A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  “That was when it dawned on me that even in the animal world, strength doesn’t guarantee victory. Strength and dexterity can each be used to restrain the other.”

  I didn’t know what it was you wanted to say, but I was sure you weren’t really talking about monkeys or bananas. This was just your lead into another topic. I was vaguely aware that the monkeys and the banana had something to do with me. But you immediately changed the subject.

  “Six-three-five, did you study mathematics at school? I’ve heard that most middle schools in China only teach humanities.”

  I said, “The school I went to was a local mission school, and it taught both Chinese and European subjects. We had math class and a basic science class.”

  I didn’t tell you why my father would spend money for me to study. Of course, for him, it wasn’t so that I could learn to speak a foreign language or master geometry and algebraic formulas. For him, it was enough for me to understand the number of credits and debits in an account. He also didn’t care if I could understand the theory of electrical generation. He just didn’t want me to inherit his craft and become a tea plantation master. He sent me to the middle school in the county seat so that I could enjoy the gentle life the village scribe Yang Deshun had, helping to write all the documents anyone in our village needed. My father said Yang Deshun hadn’t spent a single day behind a plow under the hot sun, yet he had never failed to have wine in his cup and meat in his bowl. He noticed that Yang Deshun was getting old and his hands were starting to tremble as he wrote. When I graduated and came home, I would be just in time to take over the role from him.

  You asked, “How were your grades in math?”

  I hesitated, then said, “In terms of test results, top three in every subject.”

  “In fighting, the time it takes to complete a kick or a punch is proportionate to one’s height and weight. For someone with a good understanding of math, this is not hard to understand, right?” you asked.

  I nodded.

  “That is to say, when someone thirty or fifty percent stronger than you in terms of height and weight is throwing punches or kicking, a person of your height and weight may be able to complete three strikes in the same amount of time,” you said. Then you asked, “Which part of the upper body do you think you can strike at the shortest distance and with the greatest speed?”

  I closed my eyes and considered, then asked, “Is it the elbow?”

  “And what about the lower body?”

  I followed the same train of thought down several inches and said the knee.

  You told me to keep my eyes closed, then said, “Imagine this: Where is the other person’s blind spot when fighting?”

  I said, “Behind him.”

  You went on, “And what other spots are close to the blind spot?”

  I said, “The sides.”

  You chuckled and said, “You’re a good student.”

  You told me to open my eyes and stare at you without blinking. You took out your stopwatch and timed me.

  “Fifty-eight seconds. That’s good. The expression of the eyes is a point often overlooked when fighting. How long the eyes can stay open is limited by the needs of the body, but the expression in one’s eyes has nothing to do with height or weight. It comes from the mind. When you fight, your eyes must hold your opponent like an iron vise. Your expression is especially important. A famous military scientist once said that psychology is a secret weapon in modern warfare that does not consume huge expenses. There’s some logic to this.

  “From today on, I want you to exercise strength in three places: elbows, knees, and eyes.”

  That day, you trained me to fight in the clearing in the woods until it was dark. We did the same over the next few days as well. I always thought you did this because I was smaller than the other trainees, so you wanted to give me some tips before combat classes began. Later, I realized your true intentions after I won the most spectacular fight in the history of the training camp. That is, of course, had the training camp even been worthy of a note in history.

  Ian Ferguson: A Game I Allegedly Fixed

  When I announced the groups for combat class that day, I saw a small spark in your eyes, Liu Zhaohu, but it disappeared so fast I wondered if I’d imagined it. I suspected you had fire hidden in you. On the firing range a few days before, when you were aiming the Colt pistol, I saw something close to fire in your furrowed brows and the tightened corners of your mouth. Most of the time you wrapped yourself up, as if in armor, sealing off the exit of your emotions. I didn’t know what was putting so much pressure on you, but I guessed that your captain was part of the problem. My grouping method was simple, and no one could take issue with it. I assigned each pair of adjacent desks to one training group. Accordingly, you and your captain were in the same group. The four students who sat at the two desks became partners on a rotating basis, meaning that 33.333333 percent of the time, you would practice with your captain. Considering your good results in math, I kept the decimal to six digits. As for the small strand of selfish reason hidden in this impeccable arrangement, it was known only to you, me, and God.

  I’d had an earful from Buffalo about how your captain treated you. He wasn’t an eyewitness himself, and by the time the story reached him, it had passed through many hands. The direct source was Number 520, who you called Snot. A reckless boy like him, unable to control either his nose or his mouth, would someday land in deep trouble because of his running tongue and constipated brain. Snot and your cook came from the same village and had been neighbors. The cook always gave his former neighbor an extra half bowl of porridge and a few extra radishes. In return, Snot brought all the salacious happenings to the cook’s ears. Of course, he always told the cook not to tell anyone else, since everything in the training camp was classified military information in the strictest sense. But the cook couldn’t help but tell his wife, who was Pastor Billy’s cook and laundry woman. It’s difficult for people sharing a bed to keep secrets from one another, but they never dreamed their pillow talk would one day leak out and rewrite the lives of others. Buffalo was the messenger between the American instructors and Pastor Billy. He ran back and forth between the church and our dorms several times a day. Now, understand, the rumors passed through this circuitous route before reaching me. I knew that each time a story was filtered through a new tongue, it would be tainted with new colors and impurities, resulting in a variety of distortions. Buffalo’s ears were always open wide, and they collected all sorts of rumors all day long. I didn’t just believe everything he told me, of course, but the way the captain punished you in the soft explosives class that day verified those rumors for me.

  From your first day in camp, you were always neat and tidy, with your cap badge and belt buckle directly along your body’s central axis. When I trained you to aim and shoot, I noticed your nails were trimmed cleanly. Sorry, but as a munition and weapons technician, I have a near-morbid precision when it comes to details. So I knew that the collar button incident that day was a rare oversight. I could understand that a team like yours needed extremely strict discipline, and even accidental negligence had to be punished. What I didn’t understand was the form of punishment. You could’ve been given extra classroom cleaning duties outside class or extra night guard duty or even lost your free time on Sunday afternoon. But your captain chose to humiliate you in public. It was as if a child had made a small mistake, and his parents could give them a time out but instead chose to slap their face. I understand that in your country honor is sometimes as important as one’s life. The way he chose to shame you obviously carried personal feeling behind it. I wanted to say something on your behalf, but I refrained. I couldn’t interfere with your internal affairs. Just as you had to obey your commanding officers, I had to obey my superior, Commander Miles of Naval Group China. The regulations were heavy shackles, and I couldn’t extend a helping hand to you with them weighing me down. But even if I had helped that time, I couldn’t have helped the next. God on
ly knew how many more such occasions there would be. The only person you could rely on was yourself. You had to exert your own strength to save yourself.

  At the firing range, you’d proven your strength with your results. But that was only your prowess with weapons. A weapon was nothing but a tool, independent from your body, and results were nothing but a piece of paper with some numbers that proved nothing about your ability to fight when deprived of that tool. The only means of besting your captain completely was to take him on barehanded. So I thought I’d give you some private lessons. In fact, I wasn’t entirely biased toward you. The tricks I showed you I also taught in class, but there they were generalized for everyone, but in private, I could tailor them to your physique.

  In your country, renowned for martial arts, it was actually a little absurd for a foreigner like me to teach you hand-to-hand combat techniques. In your words, it was like “showing off in the presence of an expert.” Our original idea was to add some Western boxing skills to the foundation of Asian martial arts in hope of confusing the Japanese, who had similar martial arts traditions. You weren’t a regular army unit, but a band of guerrillas with special weapons and skills. You weren’t intended for phalanx battles, but to covertly disrupt operations in enemy-occupied territory and interrupt the supply lines of the Japanese. The fighting skills were to keep you safe and help you escape if you were captured or in a close-combat situation. Their purpose was to defend and escape, not to attack. However, when I trained you in private, individualized sessions, I enhanced the attack part. So, when you later called me the behind-the-scenes mastermind of that sensational fight, it wasn’t completely without reason.

  Several times during lunch, I saw you sneak into the woods and practice hitting your elbows and knees against a tree trunk. You had to wrap them with thick strips of cloth, which showed your dedication. I also saw you stare at a hole in the tree, the heat in your eyes seeming to burn the hole even deeper, and I knew you were practicing what I taught you. You were smart, but there were plenty of people in the world who were smarter than you, and cleverness is sometimes the biggest obstacle. Fortunately, you were also diligent and persistent. Diligence clips the wings of cleverness, allowing it to stay firmly on the ground. Persistence grinds away the sharp edges of cleverness, not allowing it to take shortcuts through things. Cleverness thus clipped can more fully penetrate the nature of things. With your cleverness, diligence, and persistence, I had some measure of confidence in you, but an almost equal amount of anxiety. Your build was very different from your captain’s. If I put you two on a scale, I would’ve had to add a few stones on your side to make it balance. Your initial performance only increased my worries.

  During our initial fighting lessons, you didn’t manage to defeat your opponent in any of the sessions. Not just the captain, but the other two members of your group too. Of course, it wasn’t an easy victory for them, but no matter how thrilling and intricate the process, what really mattered was the final result. You were defeated so often that I became bored with the fights, because I already knew the outcome before you started. There was no suspense. Your other opponents stopped immediately once they’d won, but the captain didn’t. He took a bullfight approach to a cockfight, and knocking you down to the ground was only the first step in a prolonged defeat. Once, when you’d fallen to the ground, he gave you one last fierce kick and you bit off a piece of your lip, making it swell like a huge red grape. Another time he boxed you into a corner. Even after you stopped resisting, he added a punch to your face. The blood that ran from your nose nearly drenched a towel.

  I was disappointed in you. If you couldn’t win in any of the training fights, how could you win a real one? If every brick had cracks, how could I build a solid wall with them? I began to doubt myself. Were the alertness and keenness you showed when you were alone with me only good for dealing with imaginary enemies? I never imagined that you were using these defeats to fool your opponent into believing that the opening drum was the battle itself. You laid your every loss at the captain’s feet, one after the other. By the time the fight truly began, his feet were miles off the ground, and he couldn’t find his footing.

  The comprehensive evaluation at the end of training was the real beginning of your fight. Each student had to have two freestyle fights against an opponent. Another group of students was having target practice on the activity field, so we held the fights in the open space in front of your dorms. The venue was small, and the students made a circle three rows deep around the arena to observe. The innermost row sat, the next squatted, and the outer row stood. A few shorter students climbed the surrounding trees and sat on branches. Midsummer had passed, but the afternoon sun was still strong, and a thin, shimmering heat rose from the sandy ground. There was the sort of excitement that could only be generated by fighting with bare hands, for which no weapon could substitute. I almost decided to randomly assign opponents, afraid you were going to be badly hurt. But I didn’t. I wasn’t your parent, bodyguard, or nanny, and I couldn’t protect you forever. You were a soldier, after all, and you’d have to face countless unexpected dangers in battle. I couldn’t choose your enemy for you. Still, when it was your turn to fight, my chest was tight. You took your shirt off, and I saw your bare torso for the first time. There were bandages on your arms, wrists, and back, and you were very skinny.

  It was strange. Your thin body seemed like a blade as you entered the arena, slicing through the air, charged and instantly changing the atmosphere. I couldn’t explain the phenomenon. Some decades later, someone finally found a name for it: aura. Of course, your aura that day wasn’t from your muscles, since you didn’t really have any. Nor did it come from your bones or the bandages. It was your eyes that made the difference that day. Like the eyes of a bitch whose pups have been taken away, your eyes had a faint blue gleam in them. Like a fire, but without heat. Whatever your gaze fell on turned to ice, and whoever saw that light couldn’t help but shudder. As you stepped onto the field, you met and held the captain’s eyes with this light. He was stunned.

  Without missing a beat, you immediately attacked, not giving him a chance to overcome his surprise. You kept your center of gravity very low, half squatting, with most of your mass below the level of his arm. Your radius of movement was very small, making you look like a half-curled ball. Suddenly a blade shot out from that ball. It was your elbow. It was like a hatchet cutting into his side. Not expecting you to attack from this angle, he staggered a bit. But he was no coward, after all. He immediately backhanded and grabbed at your torso. If you’d been wearing a shirt, you might have exchanged several blows with him. But your body was as slippery as a mudfish, and his hands grasped in the air in a useless, almost funny, manner. In the end, he couldn’t regain his balance and came crashing to the ground.

  The crowd exclaimed. It happened so quickly, they’d hardly had a chance to see what tricks you had used. The captain stood up and waved his hand angrily at me. The interpreter said he was protesting, claiming you hadn’t followed the steps taught in class. I shrugged and said, “Sorry. The Japanese won’t fight by the rules either.” He had no choice but to swallow his anger and prepare for the next round.

  This time, he estimated your abilities anew. Like me, he began to see through your earlier tricks. From several paces away, I could see the deep breaths he took to gain control of his strength. The veins in his temples bulged, crawling along his neck down to his chest. His feet were planted wide, the soles of his feet secured like the foundation of a tower. You’d already wounded his pride, and he unconsciously took a defensive stance. You were like a flea flitting around his body, searching for a place to bite, but he closed every pore, his body completely tight, without any trace of a crack. The standoff lasted a long time. You kept attacking, and he kept fending you off. It seemed neither of you would get the advantage. And you were fading, without either the strength or the endurance of your opponent. He was waiting for the fury of your storm to run out of energy. I started to wor
ry again, thinking you were being lured into his trap. As your responses slowed, your moves started to appear sluggish.

  But we had misjudged again. This was just a new round of smoke. You were testing the waters with a few shots that didn’t take much effort, saving yourself for a massive blow. Suddenly, your legs were off the ground, and you scurried onto his back like a monkey. He’d made a tactical error. He was too defensive, his muscles held too tightly, and it took him too long to turn around. You were counting on this, and your earlier movements were just meant to increase his tension, winding the coil of his body tighter and tighter. Fooled, he couldn’t turn in time. You landed your heel like a hammer on the back of his knees, and the tower’s foundation began to shake. Though he didn’t fall, his center of gravity was off-kilter. You didn’t give him a chance to breathe, slamming a punch into his right shoulder. Your fist smashed into him like he was a ripe watermelon, and we heard a dull thud. His balance was destroyed. You dropped from his back as he fell. His right side hit the ground first. On impact, I heard him grunt, then his entire body went as limp as an empty sack. You walked over. I thought you were going to help him up, but you sat down on his back and wiped the sweat off your forehead with the back of your hand.

  “Shirt. Shoes,” you said to the onlookers.

  Someone grabbed the shirt and sandals you’d hung on a branch and tossed them to you. You put on your tan uniform, which already looked old from washing, and fastened each button one at a time. You took your sandals, shook the dust from them, and put them on. Then, you stood up and slowly walked away. The onlookers parted, creating a path for you. No one spoke. As you passed, everyone patted you on the shoulder. When you walked past me, I saw something flash. After a moment, I realized it was your teeth. They were dazzling white, exposed in the wide slit between your lips. I’d never seen you smile like you did in that moment, and it felt unfamiliar. After a while, the captain sat up, and I saw why he’d lain there so long. His right shoulder had been dislocated when he hit the ground, and his right arm hung awkwardly, like a sun-dried loofah. A few soldiers went over to help him, but he pushed them away.