Ocean of Words

by Ha Jin

  Some men giggled. Secretary Si Ma stood up again. “Keep quiet and listen to the leader!” The giggling men lowered their heads and stopped.

  Si Ma sat down. Do it to his mother! he cursed to himself. This old bugger talks like a counterrevolutionary.

  “When I joined my company again,” Old Liu went on, “they asked me where my gun was. I pointed to my bruised face and said, ‘Look at my face.’

  “But they said, ‘We don’t want to look at your face. We want to see your gun. Where is it?’

  “ ‘Gone,’ I said, ‘my gun’s lost.’ Our company commander ordered me to go back and recover it. How could I do that by myself? The enemy was in the town now. So I went away. Damn it, I thought, if you don’t want your granddad in your unit, fine, I won’t stay, so I took off. I had no idea how to return home and just wandered to the east, where I was told there was a big city. But on the way I ran into a medical team of the Red Army. They asked me, ‘Little Comrade, why are you traveling alone?’ I told them I’d had trouble with my leaders and the company wouldn’t keep me anymore. ‘Can you take me with you?’ I asked.

  “ ‘All right, you can come on our nursing staff,’ they told me, so I joined the Red Army again. This time I carried not a gun but a large chamber pot.”

  The entire audience burst into laughter, but the old man didn’t even smile. He was gazing at the young faces calmly.

  Secretary Si Ma got up again and waved to his men. He was sweating all over, and one of his molars was aching. “Comrades, be serious! We are in a lecture about the Party’s history now.” He turned to the old man, an awkward smile across his face, but he didn’t know what to say. He’d heard that even the divisional leaders couldn’t do anything about Old Liu when he got angry and swore at them, because none of them had joined the Red Army earlier than he had.

  “But I didn’t stay on the medical team for long,” Liu resumed. “What happened was that the next summer, we wiped out two regiments of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops and captured hundreds of prisoners. Among them there was an officer who was totally reactionary. Whenever we treated his wounds, he’d curse us. He called us ‘Communist Bandits’ and ‘Red Beasts.’ Everybody was outraged.

  “One night after duty, I went to the kitchen to fetch water. A group of the leaders were eating and drinking in there. They all got drunk. Seeing me come in, Mess Officer Wan Fumin stopped me and said, ‘Swig wine, Little Liu?’

  “I took a gulp from his bowl. ‘Eat meat,’ he said, pointing to the plates on the table.

  “ ‘What meat is this?’ I asked. We hadn’t had any meat for months, and at the word meat my mouth began watering. They all laughed. ‘Man meat,’ Feng Shun said. He was the leader of the Guards Platoon. I was shocked and couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “ ‘You know that filthy-mouthed officer? This is his heart and liver, fried,’ Wan told me, and picked up a chunk of the meat and put it in his mouth. He was chewing. I began to tremble and wanted to escape. But Wan handed me his chopsticks and ordered, ‘Little Liu, try a piece. See if it tastes like mutton. You must learn to eat our enemy!’

  “They all shouted to egg me on. I dropped the chopsticks and rushed out. I ran along the hilly road till the kitchen’s candlelight disappeared behind me. The night was wet and cold. I sat in a millet field and dared not return before they went to bed. I wasn’t sure if I should report them to the higher-ups. Who knew what was really going on? Perhaps the other leaders and medical officers had all accepted it as a custom to eat the enemies. Perhaps they had also shared the same sort of human dishes.

  “The next morning, Wan and Feng grabbed me in our bedroom and said I mustn’t be softhearted. Feng Shun said, ‘If you feel pity for that mangy dog, you’ve confused an enemy with a friend. The love for our friends must be expressed in the hatred for our enemies. You mustn’t take an enemy as a man!’ I didn’t understand what he meant exactly. I was scared, and my heart was shaking. What would happen if they took me as their enemy someday? Wouldn’t they gobble down my insides too? So I made off again.”

  The room was so quiet that only Old Liu’s breathing could be heard. Si Ma stood up and walked to Liu.

  “I was not a deserter!” the old man yelled, pounding the desk with his small fists. Tears trickled down his cheeks. “I hate Chiang Kai-shek and all the reactionaries, but I dare not eat them! All right, I can kill them, but I can’t eat their flesh. It’s true I don’t have the guts, but I’m not a deserter!”

  “Calm down, please,” Si Ma said and patted Liu’s shoulder. He gestured for help. Three men in the front jumped up and went over. “Old leader, you’re too tired,” the secretary murmured. “You need a rest.”

  Two men helped Old Liu to his feet and supported him out of the room.

  “Comrades,” Si Ma addressed his men, “if you have taken some notes, you must tear the pages out and turn them in. Put them here.” He brought his hand down on the desk. “Whether Old Liu’s words are true or not is not our business to judge. What I want you to do is keep your mouths shut about this lecture. Liu is a Red Army man; something he says may not hurt him, but if you blab it out, you will be turned into a Current Counterrevolutionary. Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” they said in unison.

  The room was at once filled with the noise of moving chairs. The soldiers were going to the front and placing their notes on the desk.

  Commander Pei didn’t move; he just sat there smoking a cigarette. His eyes were narrowed to short curves, squinting at the secretary time and again.

  Si Ma was wondering why Pei wouldn’t turn in his notes. Then it came to him that Pei had something against him now. He would have to write a report to the Divisional Political Department without delay, in case Pei informed the superiors of this lecture before he did.

  THE RUSSIAN PRISONER

  Squad Leader Shi Hsiang returned from the Company Headquarters with eleven pistols and told us to pack up. Only summer clothes were needed, and everybody had to take his mosquito net. “This time we got an easy job,” he assured us. Because we had the pistols, we left our rifles and submachine guns at our billet.

  Twenty minutes later, we stood at attention facing Company Commander Yan Li in the middle of the drill ground. He called, “At ease!” and then described the “easy job.” A fly landed on my cheek, crawling zigzag down to my chin. I dared not shake it off. Some piglets suddenly started screaming from the pigpens about fifty meters behind us. Squad Leader Shi told Wang Min to go tell Swineherd Liu to stop catching and gelding those piglets for a short while.

  “This time,” Commander Yan continued, “you Ninth Squad represent our company, undertaking the important task, directly under the command of Chief of Staff Shun. The Party and the people trust you. I hope everybody keeps in mind that anything you do will bear on the honor of our Guards Company. To guard the Russian prisoner is both a military task and a political task. You must not forget that to the Russian you stand for China and the Chinese Army. You must show him our true revolutionary spirit. As I said just now, in appearance you should be polite to the Russian Big Nose and not give him the impression that he is a prisoner, because at this moment we don’t know who he really is. But never forget it’s our duty to keep him always under watch, day and night. Comrades, is that clear?”

  “Yes sir,” we shouted in one voice, clapping our heels together.

  A new Liberation truck arrived. We climbed into it and sat down on our blanket rolls against the panels. As we were pulling out, the piglets began to squeal again. Off along a sandy road, the truck sped to the eastern outskirts of Longmen City. The scorching sun made us feel sleepy as we were tossed about in the truck.

  Having left behind a long dragon of dust, we arrived at the Eastern Airport, a deserted military base built by the Japanese during the Second World War. Three young officers were already there waiting for us. Two of them wore cameras around their necks, and the other held a morocco briefcase. Everything had been arranged: Our room was upstair
s in the small black-brick building, which was the only building at the airport; our dining room was on the first floor; the Russian captive and his Chinese interpreter would live in the two small rooms adjoining our large room, so that they had to cross ours to get out. There was also a recreation room on the first floor, and the Ping-Pong table looked brand-new.

  “For the time being, treat him as a kind of guest. I mean in appearance,” a tall officer with a gleaming gold tooth told our squad leader, while the rest of us were busy adjusting straw mattresses on the plank bed that stretched for fifteen meters across the large room. He was a staff officer from the Office of Tactics in the Divisional Staff, famous for his graceful handwriting. People called him Scholar Wang.

  We all felt we could have a good time here. Everything seemed neat. At least we could avoid the summer drill.

  Around three o’clock in the afternoon two Beijing jeeps pulled up in the center of the basketball court in front of the building. Divisional Chief of Staff Shun Hsin, his bodyguard, four officers, and the Russian captive got out of the jeeps. The Russian looked rather boyish and must have been under twenty-five. To our surprise, he was not as tall and big as we had expected, but just about as tall as most of the Chinese walking beside him, even shorter than Scholar Wang by half a head. He wore the Russian uniform; unlike ours, his cap had a big, broad peak. We watched attentively from upstairs, keeping our faces away from the windowpanes so that those outside would not notice us.

  “He looks smart in that uniform,” Wang Min said. “It must be made of wool.”

  “Gunnysack rags,” Squad Leader Shi said. “It looks good only when it’s new. You’ll see how soon it will fall apart.”

  “His nose is not big at all,” Ma Lin said.

  “Why is his face so white?” Meng Dong asked.

  “He must have drunk too much milk,” Wang Min answered. “You see how large his round eyes are. That means he stuffs himself every day.” Wang always liked to tease.

  “Who’s that old fellow with a gray goatee?” Vice Squad Leader Hsu Jiasu asked, referring to the officer who was walking between the Russian and the chief of staff, speaking to one and then the other.

  “That must be Interpreter Zhang. He speaks Russian best in the province. Haven’t you heard of Big-Beard Zhang?” the squad leader asked.

  “No. He has no big beard.”

  “He used to have a long beard.”

  “The Russian doesn’t look like an officer,” I said.

  “No, you’re right, Song Ming,” the vice squad leader agreed. “He must be a soldier like us. Seems too young to carry bars and stars.”

  At this moment, one officer took out a shiny toylike machine gun and a green walkie-talkie from the back of a jeep and handed them to the two officers waiting with cameras, who brought them immediately into the building to take photos. Those items must have been the most advanced Russian equipment. The walkie-talkie looked like a lunch-box. None of us could tell what model the machine gun was, because our handbook of Russian weapons did not give a picture of it.

  There were two extra rooms downstairs, which we were told not to enter. In the morning the officers would use the rooms when they interrogated the Russian captive. In the afternoon he was free, so we had to “accompany” him.

  Toward evening, another jeep came and brought over Chef Wang, who worked in Longmen City’s Guest Hotel. We heard that he was one of the best cooks in the province, and that his French cuisine had been highly appreciated by Premier Zhou Enlai. Certainly we had to eat our sorghum and rice, but we felt that eventually we might be able to take a bite of something unusual, since we had such an important “guest” among us. We enjoyed smelling the fragrance of the dishes prepared for the foreigner, which soon filled the first floor and the stairwell.

  The Russian was called Lev Petrovich. According to his own account, he was a new soldier who had just arrived at the border. He used to serve as an orderly at the Headquarters of the Far East Military Region. Because of being lazy, he was sent to the Siberian border. That is what he said. It troubled us. We could not decide who he actually was and the true reason why he had crossed the border. Was he really a new soldier? Or was he an experienced agent? Did he come over to get information? Whom did he plan to meet? Or was it true as he said that the older soldiers forced him to carry both the machine gun and the walkie-talkie during their patrol along the border and that they deliberately gave him a hard time — not waiting for him when he was moving his bowels in the bushes — so he went astray and wandered onto our side? A group of peasants working in a hemp field saw him from far away. They deployed themselves as a trap. As soon as he entered the “bag,” they jumped out, raising sickles, stones, hoes, and rifles, shouting: “Put down your weapon and we’ll spare your life!” Lev didn’t fight and just gave them his gun. This again puzzled us. It looked as though everything had been planned — he didn’t even try to escape. Those officers questioned him every morning and didn’t believe whatever he told them.

  Chief of Staff Shun came to the interrogation for the first few days. Then Lev was left completely in the officers’ hands. Our squad’s major task was to stand the night guard. It was not a big thing, since each of us only had to stay awake for one hour in the hall. We didn’t have to stroll around outside in the dark. In the morning we did nothing about him, so we studied the Manifesto of the Communist Party for two hours. In the afternoon, after two hours’ nap, we played games with him if he wanted. He didn’t join us very often in the beginning and read by himself a lot. Interpreter Zhang kept him company most of the time, because we couldn’t make out what he babbled. They slept in the same room, where two mosquito nets hung on either side of the window, whose opening was blocked by six iron bars. Mr. Zhang had many of his books sent over, and the other small room was used as their study. I had never seen so many books, which filled four tall bookcases standing against the walls. Many of the bricklike books had pictures on their spines. Those were the portraits of Russian authors, some of whom had a big beard similar to Marx’s or Engels’s. We were awed by Mr. Zhang’s books. We had heard that his father had been a general in Warlord Zhang Zuolin’s army, and that his wet nurse was a Russian woman, so he could speak Russian fluently when he was a boy. But we hadn’t imagined the interpreter knowing all those books. What a wise old gentleman. In fact, he was not so old, about forty-five, I think. Only his skin shriveled around his slender bones, and his narrow eyes looked bleary behind the thick glasses.

  Sure enough, those books impressed Lev too. During the first two weeks, he always stayed in the study, reading and writing. We didn’t expect him to be such a bookworm and also a lover of poetry. One early morning, we returned from our exercises and heard Lev shouting madly on the second floor. Hurrying upstairs, we ran into Interpreter Zhang in the corridor.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Squad Leader Shi asked.

  “Nothing is wrong,” Mr. Zhang said. “He’s reading out Pushkin.”

  The door of the study was open. Holding a large book in his hands, Lev was yelling at the bright dawn beyond the window. His face looked sweaty and burning hot. Mr. Zhang went into the study and patted him on the shoulder. They talked and both sat down.

  Soon we saw Mr. Zhang pacing up and down in the room with both hands in his trouser pockets, and we heard him humming Russian words, which must have been poetry, probably Pushkin’s. Lev sat there stock-still, his eyes following Mr. Zhang and his large ears perked up. It was a long poem, for it took Mr. Zhang about ten minutes to finish. No sooner had he stopped than Lev got up and embraced his interpreter, murmuring something to him. Then we saw Lev pull a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his eyes with it. Mr. Zhang smiled, looking amused. We all thought it funny: Lev was like a woman, who would cry for beautiful words.

  As our squad leader had predicted, Lev’s uniform did look like gunnysack rags after a few washes. Now he wore our Dacron uniform, but without the red badges on his collar and the red star on his cap. Though
he asked for a pair of badges and a cap insignia, the officers refused him. They said it was too soon for him to switch sides. As a matter of fact, he had thrown away all his Russian stuff, including the clumsy boots and foot wrappings, and instead he wore our green sneakers and cotton socks. It was funny that you could easily take him for one of us if you looked at him from behind. Once Vice Squad Leader Hsu tapped Lev on the neck, believing he was Wang Min, and said, “When will you buy us the Popsicles you promised?” Lev turned around, his gray eyes glittering with bewilderment, and his square, whiskered face broke into a feline grin. The large wart on his upper lip merged with his left nostril. Hsu was struck dumb. We all laughed and shouted: “Popsicles, five fen apiece,” just as the old women vendors did on the streets.

  Lev was an arrogant son of a bitch as well. Because we had been treating him as a guest, he was spoiled. He only smoked the two most expensive kinds of cigarettes: Ginseng and Great China. The staff officer Scholar Wang once gave him some Peony cigarettes, but Lev, after trying one, refused to accept them. He only wanted the best of the Chinese and took his privileges for granted. Naturally, he didn’t know how to respect his hosts. One day he even stood on his hands on the head of our plank bed for a good two minutes. Having landed on the floor, he waved and seemed to invite us to a gymnastic contest. None of us could do that. Perhaps in his eyes we were all clodhoppers and didn’t know how to do gymnastics or read those fat books.