval, distant thunder would follow.

  Wuchang

  October 29, 1926

  Dearest Hope and babies.

  On Double Ten Day, our National Revolutionary Army has “liberated” my home city. As we crossed the river, the Bund of Hankow was lined with workers and merchants waving banners, the shining sun of the Republic, shouting “Long live the revolution!” There was little fighting, as most of the local generals had joined with us, and the people here were unanimous in support. That has changed some now. Every day brings change.

  This is why I must stay here for the time and cannot come to you. I am sorry. I have cabled to Shanghai and received word from Sarah that you stayed on in Kuling. I think you must not receive the moneys I sent to you from Changsha in August and September. Yen will take care of you. I know this. But I worry now. I trust Lieutenant Jung to deliver this letter, these moneys to you without fail. If our troops are successful in Kiukiang, I know this will reach you. When the lieutenant explains our family connection, you will know to trust him, and he will see you return safe to our home in Shanghai.

  It is dangerous to write of particulars. I cannot say when I may join you. Neither have I news of Jin. When I arrived in Changsha, he already departed. But know that I am well. My old servants here in Wuchang take good care. I do not know what will happen to my property here. The mood of this city now is uncertain, but when I hear that you and our babies are safe and well, I be content. Sometimes during the Expedition, I look up into the mountains and think of the song of Wang Wei.

  I walk until water checks my path,

  Then turn to the rising clouds.

  I send you my love, my sorrow. My heart. Hsin-hsin.

  I am your husband, Paul

  4

  Only after Hope and the children had threaded their way through the mobbed streets of Kiukiang and were spat on by striking rickshaw pullers; after they’d been taunted by a crowd hoisting an effigy of a Catholic priest with a rope around his neck; after she noticed the machine guns rimming the foreign concession and read the wall posters announcing the public beheading of factory workers by the British-backed warlord in Shanghai; after they’d reached a Yangtze River bristling with gunboats and heard the rumors that the Kuomintang had split into two factions, with General Chiang Kai-shek taking Nanking as his capital for the right wing and Mikhail Borodin setting up a left-wing government in Wuhan—only then did Hope fully grasp the extent to which Paul’s beloved revolution was spinning out of control. Exactly why he had been arrested and the true danger of his situation remained for the moment unclear, though Hope assumed Borodin had targeted Paul as a member of the right wing. The lieutenant could tell her only that he had received Paul’s letter and the enclosed hundred dollars from William Tan, who had made a late-night visit to Paul before leaving for America, where he was to be Chiang’s ambassador. William had made light of the arrest, saying Paul was just protecting his home. The city of Wuchang was a hotbed of agitation, Lieutenant Jung explained. Workers were storming the foreign concessions, and Borodin had begun confiscating all properties belonging to absentee landowners. Paul’s, the young soldier said, was “a voice of reason at a time when common sense was branded as treason.” Hope shepherded the children onto the British steamer Tuk Wo and spent the next three nights writing fervent confessional letters to Paul, which she burned before the ink was dry.

  They arrived back in Shanghai on Thanksgiving afternoon and hired a cab to take them home. It seemed to Hope that the whole city was holding its breath. They passed Holy Trinity Cathedral as the service was breaking, and the congregation pouring out onto the streets was both enormous and unnaturally quiet. The lights were blinking on Nanking Road, the windows of Sincere and Wing On chock-a-block with displays of imported toys and liquors, fruit and puddings, and the holiday crowds were out in force, but the faces were more troubled than gay. In and around the strolling foreigners huddled permanent encampments of refugees.

  “I feel as though we’ve been gone years,” said Pearl. “Has the city changed, or is it me?”

  Hope wiped the fog from the window for Teddy to look out. “I’m afraid it’s both.”

  “Will Papa be home to meet us?” asked Jasmine.

  “I don’t think so.” After much deliberation, Hope had concluded that both the family and Paul would be best served if she kept the lieutenant’s news to herself. She had not even told Yen.

  But when the cab drew up in front of the house, a hollow cry rose in her throat. The lights were on, smoke curled from the chimney, and shadows moved across the parlor curtains. In that moment the sensation of relief drowned out all the fear and anger and heartache—even the exhaustion of the last days. She was ahead of the children, racing up the walk, leaving Yen to manage the fare and luggage. The key was in her hand. The door sprang open. The voices inside stopped abruptly.

  She turned into the sitting room and made a rapid survey of its occupants: four young men, two women. Chinese. One of the women was seated at Hope’s desk, with Hope’s pen poised over a tablet. The men were variously standing and sitting, paper-bound books in their hands. The other woman was just coming from the kitchen with a laden tea tray.

  They all stared at Hope, at the children behind her. Hope’s relief evaporated. Three months they’d been delayed. Paul had told her he paid the year’s rent in advance, but who knew what the arrangement really was? She’d never even seen the landlord. No occupants, no rent. Of course. Their home had been given away.

  She could feel her face thickening with tears, her shoulders start to quiver. She spun abruptly, but her way was blocked. Someone had stolen up behind her, and now hands were gripping her shoulders. She pulled back. The children started giggling as she lifted her face, met the familiar stretched black eyes.

  Jin.

  December 10, 1926

  I am in an agony of waiting. Since Jin left for Wuhan over a week ago, I’ve heard nothing, and I alternate between berating myself for inflating the situation and damning myself for trusting him.

  Justifications run like ticker tape. A son would never betray his father. Jin’s position as a student organizer and former Expedition propagandist gives him access to information. He knows the maze of Wuhan, both physically and politically, could escape if it came to that. And what is the alternative, after all? If I went myself, I’d have to leave the children, and what could I realistically accomplish? Paul has kept our lives so scrupulously separate that I don’t even know where he places in the current chain of command. I thought of sending Yen, and it’s possible he could contact Paul through the servant underground, but he has neither the status nor the savvy to negotiate his release. William, of course, would have been the one—of all the times for him to be out of the country! But William could not (or would not) do more when he was in Wuhan than to act as Paul’s messenger. Eugene Chou is in Peking, and Jed … well, I did go to see Jed, but whatever he witnessed here this fall has changed him in a way that scares me. He started in on some of the street executions he’d witnessed—friends of h
is, he said. Summary beheadings. One girl out by Siccawei was disemboweled and strangled with her own intestines. I became faint, but he wouldn’t stop talking. His eyes took on the most terrifying glow. We were in the back of the shop, where he has his studio, and before I left he insisted I look at his “collection.” I thought he was talking about cameras, but he showed me a box full of stilettos and hatchets and automatic guns, all stolen, he said, from the local warlord’s police.

  So I told Jin. He said he knew “channels.” Through these “revolutionary study groups” he’s been conducting, he’s acquired status as an “organizer.” I recoil from the verbal tyranny of revolution, as well as from its cloak-and-dagger aspects. I want so desperately to believe that this is really what it seems—a game played by overaged boys that will disintegrate into a pillow fight as soon as the referee finds his whistle. But who is the referee now that Sun is gone? Chiang? Borodin? The British, with their gentlemen’s clubs and battle stations ever ready? Or the French, who everyone says are playing footsie—alongside Chiang—with Tu Yueh-sheng’s Green Gang mobsters? Or the Japanese, whose intentions no one ever seems to know until it is too late. Paul could be the victim of any one of these, there’s so little rhyme or reason. Nothing’s really changed from the days when palace counselors poisoned each other’s rice to gain Imperial advantage.

  If we should ever get Paul back …

  No, I can’t any more. I can’t make those promises. Can’t form those threats. I’ve sent Cadlow my articles and pictures. I am forcing myself to write more. Two a month plus photographs will bring one hundred dollars. No mei fatse. No. I will not be fate’s pawn any longer.

  But the weeks wore on. Still nothing from Jin. No word or money yet from Cadlow. On the surface, Hope maintained an appearance of routine by writing, sewing, working in the darkroom, managing the household on a severely curtailed budget. She had tea with Sarah, whom she had not told of Paul’s arrest, and learned that the Manns had set sail for South Africa less than a month after leaving Kuling. Hope had all but forgotten Stephen Mann in her fear for Paul.

  The only time she succeeded in shrugging off this fear was when she replaced it with worries over the children. With some considerable persuasion and penalty payments for overdue tuition, Hope had gotten Pearl and Morris and Jasmine all reinstated in school, but they had barely started back when classes broke for the Christmas holidays. With no money for their amusement and grave concerns about their safety, given the city’s combative atmosphere, Hope tried to keep them at their books, making up the work they’d missed in the fall. Of course, they all complained, Jasmine by strapping on her roller skates and furiously tearing up and down the block, Morris by shutting himself in his room, and Pearl by assaulting Hope with long, teary protests about all the “holiday fun” she was missing with her chums.

  On Christmas eve a check arrived from William Cadlow in the amount of five hundred dollars—payment for the articles Hope had written in Kuling. However, her relief at receiving the money was tempered by the accompanying note, which suggested Hope comment more in future on the political climate in China. The recent successes of this Northern Expedition had fired the American public’s interest, as well as concern over the investments of American companies in China. Who were these two power brokers Chiang Kai-shek and “Michael” Borodin? How was it that they were partners one minute and mortal enemies the next? Could she possibly interview one of them?

  Hope traveled through the next days in a haze. On Christmas, the children were so thrilled by the unexpected profusion of gifts—silk scarves and stockings, colored beads and strap shoes and a wooden push-toy for Teddy, which she’d collected in a single blurred hour before Sincere’s department store closed for the holiday—and by the equally unexpected feast of roast duck and crab apples, that they did not notice their mother’s uncharacteristic silence. They did not ask if anything were bothering her. They did not question her disinterest in their jokes or think twice when she retreated to her desk. It struck Hope, watching them, that they were all four like spinning tops. Teddy pushing his wooden goose across the room, Morris utterly absorbed in his crossword puzzle … Jasmine accompanying the Gramophone on a ukulele that one of her Hawaiian school friends had loaned her, and Pearl practicing the Charleston …

  You could disappear, Hope told herself, and they would notice your absence no more than they notice their father’s. Ah-nie would stay with them. And Yen. It would only be for a week or two.

  On January 3, the morning the children returned to school, the phone rang. Jed wanted her to come to the store to see “a new camera that’s just in.” When she arrived he gave her a warning look and turned the shop over to his assistant. He motioned Hope toward the back.

  “A messenger came last night with a note from Jin.” He handed her a wad of blue paper. “It was stuffed into a shell casing.”

  She bit her lip as she smoothed the crushed note. Jin wrote that he could not arrange Paul’s escape without assistance, and time was running out. Perhaps her friends at the American consulate could intervene, or if William Tan had returned yet…?

  Hope asked Jed for a match and an ashtray, and burned the message. “Can you get me an introduction to Borodin?”

  He put a pot of water on the hotplate. It was cold in the studio, and gloomy. Jed’s bony figure and shorn, flaming hair seemed to jump among the imitation Chippendale and Ming furnishings he used for props. He busied himself measuring tea leaves, and only after he’d prepared her cup did he answer. His voice was clear and charged, with no trace of his stammer.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been asked to interview him.” She drew Cadlow’s letter from her purse.

  “I thought you steered clear of politics.”

  “I prefer to. But it seems American readers want to know what’s transformed those pathetically inept Chinese Nationalists into a respectable fighting force.” She seated herself in one of the Chippendale chairs. “Besides, Jin and Paul tell me that Borodin was quite the darling of the young moderns’ salons in Canton. He speaks English and he likes to talk.”

  “You don’t sound like yourself, Hope.”

  “No?” Her eyes fixed on a calendar—a giveaway from some paint company—that Jed had pinned to the wall. A black-green mountain beneath vaporous clouds weighed over the grid of days. “Whom do I sound like?”

  “Whom.” Jed shook his head. “Always gram-matically correct. That’s you, all right. But the rest… Where is Paul, anyway?”

  Her shoulders rose mechanically, dropped. Jed’s haggard look, his unshaven chin, twitching green eyes, and refusal to sit down did not inspire her confidence. She thought of his arsenal behind that gilded screen. Was it possible that she had changed, by any measure, as much as Jed had in the decades she’d known him?

  “You know what they call w-women like you?” he said.

  “I didn’t know there were enough women like me to be called anything.”

  “Sun w-widows.” Jed set his cup among the lenses and light filters and empty film boxes that littered his table. “Sun’s the symbol of the revolution—”

  “I know what it means,” snapped Hope. “Can you help me?”

  “There’s M-madame Sun, the original widow herself, working by Borodin’s side. Paul must know her. Why not ask her to introduce you?”

  “I’d rather Borodin receive me as an American journalist than as Paul’s wife.”

  “How very un-Chinese.” Jed yawned, showing badly neglected teeth. “You’re not p-planning to go alone?”

  “I think I’m better off that way.”

  “I hear things are pretty tense in Wuhan. Lots of anti-foreign protests.”

  “So the papers say. But I’ll only be there a day or two. I don’t want any company, Jed.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. It was a w-w-w-warning, not an offer.” He slid his thumbs into the pockets of his faded blue jacket and stood chewing on his cheek. Finally he shook his head and reached for a scrap of paper. “This fellow
is one of Borodin’s assistants. You’ll find him at the headquarters in Hankow. If you bring that letter, he’ll put you through. If I were you, though, I’d dress Chinese and avoid the British steamers.”

  Hope stared at him. It was the longest she had ever heard him speak without stammering. Though she wasn’t sure why, this realization saddened her. She took the paper and wrapped her arms around him, thanking him with her face pressed into his shoulder, which smelled of photographic chemicals and cigarette smoke, saltpeter, and faintly but unmistakably of chocolate. He returned the hug stiffly and wished her good luck.

  Hope walked from Denniston’s to the Confucian Temple, where she sat for an hour reviewing her choices. All were distasteful or terrifying, or both. She could try wiring William Tan. Or appeal to Madame Sun. Or beg for Eugene Chou’s intervention. Or, she could go to Borodin. Trust. That was where every choice broke down. Trust, the essential, the impossible—the lesson, she saw now, that had been defying Paul all these years. Those who had power were never to be trusted, yet when you needed that power you had no choice.

  She sank forward with her elbows on her knees, rubbing her thumbs into her temples and trying to remember the stories Paul used to tell of palace intrigues and ministerial deceits, the twisted chains of favor that scholars and eunuchs routinely used to gain influence at court—and how often these turned deadly when the favors unexpectedly reversed. The Chinese way was never to do anything directly. They were forever sidestepping spirit walls, averting their eyes, walking in zigzags, relying on go-betweens, all for fear of offending or being offended—or trapped—by evil or shame. Yet there was Paul, trapped. Wuchang was his home. He had friends, powerful friends who could surely have helped him escape by now. Why was he still there?