Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (20 page)

“East-Ocean Goods Sold Here.”

For the first time since the students had spoiled his shop he felt comforted. Where were those students now? There was not one to be seen. Those who had not fled were killed, doubtless. But he was alive, and he had opened his shop again and in a few days if all went well, he would bring back his wife and his children, and they would all be prosperous again.

“To love one’s country,” he thought, “is it to love one’s country when one destroys honest goods in a shop? Is that the way for men of reason to behave toward each other?”

And it seemed to him that between him and those students he was the better patriot, because he was alive and he had destroyed nothing and no one, and in a little while indeed he would be providing food and business again for others.

So although he had never done such a thing in his life before, now he took pleasure in cleaning the shop as far as he could with a wall fallen, and he thought that he might even put his house to rights somewhat before his wife came. He had not made up his mind when it would be well to bring her here, for he could not close his eyes to all the dead who lay on the streets, nor could he keep from hearing screams at night and sometimes even by day which told him that somewhere near a woman was suffering. But he never went out of his doors and he worked on and he thought, “These things are not my business,” and he told himself that it was not his fault that soldiers were like this, and that whatever came he was a man of peace.

Nevertheless he thought after a while that before he brought his wife home he must have some sort of protective paper from the conquerors of the city which would prove that he was a good citizen and one able to perceive that not all times are alike, and that Heaven changes the rulers of a nation at its own will, and whatever Heaven sent he would take and go on with his business. Where to go for that paper and whom to ask for it he did not know.

Yet it was not too long after he had put up his sign that four enemy soldiers came by, one of them a small officer of some sort and the other his men, and they came in to find if he had any food to sell.

This much he made out from the officer’s scanty speech, and the others could say nothing he understood. Fish was what the man wanted, salted fish, but all that Wu Lien had was some small fish put into little tin boxes and not salty but soaked in oil. These he brought out, and showed them to the man, and the man nodded that they would do.

“How much?” the officer asked, putting up his fingers.

Wu Lien was surprised and pleased that this question should even be asked for he was used to soldiers who came in and took and went away without asking anything, and so he shrugged his fat shoulders and smiled and said, “Nothing—it is a gift.”

Now it was the officer’s turn to be surprised, and he smiled also, and his teeth were very white and clean. “Ah!” he said, “you do not hate us?”

Wu Lien smiled yet more, “I hate no one,” he said.

The officer bowed, and he spoke to his soldiers, and immediately they also bowed. “You must take something for the goods,” the officer said.

“I cannot,” Wu Lien replied, “I bought them from your country and I return them to you.” Then he too bowed.

At this the officer sat down on a small stool by the counter, and waved his hand toward the street.

“For all this—we are so sorry. Our soldiers, very brave—angry.”

Wu Lien inclined his head. “We also have our soldiers and I know how soldiers are,” he said. “But now—let us hope for peace. Only in peace can we do business.”

And then, in simple words which the officer could understand, he told him how students had destroyed his goods, and then he said, “Of recent years in this city the times have been evil. It may be they will be better now.”

“Oh, we promise!” the officer said, “if many are like you.”

“There are many,” Wu Lien said modestly. He now began to be encouraged and so he turned and chose from his newly ordered shelves some tins of sweet cakes, and he gave one to each soldier, and all were pleased.

“Forgive me that I have no tea,” Wu Lien said, “but my household are not here, and I am alone.”

“But why?” the officer inquired.

Wu Lien coughed behind his hand. “She is visiting her mother,” he said, “but she will return in a few days.”

The officer perfectly understood why Wu Lien did not have his wife here, but he was pleased that he did not say so, and so he told him to fetch paper and a pen. Wu Lien hastened to find them in his own inner room, and the officer wrote some bold black letters that Wu Lien could not read, and then in letters that he could read he wrote his name and where he lived in this city, and then he gave the paper to Wu Lien.

“If any come here to trouble you, show them that paper,” he said.

“How can I thank you?” Wu Lien answered. “What can I say except that whatever you want me to do I will do?”

“Good,” the officer replied. Then he said, “And I will send you a sign from our headquarters to put at your door and a guard if that is not enough.”

Wu Lien was glad to hear of the sign, but he trembled to think of a guard at his door, for whoever heard of a guard that did not eat more and drink more than ten usual men and who did not ask for the best chair and for whatever else came into his mind? So he made haste to say:

“For the seal all my thanks, even to ten thousand thousand, but I am too small a man for a guard. All that I have is not worth half his price. Let it be that I may come to you, and I beg that if you have need of an honest plain man, here I am, Wu Lien the merchant, and this was my father’s shop before me, and with your kindness it will be my son’s after me.”

“Certainly,” the officer said proudly. “We will do no harm to those who do not resist us.”

“Why should I resist kindness?” Wu Lien replied.

And so upon seeming mutual good will they parted. But after they were gone Wu Lien sat down and wiped his forehead, even though the day was cold. To his surprise his body under his garments was steaming with sweat, and now he knew that in his bowels he had been afraid of the enemy after all but that he would never be so afraid again, and with his relief sweat poured out. “I have only not to resist,” he thought, “and certainly that is easy enough for a man like me.”

He felt more cheered than he had in many months, and when in the afternoon of that same day a soldier brought to his door a box and in it folded an enemy flag and attached to it a piece of cloth with some letters on it, he felt as though he had won his own battle. He made haste to give the man some money, and when the man was gone he put up the sign upon the lintel of his door. Yet while he did this he heard a girl scream in the alley next to his house and he stopped a moment to listen and knew from the girl’s babbling terror what was happening to her.

“That soldier,” he thought, “that soldier who just now brought me this sign, can it be he?”

He listened until there was silence, and did not go near to see what the silence meant, for how could he accuse the one who had only a moment before done him kindness?

“Thus it is in war,” he thought sadly and was a little distressed for a while, and he made himself some hot tea. Then while he sat drinking it he reasoned with himself and he thought with anger of the girl’s father. “Why does he keep a young girl here in these days before peace is established?” he asked himself and he thought how wise he was to have arranged his own affairs so well.

And yet all was not so well as he thought. At sundown when it was time to put up the boards for night he looked up to take down the sign first. That sign was gone. He could not believe it for he had himself nailed it up, and yet it was gone and only a few rags of the enemy flag clung to the nails. He stared at it and grew afraid as he looked. Was there a student still alive and near him?

“An enemy has done this to me. I have an enemy near me,” he thought, and he went in and put the bar against the boards and he hid himself in his lonely bed and could not sleep. “A guard,” he thought, groaning, “it may be I must yet have a guard to keep me from my enemies.”

… In his own house Ling Tan and his sons themselves made the coffin for Wu Lien’s mother. These were days when every coffin maker and every carpenter must work day and night and there was not one for hire. Some of the wisest of the coffin makers, knowing how good wars are for their business, had for months ahead made coffins and stored them in their own houses and in temples and anywhere they could, preparing for what was to come. But even all of these coffins were not enough for so many dead as were now in and around that city. Many were buried without coffins and the enemy dug holes and shoveled the dead bodies into them and covered them shallowly so that hungry dogs clawed them up again. Lucky for all it was winter and not summer, or the stench of that city would have risen into the nostrils of the gods themselves.

So Ling Tan well knew that it was useless to hope to find a carpenter, and he and his sons took boards from the beds no longer slept in and two inner doors and they built the coffin and then with ropes and poles they lifted that great body and heaved it into the coffin and nailed the lid, and with the buffalo pulling on ropes and they all pushing they dragged the coffin into the fields and buried Wu Sao and made a high mound over her body so that they could point it out to Wu Lien if ever he came back, and could say to him:

“There she is, and we did all we could for her.”

Then they went back into their house and they began to sort out the ruins and to mend what they could and make what they could, so that they could live. Thus it was with every house in that village for there was not one that had escaped without ruin except the house of Ling Tan’s third cousin, which was so poor that the enemy had not even troubled to destroy its miserable furniture. The third cousin and his wife had escaped free, for when the enemy came they ran and sank themselves into a great jar of ordure and the jar was nearly as deep as a man is tall, and wide enough around for five men. It stood at the edge of a field and its ordure was kept to enrich the land. Into this the third cousin and his wife leaped and only kept their noses out to breathe with, and they were safe, though still stinking even after many washings, so that the villagers laughed in the midst of their grief. Their son, too, had escaped, for he was in a faint when the enemy came in and his mother covered him with bundles of fuel behind the kitchen stove and so he was not found.

This house only out of all the village was as it had been, and the third cousin’s wife was virtuous and said that it was because the gods saved them. Whether the young man would live or die, none yet knew, for he could not yet eat or speak, and if he came out of one faint he fell into another, and he bled again if he were moved, but at least he did not die, and one villager after another came and looked at him and said what he would do if it were his son, and his mother did everything that any said, and spared nothing, so there was hope that out of some one thing his life would yet be saved.

But except for this household, all the others were spoiled as Ling Tan’s had been, and some had suffered worse than he, for they had not been so quick-witted to get their women away and hidden. Out of that village of less than a hundred souls, seven young girls were dead, and four women, and none knew how many were despoiled, for no man would tell if his own daughter or his wife had suffered. Among the dead, too, was that oldest man. He had laid himself down in his bed the very day the enemy had pricked him, and because it was so small a wound and the day so full of terror, none had given him great heed. In the evening when they went to him, they found him dead. And Ling Tan grieved for the old man as though he had been more than a distant kinsman in his village, and he thought sadly. “That prick went very deep. The old one knew the days were gone of our happiness and freedom and so he did not wish to live.”

When Ling Tan had seen his village and what it had endured, he and the other elders came together to decide how to put their women in safety and he told how he had his own women inside the white woman’s gate and so they all said they would do the same thing, and thereafter whenever that gateman of the white woman heard the soft scratching of a willow branch on the gate he opened it and there were other women and more girls and the white woman took them in.

So at last in the village there were left only men and one or two grandmothers, and Ling Tan’s third cousin’s wife who could not go because of her son, and she said:

“There is always the jar of ordure, and what has been done once can be done again.”

The only quarrel that came out of the jar of ordure was that her husband had a scholar’s beard that he had raised with great trouble and only after years for he was not a hairy man, as men of learning are not, and yet every scholar wants his beard. So he had his little beard at last and try in every way he could, he could not now wash the stink out of his beard, and his wife who all these years had put up with the foul bream that came out of his belly complained that at least he could cut off his beard. But no, he could not smell himself and he would not cut it off, and this came to be a quarrel between them, and it made something for the villagers to laugh at and they were glad to have it, for there was little else. It is a sorry thing for men to be living alone in a village and every man missed his wife, and they teased the one man who had his wife left to him, and they said:

“Do you love your wife best or your beard, old head?” and in the morning they would guffaw and one would say, “ah, the old one still has his beard and so she would not have him again! Well, I had rather have my wife locked behind walls somewhere than in my bed and refusing!”

For this third cousin’s wife had put her husband to shame by saying where she could be heard that she would not allow him her favor until he had cut off his little beard, and so that beard made jokes every morning for them all except the man who had it on his face.

Without going near the city himself Ling Tan contrived to send by any who took his wife or daughter there or his sister, some small thing to Ling Sao. The black hen laid a handful of eggs in spite of evil times and these he sent in a handkerchief, and he caught a fresh fish out of the pond and wrapped it in a dried lotus leaf with salt and sent it, or he picked two cabbages that a man could slip under his coat, and he longed that he could write to Ling Sao or that she could read, but all that he could do was to trust to another’s ears and mouth.