The Shadow Knows

by Kenneth Rosen

  ***

  By early December the weather in Peking had turned cold and after Christmas the temperature dropped well below freezing and seemed to stay there forever. There was almost no snow, but the wind coming out of the north found the city defenseless, surrounded on three sides by flatland and with the hills in the west serving only to look pretty in the haze of an early evening. The use of soft coal as the main source of heat resulted in an acrid-smelling layer of soot on everything and the diesel fumes from the trucks and modified tractors that rumbled by on the main road alongside the Youyi Binguan were blown about in swirls and eddies that eventually dissipated only when the traffic thinned out in the late afternoon. The post-1958 blocks of depressingly uniform high-rise apartment buildings along most of the major streets only added to the meanness of the scene: they dominated the landscape in the downtown area and their ponderous facades, a legacy of the Russians, almost completely obscured any view of the traditional hutongs and courtyards of the older neighborhoods, those sections earmarked by the government for destruction in its attempt to create new housing for the city’s ever-expanding population. In spite of the cold and the wind and the inevitable pollution, there was a slow but steady activity evident almost everywhere; heavily bundled workers and mounds of freshly-dug earth and belching heavy equipment strongly supported the view held by some residents and most foreign visitors that the city was in the process of becoming one big construction site.

  Getting to the university during the winter months was often a challenge and occasionally ludicrous. At 7:45 a.m. we would turn left out of the main gate of the hotel compound and join the thousands of other well-padded bicyclists who were pedaling to their jobs in the western part of the city. At times ten and twelve abreast, many riders wearing white surgical-looking masks to diminish the effects of both the pollution and the cold, we would move rapidly along on our Flying Pigeon machines, giving way to incessantly honking taxis and tightly-packed buses only when being run down was absolutely imminent. The road would be solid cyclists as far as the eye could see, both ahead and behind, and it was essential to plan anything major, such as a turn or a stop, well in advance, easing yourself gradually into position on the left or right, being careful not to slow down too much or too quickly (a bicycle accident during the rush-hour invariably caused a great deal of anger all round and often resulted in horrendous shouting matches, although the cyclists involved rarely came to blows). On those very cold mornings when the roads were dotted with intermittent patches of ice the journey could take on Chaplinesque qualities; a small woman wrapped in numerous layers of dark blue clothing, barely able to reach the pedals of her Flying Pigeon bicycle, brakes too suddenly and begins a slow skid to the right. Others near her can sense her difficulty and realize the possible danger to themselves, but given the sheer mass and unrelenting pace of the procession they dare not take their attention away from the riders directly in front of them, and so the predictable comes to pass; in the jerky and seemingly out-of-synch style of an early silent movie the woman and her bike go down, hitting the wheels of the machine on her right, whose owner has edged over as far to his right as possible, and the subsequent accordian effect is devastating, each rider on the woman’s right going down in a slightly different way and with a slightly different last-second attempt to stave off the inevitable.

  We never saw anyone seriously hurt on those morning rides, but whenever I finally turned in at Beida’s main entrance and was waved through by the guards I always felt elated, as if I’d once again survived some kind of test, some kind of trial by combat. It certainly started off the working day for me with all the adrenalin flowing.

  By late December things had begun to change at the university and I usually looked forward to my classes with enthusiasm. The large ubiquitous portraits of Chairman Mao had been removed from all the classrooms and only one of his statues, an impressively detailed white marble one in front of the main library, remained on display on the central campus. What little political rhetoric from the State that was allowed to filter down to us (the China Daily had just begun its first English-language edition) was comparatively mild on the subject of Sino-American affairs and most of our participants were now in the habit of actually participating in class discussions. I lectured with my gloves on and my padded overcoat collar turned up to cover my ears and on some days I could see my breath as I spoke, but when it was time to field questions the room heated up rapidly; a few of those who were clearly members of the Party usually remained reticent, but the rest were now eager to challenge me on questions of interpretation, particularly when I offered a facile or simplistic reading of something that they felt was sociologically much more complex. A strict psychological analysis of a text, if it was especially Freudian, left most of them unconvinced; with what I now realized was a good deal of humor mixed in with all the politeness and respect, they suggested ways of looking at a work that made it clear that they were doing some intellectual stretching, making a concerted effort to go beyond the current ‘is it relevant to China’s Four Modernizations?’ criterion and to see the possibility that there might be an individualistic dimension to a particular work of art. It was exciting stuff and I became convinced that I was involved with some of the brightest and most highly motivated people I had ever taught; in the back of my mind I often wondered what they would have been like if they hadn’t been deprived of books and any sort of formal education for those ten years of Mao’s final disastrous experiment.

  During one of our Chinese lessons in mid-January, Mrs. Chu told us about something that seemed to indicate at least a nominal liberalization of certain official policies in the country at large, and at Beida such events were always taken as a sign that times were improving. When pointing out an old statue of two Fu dogs guarding the steps of a building inside the Temple of Heaven complex, Mrs. Chu asked Talya, in Chinese, if she knew anything about any modern Chinese sculptors. When she said she didn’t, Mrs. Chu switched into English to tell us about one.

  “Last week a man named Wang Keping was allowed to sell his sculptures at a major show in Shanghai for the first time. He is a young man who has become one of the most well-known members of a group of dissident writers and artists. He has made a very large statue of Mao that the government thinks is very embarrassing because Mao is made to look like a Buddha with one eye closed, as if he deliberately doesn’t want to see the evil and corruption that is going on around him. Wang is known as a very courageous artist who has taken many chances with his art since 1976, but I believe this is the first time his work has been officially approved by the government to be shown in public. Only yesterday I heard a writer friend of mine call it one of the first steps in the de-Maoization of our country. Many of us would like to think this is true, but four-fifths of the Chinese are still peasants and to many of them Mao is still almost a god, even though his body lies over there in that building in Tien An Men. I hope Wang’s new acceptance by the leaders is not just a temporary one.”

  The signs seemed to be reliable, at least for the moment, because just before the break between terms in late January (a long vacation that allowed people all over the country to return to their homes and their families, in some cases for the only time all year, to celebrate the traditional Chinese New Year with relatives) Ma asked me if Talya and I would like to spend a week in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. He said his request for such a travel permit for us had been approved rather suddenly and without explanation and even though the weather would probably be bad he thought we should take the opportunity to see that part of the country while the China Travel Service was so favorably disposed to our making such a trip. We agreed, Talya pointing out that although the weather might be brutal at least there would be no tourists wandering around that part of the world at that time of year, and after a day or two of thinking it over I decided to contact Bonnie Low and tell her of our plans. There was no answer at her room at the Beijing Fandian so I left my name with the man at the switchboard
and the next day she called me at the university.

  “I’m sorry about the mix-up in Shanghai,” she began, “but it was unforeseen, and I’ve been away in Hong Kong most of the time since then so I couldn’t talk to you about it. Is everything okay?”

  “If you mean did I dispose of the item, yes, everything is fine. If you mean my regular work at the university, that too is fine – in fact, it’s getting to be more rewarding every day. I just called to tell you that I’ll be taking another trip in a few days, to Inner Mongolia, with Ma and my wife this time.”

  “Yes, a friend at the Travel Service told me your permits had been approved for a week. I imagine you’ll be going through Huhehot on your way to one of the encampments further north--would you say hello to an old friend of mine for me? I haven’t seen him in a long time and I have a small gift for him.”

  I’ll come by tonight and pick it up, about eight. Same place?”

  “Yes, that’ll be fine. See you then.”

  She hung up and I noticed we had progressed to the point where we no longer bothered with the usual hellos and goodbyes. I wondered if that meant we were now being more businesslike with each other or just that she preferred short telephone conversations.

  A few days later we were flying low over some rocky and barren-looking countryside in a twin engine Russian-built machine that had seen better days, Talya and I together in seats near the rear and Ma up near the door to the cockpit, almost surrounded by crates and cardboard boxes and canvas bags that were piled in what looked like haphazard fashion on the seats around him. The flight to the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia from Peking was an irregular event and the cargo to be transported was obviously more important to the flight crew than the six passengers. The two women in blue jackets with the CAAC patch embroidered over one pocket were continually fussing with a box or a bag as the load shifted in the light turbulence and they had very little time left for us or for the three PLA officers who sat in three aisle seats and slept during most of the flight. The women gave us each some sweets and a paper cup full of a carbonated orange drink just after takeoff and then they left us to our own devices.

  We passed over a very large lake as we headed in a generally northwestern direction and then as we turned due north we had to climb over some low mountains; they had no snow on them but they looked inhospitable enough. For more than an hour I could see no roads or trails or human habitation; the plane flew just above a very thin and patchy layer of wispy clouds and the visibility was very much like the landscape on the moon, cratered and arid and empty. Talya leaned toward me and whispered that she hoped we wouldn’t have to land down there and I silently nodded my agreement.

  When we did land about forty minutes later it was on a large plateau surrounded by barren hills and there was a guide with a six-passenger four-wheel-drive van waiting for us on the single runway. Ma introduced us to Xiao Fen, a man whose high cheek bones and mahogany-colored skin made me think of a younger version of Ma himself, and when our bags were transferred to the van Xiao drove us past the airport’s control tower and administration building and up to the exit gate in the barbed-wire fence. The two PLA guards looked eager and alert and they took their time inspecting the travel documents Ma had handed across to Xiao to give to them; each soldier had a long look at the papers and each asked Xiao a question in what I assumed was Mongolian and then one of them unslung his carbine from his shoulder, place it carefully against the side of the guardhouse, and motioned for Ma to step out. They talked for a few minutes, the guard laughed, and when Ma climbed back in we were waved through. As we turned west onto a narrow black-topped road and the van picked up speed, Xiao asked Ma a question and Ma responded in English.

  “Our guests do not speak Mongolian, Xiao Fen, so it would be better for us to converse in English. They are learning putongwa and they can understand some things if we speak slowly, but English would be easiest.”

  “I apologize for my inconsiderateness,” Xiao said in almost unaccented English, “I forgot myself. Would you prefer to practice your Chinese as we drive?” He glanced back at us for a moment.

  “That would be very helpful, Xiao,” Talya said, “but if it’s anything more than simple sentences I think you’ll have to use English with us. Yours is very good – where did you learn it?”

  “I started studying it in middle school and at home my father made me practice it. He was a teacher in the town we will be coming to in a few minutes, Huhehot, the capital of our region. Speaking languages is very helpful in getting a job with China Travel Service.”

  “You asked Ma something in Mongolian, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes, I asked Mr. Ma what the guard wanted to talk to him about.”

  Ma smiled before he responded.

  “He was very curious about why two foreigners would want to go so far into the grasslands in the middle of winter. I told him the man was an American cowboy who wanted to see if the Mongolian horsemen were as good as he had heard and his wife wanted to find out if a yurt was truly as warm in the winter as some people said it was. He was amused at foreigners being so ignorant about the obvious, but his amusement, I believe, kept him from delaying us even longer. They were very conscientious soldiers doing their proper job, but we have a lunch planned in Huhehot and I would like you to have some time to walk around. It will be the last place with any shops that you will see for several days.”

  The town was crowded and dusty and the people on the streets were broader and shorter than the Han we were used to seeing in Peking and Talya and I agreed that many of these people looked like American Indians, particularly like the Pueblos in New Mexico. We had an excellent lunch of millet cakes and yogurt and beer and then the four of us walked around the center of the town, Xiao pointing out the various government buildings, commune projects, and the brigade headquarters. The small village we were going to visit farther north was part of this brigade and Xiao thought we should meet the leaders of the brigade before we went on. They spoke neither English nor Chinese so it was a brief meeting with Xiao translating and Talya thanking the brigade’s chief political officer, a handsome and dignified-looking man who watched Ma as he talked, for allowing us to visit a village so close to the border.

  After the meeting, Xiao excused himself to make sure the van was ready for the rest of our journey – it was only two more hours to the village but he said he wanted a full tank of gas just to be safe – and Talya asked Ma to take her to a crafts shop he had mentioned earlier. We all agreed to meet at the van in an hour.

  It took me almost thirty minutes to find the traditional medicine shop Bonnie had described and it turned out to be just down an alley from the brigade headquarters building. Mr. Liu Bing, the proprietor, was a very old man with bowed legs and a wisp of grey beard who waited on the only other person in the shop in a slow and yet efficient manner and only turned to face me when that woman had taken her small brown envelope of herbs and closed the door behind her. His English was poor and my Chinese brought only bland stares so we kept the talking to a minimum. I identified myself and he made it clear that he was expecting a letter from a Miss Low in Hong Kong. I took the folder letter from my wallet and he smiled an almost toothless smile as he took it with his left hand and made it disappear almost instantly up into the wide right sleeve of his old-fashioned and badly frayed gown. I had turned to leave when his English suddenly improved.

  “You will be going to very windy place. If you come back to Liu Bing at end of journey the photograph Miss Low desires will be here.”

  Bonnie hadn’t said anything about my bringing back a photograph.

  “I will try to come back here in six days. Will that be satisfactory?”

  “On sixth day, please. To keep here is unwise even for old Liu Bing.” No smile this time as he dismissed me by showing me his back.

  Just before dusk we passed a herd of camels, thirty or forty of them, moving eastward across the faint track Xiao had been following sin
ce the paved road had ended about an hour out of Huhehot. We stopped the van to watch them; a strong wind had come up out of the north, strong enough to shake the van as we sat there, but the thick-coated animals seemed to ignore it as they slowly padded along, a few of them cropping the stubble as they went but most of them just moving steadily, their undulating gait and their knobby long legs making them appear to be well-adapted to the relatively flat or gently rolling terrain and the high winds that now buffeted our squat vehicle in earnest.

  We came over a rise and dropped down to cross a dry stream bed and enter the village just as darkness descended. It was a small encampment with only a few permanent wooden buildings; dotted around these were several dozen yurts, conical-shaped and covered with animal hides, and from most of them we could see smoke rising from a small hole in the center of the roof. We were greeted by the village leaders, two weather-beaten men who welcomed us warmly in soft-spoken Mongolian, and a woman who spoke Chinese and who had been sent on ahead of us from brigade headquarters to prepare the way. She was all smiles and effusiveness and it was apparent that the men were making an effort to tolerate her. As she led the way into a large yurt where our welcoming meal was to be eaten Ma lagged behind and whispered to me that she was a political officer, not a Mongolian, and that she was here only to see that foreigners were properly received and that she would be returning to the city early the next morning.

  I stooped to enter the low wooden door that swung inward on rawhide thongs attached to the yurt’s rounded wall. Inside we sat in a large circle on mats made of animal skins and the food, brought in from somewhere else, was placed on a raised wooden platform in the center and we either sat cross-legged or lounged on one hip as we reached across to the various bowls and took what we wanted. The two village leaders had seated themselves first and then had indicated that Talya and I were to sit on their right. Ma sat next to Talya and then the brigade officer and Xiao Fen completed the circle. With Ma and Xiao translating, the older of the two leaders explained the etiquette of the yurt and what it was that we were being served. With his chopsticks he would lean forward to pluck something from a bowl and then reach around and place it in front of me or Talya and wait for us to taste it, watching for our reactions with a friendly grin on his face. The meal was dominated by a large plate of thick fatty pieces of lamb, more meat than an average Chinese in Peking would eat in a year, and several bowls of heavy curdled sour milk, milk (we were told) that was skimmed daily from the top of wooden casks left standing open in the homes of most Mongolians. It was a meal for people who worked outdoors, for semi-nomads who herded sheep and goats and rode horses and camels and who burned up protein and animal fat as a matter of daily routine; for the sedentary city-dweller, especially a Westerner who had spent the previous five months getting used to a diet of rice and a few vegetables, it was a heart-clogging experience. I tried walking it off when we stepped outside but there was only a small sliver of moon and almost no light in the surrounding grasslands and the wind was cold and cutting. Ma and Xiao were assigned to a small yurt on the outer edge of the encampment and Talya and I to one right next to theirs and almost immediately after eating we settled down on our palettes made of several sheep and camel skins and tried to get some sleep.

  The unusually heavy meal and the gamy smell of our bedding made it difficult for me. There was a small fire of camel dung burning in the center of the circular earth floor, the smoke escaping through a partially opened flap of hide at the tip of the structure, and the sounds of the Mongolian night took some getting used to; a guttural snuffling near the thin wall – it was only about three feet from the edge of the fire to the yurt’s walls so we slept up against the tightly stretched skins – sounded like a pig trying to root its way in out of the wind and in the distance I heard the occasional snorting and stamping of horses, and once I thought I heard the very faint hoot of an owl, but I couldn’t remember seeing a single tree within sight of the encampment as we had driven in so I speculated about what other kind of animal might have made the sound. After a while I thought I heard someone walking past outside, stopping for a moment and then stumbling briefly and grunting once before moving off; I assumed it was someone using the open prairie to relieve themselves – I hadn’t seen any man-made facilities since we had arrived. I must have dozed off because when I next heard something I opened my eyes to almost complete darkness; the fire was just about out, only a dim glow from some ash remained, and I couldn’t decide what had awakened me. I must have slept again because in the morning I remembered bits and pieces of a disjointed nightmare that had something to do with Navajo Indians and mare’s milk and sheep’s blood and vats of boiling goats’ heads and a huge wild boar whose screams of pleasure when mounting a sow were indistinguishable from his screams of pain when he was being butchered by the ax-wielding political officer from the brigade who never stopped smiling, but it was hardly a restful night.

  Talya, on the other hand, awoke refreshed and told me that for a change I barely snored at all and then suggested that perhaps we should build a small yurt in our backyard when we returned to the States, just for variety and some of our more adventurous guests.

  We spent the next five days with the people of the village, eating our meals in a bare room set up for that purpose in one of the permanent wooden buildings and walking out each day to explore or just to get some exercise. The days were clear and very cold and the wind, which never seemed to abate entirely, almost always increased in force in the late afternoons. There was always a coating of early morning frost on the ground and although there was no snow we welcomed the hooded anoraks that Ma borrowed for us from one of the families. On the day before we left, the older village leader invited us to ride out with him to watch a roundup of wild horses. Talya and I were given two very placid animals – nobody would want to be embarrassed by having one of the foreign guests thrown and perhaps injured by a high-spirited horse – and we all rode out about five miles from the encampment to a good vantage point, a hill that sloped gently down to a broad basin into which the horses would be herded before the most desirable ones were cut from the group and taken back to the village’s corrals. By early afternoon the basin held at least a hundred horses, their thick winter coats matted in uneven patches, and the Mongol horsemen kept them together by riding around the perimeter and chasing back any animal that broke from the herd. The riders were all thin and wiry-looking and the horses were all much smaller than the standard Western breeds and the speed of the horses and the agility of the men was often breathtaking; the riders literally stood in their stirrups whenever their ponies were in motion and, with the reins in one hand and with a long bamboo pole with a loop of rope on the end in the other, they would charge into the herd and try to cut out a particularly good-looking animal by placing the rope over its head and around its neck and bringing it to a standstill by exerting pressure on the rope and pole as the rider’s own mount – obviously well-trained for the job and responding to the slightest shift in the rider’s weight – swerved and attempted to slow down once the loop had settled around the other pony’s neck. The whole process was a study in coordination between man and beast and most of it took place at a full gallop; the first time we saw a magnificent palomino stallion cut out of the herd this way I thought of the stories I’d read about Genhis Khan and the invading Mongol hordes and I knew their prowess as horsemen had not been exaggerated. As an American brought up on both the realities and the myths of the Hollywood western it was an exciting scene to watch and it was repeated over and over again, with slight variations each time, that whole afternoon.

  The village leader, who had watched the day’s work with us from atop his own horse, returned to the encampment with Xiao and Talya when Ma suggested that he and I take a different route back. The two of us swung farther west than the others had gone and with Ma in the lead we raced across the flatland, letting our horses run after their long period of inactivity, and eventually we came to some lo
ng rolling hills and we slowed to a comfortable cantor and finally a steady walk. The wind had picked up and the light was just beginning to fade; I had been warmed by the run but now the temperature seemed to have dropped quickly and I pulled on my hood in an attempt to keep out the cold. Off to our right, far off in the direction of the setting sun, I could make out a series of higher hills and near the top of the highest I could see what appeared to be a walled compound of several stone buildings, each topped with a large conventional antenna, and at the very summit of the hill a huge white dish-shaped object that dominated the skyline. Ma explained as we walked our horses back toward the village, raising his voice a little whenever the wind gusted too strongly.

  “The commune that is responsible for the brigade to which the village, the one we are visiting, belongs has the job of keeping this section of the border secure. A few years ago they finished building that communications station. It looks down on the Russian-controlled area on the other side of those hills. It is equipped with our most advanced warning systems and any information about movements of missiles or soldiers can be relayed at once to any part of our country.”

  “It’s quite impressive, perched up there like some white-headed bird. I assume it’s not open to visitors.”

  “You are quite correct. Such places are very private. Only the national minorities, such as the Mongolians who live along the border, ever see them from even this distance. It is forbidden to get too close – another mile or even less and a patrol from the station would have come out to send us away. I would guess that very few foreigners have ever been this close to this new station – except, of course, the Mongolians who live on the Russian side of the border. They are a very aggressive people and I have heard that the Russians encourage them to get as close to our stations as possible. As I am sure you know, we consider our borders with the Russians to be a very serious issue. I thought you would like to get as close as possible to one while you were here.”

  “Thank you, Ma. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

  The next day we had a farewell meal at noon and Xiao drove us back to Huhahot where we stopped briefly for some tea and to say thank you and goodbye to the people at brigade headquarters. I excused myself when the others went for tea, saying I wanted to pick up something for Noah and Larry in a crafts shop nearby and I’d be back in a matter of minutes. I bought two different posters showing Mongolian horseman in action and when I entered the medicine shop it was empty except for Liu Bing who stood behind the counter with his back to the shop door, almost exactly as I’d last seen him; I had the momentary feeling that the intervening time had been a figment of my imagination. When he turned around to face me his ancient face looked tense, almost pained. His glance seemed to focus somewhere behind me, as if he were making sure I was alone, and then his left hand plucked a small piece of white rice paper out of his right sleeve. He held the paper out to me, I took it, slipped it carefully into the watch-pocket of my jeans, and when I looked up Liu Bing was gone, the barely perceptible movement of the faded red curtain at the rear of the shop the only indication of his probable direction.

  “So much for extended farewells,” I muttered to myself as I let myself out and walked rapidly back to the tea house.

  It was dark when the plane landed and almost nine o’clock when we finally got back to the Youyi Binguan, but I called Bonnie at her room in the Peking Hotel anyway. The last look I had seen on old Liu Bing’s face made me think I should get rid of whatever he had given me as soon as possible. There was no answer, neither then nor at eleven when I tried again, so I went to bed without looking at the rice paper in my watch-pocket and, as I expected, I had a few more bad dreams.

  In the office the next day, with Larry and Noah both busy in their classrooms, I took a good look at what the old man had handed me. It wasn’t a photograph. When I unfolded the paper I found a small strip of dark and shiny microfilm negative taped to the textured white background with a tiny piece of clear plastic adhesive. I peeled off the adhesive carefully and held the film up to the overhead light; it appeared to be a piece of standard-sized microfilm stock, the same kind used in many modern archives and museums, except that instead of being divided into two or three individual frames this strip seemed to have only a single long frame. I could see nothing else of its content so I rewrapped it, now very curious to know just what it was that I had in my possession.

  I remembered that Noah usually kept a small magnifying glass attached to a ring of keys in his desk drawer, but when I looked the ring was not there. I sat for a while trying to figure out what to do; I could probably (with Ma’s help) get access to any equipment in Beida’s main library just across the quadrangle, but in our initial orientation, I now recalled, the head librarian had told us that all microfilm and microfiche stock and readers had been destroyed at the height of the Cultural Revolution by local Red Guards and that there was no money allocated yet to have it replaced. There was only one other place I could think of that might have what I needed and I wasn’t at all sure they’d let me use their equipment if they knew what I was doing, but I didn’t have a great deal of choice.

  An hour later I was explaining to Mr. Guo, the man in charge of the small USIA library in the American Embassy, that I wanted to look at the listing – on microfilm, if he had it – of all of the educational films available for showing to my class at Beida; I stressed that I was particularly interested in finding out which of the Alistair Cook “America” series was available and what the official agency description had to say about each one. He asked to see some proof of my employment at the university and when I showed him the identification card Ma had gotten for each of us he was satisfied. He asked me to sign for the roll of film he took from one of the dark green cabinets and then he escorted me to another room, asked if I knew how to load and use the reader, and left me alone when I said that I did. I closed the door when he’d gone and after I put the roll of agency film on the table beside the machine, ready to be loaded in case someone came in, I took out my own little strip and tried to thread it into the reader. It was so small a piece that I had difficulty getting it to engage; I had to be sure I’d be able to remove it once I’d looked at it and my nervousness at the thought of losing it in the mechanism only made things worse. When I finally had it in position I flicked on the light switch and looked into the hooded eyepiece. I could focus but the strip was too small to adjust properly either forward or back; what I could see in front of me was only part of what was on the extra-long single frame, but it was enough.

  Someone had snapped a picture of a topographical survey map that had large black dots on it that ran in an irregular line along the top and left hand side; if I hadn’t seen a National Geographic illustrated map of China just before I accepted the Beida appointment I never would have recognized what part of the world I was looking at, and if I hadn’t taken the long way back from the roundup with Ma I wouldn’t have had the slightest inkling about what the dots represented. I now understood why Liu Bing had been so eager to be rid of the microfilm. I was looking at a detailed map of China’s northern and western borders, all contour lines and mountain elevations clearly noted, and I had no doubt that each black dot represented the exact location of one of her newest early-warning communications stations. The section of the film I had in focus actually showed a black dot right on the border, just north and a little west of the city of Huhehot, a place identified (as were all the larger towns on the map) by its Chinese characters written under a small dark star.

  My attempting to memorize the locations of the dots, even if I’d wanted to, was out of the question; there were too many of them, there were too few points of reference to use as mnemonic aids to my memory, and I could see only part of the border area anyway. I extricated the strip of film from the machine and put it in one of my pockets, put the agency roll in the reader and glanced at it perfunctorily as it ran through, and then turned off the reader and brought the roll back to Mr. Guo. I thank
ed him for his help, mentioning that I thought the Alistair Cook film on the Mormons would be very useful and that I would be sure to come get it from him when I reached the section on American religions and myths in my lectures. He seemed pleased that his office had been of some real service.

  I asked the taxi driver to stop at the Peking Hotel and wait for me. When I asked one of the men at the desk to ring Miss Bonnie Low’s room there were several minutes of confused consultations and referrals to various responsible persons before I was informed that Miss Low had given up her room that morning. I asked if she had left any address or telephone number where she might be contacted and I was told, with somewhat exaggerated politeness, that she had not.

  When I got back to the office I called Lynn Boaz at the Embassy.

  “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact,” he answered, in response to my initial question. “She’s been transferred back to the States, to the bank’s main office in San Francisco. Flew out today on the new Pan Am flight.”

  “A permanent transfer?”

  “Yes, I believe it is – as permanent as those things usually are, I guess. She was sorry she couldn’t say goodbye in person – told me to convey her thanks for those favors you’ve done for her. She was genuinely grateful, you know.”

  “That’s nice to hear. Do you know if anyone has been sent out to replace her yet?”

  “No, she indicated that they wouldn’t be sending one for some time, but she did ask me to handle any small item of unfinished business of hers that might come up after she left.”

  That seemed to answer my question but I wanted to be absolutely sure.

  “Kind of unusual for a First Secretary like yourself, with diplomatic immunity and all, to be handling a private bank’s business, isn’t it?”

  He barely hesitated and his casual tone remained unchanged.

  “It would be in most other countries, but here we’re a relatively new presence and many things are not as well organized yet as they might be. Besides, dealing with any loose ends for Bonnie is more in the nature of a personal favor, a favor for a good friend.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked being both a small item and a loose end, but at least I had no doubts about who I’d be contacting now instead of Bonnie Low if I wanted to continue my modest transfer service.

  “Sorry about all the questions, but sometimes ya can’t tell da players without a score card.”

  “Too true, too true. By the way, how was your trip in Inner Mongolia? Did you and Talya do everything you wanted to do up there?”

  “Yes. I was able to do everything I planned to do. I think Talya would have appreciated more time to shop for Mongolian crafts, but it was a fascinating trip.”

  I waited for some careful reference to the microfilm now that he knew I’d made my delivery as arranged. I heard none.

  “Well, I’m afraid I have some China Daily people waiting to see me. They want to know if Reagan’s going to sell those damn planes to Taiwan or not – must think I have a direct line to the White House. Sorry, have to run. We’ll keep in touch – there’s a dinner here next month for which you and Bannister and Maguire are on the list so I imagine I’ll see you then. Bye for now.”

  I said goodbye and hung up, wondering if he really didn’t know about the little gift from Mongolia or if games were being played about which I was ignorant. Nothing to eliminate the possibility that both were true simultaneously, of course, but in a world of shadows it’s always reassuring to have one or two fixed points clearly in mind. All I knew was that Lynn Boaz worked for more than one boss and I shouldn’t spend too much time before getting rid of a potentially dangerous – as well as valuable – piece of film. I spent some time considering the option of just destroying it; nobody seemed anxious to receive it and I could burn it in an ashtray in a matter of seconds. But Liu Bing had said that Miss Low wanted the photographs. If that were true, then wouldn’t Boaz know about it as well and want to have it? Yes, assuming he and Bonnie were employed by the same people.

  I realized my thinking was all getting to be too tentative and as I sat at my desk with the weak afternoon sun filtering through the dirty panes of the single window I also realized that there were other options. Giving the film to the Russians would serve little purpose other than keeping me up nights worrying about treason – I couldn’t imagine their not knowing the locations of the stations by now anyway – but seeing that it found its way into the hands of some high-ranking Chinese officials might be a different matter. It was their map to begin with and in the interest of maintaining the present precarious balance among the three countries it might be best for them to be aware of such a leak. Might be. It could all get very complicated and I heard a faint voice from out of my very distant past saying that gathering information and analyzing it are two separate tasks and only a fool confuses them.

  The next afternoon, the first day of the Chinese New Year, I telephoned the Embassy again and asked to speak to Boaz; I had decided that the simplest course of action was to give the microfilm to him even if he wasn’t expecting it. A clerk came on the line.

  “Mr. Lynn Boaz, the Public Affairs Officer, has been called back to Washington on agency business, sir. He took today’s flight and he left a message in case you called. It says, ‘Unexpected business to take care of in D.C. but should be back in about two weeks.’ Is there anyone else you’d care to speak to?”

  I said no, thanked him, and five minutes later the strip of microfilm was a small glob of melted plastic in a glass ashtray and a few minutes after that I flushed what was left down a toilet. Two weeks was too long to hold on to that particular item. I was glad I’d chosen to remain independent enough not to accept any payment for the few favors I’d already rendered.

  By mid-March the weather had improved considerably and by the end of the month I had resumed my early-morning runs. Sometimes either Noah or Larry would come along, but most mornings I ran alone – as alone as one can be in Peking at that time of day. The sun would barely have risen and the wide streets near the Youyi compound would already be lined with men and women, most of them very old, practicing Tai-ji, an ancient form of calisthenics. Some people exercised by themselves, usually between two trees or other stationary objects, and others worked in a group, either in a circle or in rows. The movements were highly stylized and over the centuries they had become ritualized; it was rare to see a young person perform them with anything like the grace and precision and total concentration that most of the older people revealed. I had asked Ma to teach me and for a time I practiced diligently, working on the state of meditation which is so central to performing the exercises well, but as I ran I saw people who had obviously been at it for forty or fifty or maybe even sixty years and I could see how pathetic my own attempts were by comparison.

  Talya and I had become good friends with Ted Sleeper and his wife and as the weather warmed up Ted would occasionally run with me. He was one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese history, a man who had lived on Taiwan and who spoke the language fluently, and he was living at the Youyi with his wife and young son while he finished a new book on the Min Dynasty. We’d arrived in Peking about the same time and he was happy to be living on the mainland and in the capital, close to all the things he’d been studying and teaching and writing about for so many years. He freely admitted that he was not looking forward to returning to Berkeley in the fall to chair his department.

  The two of us ran to the Purple Bamboo Park across from the large indoor sports stadium one morning and after circling the manmade lake twice we sat down on one of the wooden benches to rest before running back to our compound. He obviously wanted to talk but at first he seemed reluctant to do so.

  “We don’t know each other very well and what we do know is, of necessity, pretty superficial stuff – not exactly a sound basis for intruding into one’s private life, is it?”

  “Probably not, but I have the distinct im
pression that one of us suggested we sit down here so he could do just that.”

  He looked uncomfortable and I realized I hadn’t made it any easier for him.

  “Listen, Ted, I know you’re not a gossip or an aggressively vicious person so why not just say what you have to say and if I think you’re out of line I’ll let you know, okay?”

  “Okay. What I really want to do is offer some friendly advice – for whatever it’s worth. I told you that I’m here this year on a grant to write this book. Well, the money comes from an organization I belong to called the Council for Exchanges Between China and America. It was set up a long time ago, back in the 1930’s, and it’s always had government support at the highest levels even though it’s a private group set up to facilitate educational and cultural exchanges between the two countries. It remained in existence even after the communists took over here in 1949; not many exchanges then, of course, but the Council never went out of business. Very low profile at all times and it has aided some exceptional work in several fields. It gave support to people like Fairbank and Wakeman and Spence, as well as other China-hands, when they were doing research on their early books. Never any strings attached – grants are generous and always tax-exempt – but the Council has always had a good eye. Many of those who were given CEBCA grants over the years have turned out to be very influential in their fields.

  “When I was a graduate student they offered me a grant to do work on my dissertation. Back in the 1960’s I was Secretary of the organization for a few years. Just a routine job, but I had to send out the mailings and attend the meetings so I got to know something about how the Council worked and who the members and supporters were. Lots of old China-hands, of course, both in the academy and in government, but also some heavyweights who didn’t know ni hao from dzy gen. Names like Rockefeller and McNamara and Moynahan were often in the air around the Council’s table and there were always some Langley people at our meetings and at least one person from the President’s personal staff. It was heady stuff for me, I can tell you, and I’m sure that being Secretary for a term hasn’t hurt my own career any.

  “The council has kept in touch with me, as it does with most of its grant recipients. I get invited to dinners or small meetings when someone in my field returns from Asia or when I myself come back. We exchange ideas and talk about our projects and the people we’ve met in various places on Taiwan or the mainland. It’s all very informal and it does foster better communication between the scholars involved, but there’s also no doubt that the Langley crowd pick up some interesting information now and again. Some of us resent this and others applaud it. It’s also a fact that it’s very rare that a Council grant is ever turned down.

  “A long preamble to a short point. I was back in the States last week at a Council dinner in Washington and I overheard a conversation in which your name came up several times. A guy named Histon and two intelligence types were discussing Deng’s drive for more Western investment in his country and China’s real need for some of our advanced military technology. I heard Histon mention a few names, yours included, and then one of the Langley men suggested that maybe you might be someone who would benefit from a Council research grant in the near future. Just before I had to move out of range I heard him add the phrase ‘he’s in place already anyway’ and that’s the last I could get of what they were saying.

  “I know what it’s like to be used without quite being sure how it all came about, and for me the only troublesome times have been when the issue of morality has raised its Hydra-like head, those odd moments when I’ve realized I might be doing more harm than good in the world, however marginally, by being the neutral and disinterested scholar who just passes on what he knows about the people and places he’s encountered in the course of his research. I don’t know your situation at all, not in any detailed sense, and I don’t want to, but I did want you to know what I’d heard – and to tell you that you might want to be careful. I don’t feel as if the Council owns me or anything like that – not really – but in the last few years I’ve been having a few too many sleepless nights.”

  I’d listened in silence, not knowing how to react, not able to decide if he even expected a reaction. I hardly knew the man and yet he had made himself vulnerable, had made an effort to warn me about something he understood, something he knew I was probably involved in, something he suspected I might not be able to handle in the long run. I sat quietly for a few minutes, looking out at the water and a lone black duck that was moving slowly with the breeze toward the opposite side of the lake. I had the impression that Ted had wanted to tell me something about himself as well as about me, that what he’d said had been an unburdening as well as a warning, and for a long minute I felt as if I had been running along a narrow lane and someone had suddenly dropped a full-length mirror down in front of me; there was no way around it and it was too high to jump over; one of those moments that have to be dealt with directly.

  “Certainly not out of line, Ted, and I’m grateful for the advice. I never heard of the Council before – sounds like they kept the door open when the rest of us thought it was tightly shut – but I can understand why somebody there might think I’d be useful. I have done a few favors for friends in the past. I appreciate your telling me what you did and I won’t forget it. Thank you.”

  I wanted to ask him if he remembered any of the other names that were mentioned along with mine at that Washington dinner, but I didn’t. The details seemed, at the moment, to be irrelevant. We ran out of the park and parallel to the now bicycle-chocked road that passed by the Youyi. Ted seemed to be more relaxed than he’d been on the run out and I had more to think about so the run back to the compound was at a relatively leisurely pace and neither of us did much talking.

  Talya had always insisted that we do something foolish on April Fool’s Day so on the first day of April she began to collect old Canton serving dishes (one of her self-imposed limits was that she would pay no more than five yuan – about $3.35 US – for any one piece, which tended to keep the number of purchases rather low) and I took my first formal lesson on the piba, an ancient Chinese musical instrument that resembles a lyre. An Englishman named Jim, who taught English at the First Foreign Language Institute and who lived in building Number Four, had been taking lessons for a few months and he had encouraged me to go with him on several occasions. April Fool’s Day seemed an appropriate time to accept his invitation. His teacher was a young Cantonese woman whose beauty was almost luminous and who was just finishing a lesson with another foreigner when we arrived. Jim introduced me to Fred Berenson and then sat down with one of the two pibas in the room; the distractingly attractive teacher made it clear that she was ready to begin her next lesson and my appointment was for the following half hour so I excused myself, saying I’d walk around until it was time for my own lesson, and Berenson walked out with me.

  He was in his early thirties, a tall and articulate man from Massachusetts who was the first correspondent sent to Peking by the New York Times since Liberation in 1949. He had studied under Fairbank at Harvard and had worked for the Times in both Taiwan and Hong Kong before China finally opened up to the West again and officially allowed journalists to come in. His Chinese was fluent and when we stopped for a snack he did the ordering. I asked him how free he was to write about what he saw and how much of the country he was allowed to see.

  “Our accreditation here is very tenuous. If we write anything that’s even mildly critical of China, especially if it deals with the Four Modernizations or any of the top leaders, we usually get called on the carpet and we’re given a very unambiguous warning: ‘do it again and you are no longer welcome here.’ For a seriously critical item that appears in a Stateside magazine or newspaper the punishment is invariably the same: immediate loss of accreditation and a seat out on the next available flight.”

  “Do you have a local assistant who can advise you about staying ou
t of trouble when you’re doing an article?”

  “Oh yes, and the man we hired is excellent, but it’s still my responsibility to see that nothing truly unpleasant about the country is passed on to New York. At least nothing that will appear on the front page of the Sunday Times. As a matter of fact, my assistant is up there right now looking over a piece I’ve just done on the recent official approval of free markets here in the city for those who have produced their quota for the local brigade or their specific danwei and who want to sell any excess they have and keep the profits for themselves.”

  He pointed across the square and in the general direction of the Peking Hotel.

  “Do you have an office near the Beijing Fandian?”

  “A small one in the hotel itself – just a room, really, but the space is adequate. They like to keep the foreign press in one location, I imagine, so they can keep an eye on us. I can travel quite a bit, though, and speaking the language gives me more flexibility than some of my colleagues here. I always have someone with me when I travel, either my assistant or a China Travel Service person, but I can usually find ways of talking to people on my own and even if I can’t always use what I have in an article – and quite often I can’t – it’s all there for future reference.”

  We were walking through the Workers Park just off Chang An and some early buds were beginning to show on a few of the trees. I’m not sure why I thought of it then, just before I said goodbye and walked back to have my first piba lesson, but maybe it was his having mentioned that he had studied under Fairbank.

  “By the way, do you know anything about an American group called the Council for Exchanges Between China and America? I heard someone talking recently but I wasn’t familiar with it.”

  He was visibly surprised, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth as he answered.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. It’s a well-established organization of scholars, business people, and people in government and it funds research and arranges various exchanges between the U.S. and Taiwan and the mainland. In the last few years it’s received an enormous increase in the financial support it gets from Congress – substantially more this last fiscal year, I hear, than congress gave to the more well-known Fulbright program. Strange you should ask, though. Just last week they sent me some forms to fill out if I wanted to apply for a grant to do research on a book about China that I’ve been planning to write once this assignment is finished. I know some people on the Council and I had talked to them about the project – I guess they don’t know what to do with all their new-found money.”

  After I left Berenson I must not have been concentrating too well because my lesson was a musical disaster. Between the teacher and my meeting with the journalist I found it almost impossible to pluck a single bearable note. I went back for two more lessons in the weeks that followed, but eventually I faced the fact of my incompetence and gave it up. Talya, who was haunting the shops downtown almost daily, insisted that my surrender to what I considered the inevitable was the act of a foolish man.

  When Ma brought us our travel permits to visit Harbin for a few days I was less enthusiastic about going then Talya was. As the weather improved we had taken to riding our bicycles out to the Summer Palace in the late afternoons and I enjoyed walking along the lake and watching the water-birds or climbing the steep rocky steps to one of the temples in the hills. We had asked Ma to get us the permits and I knew he had gone to a great deal of trouble, had called upon all the quan-xi he could among his friends and relatives, in order to get them, but the thought of going up to China’s northernmost large city just as the days were beginning to get warmer in Peking was not an enticing one. Ma reserved space for us in a soft sleeper compartment and two days before the train left I received a call from Lynn Boaz; he’d heard that we were going to Harbin and asked if I would take a folder containing a series of blueprints up to a friend of his there. I told him I would as long as the transfer of material could be carried out in the same place. He agreed and the next day an embassy driver delivered the folder to me at the university.

  The train ride was uneventful and once we passed through Tienjin and turned north the landscape became monotonous, the flat and empty coastal plain giving way to the foothills only after many hours. Talya read about Harbin in Nagel’s pink-covered guide to China and quoted passages out loud to me whenever she came across something she found interesting; I half-listened, sipping my tea and staring out the window, thinking vaguely about a lecture I wanted to give when I got back and even more vaguely about Ted Sleeper and the Council. A meal in the dining car some eight coaches back was the usual fried noodles and vegetable dish and making our way back and forth gave us some welcome exercise. The loudspeaker above our compartment door was broken and we had the place to ourselves so we slept well and we both felt refreshed when the attendant woke us to say we would soon be coming into Harbin.

  The city was impressive in a stolidly Slavic way. A river and a large lake seemed to be hemmed in by large low buildings made of dark stone and onion-domed churches that appeared to be boarded-up and in need of serious repair. Harbin had had a large Russian population for a long time and its influence was evident in the availability of strong dark tea and a brand of gasp-inducing vodka as well as in the architecture; we settled for the tea, served with two large cubes of sugar, after we checked into our hotel near the still partially frozen lake and relaxed for a time in the lobby, a large high-ceilinged room with an ornate chandelier and several overstuffed couches and chairs arranged around low brass tables. The ambiance inside the hotel, an accommodation to which we were assigned by the ever-present China Travel Service, was very un-Chinese and when we eventually went out to explore the city on foot we noticed that the people this far north were much larger – many of them well over six feet – than those we were used to in Peking or had seen in the south. Fur hats and heavy padded overcoats reminded me of the winter we’d had in the capital, but I knew that here the temperature went down to thirty and forty below and the lake froze completely and the snow sometimes covered the doorways.

  Talya managed to find a very old section of narrow winding streets and small shops selling old furniture and used fur coats and various kinds of dinnerware and we spent several hours looking for old Canton dishes. In one shop a young woman spoke a little English and after Talya had decided on one of the distinctive (I thought of the word ‘outrageous’, but never voiced it) turquoise and pink and dark blue plates with the yellow birds and white clouds, the woman became very friendly, asking about America once she knew that’s where we were from and telling us about herself – sometimes in English and sometimes in Chinese, mixing the two just as we had been doing in an attempt to make ourselves understood – whenever we asked her specific questions. When I asked her if we would have any difficulty taking the dish out of the country when we were ready to go home in a few months, she looked quickly in the direction of the other saleswoman before she lowered her voice and answered me in English.

  “You must be careful if something older – have chop mark here,” she pointed, having turned the dish over, “and then must pay government to take away. This not pay – no chop mark – man who buy old bowl before, it have chop – he try to go away but not tell government about bowl – my husband work Beijing airport – a good job but very far – tell me man in prison now, stay many years. Sorry – my English bad.”

  “No, your English is fine,” I said, “it is okay. Can you tell me, was the man Chinese or was he a foreigner, chungwo or weigwo?” I kept my voice as low as hers in case she was in any danger of losing face in the eyes of her co-worker as a result of her talking so frankly to a foreigner.

  “He was foreigner, like you.”

  We thanked her, Talya paid, and as we stepped into the street an icy wind off the lake made us turn up the collars of our coats. The sun was still out and it was too early for dinner, but it was now too cold to sightsee or shop co
mfortably so we walked back toward the hotel.

  “Do you really think they’d put a foreigner away in one of their own prisons for something like that?” Talya asked after a while. “Wouldn’t they just confiscate the goods and kick him out of the country?”

  “I don’t know. Guess a lot of it depends on what country he’s from, what kind of relations the two countries have at the time, and how serious the Chinese think his attempted deception was. Sounds as if the guy was trying to sneak an antique out of the country – pretty stiff punishment if that’s what it was.”

  “Mrs. Chu told me once that they don’t have very many lawyers here and that if you’re arrested or even just brought in for questioning it’s assumed that you’re guilty. Trials are really only a formality, it seems; most people who get sent to prison never see a courtroom and those who do are usually there only to find out how long a sentence they’re going to get. Part of the Mandarin legacy, maybe, a part the present regime finds it convenient to quietly keep; guilty unless proven innocent and the decision made at the top. I think we’d better cross only on the green and make sure we don’t litter – this is obviously no place to play fast and loose with the local fuzz.”

  After lunch the next day Talya went off in search of a museum Ma had told her about. I had had enough walking that morning and had just settled down in a comfortable chair in the lobby to work on some lecture notes when a tall grey-haired man took the chair nearest mine, directly in my line of sight. There was nobody else in our immediate area; a young girl and a woman I had seen in the dining room were reading sections of a German newspaper on a couch near the hotel entrance, but otherwise the lobby was empty. It took me a few seconds to place him and then I waited. When he smiled I noticed that his teeth were very even and very white, whiter, I thought, than they had any right to be at his age. His accent was British and his voice was pleasant and well-modulated, the kind of voice that might have read the news for the BBC World Service.

  “I was told to contact you at your hotel and to collect the blueprints from you here as well, as I believe you stipulated. Unless it is inconvenient for you, may I suggest that we conduct the transaction in your rooms before your wife returns?”

  I didn’t respond immediately and he seemed in no hurry to get up. He watched me for a minute or two and then showed me his perfect teeth again.

  “A fen for your thoughts, sir, although at today’s rate of exchange it would be worth substantially less than a penny.”

  “I was wondering about several things: whether Anglo-American cooperation has really been reinstituted even though there are still a few people around who must remember the Philby mess; whether you learned the language in Shanghai or in some school in England – or maybe California; whether you stay at the Peace Hotel regularly or were just visiting someone on the fifth floor that night; whether you hang around with people who have Boston accents.”

  He sat very still, no smile now, looking at me intently, as if weighing the advisability of answering me at all. It had been a long time since I’d felt that old inability to breathe freely that signaled genuine fear. He may have been past sixty but he looked capable of moving very fast for a big man and if I’d really gone too far with him I saw no way of my getting out of the overstuffed chair in what would have to be record time.

  When he finally spoke his voice was flat, neither angry nor friendly.

  “Not that you have any legitimate need to know, but I’ll answer your questions anyway; yes, some cooperation has been resumed, at least in this part of the world; I took a First in Oriental Languages at Cambridge, a long time ago; I was just visiting that night – an unfortunate cock-up of assignments, I’m afraid; and yes, I do know someone who has a Boston accent. Shall we go to your rooms now?”

  Upstairs I took the folder out of my briefcase and handed it to him. He sat on one of the two beds and looked carefully at each of the blueprints before returning them all to the folder. He seemed to relax a little.

  “Do you know what these are?” He asked, putting his brown attaché case up on the bed and placing the material in it. He closed the case and set both combination locks before looking up at me.

  “No, not exactly, but those notations are in Russian so I assume that whatever it is it's probably located somewhere in Russia.”

  “Vladivostock, over the border and then east of here. I don’t anticipate the journey with a great deal of enthusiasm. The buggers who thought this one up have done themselves right proud. Steal the bloody things and then get someone to risk life and limb to put them back before they’re missed. I contemplate my retirement with ever-increasing frequency these days.”

  He stood up to leave, attaché case in hand.

  “The name is Llewellyn. We might have a pint or two together someday, if ever there’s enough time.”

  He closed the door quietly behind him. I heard the elevator doors open and then close and then all was silence.