Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  She knew, though for weeks she’d refused to admit it. He had stood up to Borodin once, when his life was at stake. This time their face-off was over property. Paul was gambling his freedom for his home. “If my head is so thick, it will protect me,” he’d joked. Even now, Hope thought, he will not believe he’s in real danger.

  Finally she decided she had only one choice. She went home and worked until afternoon, going through her notes from her earliest conversations with Paul about his student days in Tokyo and from ten years later, when he was plotting Li Yüan-hung’s abortive “escape” from Peking. When she had found the names she needed, she changed into her most tailored, businesslike black suit, tucked the necessary identification documents into her purse, and made her way to the Japanese consulate.

  For two hours she asked one stone-faced undersecretary after another for information about Mr. Nakai Mitsuru, whom her notes described as an “old friend of Paul’s from Tokyo days, now counselor of the Japanese Legation in Hankow.” Though no one admitted to recognizing the name, at length she found herself before the consul general himself, who bowed stiffly and informed her that Mr. Mitsuru was indeed still in Hankow, and how could he assist her? This short ramrod of a man had the power to help her, and so she forced herself to trust him. In return, he checked her credentials with grim deliberation, double-checked the documents proving Paul’s association with Sun Yat-sen and his years in Japan, and grilled her with obvious suspicion about the circumstances of her marriage, but she never wavered. Finally he yielded. If she could get her husband to the consulate in Hankow, he would instruct Mr. Mitsuru to provide asylum.

  The next morning, having left a worried but now fully informed Yen in charge of the household, Hope boarded a Belgian river steamer on which she was the sole female. It took but a few hours to realize that the ratios were starkly reversed on vessels traveling into Shanghai. There had been massive demonstrations against the Hankow concessions, she was told, and the British Marines had refused to fight back. Now the concessions—European, American, and Japanese alike—were evacuating women and children by the hundreds. For the first time, the Chinese first mate gloated, the imperialists were giving back some of the land they had stolen.

  It was dusk six days later when the steamer docked in Wuchang. Though bitter cold and heavily misted, the narrow streets winding back from the port seethed with voices and bobbing yellow lanterns. Hope pulled the quilted coat—a relic from her days in Peking—tightly about her neck, tugged her fur-lined cap over her ears, and wound her arm around the carpetbag that contained a single change of clothing, her camera, her wedding ring, and the notes she hoped would sustain her through the interview to come. Paul was somewhere at the other end of this blackened maze. She had debated trying to go to him first, but the rickshaw pullers’ resentful eyes and the absence of any alternative transportation dispelled all thought of this. The river captain, a fat, bearded Welshman who habitually fingered his pocket change, had told her the pullers were among the most belligerent of the anti-foreign forces in the Three Cities, “demanding a steamship fare for a trot across town—and whistling up their pals against anyone stupid enough not to pay it. Insanity’s the norm in Wuhan these days.”

  Besides, she told herself, Paul’s house was under guard, and any unauthorized visit might endanger him further—possibly jeopardize her own safety, as well. She needed to locate Jin. So she took the next ferry to Hankow and crossed the Bund as Jed had directed her, to the gloomy three-storied villa Borodin had taken for his headquarters.

  The gloom lifted abruptly as she entered the foyer. It was like stepping into the eye of a storm. Rooms opened off to either side of a once-grand mahogany staircase, each crowded with tables and books and stacks of paper and about a dozen workers busily pasting up leaflets, laying out copy, folding, punching, marking up pages. They were mostly young men and women wearing the barren colors and rumpled cotton of the proletariat. A few stood talking in rushed, earnest bursts, which were punctuated by the steady thwack of printing presses and the tapping of typewriters from adjoining chambers. Standing unnoticed in the vacant hallway, Hope thought of Paul’s old newsroom in Chinatown, her own uncertain activism in Berkeley.

  She shut her eyes and steadied her breathing. Then she turned into the larger of the two rooms, advancing just far enough to make eye contact with one of the faster-talking young men, a dark-skinned fellow with Chinese facial features but nappy, brilliantined black hair, who had an air of authority. “I’m looking for—”

  Hope stopped, suddenly confused, blood rushing to her face even as her mind seemed to empty. She tossed out the only name she could think of. “Mr. Su.” Jed’s friend.

  She could feel her heart pounding against her ribs as the man scrutinized her. He stood very straight. “I am Su,” he said in clipped English.

  She mentioned Jed’s name, which elicited a laugh and a nod, then she explained that she’d been sent by the American magazine Harper’s to interview Mr. Borodin. She showed the letter to identify herself. Hope Newfield.

  Without comment, Su strode into the hallway and disappeared upstairs. Hope followed as far as the foyer. All the way upriver she had been in a state of revolt against the subterfuge and danger that had been thrust on her. The proof of this revolt was her inability now to believe that any of this was real. Not the smell of ink and sweat, or the humming, uneven floorboards, the candy wrapper falling from one young girl’s fingers as she reached to fold her next pamphlet. Not the unwashed green drapes and curls of ivory enamel flaking off the windowsill, the unshaded lightbulbs buzzing overhead—none of these or a hundred other details made the situation any more believable. This world that Paul and Jin and Jed inhabited, this realm of revolution, was so apart from her own experience, however long she had observed it from the sidelines, that she had to stifle the feeling that she had been thrown into one of Morris’s boy adventure stories. But worse than the sense of unreality was the confusion it engendered. Her mind refused to sustain the thread of her plan. She had intended to ask for Jin when she came in, not Su. Jin was with these people in some capacity; this was the address given in his note, and she had come through the door with his name on her tongue. Now, caught at her own game, she would have to play it through. But there must not be another such lapse.

  She heard a blur of voices upstairs, the opening and shutting of a door, then the thud of boots descending the uncarpeted steps. A jug-eared man wearing the uniform of the Northern Expeditionary Army came into view. She called out softly.

  Jin blanched at the sight of her, his eyes flickering with alarm. He gripped her wrist, pushing her around behind the staircase into a narrow alcove stacked with boxes and broken typewriters. They spoke in urgent but almost inaudible whispers. When she told him her pretext for coming to Wuhan, he sucked in his breath. “Did you tell Su …”

  She shook her head, showing her naked hand. “I am only a journalist, here to interview Borodin. But I’ve arranged for Paul’s protection at the Japanese consulate. Can you get him there?”

  He looked at her in disbelief, and for one terrible second, she thought he would refuse. Then, grimly, he nodded. “Interview Borodin, right away if possible, and keep him as long as you can—he is to give the Chekka his blacklist tonight.” He hesitated to make sure she understood. The Chekka were Borodin’s secret police—specifically, the secret police used against counterrevolutionaries. “Afterward, go to the Japanese. I will bring Father.”

  For the first time in all the years she had known him, Jin hugged her. It was a hard, trembling hug fraught with terror. An instant later, he was gone.

  She waited for several seconds, leaning against the alcove wall. Then, biting the color back into her lips, she returned to the hallway just as Su was on his way down. He said she could have fifteen minutes, and led her upstairs to a plainly furnished sitting room presided over by a large dark-haired man in an overstuffed armchair.

  She would have recognized Borodin even without Su’s introducti
on. There was the woolly black mustache William had described, the world-weary eyes with their heavy lids. His black hair was cut short and parted to one side, eyebrows thick and straight. His face was lean and as sharply creased as his trousers, but beneath his loose embroidered Russian tunic, he had the build of a bear.

  “So Miss Newfield,” he said in perfect English, and waved her to the opposite seat. “You come to us from Harper’s?”

  “I come,” she said, conjuring a mental image of the last American soil she’d seen, “from San Francisco.”

  And so the farce began. A manservant dressed in white served her a sticky sweet digestif. Borodin poured tea from a silver samovar. He delivered a rambling discourse about Shakespeare’s genius, Chekhov’s craft, and his own passion for Tchaikovsky. She asked his opinion of Chinese ingenuity. He explained that the key to China’s revolution lay in the liberation of precisely that ingenious spirit, so long downtrodden and divided by the competing demands of family, warlords, and the Imperial system.

  “Unification and dedication to the national good—this will release the true greatness of these people.” He laced his broad fingers across one knee. “Unification of the world as a whole will have the same effect on us all.”

  “I believe you refer to unification under socialism, Mr. Borodin,” said Hope.

  He sucked in his cheeks. “If you wish.”

  “I suppose, then, you feel that the return of the foreign concessions to Chinese control is also to the good.”

  “To the extent that the concessions were imperialist excesses. But I believe my Chinese friends display their own excesses. I am not against foreign investments in China, so long as the terms are fair and justified. Slavery, Miss Newfield, is never fair or justified. But neither is the emancipation of those slaves overnight and without any preparation for their freedom. This, unfortunately, was the effect of the Chinese overthrow of the Manchus. My good friend Dr. Sun Yat-sen was a truly great man, a visionary. As you know, his young wife is with us here in Wuhan. However, Dr. Sun was sadly betrayed by his reactionary friends, whose true interest in revolution was to claim the Manchus’ power for themselves.”

  Hope brought the glass of liqueur to her lips, and drained it.

  “What of Chiang Kai-shek?” she pressed, once she’d regained her nerve. “People credit him with almost as many of the Northern Expedition’s victories as they do you.”

  “Comrade Chiang is an excellent general. A pity you did not come to Kuling last month. You could have interviewed us together. We are not such enemies as people suggest.”

  Hope dropped her eyes to her notebook. “Kuling?”

  “The mountain resort so favored by foreigners, above Kiukiang. Have you never been there?”

  She hunched her shoulders ambiguously, writing.

  “A very relaxing place for a meeting of the minds. Especially in winter when there are no foreign tourists.”

  She halted her mental calculations of dates and near-misses, and met his glittering gaze. “Forgive me Mr. Borodin. But aren’t you also, in a way, a tourist?”

  He laughed. “I am indeed. A revolutionary tourist, just as you, yourself, are a journalistic tourist. I like that. I hope you use it in your article. Yes, I am only passing through to offer advice and observation. Exactly.” He laughed again. “Exactly!”

  There was a knock on the door. Su strode across the room and whispered in Borodin’s ear. The door cracked open to reveal a man wearing jackboots and the black uniform of the secret police. The Chekka.

  “I almost forgot!” Hope cried, rummaging in her bag. She hoisted the Graflex. “My editor will never forgive me if I don’t include a photograph.”

  Borodin smiled.

  “Please. I know you’re busy. Just a couple of minutes more.”

  He gave a careless shrug and told Su to hold off. But his aide did not leave. The door didn’t close. The wide pockmarked face above the jackboots was now watching her intently.

  Still, Hope took her time. The lack of light would necessitate some adjustments, she told them. A square of white cloth across the lap. A rearrangement of lamps. She apologized for not bringing a flash. The exposure had to be slow, and she didn’t have a tripod, but (remembering Jed’s improvisations at Mulan’s deathbed) that table would do nicely. Now if Mr. Borodin would just turn his body, oh, and did he have a comb? That blouse with its embroidered flowers—however evocative—might not command as much respect as his uniform jacket. Yes, much better. Almost ready. And she’d neglected to ask, how had he liked the United States? He attended Valparaiso, wasn’t it? She’d never been to Indiana. He met his wife there? Fanny. A pity she couldn’t be here tonight, but certainly she should be included in the article.

  By the time she was finished, Su had attempted to interrupt three more times and Hope had stretched her fifteen minutes to nearly two hours. Borodin asked if she would like to wait and, after he’d taken care of some business, she might join him for supper with Madame Sun. Hope managed to keep her voice steady enough to thank him, but politely refused. “I have some business to attend to up in the concessions.”

  “We can give you an escort.”

  “No. Please, I find I can get a better feel for things on my own. I’m used to it.”

  “I admire your spirit, Miss Newfield,” said Borodin. “You are an impressive woman. But these are uncertain times for a foreign woman alone in Hankow. At least take this card. If you are stopped, it will assure you safe conduct.”

  She smiled, ducked her head benignly at Mr. Su, and with forced composure, accepted the square of paper signed in Borodin’s round, even hand.

  Outside, the destroyers and gunboats still lined the blackened river, their strung lights like festive ornaments haloed in the mist, their cannons silently sitting guard as clusters of diplomatic and civilian stragglers picked their way down out of the concessions and up the waiting gangways. Hope ducked into a shallow archway where she was hidden but had a clear view back to the villa.

  No guards stood watch. No faces appeared at the brightly lit windows. She would surely have noticed if anyone followed her, yet still she trembled and waited. Wheels ground into the pavement. Hooves sounded their dull staccato. Wagons deposited cargoes of household treasures, then moved off in numbing procession. All the while, as in another world, street vendors hawked the noodles and gruels that would stay a poor man’s hunger, and oil lamps smoked in the mouths of shops and on the decks of sampans huddled among the warships. What felt like an hour was, by Hope’s watch, only five minutes.

  Suddenly the villa’s front door flew open, and five uniformed policemen filed down the steps as a gleaming black touring car slid from the shadows. Though she was too far away to read their faces, she could tell by his limp that the man in the lead was the Chekka chief who had been waiting for instructions while she prolonged her interview with Borodin. He barked an order at the driver, fired a salute at Mr. Su, who stood above him in the entryway, then the car doors slammed, and the tires spun on the damp pavement. The police were heading in the direction of the ferry to Wuchang. It was nearly ten o’clock when Hope resumed normal breathing.

  She was stopped a few minutes later by a soldier in the uniform of the Revolutionary Army, but Borodin’s card worked as advertised. Instead of detaining her, the sentry gave her directions to the Japanese consulate and warned her to use the side entrance, as the front was ringed with pickets from Japanese-owned iron mills. There were several hundred camped overnight. She thanked him and told him he reminded her of her eldest son, which he did. He smiled and said he was honored, saluted, and strode off.

  Hope was fighting tears all the rest of the way to the consulate. She told herself it was irrational. Whatever might happen to Paul, she would be back with the children within a few days. But the darkness, the mist, the unconsolably ancient echoes of this place made her feel that she had passed into a realm from which there was no return. She fumbled in her bag for her ring, slipped it onto her left hand. Then she wi
ped her eyes and proceeded.

  Hope did not exhibit Borodin’s card to the Japanese sentries. Instead she pushed her scarf back so they could see her face, and asked to speak with Mr. Mitsuru. She was shown through a warren of passageways into a large underfurnished salon deep inside the building. In a few minutes, a middle-aged man in a Western suit, with alert, semicircular eyes, entered the room and bowed.

  “Mrs. Liang,” he said in meticulous English, “you have arrived safely.”

  She forced herself through the courtesy of bowing. “Is he …?”

  “Not yet. My instructions were to await his arrival. This is correct?”

  “Yes. Yes, he will be here.” She curled one hand uncertainly inside the other.

  “Please, be seated.” Mr. Mitsuru waited for her and then sat down himself. “I have known your husband for many years. We were students together—”

  “I know.” Hope’s voice shook. Her hand had found the mahogany side table and her thumb was rubbing circles. She knew that her husband could make finer distinctions than she between allies and enemies. This was more difficult than she had expected.

  “He has been under house arrest for some months. I am wondering if it might be necessary to send an armed escort.”

  Hope tried unsuccessfully to read her host’s face. His eyes seemed kindly, but his expression never changed. If he’d known Paul was under arrest, why hadn’t he sent an armed escort months ago? “No, thank you, Mr. Mitsuru,” she said at last. “We wouldn’t want this to become an international incident. I have arranged for my husband’s rescue in a more discreet—and I believe, safer manner.”

  Mitsuru sat as if his chair had no cushioning. “I mean only that you may trust me, Mrs. Liang.”

  She remembered the warmth and tension of Jin’s arms about her shoulders. “Trust,” she said, “is not easy for a woman in my position.”