by Marlene Lee
“It will not be long now.”
Agnes smiled. Already her eyes were brighter, her skin clearer. Northwest China was a tonic for revolutionaries. A brisk wind was blowing from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia. Unencumbered by Westerners and their spheres of influence, it freshened the bedraggled survivors of the Long March who had just ended their year-long walk from defeats in the South. It blew along the centuries-old pathway of the Mongols, into Xi’an, ancient terminus of the silk route.
But at this particular moment the sounds and smell coming from the far end of the pagoda interested Agnes more than the Revolution or any part she might play in it. She began walking. Her large, blue-gray eyes moved from stele to stele.
“Can you translate for me?” she asked, pointing to raised characters that ran in columns along the tablet.
Diu Ling snorted. “Ancient hypocrisies of a feudal society. I have other work to do,” and he turned and left her alone among the steles.
The thumping increased. She proceeded toward the back of the hall. There, behind the last row of stones, dressed in loose-fitting trousers and tunics, two young men squatted before a stele covered with a sheet of rice paper. One of them took a long-handled brush from an ink pot resting on the floor and brushed the surface of a small paddle. The other was already in full swing, furiously slamming something like a bean bag against his inked paddle, then against the stele, paddle to stele, paddle to stele, faster and faster, punching out a rhythm, inking and pounding, sweating, breathing hard. The sweet odor of ink saturated the air.
The man stopped. Carefully he peeled off the rice paper. It had become a black-and-white tracing of a warrior from an ancient dynasty.
Agnes bought the paper rubbing. With the purchase rolled under her arm, she wandered among the cool gray stones, returning through several pagodas and courtyards until she came to a bench beside a camellia bush. Though unable to imagine ancient China or to penetrate the characters on the steles, she could imagine camellias in bloom a few months from now. Though winter still had to be lived through, though she was forty-five, she felt warmth and fertility surrounding her. She sat down on the bench, laid the rolled-up tracing beside her, and closed her eyes. Rarely did she allow herself to rest. Always she worked to achieve something, toiled, wrote, agonized, fought, dashed here, dashed there, rushed about because she was not sure of herself, activity covering the central doubt.
A deep, involuntary breath pushed her gently back against the bench. She felt as if a hand had passed over her head. She seemed to hear, around and through the steles, a gentle humming.
She picked up the rice paper tracing and walked toward the front of the museum where the shouts of rickshaw drivers and smells of hot oil and garlic replaced the transcendental hum and earthy thumps. Strangely, she thought of America and Mother. Mother had wanted her to get an education. Well, she hadn’t done it. Not in America, not in Germany, not in China. She’d never even graduated from high school. She’d written one book about herself and one book about the Red Chinese Army. The rest, workable articles. Mentally she defended herself: I’m a daughter of earth, not heaven. My writing is useful, perhaps. Nothing as fine as Lu Xun’s, Ding Ling’s, Mao Dun’s. I am here to toil for change. I am a toiler. Hours with writers are luxuries stolen from real work.
There was an imagined murmur of agreement from everyone in the family—yes, yes, the whisper sounded, daughter of earth—except Mother.
You are a writer, Agnes.
Agnes entered the street and climbed into a taxi. Through the narrow rear window she watched the Forest of Steles, library of heavenly wisdom, recede into the distance.
Dr. Herbert Wunsch looked after Warlord Zhang Xueliang’s teeth. Long before Agnes left for the Northwest, she’d persuaded the German dentist to move from Shanghai to Xi’an where he now served as the last link in a smuggling operation she’d set up to bring medical supplies from the coast to the Communists recuperating north of Xi’an from their Long March.
“The Young Marshal has allowed his teeth to deteriorate,” Dr. Wunsch said when Agnes returned from washing up in his Western-style bathroom.
“His teeth are just one of his problems,” Agnes said, accepting tea from the servant girl. “He’s rumored to be addicted to opium.”
Dr. Wunsch stretched his legs out before him. “Was,” he said in German. “Was addicted. He has recovered. There is much at stake for him and he’s readying himself to fight Japan.” He looked at Agnes as if he had secret knowledge. “We think he’s also ready to fight Chiang Kai-shek. You will learn all this.”
The servant girl stood at the door listening.
“More tea for Miss Smedley,” Dr. Wunsch said in Chinese.
“Is your young assistant a student?” Agnes asked.
One of the dentist’s gold-crowned bicuspids gleamed. “You could say so.”
Agnes stood and walked to the window that faced the wall of the old city. She felt impatient. There was a great deal to learn in Xi’an and she wanted to begin immediately.
“You have just arrived,” Dr. Wunsch observed, “and already you are tired of sitting.” He seemed to contain some inner excitement. “To alleviate your restlessness I have planned a small surprise.” Keeping his eyes on Agnes, he turned and called the servant in Chinese. This time when she entered the sitting room Agnes studied her.
“Closer to the window,” said Dr. Wunsch. “Step closer.” The girl moved until the afternoon light fell full on her face. Agnes gasped as Ding Ling tore off her dust cap and fell into Agnes’ arms. They rocked back and forth, laughing and crying. Dr. Wunsch’s gold tooth sparkled. He pulled out a large white handkerchief and blew his nose.
“They told me you were—” Agnes could not say “dead.” Just before leaving for America, she’d written numerous articles about Ding Ling’s kidnapping and placed them in Western publications. The publicity had intimidated the Nationalists and they had freed her.
Ding Ling knelt on the floor before her. “Because of you, I am alive.”
Agnes pulled the young woman to her feet and crossed the room to the sofa where they sat with their arms about each other.
“You promised you would join me in Xi’an,” Ding Ling whispered, “and you have kept your promise.”
Dr. Wunsch tried to lighten the emotion. “Ding Ling has given much thought to tonight’s menu,” he said.
Ding Ling nodded. “It will be a very special dinner.” She stood and dried her eyes. “Come talk with me while I cook.” Agnes followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Ding Ling fetched three plucked chickens from the cooling room and laid them on a board. She lifted the cleaver and brought it down across their backs.
“Mr. Snow is coming for dinner.”
“Edgar Snow!”
“He will read to us,” Ding Ling continued, “from his book about the Red Army.” She looked at Agnes’ face and her own clouded over. She laid down the cleaver. “What is the matter, dear friend?”
Agnes turned her head sharply. The book should be hers. She was the one who had urged Ed Snow to visit the Communists north of Xi’an. It was she who had arranged contacts for his travel to the army base. She picked up a green onion and pretended to study its white head and root hairs.
Perhaps Mao Zedong wanted a nonpartisan writer to tell the world about the Long March. She, herself, cared too much. She was known as a writer of the international left, and might not be believed. She hadn’t been productive these past two years in Shanghai. Bogged down in living, she’d worked on political causes to the detriment of her writing. She put down the onion. Perhaps it was because Ed was the better writer.
But Mao Zedong couldn’t know that. Or was her lack of education obvious to everyone? Could the Chinese, too, see that she was a toiler, a daughter of earth, not of heaven? Ding Ling must know it. With the girl’s talent and intellect, she must surely know it. Within the space of a minute Agnes grew jealous of almost everyone she knew.
“What is the matt
er?” Ding Ling asked twice.
“Ed Snow got to the Red Army before I did!”
Immediately Ding Ling understood. In her black eyes was an admission of her own: “I can never be a Westerner, free to the degree you are. In me will always be a remnant of China, a remnant of feudalism.” The two women gazed at each other. Love and rivalry bubbled richly between them.
Agnes crossed the hot sulfur pool in five strokes. Steep green crags looked misty through the steam coming off the mineral springs. She shook water out of her eyes and submerged to her chin. Every day she waited for Diu Ling to come and tell her to pack her suitcase and portable typewriter, that it was time to leave for Yan’an where she would see the Communist base for herself.
In the meantime she took the baths, worked on another book about the Red Army, and studied Chinese history. Often she rode horseback to the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, builder of the Great Wall one hundred miles to the north. She tied up her pony at the foot of the small, manmade mountain under which the Emperor occupied himself during death among fabled temples and rivers of quicksilver flowing through copper floors. Like the mountain rising over him, he had seen farther than those before him. He had tried to bring his kingdom out of feudalism. Agnes climbed hundreds of steps leading to the hilltop where she looked out over flat wheat lands; villages in the distance; long, dirt roads leading to the heart of China or outward to the world of non-China.
Now she side-stroked around the edges of the pool. Among the baths, temples, covered walkways and lotus ponds of Lington, ancient resort of kings and courtesans, she was waiting to report to the Western world what Diu Ling promised would be a historic agreement between Chiang Kai-shek and his semi-loyal warlords of Northwest China.
The Generalissimo was coming to Xi’an for a conference. He had hoped the armies of the Young Marshal and Yang Hucheng would drive out the Japanese, then kill each other. However, the Japanese had refused to be driven from Manchuria. In fact, they were now very close to Beijing. And far from killing each other, the two warlords were beginning to cooperate, thanks in part to Communists such as Diu Ling who had infiltrated their organizations and tried to reconcile their viewpoints in favor of unified war against Japan.
Agnes let her feet rise. She floated, partly exposed to the cold air, partly cradled by the mineral springs. Through wet eyelashes she looked at the temples and pavilions set like gems in the terraced mountainside rising straight up from the baths.
While Agnes was staying with Dr. Wunsch, Edgar Snow had visited them and read parts of his manuscript aloud. The book was superlative. She recalled a bit of it: “… there had been perhaps no greater mystery among nations, no more confused an epic, than the story of Red China. Fighting in the very heart of the most populous nation on earth, the Celestial Reds had for nine years been isolated by a news blockade as effective as a stone fortress … their territory was more inaccessible than Tibet. No one had voluntarily penetrated that wall and returned to write of his experiences … .”
“His experiences.” Agnes kicked lightly and propelled herself across the pool again. Edgar Snow was a man. Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai were men. She let her mind drift over an imaginary Central Committee composed of women. Mentally, she played with the implications for a woman reporter.
Apart from the real difficulties in competing with men, she had a jealous, insecure nature. She knew that, and struggled against it. Like steam hanging over hot springs, her self-doubt rose and drifted away, to form again and dissipate. She would think it had blown over for good, and then a certain weather condition would return, bringing the steam again.
Ed Snow wrote better than she did. Like herself, he was born in Missouri, but his family had money, stability, education. When he first met her, he’d tried talking about a past he thought they shared. But she had no intention of discussing her childhood or exchanging fond remembrances of the Midwest. She had no summer camps and college to talk about. He would never understand a father in the coal mines; a mother who dies of overwork and malnutrition; an aunt who is a prostitute. She’d shocked him, she knew, by her bitterness. Too bad. In her experience, the middle class was easily shocked.
“In working overseas you are bound to notice that fifteen of every sixteen people on earth are not Americans,” Ed said once. She’d laughed. He was clever. He was talented. But he did not feel poor. He did not feel Chinese. Agnes felt both. For her there was never a curtain, not even a transparent curtain, between herself and China. She saw herself in every girl child’s eyes. Her parents were everywhere she looked.
In Xi’an, in Dr. Wunsch’s compound, she’d gained perspective on herself. It was partly the simple act of confessing her jealousy to Ding Ling. But mostly it was Ed’s writing. She was a worker who happened to be a writer; Ed was a writer. When he’d finished reading to the party gathered in Dr. Wunsch’s living room, he’d closed the book to silence. No one applauded. They were too close to the Revolution, too overcome, to break the stillness immediately. Dispelling his own self-consciousness, Ed had turned to Diu Ling.
“You must tell me of developments in Xi’an,” he said quietly.
Diu Ling nearly trembled with intensity, shifting his position where he sat on the floor near Dr. Wunsch’s chair. As he spoke, he touched the fingertips of his hands together.
“I brought Zhou Enlai to the Catholic Church in Yan’an for a meeting with the Young Marshall.” Agnes had scarcely breathed as he described the conference between the Central Committee member and the powerful warlord who had been pushed out of Manchuria by the Japanese. At that point Diu Ling had turned and looked at her.
“We want you to report an expected agreement between the warlords and ourselves for the defense of China.And we want you to report the warlords’ conference with Chiang Kai-shek. Whatever the results, we want the world to know that Chiang is losing control in the Northwest.”
Ed Snow had smiled at Agnes. She bowed her head.
“And we are isolating you at Lington,” Diu Ling added with rare humor. “If your presence in Xi’an becomes known, the Kuomintang will suspect something newsworthy is about to occur.” Agnes lit a cigarette and joined in the laughter.
Now she pulled up out of the pool and dried herself. The climb up the wide stone steps to her room in one of the small temples chilled her in spite of the pink flush she carried away from the mineral springs. She opened the intricately carved door to her room and closed it behind her. The fire in the fireplace had nearly gone out. She stirred the coals and added a log. As she stepped out of her wet bathing suit, she saw a letter that one of the servant women had laid on the sleeping platform. She crossed the room and saw Myrtle’s handwriting. She opened it and read the single sheet. Shaking with cold, she pulled on long wool stockings, wool undershirt, riding breeches, and red sweater.
Father had died. Myrtle blamed Agnes for leaving the family after Mother’s death. Agnes, the letter said, should have stayed home to care for her younger brothers and sister. If she’d stayed home, Father would have found work and remained sober the rest of his life.
Agnes sat down at the table and stared at the wall. She started a letter but couldn’t finish it. She sought desperately for something to do.
The Emperor’s tomb. She would ride to the Emperor’s tomb! But she found she could barely stand. Trembling, she lay down on the platform and cried. Years of misery passed before her eyes, the misery of a man who failed at everything he tried, the misery of an exhausted woman attached to failure. Now that Father was dead, she cried for both her parents.
The next day her desolation mysteriously lifted. This room in the temple, the very room that had belonged to Yang Kweifei, favorite courtesan of ninth-century Emperor Hsuan Tsung, bestowed its gift upon her. Agnes heard music and love-making. Not the rough sounds of her parents at night that had so frightened her as a child, but simple, dove-like sounds. Unexpected beauty and quiet joy.
An old musician once played for her “Song of Unending Sorrow” on his five-stringe
d lute. The words told of the Emperor’s grief when Lady Yang died and how her spirit sent him messages from the enchanted isle where she lived among the immortals. Waiting in this beautiful place for the signal from Diu Ling to travel to Ya’nan, Agnes felt that she was receiving a life-giving message. Perhaps it was from her mother and father, transformed. Perhaps it was from some part of her own mind growing stronger.
From where she sat on the steps of the temple, regarding the swirling red and gold leaves blowing down from the mountainside, skittering and popping against retaining walls, Agnes watched the figure of portly Dr. Wunsch advance toward her from several terraces below. She was run through by yearning. Father! Underlying the sharp need was a generalized longing for a man, for maleness, for mental coolness, the analytic edge, height, weight, the flat male chest against which to lay her breasts.
The figure seemed to move in slow motion while she endured a long moment of self-revelation. She lacked. Lacked love. Lacked family. It came down to something quite simple: a husband and child. Family, which she held in contempt—bourgeois anodyne for pain, prettifier of reality, exploiter of women—suddenly seemed truth itself.
“Dr Wunsch!” She stood and ran down the steps to meet him. Breathing heavily from the climb, he opened his strong arms and caught her up in a hug. She pulled away and looked into his faded blue eyes spilling tears. “What is it?”
He took her hand and spoke in German. “I’m afraid I have bad news. Bad news for all of us.”
No more bad news, she silently begged.
Dr. Wunsch withdrew a clean white handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Lu Xun is dead.”
The terrace dropped away. Agnes whirled and faced the mountainside. She saw that the colors of blowing leaves were no longer ruddy and gold, but brown. Winter. Wordlessly she and Dr. Wunsch sat down on one of the steps. He forgot to offer her the handkerchief. Instead, he wiped his own eyes.
“Good is fragile, evil so strong,” he said brokenly. He was, she knew, thinking of his native Germany as well as of China. He opened his mouth. She concentrated on the gold bicuspid. “China has fallen silent,” he said in a near-whisper. “Now there is no one to speak for her.”