The Last Supper
Page 30
“He’s alive,” Patchen said.
He told them what he had learned in Hong Kong.
“Where are they holding him?” Wolkowicz asked.
“We don’t know.”
“Was he wounded?”
“We don’t know.”
“What the fuck was he doing in China?”
“We don’t know.”
Webster struck the table with his fist, rattling the dishes. “What do we know?” he shouted. “What are we doing for him, God damn it?” His voice was slurred.
Patchen gave Webster a long, cool look. “What we are doing for Christopher, Tom, is having dinner together,” Patchen said.
“I see,” Webster said. “We’re just old comrades keeping his memory alive. Is that it?”
“For the time being,” Patchen replied, “that’s it.”
Webster drank more wine.
Wolkowicz had not taken his eyes off Patchen’s face while Webster talked. Now he went on with his questions, as though the other man had not interrupted.
“Did you make any progress on identifying the plane and the pilot?”
“No. All our own pilots are clean. We polygraphed every one of them.”
“Nobody is missing?”
“Nobody. Who would be crazy enough to fly into China? Anyone who did would certainly be in the next cell to Christopher.”
“Then he must have been kidnapped,” Wolkowicz said.
Horace Hubbard spoke. “That’s possible. But by whom? It’s a blank page. We have Christopher to thank for that. He covered his tracks in a routine professional manner. He didn’t want us to know where he was going.”
Patchen held up a hand. “Barney knows all this. We all know all this. We may never know more.”
Webster rapped on the table again, a series of sharp knocks. “David,” he said, “I don’t like that. I don’t like what you just said.”
Patchen’s expression remained the same. “I’m sorry. What would you like me to say?”
Webster had difficulty in forming words. “I’d like you to say that we’re going to keep trying,” he said, “that we’re going to find out what happened, that we’re going to get him out. I’d like somebody to say that he was the best of us. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? Don’t we have any obligation to him at all?”
There was no reply. Webster struck the table again. “God damn it, David!” he said.
Wolkowicz put his elbows on the table and leaned around Horace in order to speak straight into Webster’s face. His voice was even rougher than usual.
“Let me answer Tom’s question,” he said. “The answer to your question, Tom, is no. No, we don’t have any obligation to Christopher. When he went into China, was he on a mission for the Outfit? No. Had he torn the heart out of the Outfit by puking his crazy fucking theory all over everybody’s shoes? Yes. Was he told to leave it alone? Yes. Could he leave it alone? Not Christopher. Paul Christopher got himself into a Chinese prison without any help from anybody. Do you think he expects the Outfit to get him out? No. Of course he doesn’t. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid.”
Webster seized the edge of the table. “Are you saying we’re abandoning him?”
“Ask Patchen. I thought we’d go in and get him. That made sense to me—quick in and out. We’ve got all those fucking helicopters in Vietnam. Get him out before he talks. That was my suggestion. Patchen didn’t buy it.”
“Christopher won’t talk.”
Wolkowicz grinned, a long fixed grimace, giving them all time to remember what had happened to his teeth.
“Of course he won’t,” Wolkowicz said. “Nobody ever does.”
Webster pushed back his chair, as if to walk out in disgust. It was not easy for Patchen to show sympathy, but he touched Webster—put his hand on the other man’s hand.
“The fact is, Paul doesn’t have very many friends,” Patchen said. “The four of us are his friends. That’s not much, Tom, but it’s all he’s got. Nobody else wants to think about him. He’s an embarrassment. A few want him to rot in China.”
“But we’re not like them,” Webster said. “We’ll feel bad about him rotting in China.”
“More than that. We’ll get him back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Faces change in Washington. In China, too. The time will come, and when it does, we’ll get him back.”
Webster stood up. He steadied himself, gripping the back of his chair. He tried to say something, but drink had robbed him of the power of speech. He opened his mouth and shook his head, trying to force his voice and tongue to form words. The others looked up at him.
“Tom,” Patchen said, “we all know you feel responsible because of what happened to Molly in Paris. But you’re not responsible. Barney is right: Paul is responsible, and only Paul.”
Webster shook the chair, banging its legs against the floor. Still he couldn’t speak. Suddenly he began to cry. Fat round tears like a child’s squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and slid over the broken drinker’s veins in his cheeks.
“I don’t think we can get him back and neither do any of you,” he said. “Do you believe it, Barney? Horace?”
Wolkowicz said, “Patchen believes it. Maybe he knows something we don’t know.”
Patchen sat very still, saying nothing, watching Webster cry like a child.
“Christopher doesn’t even know that Molly is dead,” Webster said. “Who’s going to tell him that when we get him back?”
“You can have that job if you want it,” Patchen said. “In the meantime, I think the four of us should keep in touch. We’re all Christopher has.”
Wolkowicz looked around the table. “Lucky Christopher,” he said.
Three
— 1 —
Seven years had passed since Paul Christopher had seen the dead man standing in a hospital room in Peking, and still he was not sure if the face he had glimpsed and the voice he had heard were real or if they were hallucinations.
As Christopher lay in the darkness in his cell, he reconstructed the incident in his mind, putting together fragments of memory like the smudged pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle. He did this every night, just before he went to sleep, and just after he wrote the single word of poetry that he permitted himself every day.
It took a long time, under the conditions of Christopher’s imprisonment, to write a single word of poetry; he was allowed neither paper nor pencil, so he had to compose in his head. Before adding his daily word, it was necessary to recall the entire poem and visualize it as it would appear on a printed page. The poem was now 3,569 words long. It was his calendar.
He had actually been in prison 3,753 days—ten years and 100 days—but he had been unable to write for the first 156 days because of the round-the-clock interrogation, and he had been unconscious or immobilized for 28 days after the wall of his ditch had collapsed, injuring him so gravely that he had been taken to the hospital in Peking.
When the accident happened, Christopher had already been in prison for more than three years. He had been using the mattock, chopping at the wall of his ditch. The earth had shaken itself like a wet dog—Christopher felt the muscular contortion of the soil through the soles of his canvas shoes—and dirt poured in, burying him. He could not possibly escape; the top of the ditch was four inches above his head. He slammed the mattock into the lip of the ditch and tried to pull himself out, but the cascading dirt seized his legs and then his throat, and the last thing he saw was the horrified face of one of his guards as he ran toward him, shouting in Mandarin for Christopher, who was being buried alive, to give him his hand.
When Christopher regained consciousness, he remembered nothing of this. He knew that he was not in his cell. He smelled antiseptic. He was in pain. When he opened his eyes and saw the bandages and the plaster casts on his body, he thought that he had been injured in the crash of Gus’s plane on the runway in China, and that all that had happened to him in the three years since had been a dream.
At the foot of his bed, a man and a woman were conversing in Mandarin. Christopher did not understand everything they said; the Chinese did not want him to learn Chinese. They hardly ever spoke to one another in his hearing, and when they talked to him, they invariably used English. Nevertheless, he listened closely to the Chinese as they talked. It had been more than a year since he had heard so many human voices speaking at the same time.
The woman was a doctor. The man wore a uniform. Evidently he held high rank: the doctor responded with great deference as he asked a series of questions about Christopher’s injuries. Christopher learned that he had suffered a broken leg, a broken pelvis, cracked ribs, a punctured lung, concussion. He had been unconscious for eight days.
The man in the uniform asked more questions. He had a clear tenor voice. Currents of humor, detectable even by Christopher’s foreign ear, swirled in his rapid sentences. He inquired, with anxiety, if Christopher was likely to suffer a permanent loss of memory as a result of the injury to his head. The doctor was not willing to commit herself on this point; her tone was sober and cautious. Clearly she realized that it was important to tell this man, whoever he was, the absolute truth.
Christopher thought that he recognized the man’s voice. He could not place it among the voices of the Chinese who had interrogated him, prosecuted him, instructed and disciplined him in the time that he had been in captivity. Had he heard the voice outside of China? It resembled a voice Christopher had heard speaking in another language. But whose?
Christopher saw the female doctor in profile. She was young, with a bespectacled, serious face. The man seemed to sense that Christopher was awake and watching. He turned and looked directly into Christopher’s eyes, and it was then that Christopher recognized him.
It was Gus, the pilot who had flown Christopher into China. He wore the mustard-colored uniform of the Chinese Army, with colonel’s badges, but under the floppy service cap with its red star he had Gus’s seamy, mobile face.
Even then, Christopher wondered if he was hallucinating. He tried to speak to Gus, but could not form words.
Gus covered his face with his hand and turned his back. He said something to the doctor, who threw a startled look toward Christopher in his bed.
Christopher coughed. His broken ribs sent a pain running through his body. When, at the end of the spasm, he opened his eyes again, Gus was gone. The doctor was at Christopher’s side.
“How long have you been conscious?” she asked in slow English.
“Not long.”
“What is your name?”
Christopher told her.
“What is your nationality? In what country are you now?”
As she asked these questions and as Christopher answered, she peered into his eyes with an examining light.
“Do you remember what happened?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you remember your work?”
“The digging? Yes.”
“The ditch collapsed. You were buried. There was a minor earthquake in . . . in the place where you have been.”
Christopher had never been told the name of the place where the Chinese kept him. He did not now ask where he was; it would have been discourteous. Besides, it did not matter. The doctor completed her examination.
“Are you hungry?”
“Thirsty.”
The doctor produced an orange from the pocket of her coat and peeled it. Christopher’s entire head filled with the pungent odor of the opened orange; it was the first orange he had seen in three years. Droplets of juice sprang from the fruit as the doctor broke it apart. She fed it to Christopher, a section at a time, with the sort of impersonal, efficient goodwill that the Victorian English called “loving kindness.” This was a common quality among the people of the puritanical new China that held Christopher prisoner.
It was seeing Gus, or imagining that he had seen him, that started Christopher on the systematic recollection of his life. He had begun with an effort to remember the details of the accident in the ditch. In this he succeeded. Soon he was engaged in remembering every detail of everything that had ever happened to him, everyone he had ever known, everything he had ever said or heard. He recorded it all, a word a day, in the shorthand of his poem.
In the years of his imprisonment, he had passed through all but the last years of his life outside of China. He understood nearly everything.
But even after seven years of intensive thought, Christopher did not understand why Gus should have been in his hospital room, wearing the uniform of a Chinese colonel. Though Christopher had never had a hallucination, it was certainly possible that Gus had been a hallucination. However, the doctor had not been a hallucination, the pain had not been a hallucination, the orange had not been a hallucination: in his memory, Christopher could smell the orange and see the doctor’s nimble fingers as she fed it to him. He could see the colonel’s wrinkled face and hear his good-humored voice. These belonged to Gus.
Christopher pulled up the quilt and prepared to fall asleep. Though he had dreamed colorful and intricate dreams all his life, he no longer did so. He supposed this was because he exercised his mind so rigorously when he was awake. However, he still had unbidden thoughts, and as he began to doze, he remembered Molly: a gesture she had made, walking toward him through the Roman evening on the Ponte Sisto. For a moment, he let himself see her as she had been in the first days of their love for one another. Then he stopped remembering. He never let memories of her run on; he still found it impossible to say good-bye to her.
— 2 —
Christopher had already been awake for some time when the reveille whistle blew: the season was changing from winter to spring and he could see the morning light beyond the frosted panes of the barred window set high in the wall. The weak bulb screwed into the ceiling fixture switched on, erasing the glow in the window. The peephole opened with a screech and the guard looked in.
Christopher rose at once and put on his clothes, a discarded army uniform of quilted cotton that he had patched himself. He then folded his pallet and quilt into the regulation triangles and waited, standing at attention. In a moment the peephole opened again. Then the door swung open and the guard, a man named Cheng, greeted Christopher with a brisk nod. He did not speak; the guards were not permitted to speak to this prisoner.
Christopher put on his padded cotton boots and walked ahead of Cheng down a narrow corridor. There were cells to each side, but they were empty. Christopher was the only prisoner in this installation. Like his school in Switzerland, the prison was a former monastery, built of greenish stone.
Outside, the country, as revealed in the thin morning light, was hilly and empty. Christopher’s ditch, a perfect straight line, ran up and over the nearest hill, vanished, then reappeared on the flank of the hill beyond. Mist hung in the low places. Birds muttered in the eaves of his prison. The line of the roof was very beautiful. Cheng watched, his Chinese-model Kalashnikov with its bright yellow stock slung across his chest, while Christopher defecated into the concrete latrine, then sprinkled lime on the droppings.
Inside his cell again, Christopher washed in the two liters of cold water that he had drawn from the outside faucet on the way back from the latrine. When he was through, he wiped out the glazed pottery washbasin and dried the piece of Sunlight soap, replacing them neatly on their shelf. Then, spitting into the tar-lined slop bucket, he brushed his teeth with a toothbrush, wooden with pink bristles, and hung it up. He folded his towel into a triangle.
Because Christopher had no relatives in China and was too poor to buy his own necessities, all these items had been provided to him by the government; it was understood that he would return them at the end of his sentence.
He had two books: the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which he was permitted to keep, and a copy of Wut
hering Heights, which was one of the twenty-two books in English that he was given at a rate of one book per month; when he got to the end of the list, he started over again with the first book. He had taught himself to read very slowly. The dictionary was the one material object he still loved. He read it every day like a breviary. The thought of losing it or having it taken away from him was almost unbearable.
This was Tuesday, the day of the week designated for shaving and for the clipping of nails. Cheng opened the door and gave Christopher a small pair of nail clippers. Christopher removed his beard with this instrument, one whisker at a time, a task that consumed about an hour. Then he clipped his fingernails and toenails, placing the parings in a small box provided for this purpose. Every two months, the clippings were collected for use in the manufacture of traditional Chinese medicine.
By now it was eight o’clock. Cheng brought Christopher the first of his two meals. The menu never varied: it consisted of two pieces of rough cornbread, each weighing 150 grams, a piece of salted turnip, and a bowl of gruel. Christopher ate every bit. He would have the same things again at four o’clock, along with a cup of tea.
Cheng marched Christopher to his ditch. Christopher descended a ladder and walked along the bottom. Cheng stayed up top, looking down on his prisoner. The ditch was Christopher’s principal labor. He was required to dig 1.5 cubic meters of dirt every day. This advanced the ditch, which was 2 meters deep and 1.5 meters wide, a distance of one half meter. He enjoyed the work, which made the daylight hours pass swiftly, and took satisfaction in producing a ditch that was pleasing to the eye, with smooth perpendicular walls and a flat bottom.
The ditch was now about two kilometers in length; it seemed to have no purpose. When they reached the end, Cheng measured off the day’s quota of soil, driving a peg into the ground to mark the place where Christopher would stop digging. Christopher picked up his mattock and his shovel in his callused hands and began to dig. He swung the mattock in a slow, steady rhythm; the blows he delivered to the loam were the only sound in this empty, windswept place.