A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  You, Zhaohu, stopped suddenly in your tracks. Your eyes turned to the girl carrying the laundry basket. For a long time, you stood motionless.

  I knew who you were thinking of, but I could not speak that name. That name would make the sky weep and the earth groan.

  From then on, I had a companion for my annual trip to Yuehu. All these years since, Liu Zhaohu and I have been waiting for you, Ian Ferguson.

  I didn’t expect such longevity from you. Before we knew it, you had kept us waiting fifty-two years.

  For the first three decades, Zhaohu and I remained patient. We suspected you were working, paying off your home. Perhaps you retired and were taking your wife on a cruise to places you had heard about but never seen. You wanted to make up to her all you owed her in this life. Perhaps your grandchildren were still small, and you wanted to make an impression in their childhood from which they could remember their grandpa. In short, we speculated and wove together various narratives to explain your absence.

  By the time the fortieth year came around, our patience had worn thin. A man in his eighties would no longer have a mortgage to pay, and his children would no longer need him. If a man of eighty died, his wife—if she were even still around—wouldn’t have anything to regret. That is the season when nature’s leaves are dying and its fruits fall. It’s a good time for a person to die. Were you so reluctant to leave the world of the living that you had forgotten our agreement?

  And yet, you didn’t appear.

  By the time we were in the fiftieth year, we had not only lost our patience, but there was anger creeping in as well.

  We too had gone through the war, but we had received none of life’s favors. We were young when we departed, and you were leisurely wandering around, outside nature’s laws, still not returning even at this late date. Why? What gave you the right? You were in your nineties, a rancid old man whose breath exuded decadence. Shouldn’t you relinquish the ground beneath your feet to younger people who couldn’t find a footing? You could die. You could have done so long ago.

  You must have heard our wrath, mine and Liu Zhaohu’s. After waiting fifty-two years, today you finally made your way here.

  Ian Ferguson: Comrades, Khakis, an Uninvited Guest, and All Sorts of Things

  Here I am, almost without delay. If you went to that cemetery on the outskirts of Detroit, you’d find the flowers on my grave have barely faded.

  You probably noticed I’m wearing the plain khakis we wore in camp. In fact, I still have the navy uniform I had tailor-made for me in Shanghai, packed in my suitcase and still in good condition. It was the only uniform I had in China. The tailors in Shanghai probably never imagined victory would bring them such lasting success. From the day we got to China, we stopped wearing our military uniforms. Miles ordered that we only wear plain khakis, with no military hat and no insignia to identify service or rank. It made it easier to avoid formalities when we ran into our commanding officers. But more importantly, if we fell into Japanese hands, they wouldn’t be able to learn anything about us from our clothing.

  In the fall of 1945, when we finally left the remote village of Yuehu for Shanghai, everyone was full of anticipation. We had a saying: “Shanghai is Shanghai. Shanghai is not China.” Shanghai had visible influences from around the world. It hardly seemed like part of China anymore. In a city like that, no one could afford to look disheveled. We needed sharp new suits, and we had to stay on our toes. The first thing we did when we got there was ask the hotel concierge about a well-respected tailor, then we had him rustle up some blue sailor uniforms, each with a neck scarf, white cuffs, flared legs, and on the sleeve, a golden eagle with crossed gun barrels and three bright-red chevrons under its claws, the emblem of a gunner’s mate first class. It was finally time for us to take the stage and make sure the attention of those fashionable women in rickshaws along the Bund would not forever belong exclusively to the army and air force.

  That navy uniform made in Shanghai has always accompanied me on my travels. Though its color faded, the blue was still pure, and the weave remained as strong as a copper plate. After seventy years, its quality did credit to the workmanship of the tailor.

  But I left the world in my plain khakis, according to the detailed instructions I’d left in my will for the funeral home. Alive, a person might wear hundreds or thousands of outfits, but dead he can only wear one. I picked this unremarkable tan as my shroud because it reminded me of equality and dignity.

  I know I’ve kept you waiting, but I’m here now, and I lost no time coming. Please don’t greet me with those looks, friends—no, comrades.

  I was ninety-four when I died. I lived too long, and inevitably made some new friends. Some were classmates, some were colleagues, and some I knew because we shared interests. We’ve attended each other’s weddings, children’s christenings, anniversary celebrations, and funerals. We’ve been godparents to one another’s children. We’ve trusted our life secrets and our ups and downs to one another, but never our actual lives. So they are only my friends, not my comrades.

  I guard this word “comrade” like an Asian girl guards her chastity, not giving it easily to others.

  We were strangers before the war, and after the war, I barely contacted you. I once sent a letter to the US address Pastor Billy left me, but it was returned after a few months. I didn’t understand why until today. Five years later, at an annual meeting of the American instructors, we remembered old times in Yuehu, talking of Buffalo, Snot, and Liu Zhaohu. When I got back to the hotel that night, I was a little emotional. I couldn’t help writing a letter to Liu Zhaohu. I thought it would probably just sink into the sea, because the country was going through a major transformation. After that, I didn’t try to contact either of you, and I didn’t get news about either of you for the rest of my life.

  Although our time together was short, I still call you my comrades.

  I was an instructor back then. Liu Zhaohu, you were a student in my class. According to your culture’s tradition of giving teachers great respect, there was a clear hierarchy that separated us. Even so, out on assignment, all hierarchies were meaningless, because our lives hung on the same fragile rope. You held one end of it, and I held the other. Your loss was my loss, and mine, yours. We could live together, or we could die together at any moment. So we always had to look out for each other.

  I remember that night march. We walked on a mountain road so dark, we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. Fearing an ambush, we couldn’t smoke, and we had to be silent. When you tapped me lightly on the shoulder, I knew I was standing on the edge of danger. This was your native land, your mountain road, and you knew secrets about the terrain that I didn’t. One coded signal from you saved my life. Had I taken another step, I would’ve fallen into the abyss and shattered every bone in my body. I put my life in your hands, an unparalleled trust. That’s why you are my comrades, and they aren’t.

  Another time, we got reliable intel on a convoy of Japanese transporting military supplies. According to the source, it would cross the train tracks two nights later, just a little over fifty-five miles from our position. We marched hard to reach it in time and set up an ambush. The Japanese transport had seen plenty of ambushes and knew how to deal with them. They put an empty car at the front, in case of attack, while the cars at the rear contained the actual cargo. They’d stretched their front lines too far, and the supply lines couldn’t keep up.

  In fact, our luck wasn’t much better than theirs. After several attempts, we still hadn’t managed to hit the target. We even lost a few Chinese trainees. Instead of sending men to ambush them, we decided to use a new explosive. The first time we tested this new weapon, it was you who controlled it, Liu Zhaohu. You held the detonator, waiting for me to calculate the timing and distance of the detonation. My eye was crucial, not just in figuring whether the target could be hit but also whether the person detonating the device could withdraw safely. It was a special skill of mine, as a first-class America
n armorer.

  When I first became your instructor, no one was interested in remote or timed explosives. You all preferred close-range weapons, like grenades. You wanted to see the immediate effects of bodies blown to pieces. A victory that you hadn’t seen with your own eyes couldn’t be a real victory, just as a life that didn’t dare to risk everything couldn’t be called a life. I was like a chisel, patiently chipping away, an inch at a time, at your stubborn way of thinking. I told you that if a specially trained soldier was sacrificed, it was a huge waste of manpower and material resources. Only by staying alive could you destroy the enemy, so any action plan that didn’t include safe evacuation wasn’t worth trying. You dismissed my advice and made me out to be a coward, afraid to die. My view was eventually accepted, but that was later, after you’d tasted the sweetness of large-scale lethality that such special technology held.

  That day we tested it, Liu Zhaohu, you squatted beside me, waiting on my eye. You put your life in my hands without reservation, because I was your comrade.

  And Pastor Billy, even though you didn’t wear our tan uniform, and though you didn’t see action with us, I still call you comrade. We called you Basketball Billy and Pastor Billy, but you didn’t know we had another nickname for you: Crazy Billy. Because you weren’t the sort of pastor we were used to, the kind who was all fire and brimstone and the wrath of God at the drop of a hat. You wore a tunic like the locals and rode a dilapidated old bicycle, sweeping back and forth between your church and camp. Afraid the hem would catch in the bike’s wheel, you pulled up the end and tucked it into your waistband while you rode. Your hair, which had already begun to thin, looked like a dandelion in full bloom, blown by the wind. Your bike didn’t have hand brakes, so you had to pedal backward to stop. That was how you traveled the mountain road, switching between pedaling forward and backward. You were a pastor and also practiced medicine, so all day all sorts of people came in and out of your church, including teachers, butchers, tea farmers, weavers, and even tramps. In your circle of acquaintances, there could’ve been someone whose wife’s brother was a cook at a big restaurant in the county town frequented by members of various secret societies and who knows how many other gangsters and tobacco dealers. Maybe there was also somebody’s aunt, a cook for a certain Japanese defense officer, who might inadvertently overhear a few words of a conversation while carrying in a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. And maybe there was someone whose son studied at a school in the city, and his roommate was the son of an officer in the puppet government who bragged incessantly. Your nose was as sharp as a dog’s and your tongue as sleek as a snake’s. You put both to use in picking up all sorts of information from these people, then pedaling forward and backward to bring it to our intelligence officers. This often got our timed explosives in the right place at the right time.

  Old Miles (though he was only in his forties then) said over and over that our safety depended on our relationship with the locals. “If he has the trust and protection of the Chinese people, a person can move through the place as he pleases.” This was the experience he summed up for us. As an American who’d lived here more than ten years, you warned us that Americans must not only avoid offending locals but also learn to blend in with them. You taught us to wear Chinese tunics, strap our trouser legs, and put sandals on over our socks (we weren’t used to going around barefoot). You said that, on average, we were much taller than the Chinese people, so if we wanted to be unobtrusive, we had to learn to walk with an appropriate posture. What most gave us away was our gait and the way we sat. You repeatedly told us that we should keep the center of gravity low and our legs always bent. You told us to carry baskets on poles, like the locals did, and not use rice, sweet potatoes, or mung beans to hide what we carried, since these were too heavy and the weight of a full basket would be too much while a half-empty basket would raise suspicion. The best thing for us to carry were cowpeas. Once they were dried, cowpeas were light and could fill a whole basket, leaving plenty of room. This made them ideal for hiding small weapons, and it was easy to get the weapons out of them. You even gave us Atabrine to take, which cured malaria and would turn our skin a bit yellow, closer to that of the local people. Your suggestion annoyed our resident medical officer, but a few cups of rice wine calmed him down, and you finally got him to support your idea.

  You knew we were homesick. One day, you heard us cursing the pork and luffa rice made by the kitchen without variation, so you taught our cook to turn his wood plane to the other side and shave potatoes with it. With a little vegetable oil, he made fried potato chips that almost tasted like our mothers’ home cooking. There was always a wooden box slung over your bike’s handlebars. We called it the treasure chest, because crazy objects popped out of it all the time. A thick prayer book was probably the only item a pastor should possess, but you also produced things like emergency medication, a pack of Camels, a tattered copy of Time magazine, a tin of chocolate toffee, a bottle of Korbel brandy, and a bag of Colombian instant coffee. To thank you for your free diagnosis and treatment, your variety of friends managed to get rare American items on the black market, things we could only get with great difficulty and danger through the Hump. You had it all, but you never hoarded it. As soon as you took it with your left hand, your right hand was passing it along to us. In your treasure chest, you sometimes hid a few packs of condoms, since you’d occasionally seen women coming in and out of our dorm. You worried we couldn’t stand the isolation and loneliness of Yuehu and would defy orders and head into town on our own, looking for some fun. If we got into trouble there, it could cost us our lives. The Japanese offered a reward for any American soldier participating in covert missions. Instead of losing our lives that way, you figured you might as well let us stay in our little nest, committing minor sins that God could forgive later. Every Sunday, when you saw us dressed up and sitting in church to pray, you smiled like a child. If someone missed a Sunday, you just shook your head and clicked your tongue.

  You troubled yourself over our lives and souls every day, so even though you never saw the battlefield with us, you’re my comrade, and they aren’t.

  I know you’ve been waiting for me for fifty-two years. No—for Pastor Billy, it’s been seventy. I understand your impatience, even anger. But life and death aren’t in our control. Just as you prayed to God to give you a few more years, Pastor Billy, I repeatedly prayed he would give me a quick death. When I turned seventy-two, and my wife left this world, she took with her my passion for life. At eighty-four, I fell in the bathroom and was taken to the veterans hospital in Detroit. I had a brain hemorrhage, paralysis, and aphasia, but no memory loss. I never again left the hospital. From my bed, I asked God again and again, “Why keep my body imprisoned here on death row, but let my brain stay alert?” But fate’s detonator wasn’t in my hands, and I couldn’t determine when it would go off. Just as fate punished you with an early death, it taunted me with mere survival, leaving me bedridden for another ten years.

  Actually, I could have lived even longer. As my muscles no longer listened to my brain, my body’s energy consumption was compressed into the smallest possible space, like an oil lamp with its wick turned very low, which, though it is nearly dark, burns on for a long time.

  That is, I could have gone on living—if it weren’t for that uninvited guest.

  One day, when I’d been at the veterans hospital for ten years, the nurse told me there was a woman named Catherine Yao there who wanted to see me. I scoured the list of relatives and friends I could still remember. Her name wasn’t there. Both my sons had passed on before me, and my daughter had moved to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil with her husband fifteen years earlier. When you live to be nearly a century old, your greatest blessing is that you’ve attended the funeral of nearly everyone you know. Your greatest sorrow is that they can’t repay the respect you’ve shown them. They won’t, or rather can’t, come to your funeral. They not only won’t be at your funeral but also won’t visit you. I had almost no visitors
in my ward during those years, aside from my social worker. After a long time in speech therapy, my ability to speak had been partially restored, but I had few people to talk to. Oh, I wished to exchange the regained freedom from my tongue for my body. A ninety-four-year-old man has far fewer opportunities to use his tongue than his hands or his feet. So on that particular day, I didn’t hesitate to agree to see this woman named Catherine. I was lonely, and I wanted to talk to someone from the outside world, even if she was a stranger.

  It was a damp day near the end of July and unseasonably cold. Raindrops drew line after line of tears on my windowpane, making the dahlias outside as blurred as a Monet. She walked in and stood next to my bed, silently looking at my thin face collapsed against my pillow. She wore an exquisite cloth hat and an equally exquisite windbreaker. I couldn’t tell her age from her features, but the gray curly hair slipping out from under the brim of her hat and her slightly stooped shoulders in the windbreaker made me think she stood somewhere in the hazy zone between middle and old age.

  No matter how much she’d changed, I recognized her immediately, even though it was a full twenty-three years since the winter I’d chased her down the street in front of my house. At that time, she wasn’t called Catherine. Maybe Catherine was the name she’d taken to adapt to the environment. During those twenty-three years, there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t regret my actions that day. I felt my wife’s death and my illness were God’s enduring punishment. During those twenty-three years, I’d never stopped looking for her. I sent a notice to the missing persons column in the newspaper and broadcasted requests for information about her on the radio. I contacted old comrades in Naval Group China and even relevant Chinese government departments inquiring after her whereabouts, but it was all useless. She seemed to have completely vanished from the world.