The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (36 page)

“They've vanished!”

The Broken Shoe explained: “They are wandering ghosts. We may not be able to see them now, but they may be following us. If you hear someone calling your name behind you, don't turn your head or look over your shoulder. If you do, you will blow out the little lanterns hanging on your ears.”

“What?” I asked in perplexed anxiety.

“They are invisible, but those lanterns protect you from ghosts at night. Don't you know that? You don't? Good Heavens! Perhaps your lights have already been blown
out. Did you hear someone calling you when you came to my place?” she asked earnestly, in a shaky voice. “You didn't? Thank God! All right, now you walk close behind me, so your two lanterns will shine on the ghosts and frighten them away.”

“What about your invisible lanterns?”

“I don't have any,” she replied in a barely audible voice. “I am the lowest of the low. I have nothing either in this world or the next.” She bit her lip. “You will protect me from behind. I will walk in front of you and keep the wind off you. You are shivering? Hold on to me if you feel yourself falling.”

And thus we entered the village, the Broken Shoe leading me as a shepherd leads a wandering sheep through the storm.

When Xiu-ying told the other activists next day about Tu's nocturnal doings, they were furious. Following my lead, others spoke out and soon there was more than enough evidence to show that Tu was far from being a model Party member, particularly when it came to women.

When the militia hauled Tu in, we faced him with the Broken Shoe's statement.

“Did you hope I would just disappear without a trace?” I shouted.

Tu's face turned ashen and his lips worked silently, but he blustered, “If you believe what the Broken Shoe tells you, you can round up half the men in the village. She has a story for every one of them.”

The young activists no longer bothered to conceal their animosity. Tu had lorded it over them, and now they gave vent to their anger. “Tell the truth,” they shouted at him. “Who else have you slept with? What were you plotting with Chi?”

While they were badgering him, Xiu-ying took me aside and whispered, “If we don't put more pressure on Tu and Chi, they won't budge. Words won't move them.”

“I don't want them beaten.” My nerves were stretched
to the limit, but I knew we dared go only so far to get a confession out of them.

“We won't beat them. But how about throwing a little cold water over Chi just as he used to do to his farmhands?” the tousle-headed young militiaman urged.

“The weather is cold and it's still colder outside when the wind blows. I wouldn't shed a tear if he dropped dead somewhere else but I don't want him to get pneumonia and die in our hands.” I surprised myself with these words; it was as if the spirit of brutality which I myself had condemned had entered my soul and was taking me over.

“If you don't want to douse him with water, then hang him up to a beam like he used to hang others. That way he won't get injured or die.” The young militiaman would not relent.

I sat up straight as a judge and said, “Xiu-ying, you are my witness. I have tried to reason with Tu and Chi and persuade them to surrender to the law, but they are incorrigible,” and I organized a full interrogation, first in Chi's “cell” and then in Tu's.

We took turns questioning the two prisoners until after midnight. We gave them no rest, no time to catch their breath, no chance to collude and synchronize their stories.

Tu was a man of few words. His answers were never more than a yes or a no, or simply silence. But Chi skillfully debated with us.

“How long have you known Tu?” I asked him.

“More than ten years. He was my farmhand.”

“Was he a loyal one?”

“He was good at his job.”

“Then how come you let him go to work with Shen?”

“He is a grownup, a mature man. I had and have no control over him.”

“Who asked you whether you had or have any control over him?” I asked quickly.

“Nobody.”

“Then you were answering your own question, the question asked by a guilty conscience: ‘Do these land reform
cadres know of my relations with Tu?' If you have nothing to hide, why do you defend yourself on a point that we didn't question you on?”

Chi refused to be baited. He said evenly, “Young lady, I know what you are trying to do. You are trying to force a confession out of me that it was I who instigated Tu to worm his way into the revolution and the Party. But that won't work.”

“You son of a bitch. How can you accuse us so?” I sounded less and less like myself. I noticed with some satisfaction the effort he made to steady himself on his feet. He was weakening. But his stubborn defense, his continued efforts to picture himself as an ordinary landlord with ordinary sins enraged me. I moved towards him threateningly.

He recoiled. “Hold on, young lady!”

My arm, raised above my head, froze there.

“You dare resist?” A young activist hit him in the mouth. Chi staggered. His sallow face darkened.

“Take him away,” I shouted.

Later I wondered at myself. It took this crisis to bring out traits within me that I didn't even know existed. I was exhausted and my head reeled. Intoxicated with the mingled babble of voices and stale air, I saw the table, the flickering light, the sweating faces of our prisoners, the ropes stretched tight across their chests and shoulders, all with a sort of heightened consciousness.

However, Chi and Tu had calculated correctly that, for all our bluster, we could come up with no real evidence that they had been working together. Even with the help of the Broken Shoe we had not made much headway in finding out the truth that would bring them to justice.

It was late, and since her home was nearer than Da Niang's, Xiu-ying took me with her. The storm had abated and the wind had dropped, leaving the night in a silence that seemed uncanny after the shouting and the tumult in the office. Our footfalls made no sound on the carpet of
snow. Occasionally the tiny plop-plop of dripping water was punctuated by a slide of snow from a roof or tree.

Locked in our thoughts, we lay in silence on the kang. I was just dozing off when I heard a loud knock followed by urgent thumps on our door. Xiu-ying leapt up.

It didn't take too much effort to open a cottage door in Longxiang. To our astonishment Landlord Wu burst in. Someone had given him a push in the back and he stumbled in flailing his arms before he tumbled to the floor. Laughter cackled outside. Reeking of alcohol, Wu twisted around and, still seated on the floor, let out a string of abuse at the man outside. I saw it was the idiot. “What do you want?” I cried, utterly astonished.

Outside, the idiot stood gesticulating. I slammed the door in his face. The noise jolted Landlord Wu momentarily to his senses. But only for a moment. He looked confusedly from me to Xiu-ying and back and then cocked his head to one side as if recalling something. A hint of recognition appeared in his drunken, bleary eyes. For a moment he looked anxious and then again maudlin and stupid.

Xiu-ying's father's voice came muffled from the inner room: “What's happening?” and Xiu-ying calmed him with a “Nothing, Father!”

Landlord Wu slumped back to the ground and promptly fell asleep, snoring with his mouth open. I heard a noise like a cat clawing at the door. I thrust the door open and nearly knocked the idiot to the ground. Recovering his balance, he tugged at my sleeve, pointing at Landlord Wu and then at the darkness outside. He ambled to a tree that swayed its branches there and climbed into its forked cleft, squatting there like an owl and pointing now to the door.

Xiu-ying and I gazed in wonder at this performance for a while before we shook Wu from his stupor and drove the two intruders away. One of us would have to go to visit the Wus and find out what was behind this pantomime.

I lay on the warm kang with Xiu-ying beside me. In the
utter silence I half dreamed, half imagined a glimmer of light. A firefly's glimmer, shining for one instant. I was an invisible atom in that glimmer. If I disappeared, who would notice?

I heaved a deep sigh. Before I lost consciousness completely I felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from my chest.

“What have you been doing?” There was disbelief in Cheng's voice. “Did you see Chi's swollen feet? Did you see the sweat pouring off him in that cold cell?”

He had rushed into the office. Upset and perplexed, he nervously mopped his forehead, face, and neck with his handkerchief although there wasn't any sweat. He had caught me by surprise and I sat in silence.

Soon, his first sense of shock over, he considered the situation a little more calmly. “You must put a stop to this brutality.” He spoke mildly enough, considering the provocation, but from the look he shot at me I could read the reproach in his eyes: “What you denounced others for doing you have done yourself—and overdone.”

“You were disgusted with the way the feudal landlords dealt with people. They flouted their own laws. They ruled over their clans like tyrants. They could arrest, interrogate, and jail people, torture them, and even sentence them to death. They were the accusers, police, judges, and executioners all in one. And now you yourself are trying to do the same as they did!”

“I guess I've gotten into a situation where I can't help contradicting my belief that I should always be on my best behavior.” I tried to give a short, cynical laugh.

“That's no excuse.”

“Who's asking for it?” I asked defensively.

“I'll go tell them to untie Chi and Tu,” Cheng said.

“You're the senior cadre. Your decision can overrule mine.” I was beginning to feel that I didn't care what happened to Chi and Tu. I half hoped that Cheng would take over and clear up the mess. But then again I felt the urge
to put up a last-ditch fight to save some of my self-esteem. As he turned to go, I shouted, “But don't release them!”

“I didn't say I was going to release them. Why did you shout at me?” The color was rising in his face.

“You came in and didn't ask anything. You jumped to conclusions and decided right away that I'm in the wrong.”

“That isn't why you were rude. Maybe you don't think you have to listen to me, and perhaps you're right. I don't count for much, and I'm not very ambitious. Many of my old friends are now important people like Wang Sha.” Cheng gave me a searching look.

“Sometimes a disagreeable thought flits across my mind: ‘Cheng, what have you done with your life?' I always seem to fall behind everyone else. I fret and fume, but I don't get ahead. Oh, yes, I know what I should think. ‘Comrade Cheng [he mimicked the voice of a lecturer], don't think about yourself. Put ambition behind you. Think only of service to the people and the revolution.'

“But sometimes what does one see happening? An eager beaver puts on a very revolutionary front, acts more left than the left, gets a gentle tap on the shoulder: ‘Now, now. You are too left,' and then is promoted! I won't go in for that sort of thing.” As he went, he threw his arms out in a mock dramatic gesture and declaimed, “To be left or not to be, that is the question.”

He left me riled and irresolute. I was buoyed up again, however, when Xiu-ying came in to tell me what she had learned in a talk with the Wu family. As I had surmised, they did have a suspect in mind. They couldn't remember his name or which village he came from, only that he had borrowed money from Landlord Wu after he had gambled away all his earnings. They had no idea who his two partners in the rape had been. Only after they got news of Tu's arrest did they realize that not even a poor peasant or even a poor peasant cadre was immune from punishment for wrongdoing. Wu's wife had then nagged her cowardly husband to go and tell the work team all he knew about the crime and its possible perpetrators. Before he had
gone halfway, however, he had lost his nerve and gone off to drink with the idiot.

“What has the idiot got to do with all this?” I asked.

“Wu's wife thinks that he hid himself somewhere in their courtyard that night and saw something.”

“I think we're getting somewhere,” I said with some satisfaction. I wanted desperately to track down the men who had ravished Little Jade. But at the same time I felt a bit guilty for calculating that if we caught these criminals it would to some extent offset what might well turn out to have been an appalling blunder—imprisoning Chi and Tu. But clearly Tu's exposure and downfall, whether right or wrong, was unlocking doors that up till now had been closed.

22
  

Wang Sha returned to Longxiang the next day at noon, and soon after called me to his room. When I went in, he did not turn around to greet me but just stared at the map of the county tacked to the wall. I waited for a while, but he still kept silent. Then I saw that he was actually looking intently not at the map but at a black, dirty spot on the wall beside it.