by Xu, Lei
But you can’t always get what you want. There was no easy way across the shoal. We were leaping from boulder to boulder with huge packs, like stuntmen in training. And if we stepped on the gunnysacks? Our entire foot would sink in, catching on the wire and requiring that we be cut free. We gritted our teeth and marched doggedly on, but in nearly three hours we’d gone little more than a kilometer and even the deputy squad leader had reached the limit of exhaustion. Wang Sichuan looked at me, panting for air. “Old Wu, at this rate, we’re going to be camping in the mass grave tonight,” he said.
He was right. Looking at the darkness up ahead, there was no way to tell how far it went. And hiking for another three hours was not possible. “If we have to, then so be it,” I replied. “These are our compatriots. Dead all these years and they still haven’t spent one night in peace. Tonight we will watch over them. Now, what’s so bad about that?”
Chen Luohu promptly cut in. “I object.”
This surprised me. “Well, then what do you propose?” I asked him.
“I think we ought to keep going and rest when we get out of here,” he said. “Because… um… because we won’t be able to rest well in this kind of place.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Who wouldn’t rest well?” said Wang Sichuan sarcastically. “I’m afraid only you’d have trouble falling asleep. What is it, Luohu, you afraid there’s ghosts here?”
Chen Luohu’s face immediately flushed a deep red. “Well, I am afraid,” he quickly replied. “What’s so terrible about that? My mom carried me but six months before giving birth. I’ve been deficient from the start, a natural coward. Can I be blamed for it? But being a coward never stopped me from serving my country. Whoever wants to laugh at me is laughing at a comrade.”
Wang Sichuan and I exchanged a look—there was nothing to be done about this guy. “Spirits are nothing but superstition,” I said. “Rock is a form of matter. Corpses are a form of matter. Better just to think of all this as stone. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Besides, even if we walked a whole day, we still wouldn’t get out of here. We just don’t have that kind of strength.”
“How do you know?” Chen Luohu replied. “It’s pitch-black up ahead. We might walk another fifteen minutes and be out of here.”
I thought about it, and he did have a point. If it were possible to sleep somewhere else, I too would rather not have to brace myself for the long night ahead. It was here that Pei Qing spoke: “We need not fight about it. Listen to the noises around us. Up ahead, the water still sounds very calm. The direction and flow of the river are not changing. And even if the edge of the water was just out of earshot, we’d still have another two to three hours to go. Now that we’re exhausted, it’s going to be impossible to maintain our previous pace or intensity. The road’s going to be increasingly difficult for us. To continue would be inefficient—a waste of time and energy.” His intonation was neither too fast nor too slow. He was very convincing. “It would be wisest to rest here,” he continued. “I’m in support of setting up camp now, but perhaps we shouldn’t stay as long as we might normally.”
Wang Sichuan didn’t care about estimates or anything. He was just pooped. “Three votes to one, majority rules,” he joined in.
Pei Qing really does have his own way of doing things, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t have expected so much from him. “Little Pei is top of the class,” I said. “He looks at problems differently than us dummies. I agree with his analysis.”
Wang Sichuan made a few gestures and at once the corpsmen set down all of their gear. Chen Luohu was mad as hell, but there was nothing he could do. His expression was terrible to look at, but we paid him no mind and began searching around for a suitable campsite. Soon enough, we’d located a large rock, dry and flat as a board. After climbing up, the corpsmen began to put our campsite in order while we unloaded our gear. Once we had set down all of our equipment, we felt much more relaxed. Pei Qing and a young corpsman then packed some basic supplies and set off to see just how much farther the rocky shoal went. If it continued for a long way, we’d be forced to leave some of our equipment behind or we’d be stuck here forever and never accomplish our mission. I didn’t pay much attention to their departure and merely told them to be careful, but the deputy squad leader acted like he was in a movie. “You take good care of Mr. Pei!” he commanded the young soldier. We decided that if anything went wrong they would warn us by firing gunshots into the air.
We had our own matters. After tidying up the base, we made a fire and began cooking our military rations. Though we all wore waterproof ponchos, we were wet through and through. We stripped off our clothes and let them toast by the fire. My sleeping bag had been provided by the army. It had a big “US” stamp on it, and someone had told me it had been seized during the Korean War. I’ve never been too obsessed with cleanliness, so as soon as the bag began to heat up, the scent of mildew permeated the air. Wang Sichuan made me put it away.
Chen Luohu continued to sulk and ignore the rest of us, but Wang Sichuan and I talked and laughed between ourselves, and all the corpsmen took a similar attitude. There’s a lot of turnover in military units: While it’s great if people get along, there’s no need to force it. After all, once the mission is over we all return to our respective homes, and who knows when we might meet again.
Our military rations consisted of condensed, dehydrated wheat flour and rice with accompanying packets of sugar and salt. Unwrapped, it was the size of one’s finger, but once cooked it would fill the pot. Wang Sichuan got up to go draw some water, but as soon as he reached the edge of the rock and beheld the field of black bags and twisted wire, he changed his mind. “I think I’ll just use the water I carried in,” he said. Someone located a kettle and put it to boil. Together we sat and ate our rice-and-flour paste out of a big basin. It was almost inedible and tasted like medicine, but we made do.
As I ate, I began to consider some of the problems we might face. What was I to do once I had drunk all of my water? The more I thought about it, the more vexed I became. At the back of my mind I kept thinking: Should I be on the brink of dying of thirst, would I be able to drink my own urine? Surely that would be no time to be picky.
We’d finished our meal, but Pei Qing and the soldier still hadn’t returned. We smoked and waited. The cigarettes I had at the time were an unruly combination of Harbin and Hengda brand tobacco. Either Wang Sichuan’s salary or his connections weren’t as good as mine, because he smoked Albanian brand cigarettes, which went for eighteen cents a pack. I could see that none of the soldiers were smoking anything good, just generic cigarettes, so I handed over a pack of Hengdas to the deputy squad leader and—no joke—he blushed all over from happiness. Even after smoking for a while, though, we still felt ill at ease. Not a word was spoken. We just gritted our teeth and kept puffing away.
Honestly, I could understand where Chen Luohu was coming from and, in several respects, he was braver than the rest of us. First of all, he had the courage to admit in front of everyone that he was afraid, and even if we weren’t as scared as he was, no way were we entirely free of fear. The worst was eating dinner in that place. I could see how each man tried to behave with an air of complete indifference, but I knew how uneasy they really were. The feeling that people were watching us from every direction never slackened. Our shoulders grew tense from fighting the constant urge to turn our heads and look.
Wang Sichuan suggested I tell some jokes to lighten the mood. I’d worked for a long time as part of a prospecting team that included a number of young soldiers. They’d often ask to hear jokes and stories and I’d composed more than a few of them. Wang Sichuan had heard a few while we were living together, so he knew I had a gift for storytelling. Still, being asked out of the blue made me feel a little embarrassed. I usually liked to build up to the story subtly, talking about work, chatting about one thing or another, drawing the listener in, and then bring out the jokes. And of course, I couldn’t tell scary stories he
re. I did have a good bit that I kept in reserve, though. It was about a prospector in Yunnan making a fool of himself with a young woman from an ethnic minority. The routine was truly hilarious, romantic as could be, and with punch line after punch line. I wasn’t sure how long it had been since these young soldiers had seen a woman, but hearing this story would absolutely divert their attention.
As I was pondering the best way to begin—Bang! Bang! Bang!—three shots suddenly rang out, booming like a series of thunderclaps. We all leaped in surprise. The deputy squad leader clearly knew what he was doing; at once he tossed away his cigarette, hoisted his rifle, and headed off in the direction of the noise, the rest of the soldiers following closely behind. We had none of their superior agility, and I quickly lagged some sixty feet back. Wang Sichuan was too large and too heavy, and before long he had slipped down the side of one of the boulders and caught his foot in a gunnysack. Unable to pull it out, he began to call for my help. I didn’t have time to worry about him. I yelled for Chen Luohu—farther back and nearly crawling flat on his stomach across the rocks—to give him a hand. Then I hurried onward.
CHAPTER 10
A Martyr’s Death
I ran through total darkness. All I could see were the shaking beams of the soldiers’ flashlights up ahead. I had to slow my pace and withdraw my own flashlight to shine the way. I continued on, leaping across the gaps from rock to rock. There was nothing easy about crossing these spaces. A man is not a kangaroo, and as I hurtled on, it seemed that each jump would be my last. Sometimes, if my feet weren’t fast enough, I would begin to slide down the side of a boulder. All I could do was try my best to keep up.
They were still firing their weapons in the distance. Soon I could see the course of their bullet tracers as they shot through the dark. I guessed they were still about eighteen hundred feet away. Pei Qing and the soldier hadn’t been walking for that long. My strength was gone by the time I’d made it half that far. I came to a stop. I was panting so hard I thought I might vomit, but after resting for a moment, I realized I could wait no longer. All around me was pitch-black, and up ahead the soldiers continued to fly across the boulders, moving farther and farther away. As I looked at the gunnysacks scattered all around me, with the limbs of desiccated corpses emerging at sickening angles, the blood ran cold in my veins. I gritted my teeth and carried on.
By the time I caught up with them, the gunfire had already ceased. I saw that it was Pei Qing who had been doing the shooting. The soldier who’d accompanied him was nowhere to be seen. The deputy squad leader’s complexion had turned deathly pale. Along with another soldier he began running back toward camp. “What is it?” I asked, but he ignored my question and ran straight past me into the darkness. I could do nothing but climb over to Pei Qing and ask what was going on. His face was ashen and he made no reply. The soldier at his side began to explain, but he could barely get the words out. He just pointed and stuttered. It took some time before I understood what he was saying. Someone had fallen. The deputy squad leader had rushed back to find a rope.
I could hear the roar of water nearby. Taking a few steps closer, I saw that we had made it to the end. The boulder field had come to a sudden stop. Here the river crossed a fault line and dropped a level straight down, forming a waterfall. It wasn’t that high, sixtysome feet at most. As I shined my flashlight along its base, I could see that the bottom was entirely covered in rocks. Then my beam lit upon the soldier. His body was caught between two rocks, his whole face red with wounds and blood. I couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead.
My head began to buzz. All at once the situation had become very serious. I hurriedly asked Pei Qing what had happened. He said that after reaching this spot they had initially planned to go back, but when he saw the waterfall was not that high, and given that they had already come this far—no easy feat, in itself—he decided to climb down and have a look. The young soldier told Pei Qing that he had been ordered by the deputy squad leader to protect him. This was a dangerous situation, the young man had said, so he’d better check it out first. Handing his rifle to Pei Qing, he began to climb down. Before the soldier had even gone two steps, he suddenly slipped and fell to the bottom. Pei Qing had immediately called for help, but after yelling for some time and receiving no response, he began to fire the rifle.
I’d seen this before. Losing one’s footing and falling is the most common danger we prospectors faced. I wasted no time in telling the two soldiers waiting next to me to call out the fallen soldier’s name. If he was still conscious, we had to keep him from going to sleep. They yelled and yelled—they called him something like “Big Beard”—but the fallen soldier didn’t make even the slightest response. My heart sank. The situation looked grim.
Wang Sichuan rushed in, once more exhausted to the point of collapse, but when he heard someone had tumbled over the side, he instantly went to climb down and save him. It took everything the two soldiers and I had to drag him back.
Finally, after twenty anxious minutes, they returned with the rope. The deputy squad leader himself descended, hoisted the young soldier on his back, and we pulled them both up. The deputy squad leader’s hands were covered in blood. At first I thought it had to be the fallen soldier’s, but then I saw the rips and gashes on his palms. Wire netting had been wound all the way up the falls. It was hidden behind the spray of water. This was why the young soldier had lost his footing. When I went to examine him, his eyes had already closed. He’d died a martyr’s death, and before I had even learned his name. Because he’d always worn a helmet, I’d never given this soldier a close look. Seeing him now, I could tell that he was no older than nineteen—still totally naive, recklessly tramping through his youth. He had died rashly, probably without ever having fallen in love, and no one had been there to hear his last words.
The deputy squad leader had served on the battlefield. His only response was to light a cigarette. The rest of the soldiers began to cry, as did Wang Sichuan. He grabbed Pei Qing, saying the boy was still a baby, how could you let him do something that dangerous. Pei Qing said nothing. He didn’t resist and his face looked terribly ashamed. I went to console the soldiers, but the deputy squad leader held me back. If they needed to cry for twenty minutes, I should just let them, he said.
The boy’s death hit me hard. We’ve always been conscious of the dangers inherent in prospecting work, and although we may appear relaxed, we’re nonetheless highly alert when it comes to these critical points. What a shame, I thought. We’d become so accustomed to taking care of ourselves that we’d forgotten to look out for others. We should have realized that these engineering corpsmen had no experience in geological exploration. Other than their level of physical fitness, they were no different from ordinary people. It was our negligence that killed this young soldier. These were the facts and there was no escaping them. Had it been I who brought the young soldier to this precipice, I wondered, would I have cautioned him before he climbed down? I’m afraid I too would have said nothing. Though all of us are highly skilled at our professions, when it comes to other things we’re entirely too lax. Pei Qing alone was not to blame.
That night we carried the soldier’s body back to camp and laid him on a sleeping bag. We couldn’t bring him deeper into the cave with us. Though we had to give him a proper burial, that would have to wait until we were on our way back to the surface. The deputy squad leader had us tuck in early, but how were we to calm down after something like that? None of us slept a wink.
The next day, not caring whether it was morning or night, we rose from our bags and put all of our belongings in order. After ceremonially paying our respects to the dead, we continued on our way. In 1962, our duty to the country was more important than anything else. Never once did we consider returning to the surface to rest, reorganize, and return again. We thought only of completing the mission. In prospecting jobs nowadays, as soon as something like this occurs, the assignment is over.
We stopped to eat lunch beside
the waterfall. Here the body bags had already thinned out. The rocks had become smaller, the distance between them much closer, and our progress was now relatively easy. Wang Sichuan requested to scout ahead and explore the route, but we stopped him—for no other reason than it just didn’t feel right. After eating we took a twenty-minute rest. While fishing around in my pocket for a cigarette, I brushed against a crumpledup piece of paper. That hadn’t been in my pocket earlier, I thought. Unrolling it, I discovered it had been torn from a labor-insurance form. There were only four words: “Beware of Pei Qing!”
CHAPTER 11
The Note
I had no idea who had covertly stuffed the note into my pocket. I glanced around at the rest of the group, but no one was paying me any attention. Then I looked over at Pei Qing. He was cleaning the martyred soldier’s old rifle. After the soldier died, Pei Qing had begun carrying the gun on his back. Though it had made no difference to me before, I suddenly found something distasteful about the sight.
Things were getting rather frustrating. Back then the country was in a bad way. We’d just suffered three years of natural disasters and were now facing the threat of invasion by the Kuomintang. I assumed the latter was to blame for the strictly enforced confidentiality of our mission. The threats were coming from both sides, however. In those years, “Kuomintang spy” had become a sensitive term on the mainland. Today this must sound like the plot of some second-rate TV drama, but at the time it was no laughing matter. Supposed US-backed spies for Chiang Kai-shek were “found out” within the police force, people’s militia, and people’s communes. Men and women were being seized at the slightest provocation. Wang Sichuan later put it best: You could look at it two ways, he said. On the positive side, the nation deeply impressed upon the minds of its citizens the importance of national security. Of course, the other way to see it, he continued, was a form of entertainment. In 1962 the country was engaged in class warfare, and as dances and parties disappeared entirely, all that was left to while away one’s days was the possibility of catching a few spies.