Anthony Grey

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

  But as the pain produced by the jet-plane posture intensified in his back, chest, and legs, Chiao found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on what was being said. His temples were still throbbing from the constriction of the iron torture helmet, which had been removed minutes before he was taken from the army punishment cell, and he was able to catch only snatches of the accusations hurled at him. The fierce hostility of the vast crowd and the indignity of his helpless position were combining to make him tremble and sweat despite the cool December air; perspiration was pouring down his face and neck to gather in a pool on the oilcloth covering the wooden stage and he was soon able to see the agonized reflection of his own face in it. The sight of his nephew, Kao, leading his accusers had added to his sense of shock and disorientation, but although the young cadre’s face contorted into a vindictive expression whenever Chiao looked in his direction, he still found it hard to decide whether Kao’s hostility was genuine or an expedient pose adopted by necessity to protect himself. Occasional waves of dizziness were threatening to undermine Chiao’s sense of balance, and fearing he might lose consciousness soon, he began trying desperately to focus and discipline his senses as he had done earlier in the day in enduring the agony of the iron helmet.

  A dragon is born a dragon, a phoenix is born a phoenix, and a rat is born with the ability to gnaw a hole in the floor,” yelled the Red Guard who had tormented him with the iron headgear, quoting a slogan commonly employed to condemn the offspring of capitalist families. “So it’s not surprising, is it, that the bourgeois revisionist slave to foreigners Lu Chiao plotted and intrigued during the Long March to obtain the freedom of a British imperialist spy who had been uncovered by the masses and sentenced to death!”

  Another outraged roar from the crowd engulfed the stage, followed by slow, echoing chants of “Down with the craven slave to foreigners! Down with slave to foreigners Lu!” Forests of red books were flourished in the air and Red Guards in the front rows rushed forward and spat at the painfully bent figure of the army marshal, soaking his face and uniform with spittle.

  “That imperialist spy who deserved to die now publishes a slanderous ‘research newssheet’ in Hong Kong vilifying China and Mao Tse-tung’s thought every day,” screamed the Red Guard. “Doesn’t that make the deeds of this slave to foreigners smell worse than dog shit?”

  The stadium erupted with new howls of “Smash the dog’s head of the slave to foreigners! Smash the dog’s head of the slave!” and the Red Guard at the microphone made an emphatic signal to a denim-clad worker who had been crouching beside the stage. On a shoulder pole the man carried two wooden night-soil buckets that were commonly used to remove human excrement from homes in the capital’s narrow hu’ tungs, and after trotting quickly up the steps, he placed the buckets beside the microphone, then stood aside.

  “The slave to foreigners should confess his towering crimes now before it’s too late,” yelled the Red Guard, motioning to Chiao’s tormentors to allow him to straighten up. “Otherwise he must suffer the consequences!”

  Chiao lifted himself slowly upright, his face a mask of pain. He began to rub his aching back with his Lands as repeated roars of “Confess! Confess!” rolled down from the stands all around him. The Red Guard glowered at him a few feet away but Chiao stared straight ahead, his mouth set in a firm line.

  “Confess now — or face the consequences!” shouted the Red Guard menacingly into the microphone.

  As the crowd repeated the chant, the Red Guard snatched up a ladle and dipped it into one of the night—soil buckets. Chiao looked at him steadily, aware of his intention, but still made no move to speak. From the circle of stands the deafening chant of “Confess!” continued and with a sudden movement the Red Guard stepped toward Chiao and emptied the contents of the ladle onto his head.

  “The filthy slave to foreigners stinks now like his crimes!” screamed the Red Guard, hurrying back to the microphone, and at once the chanting of the crowd became more angry, changing again to “Down with the filthy slave to foreigners! Down with the filthy slave!”

  Chiao could feel the sticky slop trickling down his face into his collar as he stood gazing around at the sea of wildly yelling faces. Twisting his head, he looked in Kao’s direction and found the young cadre glaring at him from the side of the stage; his eyes seemed to blaze with the force of a hatred which Chiao found utterly incomprehensible and he turned back toward the baying crowd, fighting a deepening sense of despair. Closing his eyes, he listened briefly to the din of condemnation washing toward him; then he opened them again and stepped unsteadily toward the Red Guard at the microphone.

  “I will confess now,” he said, struggling to control himself. “Let me have the microphone.”

  “The slave to foreigners has decided to confess!”

  The Red Guard shouted his announcement triumphantly over the relay system, and after receiving a discreet nod of approval from Kao, he stood back and motioned the jet-plane guards aside to allow Chiao to move to the microphone. Taken by surprise, the crowd quieted and an unfamiliar hush settled over the Workers’ Stadium.

  “I wish to confess ... that on the Long March I commanded the party of heroes ... who stormed the Luting bridge,” said Chiao, stumbling over his words. “Afterward, the Central Red Army’s commander in chief Chu Teh. . . made a memorable speech. . . . He recalled that often in China’s past history, heroes who rose from among the people changed when they became emperors and generals. They forgot their beginnings and came to despise and enslave the mass of the people

  Chiao’s voice was gradually growing stronger, but he was still swaying unsteadily on his legs and he put out one hand to hold on to the microphone stand. Uncertain of his meaning, the crowd listened in a rapt silence, sensing that drama lay ahead.

  “At Luting, Marshal Chu said the Red Army had succeeded in creating new heroes, heroes willing to die for the revolution . . . heroes with no selfish interests . . . and he was, right, it had! But standing here today I realize that’s . . . no longer true!”

  Chiao paused, drawing a long breath. “All those who forced you to come here today to take part in this shameful spectacle — the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee and the leader behind them — are behaving like those emperors and generals of our feudal past! They’re acting for selfish reasons and they’ve come to despise the masses. They’ve forgotten the ideals, the unity, and the sacrifices of the past in their lust for power hat is all I have to confess!”

  The guards, who had begun moving across the stage as the meaning of Chiao’s words began to dawn on them, flung themselves on the aging marshal at a shouted order from Kao. Under a rain of blows they wrestled him roughly into the jet-plane posture once more. The startled crowd watched in silence, and the Red Guard who had been addressing the rally snatched up the ladle and dashed more liquid night soil from the buckets repeatedly in Chiao’s face, drenching his clothes.

  From his place at the side of the stage, Kao glared furiously at the helpless, doubled-up figure of his uncle, uncertain how to combat the effect of his act of defiance. Then he signaled quickly to the Red Guard at the microphone and the youth launched into a fresh tirade of abuse, picking up from the place in his notes where he had left off a few minutes before. Finding its voice, the crowd began chanting wildly in response to the promptings of its cheerleaders, and the bowl of the stadium was soon filled once more with the deafening roar of prearranged slogans.

  13

  Using a small piece of broken glass, Mei-ling scraped steadily at the last of a long row of latrines in the student dormitories of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Her arm ached and her body was stiff from crouching beside the stained latrines for more than two hours. A few yards away three female Red Guard students who made up her kuan niu kui tui — “monster control team” — stood guard, calling out sharply for her to continue whenever she paused for a rest. The air was fetid and the floor around her was strewn with used lavatory paper which students now t
hrew down deliberately, knowing that occupants of the cowsheds would be forced to clean up after them. Brushes which were usually on hand had been removed and every morning for the past month the monster control team had issued Mei-ling fragments of a broken bottle so as to make the job of cleaning the inner surfaces of the latrines more arduous.

  Several times she had cut herself: her left hand was already swathed in a bandage made from a torn-up sheet and her right hand bore the visible scars of older mishaps. She had been unable -to get proper dressings for the injuries because she had not been allowed to return to her home at all since being dragged back to the conservatory cowshed by a mob of about a hundred Red Guards a few days after Kao returned to Peking. They had appeared unannounced at Mei-ling’s house after dark and without offering any explanation had taken her forcibly by truck to the conservatory, chanting repeatedly that they had “scored another great victory for Mao Tse-tung’s thought.”

  From the beginning, the regime they imposed on her had been much harsher than before; instead of sleeping on a bamboo mat in a communal dormitory with other victimized teachers and professors, she had been confined alone in a tiny instrument storeroom scarcely large enough to lie down in. The walls had been smothered with slogans condemning her as “Unrepentant Bourgeois Reactionary Vampire Lu” and at night she slept on a makeshift cot which had been wedged against one wall. The monster control team, led by a female Red Guard from Peking, had installed a hinged panel in the door through which they kept Mei-ling under observation day and night, and the glass of the single window high up in one wall had been covered with black paint so that little or no light could enter. Each morning her control team had ordered her to make fresh self- criticisms of both her published writing and her family background, and she had crouched forlornly on her bed to do the work, using a plain wooden chair as a desk and writing by the feeble light of a single naked electric bulb suspended from the ceiling. On her first day back in the cowshed her tormentors had written a placard bearing the announcement “Lu Mei-ling, Agent of the Bourgeois Opposition,” which she had been compelled to wear around her neck constantly ever since. -

  A different class of Red Guards each day had taken its turn to inspect her self-criticisms and she had lost count of the times she had been drenched with paint and subjected to “struggle” because they yellingly judged the writing “insincere.” Instead of being allowed to join other teachers in a communal dining hall at midday, she was forced to eat a sparse meal huddled alone in her storeroom cell; each afternoon she had been made to do physically tiring work, either cleaning latrines or shifting heaps of heavy stones pointlessly from one part of the conservatory yard to another. Every day of torment and ignominy had seemed to merge into the next in a dreary, exhausting blur, and soon Mei-ling had begun to lose track of time. Cut off from all normal contact with others, she had been struggling daily against a mounting sense of despair and when the jagged glass fragment she was holding suddenly opened up a deep gash in the palm of her hand, she sat and watched indifferently as the blood flowed fast into the filthy water. Only when the Peking Red Guard appeared beside her, shouting for her to stand up, did she drop the shard of glass and rise slowly to her feet_

  “You’re abusing the sign prepared by the revolutionary Red Guards!” yelled the girl, pointing to the blood that was dripping from Mei-ling’s hand onto the placard around her neck. “Wash your injury and bind it with the bandage from your other hand — then return immediately to the area designated by the masses!”

  Mei-ling ran her hand under a tap and removed the soiled bandage from her other hand with difficulty. When she had fixed the bandage loosely in place around the new wound, she walked wearily back to the storeroom between her escorts with tier shoulders bowed. The Peking girl followed her inside, pulling two sheets of paper from her pocket, and after glaring angrily at Mei-ling she flung them contemptuously on the low cot.

  “Your confession of today is inadequate! You state that after undergoing reform through labor in 1957 you decided the best course of action was not to participate any further in political life — and that’s why you came to Shanghai to teach music. We revolutionaries reject that! It’s evidence that you still harbored reactionary ideas. Shanghai is your old home, where your family sucked the blood out of the Chinese laboring classes. You returned to wallow in bourgeois musical habits acquired when you studied in Europe as the pampered daughter of a filthy capitalist family. You must write a new criticism and confess all these things. We shall return to look at it in an hour!”

  Mei-ling looked dully back at the girl. Slender and strong beneath her khaki uniform, she wore a broad leather belt around her slim waist and her pale, northern face was striking in the full bloom of youth. No more than eighteen or nineteen, she was as beautiful as Mei-ling had been as a young woman, but the burning expression of hostility in her dark eyes disfigured her, features. Behind her shoulder, the two Shanghai students who were also part of her control team were staring at her with equally ferocious expressions and Mei-Iing felt her despair deepen. The two local Red Guards — formerly gentle, intelligent girls — had been among her piano students, and during her previous spell in the cowshed she had guessed from their demeanor that they had been reluctant participants in actions against her. But now in their faces she saw only a deep, irrational hatred, and suddenly a renewed sense of bafflement at the mindless persecutions of the Cultural Revolution swept over her.

  The movement had engendered hatred, suspicion, and terror on an unprecedented scale in and around the Conservatory of Music; even outside the cowshed, long-standing friends and colleagues had turned against one another out of fear they scarcely understood, and all the nonpolitical practices of everyday life had long since been drowned under the flood tide of distorted rhetoric from newspapers, the radio, and wall posters. The whole population of Shanghai seemed to have become strained and tense during that long autumn, and since her second arrest the constant barrage of insults and illogical demands made by Mei-ling’s jailers had taken a severe toll of her dwindling physical and mental resources. Often she had felt close to panic and because the added pain of her newly wounded hand was now making her feel dizzy, she sank unsteadily into a sitting position on her cot. For several seconds the three Red Guards continued to gaze contemptuously at her; then, with another shouted order to write a new confession, they swept out, slamming the door behind them.

  Alone and exhausted in the storeroom prison, Mei-ling felt her sense of hopelessness grow. Among the daubed slogans a big colored portrait of Mao Tse-tung gazed silently down from one wall, and as she looked at it, she was seized by a terrible feeling that nothing in her life had ever made any sense. The recent image of the young Peking Red Guard’s lovely face so sadly contorted by her misguided fanaticism made her think involuntarily of her own idealistic youth and she sat shaking her head slowly from side to side in silent bewilderment. Could the cold, totem like features staring grimly at her from the wall of that wretched cell really belong to the exhilarating, heroic figure who had become the focus of so much awe and affection on the Long March? Could this be the gangling, mop-haired bohemian who had smiled engagingly at her while jogging over mountains and rushing rivers at the head of a peasant army, composing poetry about the greatness of China’s landscape? Could that young inspirational leader have become the ailing, unstable demagogue who had deliberately set neighbors at one another’s throats, turned children against their parents, and unleashed the tidal waves of violence that were engulfing the country? Could she ever have shared the same ambitions for China’s future with such a man? Or were all those early years, in fact, just a barely remembered dream? Had she truly walked and ridden twenty thousand Ii across China at the heels of that hero — only to end up in a filthy, improvised punishment cell constructed for her and countless others like her on his specific orders?

  Mei-ling closed her eyes in an effort to shut out the living nightmare that the present had become, but other harrowing images from t
he past flashed unbidden into her tired, tormented mind. She saw the tall, waving vegetation of the Great Grasslands with endless columns of the Red Army snaking away into its mists and knew again the daily fear and horror of plunging accidentally into the morass; she felt herself falling, felt the terror of sinking unstoppably downward, saw herself fighting a frantic battle for her life in the black, oozing mud. She clutched a tiny, pale-skinned baby to her breast and as she struggled the baby grew quickly in her arms and became the beautiful flaxen-haired Englishwoman who had appeared so suddenly amid the devastation of her Shanghai apartment only weeks ago. The swamp and the wrecked apartment merged, and Kao too was struggling frantically in the mire beside them — he was shouting unintelligibly and his face was twisted but Mei-ling felt an unbearable anguish seize her because she was unable to tell whether he was trying to rescue them or not. Then thrashing through the black slime came Jakob himself, youthful, bearded, and dressed in a Chinese long-gown. As had happened in reality, she felt his arms tighten around her and slowly but surely he bore her up out of the swamp. In a sudden transformation of mood she felt again the deep, peaceful silence of the yurt they had shared in the Great Snow Mountains. The fire was crackling gently in the hearth of stones and the infant, tiny and defenseless as before, slept safely beside it. While the blizzard banked snow softly around the yurt walls outside, she experienced again the profound sense of purity and rightness which had come upon her as she gazed into Jakob’s famished face. The feeling strengthened inside her until she was sure that if she had opened her eyes ‘she would have found herself once more seated amid the furs and animal skins in that mountain yurt. She felt her arms go around his shivering body and press his face against her naked breasts, felt his searching mouth draw life from her, and she knew again the exultation of peace and love that had filled her, body and soul, during those few hours when they had lain entwined with one another on the high mountain.