Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (35 page)

The little man glared at him. Then he said in a loud voice, “Write on!”

So Wu Lien wrote on. “Why has this been so? It is because the country has been too weak, deficient in power, lacking in strength.”

The little enemy rolled these words out of his mouth like thunder, but Wu Lien’s mild pallid face did not change. He wrote, murmuring the words to guide his brush as he used to murmur the names of the goods he sold in his shop.

“But now,” the little enemy roared, “to our great fortune, we have the opportunity afforded by the present turn of events to use the strength of a friendly nation, and thus to attain our long cherished desire and gain revenge upon the white race! After this we can be a completely free people! But our friend Nippon, although she has put forth this great effort on our behalf and has made this great sacrifice, nevertheless asks nothing in return, only that we establish the New Order in East Asia!”

The little enemy puffed up his breast and twisted his short and scanty mustache and coughed. Wu Lien looked at him and waited. In his mind he was thinking, “How is it that these little wild men can grow such scanty hair? I always thought savages were hairy.”

“Write on!” the little enemy said.

“I write,” Wu Lien replied gently.

“This New Order,” the enemy shouted, and now he rose to his feet because he was so pleased with what he had composed. “This New Order, whose objective is not only our temporary salvation but also in truth our eternal redemption! So from this time forth we shall certainly attain our lasting freedom! Fellow citizens, the New Order in East Asia is truly the Star of Salvation for our four hundred million people!”

At this point the enemy was overcome with himself, “Banzai! Banzai!” he bellowed.

Wu Lien looked up again. “Do I put that down, too?”

But the enemy was not pleased at his coolness.

“Say Banzai to these noble words!” he shouted.

“Banzai,” Wu Lien said in his soft voice and wrote it down. “And is that the end?”

The enemy stared at him furiously. Something was wrong with this man but he did not know what. “You are not to write Banzai,” he shouted. “Have you no wits? This is a people’s document!”

Wu Lien crossed out “Banzai.” “With what name shall I sign it, sir?” he asked. And he held the paper up and blew on it as he spoke.

“The Great People’s Association,” the enemy replied.

Wu Lien wrote down the letters of this association which did not exist.

“This is to be put in the usual places?” he inquired, rising to his feet with the paper in his hand.

“It is to be put everywhere!” the enemy shouted.

Wu Lien bowed and went out, his cloth shoes noiseless on the carpeted floors. Once outside he gave his orders with correctness and dignity to those beneath him, and then feeling faint he went toward his own rooms. There his wife waited for him. Ever since the poisoning she had been alarmed, though like Wu Lien she was glad that he had been poisoned a little, lest he might have suffered more had he not been. Now she had some chicken broth ready for him, with a sort of moss brewed in it which was known for its healing power in the intestines. When she saw him come she poured a bowl and gave it to him with both hands, and being a good wife she did not speak until he had drunk it down. Then she said, “Do we do well to continue in a place where your life is in such danger?”

“Is there any place where my life is not in danger?” he answered her. “In these times one chooses to live in the den of the tiger or the lion. There is no other place.”

He closed his eyes as he spoke and lay back in his chair and she left him.

… Outside this compound in a few hours there were men busy with long brushes full of flour paste. They were putting on walls large sheets of paper bearing the words which Wu Lien had written. Everywhere they went a small crowd went with them, seeming to read the words. But few truly read. Most of them were hungry people who hoped for a chance to dip a bowl into the mixture of flour and water and then hide behind a wall and drink it down. Flour these days was scarce and dear and after the enemy had taken what they wanted there was little left for the people. As for those men who pasted the sheets, they seemed not to see how quickly their paste was gone, and when they went back for more there was always the excuse that they had pasted in many places. If there were too many sheets left to make this true, then they gave the sheets away, and people burned them for fuel. But still there must be enough put up to deceive the enemy.

Now in one place that day it chanced that Ling Tan’s third cousin was one who saw that something was being put on a wall. When he saw the letters he must go to see what they were, partly because he was made so, and partly because he liked the little show he made when in the midst of an ignorant crowd who did not know one letter from another, he could read aloud what the letters said. So today he moved to the front of the crowd and he put on his brass-rimmed spectacles and began to read aloud in his largest voice and very slowly those words which Wu Lien had written down. At the sight of such learning all the crowd fell into silence from curiosity and respect and they listened until he came to the end. Then he took off his spectacles.

All that crowd was still more silent when they knew what the words said, and so was the cousin silent. None could say what was in his heart, nor did any dare to laugh. These people who had once been free, who on these very streets, when they were their own, had laughed and cursed and spoken out their angers and their hatreds as easily as their praises of all, gods and men, now had learned to keep silence and to drift in bitter silence from one place to another. So they did now and this third cousin went away too, and he wished he had not read the words because they made more cause for vengeance, and he wanted only to forget all.

This man, Ling Tan’s third cousin, had in recent days found his comfort, for now daily he turned to opium. He went at this moment to the poor small place where what he bought was cheap. It was on another street toward the south, and he crossed three streets and entered a low mean door that stood open night and day. A thin yellow girl with crossed eyes came toward him and motioned him to an empty bed of boards spread with straw. He went and lay down, and he put his head upon the wooden pillow and waited while she mixed the dregs of opium and put it into the bowl of the pipe and lit it, and thrust the stem of the pipe between his lips and he breathed the sweet smoke deeply in and he closed his eyes. Oh, the calm of this, he thought, the lonely calm! It did not matter who ruled outside, for none ruled him here. His body lay like dead and his soul could wander far from it and all its ills. He was free.

How had it come about? This man caught between the grindstones of his life was nevertheless a little better than he need be, and therefore he was miserable. Afraid of his wife, he had gone back and forth with her messages to Wu Lien. They were small messages, often useless, such as that she had that day seen some men whom she was sure were hillmen and they had gone toward the west. But sometimes she sent word that Ling Tan’s sons had come and were in hiding in their father’s house. Small or large, her husband had to carry her messages because of the money Wu Lien gave for them, and often the man meditated whether or not he could twist these messages and put north for south or forget to mention Ling Tan’s sons, but his courage was at first too weak. He did not know in what large affairs these messages were links and he feared being caught and tortured as the enemy now tortured, gouging men’s eyes and pulling out the ends of their entrails, and cutting off their ears and noses or right hands and all those cruelties which now the people took as things that might happen to anyone any day.

“The New Order!” he now murmured as he began to sink to sleep.

The thin girl bent over him. “What do you say?” she asked him.

But he was already gone and he could not answer. In three hours she would wake him as she always did and he would pay her a small coin and go away. Still drowsy, he would go to Wu Lien and tell him whatever he remembered and Wu Lien would give him two coins, and one he would take and one he would keep hidden for another day here. At first he had been frightened lest surely some day he would be found out. But he had now passed fear of any kind and all he wanted was enough money to come back, and his greatest hope was a little more money so that he might go to a place where he could buy real opium, and not the scrapings and the ashes of pipes from houses better than this one. Nor was he alone here or anywhere. The people crowded into these opium houses, because they saw no hope of freedom to come in their lifetime. They longed for the old years back, and of that there was no hope.

In the village none noticed what had befallen the third cousin, for none heeded one whom they thought only a silly old man. Ling Tan saw him grow more dry and yellow, but so did they all, since food was now dear and scarce, and great floods this year had spoiled the crops. And yet Ling Tan could not curse Heaven for flood as he always did in other years. Hungry though he often was, and though he knew he risked his life by hiding food for his house, yet he was glad when the rains fell, because this year the enemy would pay the loss.

“Heaven helps earth, after all,” he said.

All that happened in Ling Tan’s house the third cousin’s wife knew, or guessed, and she sent word on it to Wu Lien, but of what he learned Wu Lien still told nothing. He sat in his place in that enemy palace and did his work and his words were few. To the enemy he seemed a mild man who would do anything he was told, and they paid him well. This money Wu Lien saved as he did his knowledge, and without knowing what he would do with it. He did not give it to anyone nor did he do good with it, nor did he spend it for himself or for his family more than was needful. His children grew within these walls and they played with enemy children and learned their language, and he let this be also, and he did not send them out to school. His wife he loved moderately and in his own way, and he comforted her when she mourned that she never saw her parents, and he told her that when times were better they would all understand each other again.

But within himself Wu Lien kept all that he knew, and he was careful never to let anything in his manner or his voice or his look betray that he had any special knowledge. Yet he did have, for to him came ten or twelve men and women who told him news of every kind and were his ears and eyes everywhere. Thus he learned fully how evil the enemy was and how they continued to burn villages and to pillage the land as they had the city, and he learned what the hillmen did, and before Ling Tan knew it he knew what Ling Tan’s sons did. He was stuffed with knowledge he seemed never to use.

This Wu Lien was a man of his own loyalties. If ever this city was taken from the conquerors, he would turn again to his own. But while the conquerors were here, in his way he worked hard for what he thought was right for his own people, and he comforted himself always by thinking that at some time he would be able to do one great thing to show how right he was. Meanwhile he did small things that were right. Since that money he paid his ears and eyes was enemy money and he must show some return for it, he did write down long reports of small things and gave them to the enemy. But of Ling Tan’s village he wrote nothing, not so much as its name, nor did he tell what the hillmen did except in some far distant place where he knew Ling Tan’s sons were not, and in all ways he spared his wife’s blood, not only for her sake, but because Ling Tan had buried his old mother, and had given her shelter in the earth in a day when many had no such shelter.

All this time the city had been like an island in the middle of the sea. There were no messages from the outer world. None here knew what the people in the free lands were doing, and people often asked each other, “Is there any hope that our own armies will come back?” For of all those who had complained of their own soldiers there was now not one who did not think of them with longing and as good men, so evil was this enemy and so cruel these East-Ocean soldiers who took what they wanted from miserable shops and gave worthless money long since not honored. Sometimes they gave foreign money and more often they gave nothing, and they took the women they wanted, even though the city was full of courtesans who had gathered here from everywhere around, because here were the great men among the enemy and their many soldiers.

But even among the enemy Wu Lien had a friend, a good man. He was no warrior but a man who made pictures and sent them away, and this man went out every day to see what he could see for his pictures, and he sought for good and he found much evil. With his own eyes he saw his fellows seize young women and foul even old ones, and he saw the wine-filled soldiers of his own people do their filthy deeds in daylight before the eyes of decent people who would have been killed had they lifted a voice to cry put, and indeed he saw them die. He grew so weary with such wickedness that one day he spoke to Wu Lien when they were alone and he said:

“I have no chance to talk elsewhere, but to you at least I can say that I hate what we have done to your people, and I am ashamed, and I wish our Emperor could know, but he cannot, for none would dare to tell him. Yet why do I say the Emperor? Even our people at home would never believe if they were told the cruel things their sons and husbands and fathers and brothers do here.”

Wu Lien listened and answered well, and after that a sort of friendship grew up, Wu Lien saying little and the man saying much, and from this one Wu Lien first heard that not only in this nation of his was there war but in other nations, too and perhaps in the whole world,

“How can you find out so much?” Wu Lien asked. And then the man took him to his own room and showed him a small black box, a thing of which Wu Lien had heard but had never seen. The man turned a peg and then another and out of the box came a voice, very low.

“Listen!” the man said.

So Wu Lien listened and out of that box the voice told of vast happenings and for the first time Wu Lien heard for himself that nation had declared war on nation, and in the great western cities the bombs were falling even as they had fallen on this city. What were the small things Wu Lien knew from his little spies when such things were happening as this?