Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

  In his irritation, the bus driver drove even more recklessly, and the bus nearly collided with an oncoming vehicle at one point. The military officer’s wife, bothered by the smell of gasoline, retched whenever the bus jolted. Each time there was a smell of soured Shaohsing wine, along with the odor of rotting onions and turnips, on her thick breath. When Hung-chien, also feeling giddy and queasy, caught a whiff of this, he could stand it no longer and hurriedly pulled out his handkerchief to press against his mouth and stop the flow of vomit. As he had not had any breakfast that morning, what came up was acid, which his handkerchief could not absorb, and it seeped through his fingers, dampening his clothes. Luckily he had not vomited very much. Then he began to feel uncomfortable in his seat. The suitcase was too hard and too low to sit on. His body was so tightly wedged in the crowd of people he could neither stretch his legs nor bend his back, which made it difficult for him to change his sitting position. All he could do to adjust was shift his weight by turns from right to left buttock. After leaning for less than a minute to his left, his buttock became sore, and he switched to the right, but no matter what he did, nothing proved comfortable. Each moment became harder to bear than the last, and he doubted they would ever reach the station.

  But surprisingly enough, after three breakdowns, the bus arrived at a small station. The bus driver was going to eat lunch. The passengers also got off and ate at a small roadside restaurant. Hung-chien and his colleagues, as though granted a pardon, got off to stretch and move their legs. They had no appetite for lunch, and with a pot of tea they munched on some crackers they had brought along in their cases. After a brief rest when they once more had the strength to return to the bus and suffer, the bus driver said that the bus’s engine had broken down, and they would have to transfer to another bus. Everyone quickly boarded the bus to get his hand luggage, and then scrambled onto the second bus. Hung-chien and his colleagues unexpectedly managed to secure good seats at the back of this bus. Those who had had seats on the first bus and now found themselves without any declared righteously that the original seating should be observed, that the Republic of China was not a land of robbers, and that people should not resort to forcible seizure. Those with seats, however, were not only physically secure but at a psychological advantage. They could dispassionately eye those without seats, while those standing merely looked out the window, not having the courage to return their gazes.

  This was a sick bus, stricken with malaria. When it moved, the doors and windows all shivered. Those sitting in the back of the bus received such a shaking that their bones came loose at the joints and their entrails were turned upside down. The coarse rice they had just eaten rattled and knocked about in their stomachs like dice in the cups at a gambling casino. It was dark when they reached Chinhua. Since the checked baggage had not been transferred from the first bus, they had to wait for it to be brought on the next day’s bus. Hung-chien and his colleagues wearily left the bus station and put up for the night at a small hotel nearby. Since the day’s misery was over and the next day’s misery was still far away, they found a temporary ease of mind and body, an escape into a neutral zone belonging neither to that day nor the next day.

  The name of the hotel was “The Grand Eurasian Hotel.” Though no Europeans had ever stopped there, the name served well as a kind of prophecy and not as an empty boast. The two Chinese-style, single-storied buildings in the back were divided by wooden panels into five or six bedrooms. A tent, which served as a dining room, was erected on the bare earth in the front. The hotel relied on the aroma of wine and meat, the banging of knives on pans when the food was ready, and the cries of the waiters to draw travelers in to spend the night. The electric lights inside the tent were dazzlingly bright. The bamboo and mud-plastered walls were completely pasted over with red strips of paper on which were written the names of the best dishes of the house, including “steamed turtle,” “famous local ham,” “three-delicacy rice noodles,” “milk coffee,” and so on. Most of its dozen or so tables were occupied.

  At the cashier’s counter sat a fat woman plainly and publicly displaying her fair but not so flat bosom as she nursed a child. The milk was the child’s dinner, so it too must be eaten in the dining room—proof that this hotel was scientifically operated. The woman’s breasts were big and heavy enough to have been included in Baudelaire’s poems on the local customs of Belgium. The child must have been sucking melted lard with sugar. The woman was not only fat on the outside, but she seemed rather thick in the head and full in the gut as well—solid flesh and no soul. If she did have one, then it must have been tiny, just large enough to keep her physical body from rotting, like a little salt sprinkled on meat, since with no soul at all a body will immediately decompose. In any case, her corpulence was an indication of the restaurant’s wholesome food. Sitting up against the counter she made an excellent living advertisement.

  Hung-chien and his colleagues checked into their rooms and washed their faces, then came out to eat, found a table, and sat down. The table top looked like Fan Chin’s face in The Scholars6 after Butcher Hu had given him a slap. Nearly a catty of lard could have been scraped from it. They gave their order. Hung-chien and Miss Sun both said they didn’t have much appetite and wanted something bland, so each ordered a serving of rice noodles. Hsin-mei did not care for rice noodles and ordered a dish of three-delicacy mixed noodles.

  Suddenly noticing the pink strip of paper saying “milk coffee,” Hung-chien said in surprise, “I never expected to find that here. It really lives up to its name ‘Grand Eurasian Hotel’! Why don’t we start off with a cup to whet our appetites and have another one after dinner European-style?”

  Miss Sun was neither for nor against the idea. Hsin-mei said, “I don’t think it could be very good. Call the waiter over and ask him about it.”

  The waiter assured them at once that it was good stuff from Shanghai with the original seal intact. Hung-chien asked what the brand was. This the waiter didn’t know, but in any case it was sweet, fragrant, and top quality, for one paper bag made one cup of coffee.

  “That’s coffee candy to cajole children with,” said Hsin-mei, suddenly understanding.

  “Don’t be so particular,” said Hung-chien in high spirits. “Bring us three cups and then we’ll see. At least it should have a little coffee flavor.”

  The waiter nodded and left. Miss Sun said, “That coffee candy has no milk in it. How could it be called milk coffee? Milk powder must have been added to it.”

  Hung-chien jerked his mouth in the fat woman’s direction and said, “As long as it’s not her milk, anything’ll do.”

  Miss Sun frowned and pouted in a rather charming expression of disgust.

  Reddening, Hsin-mei restrained a laugh and said, “You! Your remarks are disgusting.”

  The coffee came; surprisingly enough it was both black and fragrant with a layer of white froth floating on the top. Hung-chien asked the waiter what it was. The waiter said that it was milk, and when asked what sort of milk, he replied that it was the cream.

  Hsin-mei remarked, “It looks to me like human spit.”

  Hung-chien, who was about to take a drink, brusquely shoved the cup away, saying, “I won’t drink it!”

  Miss Sun also refused to drink it. Hsin-mei smiled and apologized, but he didn’t drink any either, and playfully spat into the cup. It did in fact look very much like the white froth floating there. Hung-chien berated him for spoiling things. Miss Sun only smiled indulgently like a mother looking on while her children fuss.

  The waiter brought the dishes and Hsin-mei’s noodles. The noodles were overcooked, greasy, and sticky like a bowl of paste. Some chicken neck bones and ham skin were heaped on the top. Hsin-mei lost his appetite.

  Smiling, Hung-chien said, “You say there’s spit in the coffee. Well, it looks to me like there’s snot in that bowl of noodles of yours.”

  Hsin-mei pushed the bowl toward him, saying, “You eat it then,” and asked the waiter to take it away an
d bring another. The waiter, however, refused, and Hsin-mei had to order a bowl of rice noodles instead.

  When they settled the bill after dinner, Hsin-mei said, “Lucky for us Li Mei-t’ing and Ku Er-chien weren’t along today. They would have scolded us for ordering things and not eating them. I really couldn’t have eaten those noodles; I didn’t even dare to look at those rice noodles too closely.”

  Their rooms, lit by oil lamps, weren’t as bright as it was outside, so the three of them sat and talked for a while before going in. They were all feeling a little keyed up from exhaustion. Miss Sun herself was full of spirits, but compared to the way Hung-chien and Hsin-mei carried on, she was much less boisterous.

  Just then a three-or four-year-old little girl, her hands wildly scratching in her hair, ran screaming to the fat proprietress. The fat woman patted the child sleeping soundly at her bosom with one hand while with the other she scratched the little girl’s itch. The five sausage-like fingers were quite nimble. With one pluck she seized a louse, squeezed it, and telling the girl to spread out her palm, laid out the louse corpses one after another. Pointing at the dead lice with her other hand, the little girl counted them haphazardly, “One, two, five, eight, ten—”

  After Miss Sun had seen and told Hsin-mei and Hung-chien about this, they all began to itch before returning to their rooms to sleep. The preceding scene, however, had put them on guard against their bedding. Miss Sun lent them her flashlight to shine on their beds, but just at that moment the battery went dead and they had to stop.

  Hsin-mei said, “Don’t worry. Fatigue will conquer all the little pains and itches. Let’s get a good night’s sleep first.”

  Hung-chien climbed into bed, and when after a long while, nothing happened, he relaxed and was about to fall asleep when suddenly he began to itch, an itch impossible to ignore. First one place, then another, and his whole body itched. There was a strange itching sensation on his chest. It seemed the Montmartre Flea Market and the International Louse Alliance of the Temple of Palestine were all being held at this Grand Eurasian Hotel. He was bitten till there wasn’t one piece of skin left whole, and he plucked till his fingers went limp. His fingers came down with the speed of thunder and lightning on each fresh, well-defined itch, then picked it up carefully and gingerly, only to find that he hadn’t caught the biting little pest after all but had wasted his energy and had nothing between his fingers but a small piece of skin. When he did finally manage to pinch one bedbug to death, he felt the sweet joy of revenge, and now having found his peace of mind, he could go to sleep. Who could have known that by killing one he had not deterred a hundred more, and his whole body still itched. Eventually, overcome with exhaustion, his consciousness began to shrink smaller and smaller till he could only push his body outside of himself. Imitating the example of Our Buddha7 sacrificing himself to the tigers, he gave himself up to the lice. The Germans say that a person with a keen sense of hearing can hear a louse cough (Er hört die Flo he husten). That night a pair of sharp ears could have picked up the belching of feasting fleas.

  Waking the next morning, Hung-chien found to his surprise that the lice had not completely devoured him, there was still enough to make a man, though not to become a Buddha. He heard Hsin-mei cry wrathfully from his bed, “Ha! Another one! Enjoying your meal off me, aren’t you?”

  “Are you talking to the fleas or catching them?”

  “I’m committing suicide,” replied Hsin-mei. “I caught two bedbugs and one flea, and when I crushed them, there were little specks of red—all my own blood. If that’s not committing suicide—Ai! Another one! Uh oh, it got away—Hung-chien, I can’t understand how that cashier woman can still be so fat with all the blood-sucking animals they have around this hotel.”

  “Maybe all these lice are raised by the cashier to suck the guests’ blood and give it to her. You’d better not catch anymore. She’ll demand that you pay with a life for every last one of them. Then there’ll be real trouble. Let’s get up quickly and find another hotel.”

  Both got out of bed and stripped off their underclothes; while standing there in the cold, stark naked and laughing, they squeezed and pressed along the seams of their clothes with their fingers. They shook them out again and again, then put them back on. On their way out of their room they met Miss Sun, who had red spots on her face and smelled of cologne. She too had itched all night, she said. The three of them went to the bus station where they saw a note on the message board left by Li and Ku saying that they had stayed at a hotel next to the train staion and had moved out. While settling the bill with the cashier, Hung-chien remarked that there were too many fleas in the hotel. The cashier disagreed, arguing that the beds in her hotel were the cleanest, and that those bedbugs and fleas must have been brought in by Hung-chien and his friends.

  The baggage arrived piece by piece. One day a trunk came; another day, a bedroll. Every afternoon they went to the bus station to pick them up. When by the fifth day there was still no trace of Li’s metal trunk, Li grew so upset that he began yelling and jumping about. After two long distance telephone calls, it finally arrived. Li hurriedly opened it up to see if anything had been lost. Happy for Li, everyone crowded around to look at the inside of the trunk, which was filled with tiny drawers like a dresser. When a drawer was pulled out, there were white cards neatly arranged inside like a library catalogue. They gasped in wonder.

  “This is my stock in trade,” explained Li, looking pleased with himself. “As long as I have this, even if all the books in China were burned, I could still go on giving courses as usual in the Chinese Literature Department.”

  The cards were arranged according to the four-corner system,8 divided by both name and subject matter. Curious, Hung-chien pulled out a drawer and opened one of the cards. At the top of one card he saw the two characters “Tu Fu”9 written lengthwise in red ink. Underneath a heading was written in purple ink followed by the text in tiny characters in blue ink. Sensing that Li’s white eyes behind his dark glasses were fixed on him, Hung-chien said, “How exquisite! Amazing—” Aware that his tone was not emphatic enough to deceive Li, he quickly added, “Mr. Ku, Hsin-mei, would you like to come take a look? A truly scientific method!”

  Ku Er-chien said, “I’d like to broaden my perspective, but I could never learn all that!” and without fear of tiring his mouth or parching his tongue, he began heaping on the praises. “Mr. Li, your fountain pen calligraphy is quite impressive, and you can write in so many different styles with such endless variations. How admirable!”

  Li said with a laugh, “My calligraphy is very bad. These cards were all written under my direction by my students, so there are a dozen or so different styles of handwriting.”

  Shaking his head, Ku said, “Ai! As they say, ‘A great teacher produces outstanding students!’” With that he pulled out a few drawers from the top, bottom, and both sides.

  Li Mei-t’ing said, “The others are all the same. There’s nothing to see.”

  “It’s so comprehensive!” exclaimed Ku. “I really wish I could steal it”—and before Li could stop him, he had opened two drawers near the bottom of the trunk—“Ai! These aren’t cards—”

  Miss Sun came closer to look and said uncertainly, “It looks like Western medicine.”

  Li said icily, “It is Western medicine, for use on the road.”

  Too overcome by curiosity at this point to notice Li’s expression, Ku opened two more drawers and saw bottle after bottle tightly packed in cotton with the soft cork stoppers exposed. Wasn’t it Western medicine? he wondered.

  Li could not keep from pushing Ku aside as he said, “Nothing’s been lost. Let me close the trunk.”

  “Nobody would have stolen anything,” said Hung-chien maliciously, “but the porter might have been careless in handling the trunk and broken some of the glass bottles. You should make a careful check.”

  “I don’t think so. I stuffed everything carefully with cotton,” replied Li, as he began instinctively openin
g the drawers. Half the trunk was filled with Western medicine, including yatron, cinchona, sulfate of quinine, and formamint,10 all in their original wrappers. Nothing had been left out.

  “Mr. Li, you couldn’t use all that by yourself!” exclaimed Hsin-mei. “Did Kao Sung-nien ask you to bring it for the school?”

  Like a drowning man suddenly given a rope, Li said gratefully, not letting go, “Yes, that’s right! You can’t get Western medicine in the interior. If by chance someone should get sick, then he’ll appreciate what I, Li Mei-t’ing, have done.”

  Smiling, Hsin-mei said, “Let me thank you in advance! With the cards in the upper half of the trunk if all the books in China were burned, Mr. Li alone could teach Chinese literature. And with the medicine in the bottom half, if the Chinese all died of disease, Mr. Li could still stay alive.”

  “Nonsense!” said Ku. “Mr. Li is not only the school’s benefactor, but also our savior.”

  Just as curiosity cost Adam and Eve their paradise, so Ku Er-chien lost the paradise Li had settled him in because of his curiosiy. No amount of flattery could ever bring back Li’s good will, and Ku’s next few sentences nearly sent Ku straight to hell. “I’ve run a temperature these last couple of days, and my throat’s a little sore—but never mind. When it gets really bad, I’ll ask you for three or four formamints to suck on.”

  Hsin-mei said that the several days’ delay in Chinhua had cost them quite a bit of money. If every one would take out the money he was carrying, they could see how much they had altogether. As he had surmised on the boat, Li and Ku had not brought with them the entire amount of the travel allowance provided by the school; the two of them also probably held back a few dollars for cigarettes. The rest of them each had about eighty dollars left, and they hadn’t yet paid their hotel bill. In any case, they could not make it to the school and decided to send a telegram to Kao Sung-nien asking him to wire them some money to the Central Bank at Chian. Hsin-mei said that until they got to Chian they would have to pool all their money for general use. Not a copper could be wasted. When Li asked about cigarettes, he replied that from then on no one was to buy cigarettes and would just have to give up smoking.