Chi was tough. If he wanted to use violence against me I was no match for him, but I had taken him on before and I put on a bold front. There was no alternative. Seeing me, he threw the still burning match in my direction. It fell near my feet and spluttered out. Without looking at him, pretending I had noticed nothing, I walked on slowly, as if taking my time.
Up the road, the only occupant of the district town office was a local county cadre. Wang Sha, he told me, was not in the town.
“He came here for a while and then hurried off. I think he went back to Ma Li’s village.”
The young cadre tried to dissuade me from traveling on further that evening. “By the time you get there, Wang Sha may have left already. He said something about visiting a few places.”
“If I leave now, maybe I could catch him there.”
“Hold on. I’ll be back in a minute.” He went to arrange for a peasant militiaman to accompany me at least part of the way beyond the border of the village. After that I would be on my own. We couldn’t have every cadre in the countryside going around with a bodyguard.
I hurried to reach Ma Li’s village before nightfall, but the sudden gulps of cold air into my lungs brought on a fit of painful coughing. The dun-colored late fall had passed into grey winter. The mornings and evenings were cold. Noontime temperatures went up but never caused a thaw. Dressed warmly for the morning cold, I sometimes grew overheated at midday without noticing it. In this way I had caught a cold in the last few days, but restless energy drove me on. The coughing grew worse. I had to sit down until it was over. But when I got up to walk again, I felt as if I had been drained of energy. After dragging on a bit, I was convulsed with coughing again and spat out bloody phlegm.
The moon, shining dimly through the clouds, gave just enough light to see my way by. I could see nothing clearly, but I sensed what was there. The scene of the murder went round and round in my head, transforming everything around me into something sinister and menacing. I heard the sound of weeping. A lonely ghost complaining? Or a landlord’s bully trying to panic me before he made his attack? In that eerie light my fevered imagination told me that anything was possible.
The old wives say that a ghost always appears when you least expect it. When I was past the place where the sound of weeping came from, a face deathly white and streaked with blood suddenly appeared right before my eyes. The scream I suppressed hit my heart like a hammer. My knees went weak. I collapsed on the ground and for a few moments, although I was conscious, I didn’t know what was going on around me.
Incongruously, out of this haze I heard a childish voice whimper, “I didn’t do it.” He was still crying in breathless gasps. “They painted my face!”
“Who are they?” I asked through my coughs.
“The other kids.”
“Oh …” Another fit of coughing ended my unfinished sentence. Every cough now hurt me so much that I stuffed a handful of damp weeds into my mouth and chewed it to soothe my dry throat.
I gave the child a piece of paper from my notebook. He spat on it and used it to wipe his face so that at least he would look less like a ghost when he presented himself at home. It seemed that we were not far from the village. A few moments later I was in Ma Li’s little cottage.
“Wang Sha is making the rounds of all the work team units. He will soon be back in Longxiang,” Ma Li told me. “But you’ve caught cold. Let me boil some hot water.” The kettle was soon rattling as steam billowed out of its spout and from under its lid.
The murder had deeply shocked Ma Li. She looked like a different person. She was listless now. She gazed at the kettle for quite a while and then with an effort roused herself to take it off the fire.
“Have you seen Chu Hua?”
“Yes.” Her hand trembled. The water spilled on the table. With a slightly hysterical ring to her voice she cried,“She should have refused to change places with me. If she had been here perhaps nothing would have happened. She could have guarded him from this. I can’t help feeling that I’m to blame.”
“Ma Li, don’t work yourself up.” I held her in my arms. I felt her body stiffen. She was driving herself into a fit of hysteria. “Please relax. Please stop shaking.”
“I can’t!” she cried through her chattering teeth. “I can’t forgive myself. Cheng and the soprano suggested that since the peasants didn’t know of it we should keep their love affair quiet, treat it as a family matter and not make a fuss about it. I should have agreed with them.”
A lump was rising in my throat, but I had no tears to shed. I felt my chest constrict. There was a hate there, hard and relentless, for those who had taken that young lover’s life.
I was shaken by another fit of coughing. Ma Li calmed herself enough to see that I needed as much care as she did. Her face grew red with the effort she made to get herself under control. She choked down her sobs.
“I must get back to Longxiang as soon as possible. If I’m not there, Wang Sha will be worried.”
But Ma Li would not hear of my traveling further that night. She would get one of our peasant friends to escort me back to Longxiang the next day.
“Ma Li, to tell the truth, Wang Sha asked me not to leave the village while he and Cheng were gone. I ran away.”
My confession didn’t seem to surprise her, where before it would have exasperated her. “He’ll understand,” she merely said. “Now drink this hot water and try to go to sleep.”
I got under the blanket first as Ma Li folded some clothes to make an extra pillow.
“Do you remember the last time we shared a bed?” Ma Li asked me in the dark. “Back in our school days.”
“Yes, Matron forbade us to. ‘No visiting after ten o’clock at night.’ That was the rule. When Matron opened my room door she knew you were there. She asked, ‘Ma Li, what are you doing there hiding under the bed?’ ” I mimicked Matron’s voice.
“That night I came to tell you that I had decided to drop out of school and become an actress.”
“Yes, I remember that.” The image of a younger Ma Li rose before my closed eyes. I remembered the audience applauding her. Dressed as Juliet in a long white medieval gown with a circlet of gold web on her hair, she curtseyed to them, and her face, pale and ethereal under the glare of the spotlight, shone with happiness.
“We hoped we’d make a team. You would write a play for me. But why are we reminiscing like two old women?” She was piqued by her own question.
There was a long moment of silence and then Ma Li fell asleep. I listened to her soft and even breathing. She murmured something in her sleep. I pulled myself gently away from her arms. Half of her quilt hung over the side of the bed. One of her legs was uncovered. Her toe wiggled as it often did in her sleep, as I remembered from our school days.
I was feverish, and somewhere in my body I felt a pain. But I could not place it precisely. Gradually the pain gave way to a dull, aching sense of loss.
20
Riding a Tiger
Next day as I said good-bye, I asked Ma Li when she would come to Longxiang.
“I don’t know.” Judging from her voice and expression, I knew that she didn’t want to make the move. She took pride in her stubbornness. That meant I too would have to stick it out on my own, and I wasn’t too happy at the prospect.
A few days later, Liao’s murderer was discovered and arrested. He turned out to be not a landlord or a rich peasant but a local troublemaker. He said he had killed Liao because he didn’t like what we were doing to “overturn the natural order of things.” It seemed that no mastermind was behind him, but we did find out that on that fatal night he had joined a drinking bout in a landlord’s house. What they had talked about was anybody’s guess. At the very least one could suppose that their grumbling had predisposed him to murder. And anyway, drunkards were drunkards. There had been wild talk, but was that plotting? None of them could remember exactly what they had talked about.
After the man had been tried in the county court an
d found guilty, the local authorities decided that he should be taken around to each township in turn to appear at mass meetings where the case was explained and the local people exhorted to maintain vigilance against their enemies. At each meeting, local landlord tyrants, guarded by militiamen, were put on the platform with him. The warning was explicit: Anyone who sabotaged the land reform was as bad as the landlords and would be severely dealt with.
Longxiang, smaller and poorer than most other townships, had only one landlord whom we could possibly put on the stage. This was Chi, and he was keeping a very low profile. We could gather no more information or evidence about him than we already had, and we felt frustrated. Finally, Little Gao, our new militia leader, devised a brilliant plan to smoke him out. He sent members of his militia to spy on him, and they played a lovely game of cops and robbers with him. Chi, harassed and suspicious and with nothing to do, wanted desperately to know what they were up to. On one occasion he followed them while they were following him.
One evening, Little Gao, agog with excitement, rapped at my door and after a cautious glance around to make certain that Da Niang wasn’t within earshot, blurted out, “Our reconnaissance party has just told us that Chi is preparing an attack! He and his lackeys are in our headquarters and at this very moment are setting fire to it. Smoke is coming out of a window. Our people are surrounding the place on every side and we’re going to catch them red-handed! Do you want to come with us?”
Almost not believing our good fortune, I hurried out with him to join a fighting detachment of militia gathered behind a cottage wall. Everybody carried some sort of weapon: sticks, mattocks, cudgels, carrying poles with knives tied to one end. Our group carried bags heavy with sand which trickled out through the sides—our fire extinguishers. Someone thrust an ax into my hand.
Little Gao inspected us with a critical eye. To raise our morale, he displayed great confidence and determination. When his eye lit on me, he looked at the ax in my hand and lifted his eyebrows inquiringly: “You are thin, all skin and bone. How can you wield an ax?” A good commander, he was concerned about his troops. He turned to give an order to his lieutenant: “Take that ax away and give her a stick instead.”
He led us forward cautiously, crouched low as he crossed the intervening courtyard. He stopped at the door of the office. Smoke was oozing out of the crack at the bottom of the door.
Little Gao motioned forward the ones who carried the sand bags; we would defend them and overwhelm the enemy while they put out the fire. Little Gao suddenly leaped forward, breaking open the door with his shoulder. We rushed in brandishing our weapons. But the room was empty except for a little boy about six years old who was sitting on the floor. His parents had probably been busy and left him at home, and he had somehow wandered into the cottage room that housed the militia headquarters. He hadn’t even been able to dress himself properly. His trousers hung below his belly. His jacket looked untidy because he had mismatched the buttons and the button holes. He had found a box of matches and was thoroughly enjoying himself burning bits of paper. When he saw us he gave us a toothless smile. Never having seen such an army before, he was quite unafraid.
While I did not relish Chi getting off scot-free, I was apprehensive that we might overplay our hunch about him with some hasty action. We simply couldn’t believe that he wasn’t guilty of some hidden crime or that there was no evidence to be found.
It was a busy time. Soon we would be entering the last stage of the land reform—marking out the land for each person who was entitled to get a share. Senior cadres like Wang Sha and Malvolio Cheng were shuttling back and forth between the villages helping them complete their work, and I had a grim foreboding that something might happen just when they were not around. I sensed that the different groups—the landlords and their hangers-on, the conservatives, and the impatient militants—were each groping their separate ways to forestall each other.
Da Niang tiptoed into my room during my noonday rest.
“I’ve heard that you people have caught Landlord Chi,” she said. Her face revealed her fear.
I sat up on the kang as if I had been scalded. So they had struck even without telling me!
“Yes, we’ve finally caught him.” I was improvising; I couldn’t let on about my ignorance.
“Why?”
“We’re looking into his case.”
“What case?” she stuttered. She was not her usual quick-tongued self.
“I can’t tell you now.” I deliberately turned away from her.
“I understand.” There was a tremor in her voice.
I dressed and walked out unhurriedly, but dashed off to our office as soon as I was out of Da Niang’s sight.
I found Xiu-ying there, and I asked her in a low voice but point-blank, “Where is Chi?”
“We put him in the back room.”
“Xiu-ying, I know you young cadres and activists can take care of your own village affairs and I’m glad that you can. Honestly I am. One of the reasons we came here is to pass on all we know to you, inside and outside the study classes. All we know.” I paused for a few seconds to let my words sink in. “However, I might still be of use to you.”
As I said this, several of the other young people came in. They beamed at me as if waiting for my compliments.
“Don’t get us wrong! We didn’t plot this behind your back,” Xiu-ying cried, genuinely upset. She looked at the others for confirmation. “It all happened so quickly and suddenly that we didn’t have time to consult you. Chi was prowling around the office. We ran into him and demanded an explanation from him. You know all the registrations, files, and documents are kept here. We don’t know yet whether anything has been stolen or not. We were just going to examine that carton there when you came in.”
A large cardboard box covered with a sheet of newspaper was set aside from a pile of similar cartons stacked against the wall. Xiu-ying gave a sign to a young peasant militiaman. He instantly put on a grave expression and approached the carton, stood awhile, arms akimbo, head thrust forward. A bit of overacting. He bent down and with a dramatic swoop of his hand lifted off the covering paper.
“Well?” I queried, skeptical but very willing to be convinced.
He replaced the paper cover on the carton, made a foolish, deprecating sound with his pursed lips, and stood back.
“While you go on examining things here, I’m going to ask Chi a few questions,” I said.
“Okay.”
A young peasant activist led me to the back room. He turned a key in the lock, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. Chi lay huddled in a corner.
“Stand up!” the young peasant ordered in a gruff voice.
Chi looked up and hesitated for an instant. He stood up and nervously looked around. The young peasant twirled the chain with its ring of keys around and around on his finger. The whirling ring of metal reminded me of that ancient weapon used by Chinese warriors: two balls of iron joined by a chain which were twirled and then hurled with terrifying force against an enemy. I had read about it in some classical novels.
“Why were you sneaking around here?” I tried to sound impersonal and official.
“I wasn’t sneaking around,” he replied without lifting his eyes. The whirling of the keys speeded up threateningly.
“Are you complaining that we should not have detained you or that the activists are telling lies?” I pretended to be surprised, but I could hardly believe that he had been planning to raid our office in broad daylight.
“I was just passing this house. I wasn’t near it. The main road goes by it, you know. I’ve walked along the road so many times that I don’t notice this place anymore. That happens, you know. You must have had the same experience. Why did I arouse suspicion? Who knows? Everything is suspicious these days. Perhaps it was just my unlucky day. I should have looked at the calendar and stayed home. Anyway, I was stopped in the middle of the road and these young … men … came up to me and seized me by the collar. There w
as an argument which ended up by my being locked in here.”
“That’s your story,” I said.
“It’s true.”
“It’s a lie!” The strong young peasant leaped forward, grabbed Chi’s wrist, and twisted his arm behind his back. Chi screamed in rage and fright and pain. The young man disdainfully loosened his grip and tossed Chi back into the corner as if he were throwing away garbage.
“Hold on!” I thrust my arm forward to restrain him. But then I looked at Chi. His face was contorted with rage and hatred. If I let him out would he tamely accept these humiliations without retaliating? Now he must really hate me. He might not expect that he could prevent the land reform from going through, but he might still be tempted to enjoy a little vengeance at my expense. This was a critical moment. To waver might cost us dearly. Young Liao had been murdered because he was good-natured and irresolute. He had gotten things moving and then couldn’t make up his mind what to do to keep the initiative in his hands. When he appeared to be vulnerable, his enemies had drunk courage into themselves and killed him. I didn’t want to repeat Liao’s mistake.
“We’ll come back later,” I said, changing my mind. “You’d better think again and make a clean breast of your crimes.”
Night fell early in the wintertime. When I returned, the courtyard was in darkness. I had cautioned Xiu-ying and the other young peasants to be on guard, but not even a single militiaman was in sight. Had they moved Chi to some other place? I looked at the window of the office. It was dark. Not a sound was to be heard. Increasingly apprehensive, I began to imagine all sorts of explanations when suddenly all hell broke loose. A sharp sound like a clang of metal. A cat screeched and flew off the roof. Yells of anger and of triumph. Imprecations. Pounding fists. Scampering feet.
“We’ve got him!” a voice cried exultantly. Four young militiamen running up the road from various directions converged on the door of the office where a lantern, hastily lit, sent flickering shadows darting over the walls. They carried me inside with their rush. Several young activists were in the room. Two of them were still scuffling with someone. It was Tu! One had his neck locked in a savage grip, while the other was trying to get his arms tied behind his back. Tu’s jacket was torn off and he was stripped to the waist.
The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China Page 25