by Aimee E. Liu
The commander barked at the guards and Tot to leave the room. When they were gone he lifted the bills one by one to the dirty light angling through the barred window. Lawrence drew forth the twenty he’d kept in reserve. The man coughed and spat into the corner, then casually pocketed the lot. After a pause he reached under his desk and pulled out an old Lee-Enfield rifle. Smiling, he took aim at Joanna, then Kamla, intermittently glancing sideways at Lawrence, who swore under his breath for the other two not to move, though he sensed they weren’t even breathing.
Without Tot to translate, Lawrence could only guess what the man was up to. It was not benign, but it was not a real threat either. The soldiers of this garrison wore the same Nationalist drill as the men who had attacked the caravan at Saser Pass.
Slowly Lawrence rose and moved toward the door. The commander was grinning at him now, nodding, rifle still in midair. Lawrence called to Tot, who was waiting outside. They spoke briefly, then Lawrence returned. The gun was still trained on Kamla, who stood with arms locked against her chest, eyes fixed on the one barred window. Joanna looked frantic, though she did not make a sound. Lawrence patted the air for her to stay calm. The Lee-Enfield swung back toward her.
“Just think of it as theater,” Lawrence said in a low voice. “It’s only an act.”
Her lips parted as if she might speak, but a knock on the door arrested her. The commander lowered his gun, laughing and slapping the desk with one palm, a whack that made them all jump. He replaced the weapon under his desk. The door opened, and Tot appeared in the entrance cradling a long thin object wrapped in jute. He handed the parcel to Lawrence, and withdrew again.
The commander remained seated as Lawrence slid back the sacking to reveal the Mll, then laid it on the desk. Their captor muttered his satisfaction. He fingered the works of the Sten gun with admiration, even tenderness. Lawrence signaled Jo with his eyes. Her face was ashen, but she gripped Kamla’s hand. The Chinese lifted the sight, and turning the barrel now on Lawrence, released another shock of laughter as his finger teased the trigger. His voice purred for them to go.
Lawrence brought up the rear, shutting the door softly behind him as Joanna and Kamla raced toward Tot, who stood waiting beside their pack ponies. The Sherpa met them with a tense grin. It was late afternoon. The rest of their caravan had vanished.
Moving as quickly as they could without breaking into an outright run, they cleared the garrison gate. Then Joanna stopped to check on Kamla. The girl’s face was grave, and Lawrence could see something working behind the surface, but whether it was fear for herself, concern for Joanna, or something entirely different, he couldn’t tell. Joanna folded her arms around her and smoothed her hair. Their bodies swayed in the copper light. Joanna’s eyes closed as Kamla’s face burrowed into her neck, and Lawrence looked away.
They continued on, following Tot past the garbage-strewn perimeter of the fort to a knoll where the rest of the caravan was assembling what remained of the cargo and animals. The commander’s tariff had spared no one, and the mood of the men and the Muslim merchant was decidedly grim.
“It’s not hard to see why the locals are up in arms against the Chinese,” Lawrence said.
Joanna released Kamla to Tot, who laid his palm fondly on top of her head and steered her off to help him saddle the ponies. Kamla smiled up at him, her fright in the garrison already behind her. Joanna, however, had not recovered. She sat on an old rock wall and wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked drained and confused, still deathly pale. She turned on Lawrence. “If it was only an act, why’d you give him the gun?”
“Be glad we’re rid of it. We’ve got our papers. Money. Our lily-white skins.”
“How reassuring.”
He sat beside her. “Come on, Jo. Even here in the back of beyond, they know. There’d be hell to pay if that bastard touched a hair on your head.”
“So why surrender?”
“Kamla’s skin’s not as white as ours. Nor is Tot’s.”
She flinched as if he’d raised his hand against her, but did not drop her eyes. “Those were his men who shot Simon, weren’t they? That’s how he knew you had that gun.”
Lawrence swallowed. “No.”
“Well, how, then?”
“Same way he knew not to shoot us,” he said. “Lily-white’s code for a lot.”
And partial truths were a coward’s crutch. She let it go and was silent, but that didn’t end it. “What about Aidan? He’s not lily-white either.”
He got up and turned away from her. “Isn’t that why you’re going after him?”
The answering silence seemed to throb. When at last he looked back she was standing with her hands in her pockets, eyes on the sky. The horizon glowed hot mustard and pink. Below, the earth stretched, blue. Lawrence touched his forehead and felt the peel of sunburn and dried sweat. They’d been traveling together for thirty-eight days, and still he’d told her nothing.
“I wonder if he even knows,” he said. “And if he does, whether he can begin to grasp what it’s worth.”
“What?”
“To have someone care so very much whether you live or die.”
7
Strange how the mind opens and closes, casting memories over the present like shadows from a moving cloud. I did not recognize that garrison until it was nearly out of sight. By then the sun was low in the west, the light at once bright and dying. We passed a field of crude stone markers. That’s when I remembered.
You see, when I had come through before with my uncle, there was still a great deal of fighting. The local tribes were burying their dead in this field, and as my uncle and I watched them from a distance, I felt as if I’d been lifted up and returned to my mother’s funeral.
This memory now seized me again. I ran to Mem and told her, but my words scattered. She could not understand. Was my mother buried here, she wanted to know.
No, I said. Not this place. But there, also, I had seen guns, soldiers. My mother was not yet under the earth when the uniformed Chinese took my father from the graveyard in a large black motorcar. For a moment I could see the day so clearly I tasted the soot in the air, felt the bite of the wind, the rumble beneath my feet as a convoy of lorries passed down the street outside the graveyard. But then, just as unpredictably as it had opened, my mind’s eye snapped shut. I stared at the past, commanding it to present itself, but all I saw was darkness.
Mem’s questions didn’t help. My mind refused. I shook my head and continued walking. But that night as I lay pretending to sleep, I heard Lawrence say to Mem, “Sounds like Tihwa.”
“What does?” she asked.
“The black cars. The secret police—the Chekka. Chinese death squads.”
It was too warm now for the tent. I lay in the open, just outside the circle of firelight. Mem and Lawrence sat alone. They took my words and turned them until I sensed that they were no longer talking about me or my father at all.
“Why Tihwa?” Mem asked.
“It’s the capital. Up near the rebel territories—and the Soviet border.”
“Dr. Akbar said the Americans were planning to build an air base in Tihwa.”
Lawrence nodded and spread his hands. “Welcome to the Tournament of Shadows.”
“Perhaps that’s why Alice James is heading there,” she said.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do, Jo?”
“You know. You already said it.”
Oddly then, Mem paused. I felt her looking in my direction. She said, “I’ve passed the point of no return.”
Yarkand was a large, gray, walled city three days on. We arrived just before the muezzin’s call to afternoon prayer, and a crowd of kneeling worshippers filled the central square. Surrounding them, Chinese soldiers in ragged uniforms stood smoking at every corner. Within five minutes a pair of these sentries stopped us. While Lawrence bribed them from funds concealed in his vest pocket, Tot slipped away to hire a jeep. Mem and Lawrence and Tot and I were to leave the ca
ravan here.
Before we parted, however, the begum came silently beside me. Except for the songs she had crooned to her daughter, I never did hear her speak, but now I could feel her eyes touching me through their thick veil. She took my hand and gently wrapped my fingers around something small and dry, then released me and walked away. I lifted my palm and found there three golden desert raisins.
Over the years that followed, I would often wonder what significance the begum attached to that curious trinity. I had been one of three children when we began the march. I was one of three women who completed it. Or, had her gift represented the union of father, mother, and child—a well-intended wish for my future, or a grief-stricken token of her own loss? Perhaps these three raisins were simply all that she had to give? In any event, I sensed in this gift both forgiveness and thanks. It was my first instruction that the two go hand in hand.
We entered Kashgar well after dark, three blinding dust storms and two days beyond Yarkand. The night was clear, and the entire population appeared to be celebrating this relief from the desert wind. Donkeys, camels, sheep, and goats stumbled among the throngs. Oil lamps swung dizzily above the night bazaar. Towers of hats and melon pyramids leaned out into the road, and groups of boys squatted between the stalls playing games with sticks and stones.
Finally we came to a grand house outside the city walls. Torches burned above the gates and turbaned guards stood at attention. An Indian lady came out to greet us, older than Mem and clearly no servant. She wore her shiny black hair coiled fat behind her neck and a bindi the size and color of a cherry in the middle of her forehead. Diamonds sparkled from her earlobes, and black-rimmed glasses on a chain thumped against her peacock green sari. Her husband was away, but she welcomed us without hesitation, brought us inside to bathe and dine. She said that Mem’s husband and Miss Alice James had been visitors here just one week earlier. Now they were gone.
I was glad. The very next morning we boarded a lorry full of Chinese soldiers bound for Tihwa.
Chapter 5
1
EVERY FEW HOURS for the next twelve days they would halt to refill the radiator or laboriously climb in and out of the dry watercourses that sliced the road like knife cuts. At night they camped or stopped in the rough communal inns that clustered about the oases. By day they drove beneath a bleaching sun or through curtains of flying sand. The lorry rattled, and the stink of petrol fused with the odor of too many bodies jammed into too few seats. Tot, accustomed to mountain climates, became sick with the heat, which was worse than summer in Delhi. Hands would blister at the touch of metal, and perspiration dried before it surfaced to skin.
As the lorry moved north, they passed through villages burned to the ground. Most were deserted, many half buried in sand. When Marco Polo was here, Lawrence said, he had recorded the danger of talking spirits, sirens who assumed the voices of loved ones in order to lead unwary travelers to their doom.
Joanna answered, “I keep seeing the newsreel flash of atomic bombs.”
On the roof of the lorry, beneath their feet, and strapped outside the windows, canvas flapped around bundles of arms—bayonets, rifles, submachine guns, dynamite, plastique, fuses, and detonators—all being transported to the capital air base in preparation for action against the northern rebels who had allied themselves with the Communists. The war in the west was accelerating, it seemed, with the news that Shanghai had fallen last week to the Reds. This news had been passed on to Joanna and Lawrence in Kashgar by the Indian consul’s wife, Mrs. Desai, along with the information that Aidan had caught up with Alice James there at the consulate, then proceeded on with her to Tihwa. Alice apparently had arrived in Kashgar nearly two weeks earlier and had become quite the toast of the town. The Desais, both teetotalers, pretended not to notice, but the dark circles and blotchy skin on such a young girl’s face, according to Mrs. Desai, was a dead giveaway.
Such a young girl. The words spun through Joanna’s head like marbles as she shifted Kamla against her arm, urging the child to sleep. Alice had apparently spent her evenings in Kashgar with a U.S. State Department fellow named Douglas Freeman, a linguistics specialist sent to Sinkiang two years ago as a favor to Generalissimo Chiang. Freeman was stationed inside the Old City, and no one really knew what he did except that he’d become a champion at the local horseback sheep-tossing contest called baiga and was a renowned drinker, both of which seemed to interest Miss James most keenly.
“We thought perhaps they had taken up together,” Mrs. Desai told Joanna in her clipped English-Indian accent. “But then your husband arrived, and the very next day she set off with him for Tihwa!” She was pleating her sari between her fingers as she spoke, so that the fabric’s golden paisley pattern broke into jagged spikes. When Joanna failed to answer, a flash of embarrassment crossed Mrs. Desai’s face. “Your husband and this girl—” she groped. “I am not sure they even liked each other, but journalists often seem to band together in competition. They are an odd breed, are they not?”
Joanna nodded equivocally. Then shrugged. Then rose and left the room.
On entering Kashgar she had noticed telegraph wires leading north over the desert like a string of empty clotheslines. That night, after putting Kamla to bed, she sat at the writing table in their room and composed a note to wire to Aidan, care of the American consulate in Tihwa: Arrive Tihwa next week. I love you. Joanna.
The irresistible desiderium incogniti. That was what Lawrence called it. He had hauled her into the Desais’ library and presented her with a dog-eared volume by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin. The book was open to a passage describing Hedin’s obsession with Central Asia:
If ill luck prevailed, I might lose everything. But I did not hesitate for a moment. I had determined to conquer the desert. No matter how weary, I would not retrace a single step of my trail. I was swept away by the irresistible desiderium incogniti, which breaks down all obstacles, and refuses to recognize the impossible.
“Latin was never my strong suit,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “Is this ‘desire for the unknown,’ or ‘unknown desire’?”
“Or both.”
Lawrence’s push-pull gaze hooked her. He placed his fingertips on the back of her wrist. It was nothing. A moment. The slightest of pressure. Yet the sensation coursed up her arm as if he’d never touched her before. It unfurled through her body in waves so strong that her breath caught at the base of her throat.
The book fell from her hand to the floor. The last time a man’s touch had seized her this way, the man was Aidan. Now she drew back sharply, holding her wrist as if burned.
“Either way,” Lawrence said, regarding her quietly, “this same spell seems to afflict us all.”
2
My father filled my dreams and thoughts through those long burning, rackety days, so clear at times that it seemed he must have been conjured up by the desert. I recalled the measure of his bones and flesh as he used to hold my hand. The backs of his hands were lined and brown like the skin of dried almonds, but his palms were pale and smooth and large enough to curl my whole fist inside.
My father, whose name I now decided had been Badam Chand, though it might have been Patu or Braroo instead, had always come and gone. He, too, had worn a uniform, but it was smarter than those of the Chinese soldiers, and was set off handsomely by a scarlet turban. He had a raven black beard and eyes that sparkled, high leather boots that he would polish until they shone like his eyes. I was his only child, and I could remember once or twice when my parents argued, my mother pulling her hair and wailing, “If only this useless girl were a son, you would not speak to me this way.” But my father would look at me crouching in the corner, and say, “She is my sun and moon. I would have no other.” My mother hated me even more for that. When my father went across the mountains she would weep, but if I attempted to comfort her she would scream for me to leave her.
My mother was a Tungan—a Chinese Mohammedan. She had told me proudly of her ancestry: As
a people, the Tungans were warriors. A century ago they captured the capital of Sinkiang and killed many thousands of Han Chinese. Because of this, for a time the Chinese respected them. Tungans were landowners, even worked in the government. But my mother was illiterate. One day she burned the books my father brought from India, including the collection of stories he read to me. She said it was for our own good, and perhaps this was true. Perhaps there was danger for us to possess books printed in English. At that time, many men were being sent away to Russia. But I was too young to understand such things. I knew only that my mother had destroyed my father’s gift to me, and in his absence this was as if she were destroying my father himself.
Uncle was my father’s brother. Or so my mother told me the first time he came to visit. It was true he was tall like my father with the same almond-brown skin, but his voice was rough. He laughed with my mother and joked at me. He would stay with us at our home, our two bare-walled city rooms, for many days, but always left before my father’s return.
Not long after one of these visits, my mother died, still big with a second child never born. I do not know what illness claimed her, only that it came over her suddenly, causing her to scream that she was on fire. My father would not allow me to go near her, and I believed this was because he did not want me to catch on fire as well. He told me not to worry, that I would be safe. He said he would take me over the mountains to his other home, and I must not be afraid. The night my mother died I woke in my father’s arms. The house was silent. He took my hand and with his finger traced the lines of my palm. I remember, it felt as though he had his finger on my heart.