The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  The guards continued to flank me while I went to the serving counter. The food was piled in steel trays and lit by flickering light bulbs. I got six hard-boiled eggs, a cup of soggy rice and a mug of black tea. There was no cream or sugar.

  I took a seat by the balcony with a view of Gramercy Park, and cracked my eggs while the guards watched. The eggs were awfully dry in my mouth, and when I tried to wash them down with tea I spilled some on my beard because my hand was shaking. Don’t weaken, Belson, I told myself. But there was a gnawing going on at the roots of my soul. I knew what it was I had begun to want the minute I saw that room, that scurrying roach, that awful bed. Morphine.

  When I finished, the men marched me back to the elevator. In the lobby two other soldiers met us, both with rifles, and the four of them escorted me out the door and across the street to a building with a big sign that read PEOPLE’S CLOTHING AND AIDS TO HEALTH.

  Inside, a chubby middle-aged man looked me over. “Mr. Kwoo?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, we can certainly make you more fashionable than that.” He frowned at my yellow spacesuit.

  “You’re going to make me an outfit?” I said.

  “Absolutely!” he said in English. “The very best. We know about you from the newspapers, Mr. Kwoo, and we know your importance.”

  Thanks a lot, I thought, remembering my hotel room.

  The five of them took me to a back room where a big metal box stood, like an upright coffin.

  “Just step inside,” the man said. “It works like a dream. An absolute dream.”

  I stepped in. He threw a switch and I heard a hum. An invisible beam must be scanning my body, doing a contour map. “All right now,” he said and turned it off.

  “How long does it take?” I said.

  “About ten minutes. Do you like midnight blue? For the trousers, I mean?”

  “How about blue jeans?” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t Los Angeles. I was planning flannels. We’ll cut four or five shirts in different pastels, and then, to cap it all, a simple down jacket in gray silk.”

  “Don’t make it look Italian. And I’ll need shoes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kwoo,” he said, “but our shoemaking equipment isn’t working. We can give you fresh hose for those…” He looked at my feet with distaste.

  “Adidas,” I said.

  “I’m sure they’re marvelous for speed.” He turned and walked over to a wall where bolts of fabric hung above one another, reached his short arms up, and with some dexterity pulled down a heavy bolt of gray cloth. He smiled benignly toward me and then lugged the fabric over to a large gray machine, slid it into a hopper at one end and delicately pressed a green button on the side. There was a low whirr for about fifteen seconds, a click, and then another louder whirr. A folded pair of pants slid out onto a red enameled tray. He walked over and picked them up. “Perfect,” he said. “It’s really a superb piece of equipment. Japanese.” He handed them to me.

  I slipped out of my spacepants right there and pulled on the flannels. They were of good fabric, but they fit over my narrow ass like a glove. “Jesus!” I said, “they’re tight.”

  He looked me over, pursing his lips. “Well,” he said, “this machine does make them snug. That’s the truth of it.”

  “Isn’t it working right?” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody on the streets wearing anything like this. The men outside are wearing good Communist baggy pants.”

  He blushed a little. “To be frank,” he said, “I’m under orders from the Army. From Major Feng.”

  I stared at him. “White Heron?”

  He looked up at me helplessly. “Yes, Mr. Kwoo. White Heron Feng. You are to be dressed as a… as a courtesan.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I said. Inwardly I had a sense of my life—my tired and crazy life—coming full circle, with a kind of preordained click. Okay, I thought, I can follow this out to the end.

  They made me a down-filled gray jacket and one of those Ghengis Khan caps, with the earflaps. It all fit well and looked good. They were far better clothes than you could buy in New York. The truth of it is there’s nothing first-class made in America except television and French fries. Television equipment, that is; the shows are for cretins.

  Outside, it was bitter cold and I tucked my head down and started toward the hotel. One of the guards grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. “We go elsewhere,” he said in English.

  “That’s a good thing,” I said.

  They walked me four blocks through streets crowded with Chinese. Men, women and children, and they all stared at me politely. Most of them looked well-dressed and well-fed. Some carried gold-headed walking canes. There were occasional groups of Japanese among them, in business suits and double-breasted Chicago overcoats, with lapel cameras. I got snapped a half-dozen times, standing out because of my height and my clothes and my rifle-carrying escort. The street we walked along was full of black passenger cars and red taxis. Vendors sold dim sum and tea at street corners. There were bookstores and newsstands on every block. Some people walked along reading. The bustle enlivened me, brought back my love of cities. I strode with bounce in my feet and made my escorts scurry to keep up with me in their heavy overcoats and rifles and short legs. The sun was out fully now and the streets were clean, lined with trees, and busy. I began to whistle. Così fan tutte. We passed a park with grandmothers and children and swings. Trees everywhere—so unlike New York. Bright theater posters adorned a fence. A big one for Macbeth caught my eye, but I didn’t stop to read it. The architecture was dreary Old Stalinist, but the feel of Peking was lively—far more so than I’d remembered it. There were soldiers and sailors of both sexes, pretty girls, old Arabella Kim types with shopping bags full of celery and tomatoes, lovers. From time to time electric limousines passed in the street with red flags, carrying Party members. We walked by a shu mai vendor with a stack of books on his little wheeled stand. Looking closely I saw The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy and The Novels of James M. Cain next to the dumplings. I still had a few American dollars in my billfold; I bought a copy of Mildred Pierce in Chinese and stuck it in my shopping bag.

  After that, we turned a corner by a construction site and came upon an enormous white marble building, set back in a park where a dozen armed soldiers were patrolling. The building was about thirty stories high, with an entrance like a Turkish mausoleum. Over the doorway hung a huge silk banner with black ideograms: THE DEFENSE OF THE PEOPLE IS THE DUTY OF THE PARTY. Ten-foot-high statues of Mao and a dozen of his successors stood on the grass, surrounding an ICBM of the kind that carries a dozen R-bombs. My God, I thought, this is the Chinese Pentagon. The headquarters of the most powerful military force in history.

  The fence was of wrought iron and twenty feet tall. We stopped at a guard box where four dour matrons in army uniform checked out the papers of my guards and then, steely-eyed, let us pass. They looked at me as though I had been found in a slag heap somewhere. I took a cigar from my pocket and started to light it. One of the women snatched it from my hand. “No smoking,” she said, in a bullfrog voice, in Chinese.

  “Let me have that back,” I said. “I won’t light it.” My voice sounded hostile as hell; I’d have slugged her if I hadn’t been surrounded by rifle butts.

  “When you leave,” she bullfrogged back, and put the cigar on a metal table in the guard box.

  Shit, I thought. I had only one more left, and the Chinese didn’t trade with Cuban deviationists.

  We crunched our way down a gravel path bordered in peonies, blooming crazily here in winter. I bent down and felt the ground. Warm. My God, they must use electric wires to heat it. I’d never seen such profligate use of power in my life. The path was about five hundred yards long, and not a candy wrapper in sight. Bright-green grass all around in the compound too, and no pigeons on the statues. They gleamed in the sun.

  Two workmen were polishing the brass on the doorway when we came up. They stoo
d aside, nodding deferentially to my guards, and we went into an enormous Romanesque anteroom with groined arches. This led into a still larger room, a foyer with a ceiling eight stories high, and narrow windows that let light slant in and glow on pink marble columns that seemed to be everywhere, like a forest. It was as vulgar as hell, but impressive. A kind of junk cathedral with pink marble floors and crystal chandeliers and the echoing sounds of officers striding around in military boots. A crew of men was polishing the floor over at one side, while men and women officers, natty in uniform, strode from hallway to hallway like Prussian officers under Frederick Wilhelm. About six corridors fed into this grand room and the traffic was heavy.

  We took a left and entered a long hall, only three stories high this time but still lit by crystal chandeliers. We walked down it, past posters celebrating victories: the Urals Campaign of 2007, where the Chinese had routed half the Russian Army in a week; the Japanese Peace Mission of 2037, where the Great Fleet of the People had sailed into Tokyo Bay to explain to the Diet that Japan must stop rearming. At the end of this hall was something that stopped me in my tracks. A simple old realistic painting of young Mao, almost slim, squatting by a hut with a pitifully small bowl of rice in his hand and his eyes dark with fatigue. Near him sat Lin Piao. The caption read “The Long March.” I could have cried. What men—what men they were!

  My guards took me by the arms and led me to an elevator. “You sons of bitches,” I said, “don’t you have any respect?” But I said it in English and nobody tried to answer me.

  The elevator was an express; it shot us right to the top of the building; we stepped out onto a red-carpeted hallway where two female guards checked us out again before taking me from my male ones. The men who brought me were awed by their surroundings. They were told to go back and return to their base. I would be watched over from here. The two new guards took me down the red carpet to a simple teakwood doorway and knocked. A male orderly let me in.

  I looked around. I was in some kind of outer office, something like a doctor’s waiting room, with Scandinavian-style chairs and magazines on coffee tables. The orderly took me across the room to a teakwood door and knocked softly. We waited a minute until it opened. A middle-aged woman, with a general’s star on her collar, stared at me. “My God,” she said, in English, “it’s Belson.”

  ***

  Thus began one of the strangest episodes of my bewildered life: my five weeks as a Chinese whore. There was a certain fascination to it. They weren’t monsters; they were hardworking and competent army officers—the Underchiefs of Staff of the Army of the People’s Republic. Several were very attractive. There was a bedroom down the hall from one of their conference rooms; it was decorated in a Chinese idea of Western Macho. There was a giant fieldstone fireplace at one end with a moose head over it and crossed dummy rifles by the hearth. A huge brass bed sat in the middle of the room. The place was ludicrous, but a lot more pleasant than the House of Comradely Love, and the steaks sent up from the senior officers’ mess were splendid. As long as I behaved myself with these ladies I could stay there and be left alone at night. Nobody asked me about uranium, the Isabel, or endolin. We had little conversation; all they told me was that White Heron had recommended me to their attention.

  So I tried to accommodate myself to it as best I could. They must have had erection pills ground up in my food and drink; I had a hard on whether I liked it or not at almost all times. My physical health was excellent and I found myself on my back for hours a day, my mind often totally divorced from the movement of my hips and the sensations of my bruised penis—pleasuring one general or the other, with my eyes squeezed shut and lines of Shakespeare in my head:

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

  Sometimes my thoughts would be jarred by the orgasm of my partner. I had become a thinking dildo, a mournful captive of my adolescent dreams.

  Sometimes when alone in the room I would stand back from the bar, a drink in my hand, and look at myself in the big mirror. My work had narrowed my waist and firmed my abdomen even more than the Nautilus machines could, and I was still tanned. The smell of jasmine and of just-departed flesh might be in my nostrils. A line from Yeats would sometimes come into my head:

  In dreams begin responsibilities…

  and then I would wonder how long it would go on. In a fashion time-honored in the trade of prostitution, I found myself going to sleep drunk every night and so hung over in the mornings that my first two or three tricks might have been a continuation of the night’s unpleasant dreams. My God-tricks! I had no endolin and no morphine. I ate, drank, slept and copulated. I had quit exercising, since my work was vigorous enough. No. I had quit exercising because I didn’t feel like a man anymore. My underwear was always returned to me perfumed, and sometimes flowers were sent to the room by one of my lovers. When we drank together the woman would pour the drinks. The oldest of them—a wiry brigadier in her fifties—liked to feed me my desserts with a spoon. I ate them greedily.

  It ended as quickly as it had begun. One Thursday morning, in the week before Christmas, my first visitors were a pair of policemen in gray uniforms and red armbands. They were polite and clearly intelligent. I had no idea where they were going to take me and didn’t particularly care; my main feeling was relief that I didn’t have an erection when they woke me. I dressed and left without breakfast.

  The day was horribly raw, a Chicago-in-January day in Peking, with ice everywhere in the streets. Everybody but me was wearing puffy overcoats and boots and enormous caps. Fortunately, the limousine was parked near the building and I made it inside without frostbite. It felt like thirty below. In the car I was glad to be in the company of men again; I felt I could live without women forever. I leaned back in the middle of my seat.

  It was a long trip. It took an hour to get out of Peking, and we followed a winding road through bare, ice-covered trees for another hour before turning down a narrow path and beginning to climb a series of hills. At first there were scrubby bushes flanking the narrow road, then snow. The gray pavement had been plowed flawlessly, although there was no sign of habitation. After an hour the snow was high on each side of us and we were humming at a smooth thirty miles an hour through what felt like a cloud tunnel. I was shockingly hungry. Little spots whirred in front of my eyes against the dead white of the world outside. It was spooky and peaceful, like a shared dream, and no one spoke for over an hour. The driver was a wiry old Chinese with a chauffeur’s cap; he kept both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. Once I cried out when a jackrabbit shot across in front of us like an apparition. The car was very warm; after a while I fell asleep.

  I was awakened by a stop. Outside the driver’s window two guards, so muffled around the faces I couldn’t tell whether they were men or women, were standing like huge chessmen. The driver opened the back door with a switch; icy air stung my face; one of the guards bent down toward me, staring over a high collar and muffler and from under an enormous furry cap. Sunlight glinted on a bayonet. I stared back into sharp, ambiguous eyes; the guard nodded, said something to the driver and closed the door. We drove on.

  We were on top of the hills now, rumbling through plowed snow along a flat plain. There were no features, no sign of life. It was like a snow-covered Belson. I stretched and rubbed my eyes. Somehow my hunger had gone. The sun was out; we drove through streamers of mist that were now lambent, along a perfectly straight road across the plain. After ten minutes I could see in the distance a red pagoda roof.

  As we came closer and slowed, I made out a house or temple about the size of my parents’ home in Ohio, with a few wooden steps and a simple door in front. Snow had been cleared away from all around for a radius of about fifty feet. The roof was bright in the sun. On it sat a large bird or the image of a bird, head tucked under its wing. A dove.

  Our car pulled up to the front steps. A tall, muffled guard was waiting, with no rifle this time
. He held an enormous greatcoat open for me. I stepped from the warm car into it, pulling its huge collar around my ears. The guard took me firmly by the elbow and led me up the steps. The door opened. I walked inside, the weight of the coat giving gravity to my movement. I felt astonishingly calm, and the wearing of that coat for only a minute conferred dignity on my spirit as well as heft, as though it had been the robe of a Manchu emperor or Prospero’s magic cloak.

  I was in a small room with no furniture. The bare floor was teak; ink brush drawings of birds hung on the walls.

  There was a wide, green-lacquered door at the far side of the room. I walked toward it and as it swung open I saw daylight and green foliage. I heard the sound of falling water. Standing in the doorway I looked up at a skylight, with a willow tree brushing its top against it. Through ferns, light sparkled on water. I took a step forward and saw the surface of a pool. A gravelly, womanly voice said, “Come in, Mr. Belson.”

  “Mourning Dove!” I said. “I hoped it would be you.”

  I stepped forward onto gravel, turned at the feathery stand of ferns, walked around the pond and its small waterfall. A couple of abrupt chunks startled me; frogs had jumped into the water at my approach and were now peering at me from wet bubble eyes, the rest of their dark bodies floating below the surface in subaqueous murk.

  At the other side of the pond on a raised wooden dais between willow trees sat Mourning Dove Soong in a white wicker chair. Her hair was white and she wore a plain black robe. She looked much older and terribly frail. Her face was chalky and, as I came closer, massively wrinkled around the intelligent black eyes. She was looking at me steadily. On her lap slept a gray cat. I walked to the chair across from her and took it.