Naked Earth (35 page)

She had been thinking those thoughts so long and so ceaselessly. These few thoughts, like old brooms in the house too long that had acquired mysteriously, through human contact, a life of their own, were now able to hop about quite by themselves. And racing and chasing around they inevitably ran into the blind alley of the thought of Liu, and knocked themselves out.

That stopped her every time, the very idea of facing Liu with the child as a living fact instead of something dead and gone. He ought to be grateful and understanding since it was all because of him. But that would not make it any better. She knew he might not come out alive at all, but in that case nothing would be left anyway.

“Those treacherous stairs! So dark!” the manageress was standing at the foot of the bed, telling Mrs. Kuan. “How many times I’ve warned them: Be careful, be careful!” She was obviously anxious to forestall any rumors of suicide in her hostel.

Mrs. Kuan smiled. “Yes, she’s very lucky to have no bones broken. Too tight?” she asked, tying on the bandages. She was a short chunky woman with a long face, her hair a browned frizz. In spite of her padded gown of black-and-gold brocade she looked very professional.

Some of the girls in the hostel who crowded into the room to watch, talked about her after she was gone. “Very active, this Mrs. Kuan,” one of them said. “Secretary of the Alley Inhabitants’ Committee now. Must say that was very broadminded of them. Didn’t discriminate against her at all.”

“She’s much better off with that husband of hers out of the way. Even if she has to pinch and save and do all the housework herself. A lot of good it did her when he was earning such fat fees for abortion. Spent it all on cabaret girls. And the way they fought—those two! The whole alley knew. Almost took the house to pieces.”

“Who’s her husband?” Su Nan asked from her bed, speaking for the first time.

“Dr. Kuan, the one who was arrested for abortion. Why, haven’t you heard? He only served two months of his five-year sentence—hauled out of prison and sent to Korea to treat the wounded. Guess they’re short of doctors there.”

“Those technical people get all the breaks,” the other one, a proofreader and would-be writer, said discontentedly.

“Sure,” said the older woman. “And the government was so generous and considerate to him, they let him come home for a three-day leave before he went to Korea. So touching!”

“You mean you’ve never heard of this? Where’ve you been?” the young proofreader demanded in sudden astonishment, bringing on a guilty silence as everyone remembered this had happened during Su Nan’s mysterious disappearance.

Thinking back, Su Nan remembered the only time she had seen Dr. Kuan. Last autumn she happened to miss the mass injection against diphtheria at her office, so she had gone to the Kuans. As a doctor-and-nurse team they had been mobilized to give every inhabitant of the alley a free injection. It was late in the day, so there was no crowd there. She rang the bell and waited. She was a bit startled to discover a man in a long black overcoat carrying a black bag standing right behind her, also waiting, smiling slightly when she turned around and saw him. Obviously the doctor coming home. He was tall with a plump, round boyish face and very small eyes like black seeds above his apple cheeks. It was uncanny how he could come up behind her, walking in leather shoes on concrete pavement without making a single sound. When the door opened he followed her noiselessly into the hall and while his wife attended to her, went quietly upstairs with what could only be described as a marked and deliberate inconspicuousness. She had not thought much of it at the time, but now, with the infallibility of hindsight, realized he was the criminal type.

His wife looked much older than he, maybe because of the life he led her. She must have worked very hard as his assistant. The woman could surely introduce her to some other doctor, Su Nan thought. She might even be able to do it herself. But how could she win her confidence? She was bound to think it was a police trap. Working for a government newspaper made Su Nan practically a government employee. Anyway, everybody was a possible informant nowadays, eager to win credit either for atonement of some crime or simply to get ahead.

When Mrs. Kuan came again the next day to change the dressing Su Nan tried to make conversation. Yes, she was busy all day long, she answered warily, smiling, talking neither too little nor too much, her shrewd long face looking just a little derisive, probably unintentionally. She had four children all going to school, three girls and one boy. Her mother-in-law lived with her. She didn’t mind doing without servants but there’s also the work in the Inhabitants’ Committee. She couldn’t get out of that though she had insisted that she couldn’t handle it, she said modestly.

From where she lay in bed Su Nan could just see the back door of the Kuans’ house. She noticed more than once fashionably dressed girls, different ones, going in and out either singly or accompanied by a man. Their high-collared, wasp-waisted gowns were very conspicuous because they were rarely seen now around town. Mrs. Kuan did not seem the kind of person to have a wide circle of stylish friends. With their bosoms and thighs outlined by the thin, rich material of their dresses, they looked more like cabaret girls or high-class party girls. Were they her clients then? Su Nan did not see how she could just coolly carry on where her husband left off, right under the alert noses of the authorities who already had her house on their black list. Had she, by infiltrating into the alley organization, established an understanding with certain key characters? She must need money very badly to take risks like that.

Two days later Su Nan did not wait for Mrs. Kuan to come and change her dressing. She managed to struggle to her feet and make her way downstairs out of the house and to the Kuans.

“I’m well enough to get up today, so I thought I’d save you the trip. I feel so terribly sorry to make you come over every day when you’re so rushed already,” she explained to the shocked Mrs. Kuan who opened the door herself.

A pigtailed little girl in a home-made foreign dress peeped in while Mrs. Kuan went inside to get the medicine and fresh bandages. It seemed that she was going to change the dressing out here in what was apparently the waiting room with its glass-topped round table and upholstered chairs. A bunch of sweetpeas stood in a cut-glass vase on a tea stand covered by a freshly laundered light green tablecloth. The flowers were positively damaging evidence, Su Nan thought. No Chinese household who could afford flowers would ever think of doing without servants unless there was some underhand business going on which required the utmost privacy.

Su Nan had to lean awkwardly on one of the straight-backed chairs to have her leg attended to. Mrs. Kuan was visibly flustered and spilled some of the Mercurochrome on the polished floor. There must be somebody in the consultation room.

“Tch, tch! Look what I did!” Mrs. Kuan snatched a newspaper and bent down, wiping the floor scratchily.

“Can it be washed off?” Su Nan asked apologetically.

“Hm? No. No use,” she answered from the depth of her furious absorption, everything else apparently forgotten. The red stain, lighter but much bigger now, seemed ingrained in the yellow-brown of the floorboards. “Looks like somebody has been murdered here,” she said with a nervous giggle.

At this it occurred to Su Nan to wonder briefly whether Mrs. Kuan was as good an abortionist as a housewife, and if she had killed anybody. For a moment Su Nan felt quite dismayed to see her not acting like her brisk competent self. But if she was no good, she wouldn’t be doing such a flourishing business, would she?

She finally returned to the bandages, bending over Su Nan’s leg. “Mrs. Kuan,” Su Nan said in a low voice. Then after a pause, “You know why I jumped down the stairs?”

“I thought you tripped and fell,” Mrs. Kuan said with her knowing smile, looking faintly derisive. Like everybody else she probably had the idea that Su Nan had tried to kill herself because of an unfortunate love affair. She began to assume the expression of a compliant but not especially eager confidante.

Su Nan did not say anything. “I was hoping for a miscarriage,” she finally whispered, looking straight at the woman.

Mrs. Kuan’s face went gray as if she had on powder too light for her complexion. She waited, not saying anything, as if she did not understand.

“Please help me, Mrs. Kuan. I need help badly.”

She still smiled at Su Nan without comprehension but looking as if she was waiting to be struck in the face, with a preparedness that was heartbreaking.

“Please believe me,” Su Nan said. “You said yourself I was very lucky I didn’t break my neck. Could have got crippled for life too. Would I risk all that just to deceive you?” It could still be taken as a
k’u jou chi
, ruse of the suffering flesh, in which you win an enemy’s confidence through self-inflicted physical suffering. She could only hope that Mrs. Kuan would have enough sense to realize that if the police were after her they would not have to go to all that trouble.

“But I just don’t know what you’re talking about—” Mrs. Kuan began.

“Please look at this. Please have a look.” Su Nan cut her short, producing the draft she received from Peking. “I wrote home saying I’ve got to have an operation. They just barely managed to scrape up this money. Look at the chop and the date. Just got it a few days ago. Now you can believe me.”

Maybe it was Mrs. Kuan’s firsthand knowledge of the genuine injuries she sustained and the grave risks she ran that finally convinced her. And then also there was something innately trustworthy in the looks of large sums of money. After more hedging Mrs. Kuan agreed to let her come again the next day for the treatment.

This time she was admitted into the inner room dominated by a complicated couch-machine that looked frightening with its metal clamps to hold the patient’s legs apart. Once she got on it the bottom fell out of her world, she was suspended in mid-air, trapped and thrown clear, experiencing a fear that felt like the emptiness of hunger. There was the tinkle of instruments in the tray. At the first touch of cold metal, indecently tentative, she suddenly had such a sense of humiliation that the whole of her experience with Shen came crowding back. She turned her head from side to side as if to avoid seeing his face. She could not understand how she had ever got into that position, or this either.

When the pain came it was almost a relief. Mrs. Kuan had told her to stuff her handkerchief into her mouth when she felt like screaming. She bit into the choking white dryness of the handkerchief. The curtains were not drawn because that might attract attention. Instead, Mrs. Kuan had hung some of her dresses over the window as if to sun them. Su Nan found herself looking at them, even feeling a little worried for a moment because it was a gray day. People might think it odd. The dresses looked amazingly wide as dresses often do, off the body. There were flowered silk ones and a deep red silk one already grease-darkened on the stiff collar. They looked very out of place in this immaculate white room. It was after school hours and she could hear the sounds of well-disciplined children scampering somewhere in the house. A telephone was ringing next door. She noticed all this like a shopper picking up one thing after another perfunctorily, without much interest, and putting them down quickly as if afraid she would drop them when the pain came tearing into her again, knowing somehow that this time it would be far worse.

“ARE YOU
Liu Ch’üan?” the officer said, studying the documents on his desk.

“Yes.”

“We’ve investigated your case—looked into it most thoroughly. There is no doubt that you were very close to Ts’ui P’ing when you worked under him. It’s impossible you should know nothing of his Anti-People Crimes. You must realize that you are under grave suspicion of covering up for him, maybe even active collaboration—who knows? And in any case your sense of vigilance is not high enough and your standpoint not firm enough. But the People’s Government is being specially generous. It refuses to give you up as lost. It still wants to fight for you, to win you back to our ranks.”

Liu listened dazedly. When he had been taken to the office downstairs he thought it was for identification before his long awaited execution.

“You can return now to your original post. But for the time being you’re placed under the surveillance of the Masses. The Masses will watch and observe your every movement. You’re not to talk heedlessly or act heedlessly. At table you’ll be the last to sit down and lift your chopsticks. And you’re to keep your eyes lowered at all times.—Your unit leader will acquaint you with other rules of this surveillance period.”

He was marched out of the office and taken into another room where his wallet and watch were returned to him. The great iron door finally clanged shut behind him. He found himself standing on the sunlit pavement with yellow-clad sentries standing leaning on rifles on either side of the gate. He was careful not to walk away too fast and not to look back at the two sentries, however indifferent they might seem.

He did not feel safe until he was on the crowded tram and the tram had crossed the bridge. Then the curious glances and shrinking away of the other passengers reminded him that he needed a haircut and shave badly. He suddenly became aware that his soiled uniform was crawling with lice. Before he went to the bath-house he would have to go and get a clean suit from his hostel. He was grateful for its daytime emptiness and quiet, not quite relishing the idea of seeing Chang Li so soon.

If there had been a telephone at his hostel he would have rung up Su Nan right then. When he finally got to telephone her after his bath and haircut, he thought there must have been some mistake. He rushed to her office, where they told him again that she had died of a sudden illness.

Died of a sudden illness. He walked out, too stunned by the matter-of-fact tone of the clerk to really believe him. He went at once to her hostel and asked to see the manageress. She was not a figure that inspired confidence. With striking incongruity she wore the thin black floppy pants of an amah under her padded blue Liberation Suit, probably in answer to the call for greater frugality. She was middle-aged and her face was like a rectangular piece of yellow soap worn smooth and concave by use.