Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  At his side Ai-lien followed his lead, joining in with equal frenzy. If their grandfather was a class enemy as defined by Chairman Mao, he deserved to be attacked! To defy such orders was unthinkable; if they failed to comply, they would not only be dishonoring their emotional pledges to serve Chairman Mao,., they would also immediately become outcasts from the Red Guard movement and expose themselves to the same kind of attack. Although they were not able to rationalize these thoughts consciously in the moments available to them, they reacted instinctively, yelling denunciations of their grandfather with as much passion as any of their comrades.

  “You’re a bourgeois revisionist careerist, Liang,” yelled the tall Red Guard with the stockwhip, snapping it dangerously close to the cadre’s face once more. “That’s why the masses have come to take revolutionary action against you! You wormed your way into the Party! You slavishly obeyed the instructions of China’s Khrushchev to suppress the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the office of the Party Agriculture Commission. You hindered Red Guard groups in your office. Like China’s Khrushchev and the rest of his black gang, you want to take the capitalist road! You are all worse than dog’s turds!”

  Liang flinched, moving his head away from the flicking tongue of the whip’s long lash. His face remained pale and he was having difficulty breathing evenly, but he was beginning to recover from the first terrible shock of the midnight invasi0fl. Black paint and globules of yellow paste were dribbling down his arms and legs and the tall hat jammed on his head almost covered his eyes, yet despite the terrible indignity of his position, something of the steely courage that had driven him across the iron chains at Luting under fire began to reassert itself.

  “I’ve always been loyal to the Party and Chairman Mao,” grunted Liang, struggling against the arms of the Red Guards holding him. “So has President Liu, the man you call China’s Khrushchev. . . . We’re neither bourgeois nor revisionist

  “Shut up!”

  The Red Guard flourished his stockwhip again and the crack of the lash rang loudly above the hubbub of noise coming from the rest of the house. Kung saw the leading Red Guard glance inquiringly toward one of two older men who stood watchfully against one wall and when he jerked his head at the group 0ldiflg the still-squealing cat, the Red Guard leader motioned for them to come forward through the crowd.

  “How dare you say you aren’t a bourgeois revisionist!” shouted the leader furiously at the top of his voice. ‘“Keeping household pets is an old bourgeois habit! It will be swept away by the Cultural Revolution — and so will all members of the black gang!”

  He gestured angrily toward a beam that wan across the low room, and the youths holding the gray and white cat threw the free end of the rope attached to its neck over the beam. When they pulled on it, lifting the screeching animal above their heads, the rope bit tighter into its fur, strangling it slowly. A hush fell as its struggles grew feebler, its dangling legs ceased to twitch, and the pitiful sounds died in its constricted throat. From the bedroom doorway behind Liang, his wife let out a half-stilled moan of horror.

  “My husband has given his whole life to the revolution,” she said in a tortured whisper. “What you’re saying insane —“

  The older Red Guard standing by the wall made a quick sign and the faltering voice of Liang’s wife was drowned at once in a new howl of “Ta Tao Liang Tsa Chung!” With the chanting rising to a crescendo, a Red Guard with a pair of domestic scissors rushed forward and plunged them repeatedly into the cat’s lifeless body until blood trickled from it. Then he set it violently in motion and the Red Guards holding Liang stood fast so that the bleeding body of the animal knocked against his face as it swung back and forth at the end of the rope, adding smears of blood to the paint and paste that already disfigured him.

  “Hang the bastard Liang! Hang the bastard Liang!” roared the whole crowd of Red Guards, taking their lead again from the older man. “Hang the bastard now!”

  Liang’s eyes widened in alarm as the Red Guards at the front of the crowd moved nearer, brandishing their staves with renewed fury. In the other rooms the crash of axes, hammers, and crowbars could be heard as the Red Guards tore up floorboards and broke open cupboards. Glass shattered, wood splintered, furniture was overturned, and through one window a squad of Red Guards in the shadowy courtyard could be seen wrenching dwarf trees and shrubs from their tubs and digging up the small vegetable patch in their search for something that might prove incriminating.

  “It would be better if you confessed your stinking crimes now,” yelled the Red Guard leader, cracking his whip menacingly under Liang’s nose. “Nothing will save you . .

  “Leave my husband alone! His heart is weak! He’s worked so hard for so many years he’s ruined his health!” Liang’s wife pulled herself free from the two female Red Guards holding her and lunged toward her husband’s captors. She scratched and tore at them, screaming incoherently, but fell sobbing to her knees when the Red Guard leader laid the lash of his stockwhip across her bony shoulders with all his force, raising an instant welt of blood beneath her nightclothes. The two girls in charge of her rushed forward, cursing, to drag her from the room and the Red Guard leader jabbed the end of his whip against Liang’s bloodied cheek.

  “Confess your bourgeois revisionist crimes, black gangster Liang — or the revolutionary masses will strike you down!”

  “How should a man who risked his life daily for Chairman Mao on the Long March confess to ‘taking the capitalist road’?” said Liang angrily through his gritted teeth. “What sense would that make?”

  “Many people wave the red flag to oppose the red flag!” One of the older men stepped forward for the first time from his unobtrusive place by the wall. In his hand he held a sheet of paper and he glanced down at it before speaking. “Before the Long March began, did you work for a foreign imperialist spy, an English missionary who was captured by the Red Army and sentenced to death for spying for the Kuomintang clique? Weren’t you baptized a Christian by him? Weren’t you all along a running dog of the imperialists who sneaked into the Communist Party just to serve your foreign masters?”

  The crowd fell abruptly silent, awed by the gravity of the new charges, and Liang swallowed hard before replying.

  “My father’s land was confiscated when there was famine in Hunan,” said Liang in a hoarse voice. “To save my family from starving I took a job with foreign missionaries. I agreed to be baptized to keep the job — but that was long ago, before I became a fighter of the Red Army and a member of the Communist Party.”

  The adult Red Guard flourished the sheet of paper at Liang, his eyes glittering with the light of triumph. “Then why did you meet that same English missionary in secret at the Temple of Heaven when he came to Peking in 1957?”

  “The meeting wasn’t secret,” gasped Liang. “It took place for personal reasons, with the knowledge of Premier Chou. . . and Marshal Lu Chiao.”

  The adult Red Guard’s face stiffened at the mention of the two well-known names and he made a quick note on the paper. Then he looked up at Liang again. “You’re lying —“

  A loud commotion outside in the courtyard drowned his words suddenly, and all the youths who had been searching the garden burst noisily into the room. Yelling excitedly, they forced their way through the throng behind one Red Guard who was holding up a potted flowering jasmine. He had already jerked the shrub and the clod of earth clinging to its roots from the porcelain pot and he replaced it in an elaborate mime as he reached the space in front of Liang. The watching crowd fell silent and in a dramatic gesture the Red Guard pulled the shrub and its roots from the pot once more to demonstrate how he had carried out his search in the garden. When he turned the pot upside down, an oblong package wrapped in waterproof oilcloth that had been buried beneath the jasmine fell heavily to the floor. The Red Guard holding the stockwhip snatched up the bundle, unwrapped it, and grinning in triumph, held up a black leather-bound edition of the Holy Bible with gilt lettering on
its cover. Flicking it open, he peered for a moment at an inscription, handwritten in Chinese characters on the flyleaf; then looking up, he read it aloud in a jeering voice.

  ‘To Hsiao Liang, a brother in Christ. With affection and gratitude, Pastor Kellner.’

  Liang stared blankly at the Bible, his expression betraying his unease, and the Red Guard leader jabbed the end of his whip viciously into his face once more.

  “Why does a revolutionary cadre who is endlessly loyal to Chairman Mao need to hide a foreign book in his jasmine pot?” asked the youth in a sarcastic voice.

  Liang lowered his head without replying and the Red Guard leader dropped the Bible on the floor with a snort of contempt. He made a sign to a youth holding a bucket and brush and watched with satisfaction as he sloshed black paint in among its gold-edged pages. Then, kicking it aside, he turned and scanned the crowd intently until his gaze fell on Kung and Ai-lien. He gestured peremptorily toward them with the whip, and when the crowd parted, Kung advanced, still clutching his stave in front of him, followed by his sister.

  Liang did not look up at their approach but continued to stand with his chin sunk against his chest. Close up, to Kung his grandfather looked more like a terrible, comic effigy of straw than a flesh- and-blood human being. The black paint, paste, and blood were drying on him and the tall dunce cap, the poster, and placard gave his body a tragically foolish appearance. Kung’s heart was thudding painfully against his ribs as he gazed at his grandfather’s bowed shoulders and a turmoil of emotions raged inside him, making his head ache.

  ‘Everything reactionary is the same,’ “ yelled the Red Guard with the stockwhip, challengingly. “ ‘Unless you hit it, it won’t fall!’

  The vehemence of his shout jolted Liang and he raised his head to find himself looking directly into the faces of Kung and Ai-lien. For a second or two he stared in disbelief at his two grandchildren — then a terrible look of despair came into his eyes and he seemed to shrink in size.

  To Kung, the grotesque paint- and blood-spattered face of his grandfather was suddenly unbearable to Look at. He felt both a deep pity for Liang’s terrible plight and an irrational fury that he should have allowed himself to be singled out as a victim. Simultaneously the roars from a million throats in the Square of Heavenly Peace seemed to ring again in his ears, urging him on, directing him to demonstrate his loyalty to Chairman Mao.

  “Bombard the headquarters! Bombard the headquarters!” boomed the voices, and in an unconscious reflex action Kung raised his stave and brought it crashing down on his grandfather’s head and shoulders with sickening force. A new, unintelligible roar from the Red Guards crowding behind him mingled with the imaginary shouts in his ears and with Liang swaying unsteadily before him, he raised his stave above his head once more. Ai-lien and others around him, he realized vaguely, were also moving forward, aiming blows at the reeling figure, and he joined them, lashing out again and again at Liang’s unprotected head.

  “O Lord God, in my hour of need, please forgive and protect me! O Lord God, in my hour of need, please forgive and protect me!”

  As the forest of staves struck wildly down at him, Liang heard his own voice repeating again, as though from far off, the words of the prayer that had last leapt to his lips in the midst of the fire on the Luting bridge. It echoed in his ears with a strange resonance; then the floor rose up suddenly toward him like a jaw closing and the pain flowing through his head and body became a rushing torrent. For a split second he clearly felt the black iron chains of the Luting bridge cold beneath his body again. Then they parted and he slipped between them to float gently down toward the boiling white breakers of the Tatu far below.

  Kung and Ai-lien stood side by side, staring numbly at the motionless body of their grandfather lying at their feet. They lowered their staves and the Red Guards crowding around them fell silent. In the filthy pool of black paint and sticky paste, the aging Gold Star hero of the Long March was a crumpled, wasted figure and instinctively they knew he would never rise again. At the back of the room a single voice shouted “Long live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution! Long live Chairman Mao!” and gradually the other Red Guards took up the chant until the house was filled again with the sounds of their voices.

  5

  A rising tide of Chinese and Japanese newspapers, news-agency reports, radio transcripts, and sheaves of library clippings looked as though they might soon swamp Jakob’s desk as he pored over a draft of his weekly analysis of events in China in the middle of October. Behind the precarious heaps of paper he ‘.vas only partly visible to visitors approaching the glass-partitioned office on the top floor of the Kellner Institute and when Joseph Sherman appeared outside the open doorway, he stood on tiptoe and waved a folded Chinese newspaper exaggeratedly back and forth to request silent permission of Jakob to enter.

  ‘“Celebrated China Watcher Drowns in Flood of Revolutionary Newsprint’ — maybe that’s the first story I should file from here for the good old Gazette,” exclaimed Sherman, advancing jovially into the office to shake Jakob’s hand. “At least a few Washington readers could understand that, if they don’t understand anything else about the woefully misnamed Cultural Revolution.”

  Jakob’s face looked tired but he smiled with pleasure as he motioned Sherman into a chair beside the desk. “Welcome home, Joseph. I heard a rumor that you were heading back here to write a special China feature for your old paper — I’m glad to find that some rumors at least still turn out to be true.”

  “And I’m a bit concerned to find that a rumor buzzing around the foreign correspondents’ club also turns out to be true,” said Sherman with a frown of exaggerated severity. “Everybody says you’re working too hard — and we can’t afford to lose the services of one of the few people around here with the vaguest idea of what’s going on in Red China right now.”

  ‘Vaguest idea’ is absolutely right,” grinned Jakob, leaning back in his chair and waving a hand wearily at the heaps of paper. “The more information that spills off the mainland, the more confusing the whole thing becomes.”

  “Well, take it easy, Jake, that’s the message from your friends at the club,” said Sherman, smiling broadly. “We need you to keep us straight on the facts — right now I’d like to know the precise significance of one of the many bizarre label s which are being plastered all over Mao’s deadly foes. . .“ Sherman bent his head over the Chinese newspaper in his hand, peering closely at the printed characters. “Yes, this is it, ‘Cow Demon and Snake Spirit.’ What in heaven’s name does that quaint old Chinese expression imply?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Wu is better qualified for that job.” Jakob smiled at his senior translator, who had entered carrying a bundle of midday mail, which he placed carefully beside Jakob’s typewriter. “Mr. Wu, you remember Joseph Sherman, don’t you? He’d like to know the derivation of the term ‘cow demon and snake spirit.’

  The elderly translator inclined his head and shook hands diffidently with the American. “In classical Chinese literature, Mr. Sherman, cow’s demon and snake spirit are evil entities from the world of darkness which disguise themselves as humans to create trouble on earth. But if real human beings see through their disguise, they’re forced to assume their original appearance.” Wu paused and smiled bleakly. “Chairman Mao Tse-tung employed this term for the first time after the Hundred Flowers campaign. He said intellectuals who pretended to support the Communist Party were like evil spirits taking human form. When they criticized the Party’s policies they gave themselves away and reverted to their true shape. Now the expression ‘cow demon and snake spirit’ is used as shorthand to describe those denounced as politically dishonest.”

  “I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Wu,” said Sherman, pulling out a notebook. “I’ve already managed to get the hang of the ‘ghosts and monsters,’ ‘the black gang,’ and the ‘bourgeois vampires,’ but I’m very pleased to add ‘cow demon and snake spirit’ to my lexicon of Cultural Revolution terminology.”

/>   He jotted a few lines quickly in his notebook as the Chinese left the room, then looked up thoughtfully at Jakob again. The former missionary had taken to wearing thin-rimmed reading spectacles in his mid-fifties and his once-blond hair, still thick and curly, had turned pepper-and-salt right through. But although he was obviously tired from overwork, Jakob’s gaze was still keen, his face was sunburned, and his appearance was that of a man who remained active and energetic in middle age.

  “Maybe you’re still working too hard on China, Jake, but I guess you haven’t changed that much in the last nine years or so,” said Sherman warmly. “A distinguished extra touch of snow in the hair perhaps — and a light-footed crow may have left another enhancing footprint or two on your cheeks since we last met. But otherwise . .