Naked Earth (42 page)

“I don’t know. Nobody has said anything to me.—What’s that?” he asked when Chiao slipped something under his mattress.

“You better keep that,” Chiao whispered. Liu’s groping hand under the mattress told him it was a pair of scissors, the long slim kind that stood in the jar of instruments on the wheel-cart that followed the doctor on his morning rounds.

“Now, how are you ever going to get any sleep at night?” Chiao said worriedly.

“I can sleep in the daytime.”

“
Ma ti
, just wait till those bastards get into camp—we’ll bash their brains out. You know which days they change the bedsheets?”

“Yes,” Liu said a bit uncertainly.

He gave the mattress a slight pat. “On those days, don’t forget to take it out and hide it on your body.” He nodded and sauntered off singing “Pa Bamboo” in a low voice. It was the first time he had sung since the first day he came.

IT TURNED
out that Liu had no need to use the scissors Chiao had given him. Not long after Chiao left, a series of fights and beatings among the prisoners under cover of night precipitated the decision of the hospital authorities to separate the pro-Communist and anti-Communist patients. A discharged patient who had stayed on to act as orderly had tried to set fire to the kitchen. There had also been several cases of attempted poisoning.

The patients were now labelled as “those who want to be repatriated” and “those who do not want to be repatriated.” This was the first Liu had heard of it—that they would not have to go home if they did not want to. It made a great difference in everything. It was like being promised a share in a new world.

By the time he got to the camp it was no longer the paradise of anti-Communist avengers which he had looked forward to, not without a certain dread. The separation of those for and against repatriation had also been completed here. Liu was taken by boat to Koje Island where there was a large new camp for POWs who were not going back.

They had always said that Korea was a barren-looking place. But nowhere was as bare as the POW camp. Not a tree grew on the newly leveled land, a vast stretch of cream-colored flatness, always a bit blurred by wind-blown dust. All around rose the bare hills, faded to sandy pallor in the noon light. The camp officer was showing Liu around. The officer was a prisoner elected by the others. They stopped by one of the stone huts to join a small crowd gathered under the eaves watching a man playing a
hu-ch’in
. The familiar melody was like a cob-web thread drifting in the air with no place to stick.

“He made the
hu-ch’in
himself,” the officer said. “Made it from a beer can.”

There was an explosion of laughter. As the prisoners stood around listening, exposing the white letters “POW” painted on the backs of their khaki blouses, a prankster had drawn with a bit of chalk six little lines radiating from the O at the center of a man’s back. The lines, one up, one down and two on each side, made a head and tail and four feet. And the O became a tortoise, the sign of a cuckold. The abused man did not know at first what the joke was. When he had found out he chased after the culprit, shouting threats and curses.

“Hey,” somebody said, and put a hand on Liu’s shoulder. He turned and saw that it was Chiao.

“How are you? I was just going to look for you,” Liu said.

“I was wondering when you’d be coming. Look, you got boots instead of shoes,” Chiao observed. He himself had leather shoes several sizes too large. “There’s a piece of steel in the instep of your boots,” he told Liu. “You can take it out and make a knife with it. That’s what they all do—those who draw boots.”

After that Chiao took him around the grounds. It was like boarding school again. Only he was too old for school. They all were. They were old enough to worry about what was going to happen to them. And they could not forget the barbed wire around them.

It was like school too, to hear the complaints about food. They had rice cooked together with small pieces of meat and vegetables. “Just like cat food,” a man grumbled. It did not look like a respectable meal and all the taste was gone from the meat. All the POWs gained weight when they weighed in every week. Still, everyone complained.

It was humiliating to be repeatedly warned by the UN authorities that eventually they would have to shift for themselves if they did not want to go home. As if they had refused to go back home just for a meal ticket from these foreigners. Liu rather thought there were grounds for suspecting that the dependence forced on them was habit-forming, like all dependence. While they found it irksome, it could be that there was also a reluctance for it to end.

“If the UN army won’t bother about us any more, we’ll just go and till the land,” a soldier declared heatedly. They had been planting cabbages in camp with considerable success. Most of them had done farm work before.

Go and till the land where? What country in the world today would have room for a newly introduced Chinese minority? The only conceivable place they could go to was Taiwan, which might take them as soldiers. Most of the men were willing, even fervent. But with one rumor after another floating through camp, Liu did not know what to believe.”

“What’s this about peace talks?” Liu asked Chiao one evening when they were taking a walk after supper, smoking a cigarette. “If they’re talking peace, they might send us back to the mainland after all. The easiest way for them.”

“Some people say they can’t be talking peace. Say it’s impossible,” Chiao answered.

“Why impossible? That’s just wishful thinking.”

Chiao sighed and shook his head. “You don’t know whom to believe. This stuff about the peace talks might be a rumor spread by spies.”

“Spies? You mean there are Communists here too?”

“You never can tell. For instance, when we were being divided up, there were fourteen or fifteen men who went with those that wanted to go home. Then they escaped back to us.”

He stopped, so Liu asked, “Why, what made them change their minds?”

“They said as soon as the camp door was shut, the Communists called a Mass Meeting. Everybody had to make a Self-Criticism. They were going to Settle Accounts with Reactionary Elements, Running Dogs of the Imperialists. So these men just ran, and climbed over the barbed wire fence.”

“And they got away—just like that?” Liu asked.

“Yes. That’s why we wouldn’t take them in at first. But they begged and begged. Said they couldn’t go back. Most of them had their backs tattooed like mine.”

“But what made them risk it in the first place? They ought to know they could never get away with it.”

Chiao did not say anything for a while.

“Guess they’re homesick,” Liu said.

“Well, who isn’t? It’s this
pieh-niu
, living in foreign parts.” Chiao repeated the word “
pieh-niu
” a little petulantly. It is one of the untranslatable words. It means more than uncomfortable. It is the kind of unhappy feeling you get when you try to do everything with your left hand.

The bugler was blowing taps in the barracks nearby. The muscular, naked hills, too much like hills in old Chinese paintings to look real, stood greenish white in the moonlight.

“Back home,” Chiao asked, “have you got a lover?” He used the term loosely in the Communist sense, covering wife, fiancée and girl friend.

The question was surprising, coming from Chiao who was very shy on the subject of women in spite of his hill songs. Liu hesitated before he answered, “No.” With this denial his entire past seemed to rise screaming around him, a hurt and angry sea. For a long while he was quite lost in it. He thought of the familiar line written by a captive king a thousand years ago, “The old country does not bear being looked back on, in the light of the moon.”

He realized afterwards that Chiao had probably asked the question just so that he could tell him about his own experience. He knew that Chiao was not married but he could have been engaged or there might have been a girl he used to bandy songs with across the river, as they often do in the country. Liu was sorry he never thought of asking. He noticed Chiao looked a little dispirited at his prolonged silence.

He meant to ask him some other time but he kept forgetting. And Chiao never got around to the subject again.

INDIAN
music was broadcast every day from the Indian barracks outside the barbed wire fence. The prisoners called it Neutral Music. Actually it was the sexiest music Liu had ever heard, not neutral at all. The tremulous, high-pitched singing seemed endless. The Chinese POWs in the camp were in no mood for music, however; it set their nerves on edge. To drown out the sound they banged pots and pans and yelled. “Beat down Mao Tse-tung! Beat down the Communist Party!”

The uncertainty was sapping their determination. They had not wanted to move to this new camp in the neutral area where they had to listen to “explanations” by Communist Chinese representatives trying to persuade them to go home. In several camps, Liu heard, anti-Communist prisoners, afraid that their captors would betray them and turn them back to the other side, staged sit-down strikes and riots. A little town of tents had been erected in the devastated area, spreading well outside the barbed wire on the south side. There were many lights and traffic noises at night. It had become quite a city. But on the north side, where the Communists seemed to lie in wait for them, it was pitch-dark and quiet.

If the UN was not going to desert them, why had they been handed over to a Repatriation Committee of Neutral Nations? The Committee had said in a letter it wrote to them: “We guarantee that you will be free to ask for repatriation, which is your righ
t...
The explainers will tell you that you will lead a peaceful life after you go back to China and will be absolutely free.”

They felt trapped. After they were moved, they rioted several times, clashing with the patient Indian guards, ripping out enamel toilet fixtures to use as weapons. Once they threw all the pots and pans outside the compound to show their determination to fast. Reporters thronged to take pictures of them and of the slogans they strung up along the wire fence. The whole world was watching them, the reporters said. That was good; Chiao and his friends felt certain that treachery would occur the moment the world’s attention wandered.

Liu tried to reassure Chiao. “Just because the UN wouldn’t give in on the question of our repatriation, they’ve fought the war a year and a half longer. Think of all the lives it’s cost them. Do you think they’re going to ditch us after all that?”

But actually, he thought, who can tell about nations? Nations are rightly referred to in the feminine gender. Like women they always reserve the right to change their minds.

He kept his doubts to himself. He did not even know if he really wanted to go to Taiwan. Did he believe in Taiwan’s future? Taiwan’s future depends on the future of the fight against Communism, he told himself. There are troops in Taiwan, and you have to fight Communism with troops. If you are going to insist on a fresh start, nothing will ever be done. Anyhow, no matter how clean the start might be, it might soon deteriorate. Things spoil so fast in this climate; that is life.

He talked to Chiao a lot, just to boost up his own spirits. Chiao would have been surprised if he had known that Liu was thinking about the idea of going to some neutral country like India, together with Chiao. There was no reason why they could not make a living there, even if it would be difficult at first. Su Nan would like that, if she were alive to know. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? That he should live out his life in peace. Leave her out of it, he said to himself. You’ve avoided thinking about her for so long. And now you use her as an excuse for what you want yourself.

Then he told himself that actually it took a lot of courage to start life all over again in a strange land. The men who had left home to settle in the unknown lands of America and Australia had been fleeing from something too, hadn’t they? Except that what had been courage in the 18th century some people might call cowardice in the 20th.

What’s going to happen if everybody runs away? But it was difficult to think of himself in large terms. There’s always room for one man somewhere. Just because the men who ruled China had ruined part of his life, must he give up the rest of it too?

Or instead of going to India or South America or wherever else they would let him in, should he say goodbye to Chiao and go to Taiwan? Chiao had had enough of soldiering, he was through fighting for or against anybody. But Liu wasn’t so sure now that the forces on Taiwan would never get back to the mainland. Propaganda back home boasted that Taiwan was finished and its capture was only a matter of time and a few lives. He saw things differently now after the last few months. The determination of thousands of fellow prisoners not to go back gave him hope. Suddenly, so much seemed possible. Thoughts of revenge were no longer pathetically futile, something he had always held back from telling anyone else through shame of his own helplessness.

Chiao and he were lucky enough to be among the first POWs to be sent down for the “explanations.” They did not leave by the same truck. The other POWs gave the trucks a big send-off by beating on pots and pans and shouting slogans.

Everybody on the truck was excited, glad to get it over with. They were telling each other what abuses they were going to hurl at the explainers. One man, an older veteran, even demonstrated graphically how he was going to spit on them. But a cynic stopped them with “I’m not going to believe any of you. Not until I see you back in camp again tonight.”

At the “explanation grounds” in the valley they were searched by Indian guards for hidden weapons, then taken to a tent to wait. They sat on the ground around a pot-bellied stove and the Indian guard buttoned up the tent flap for them. Nobody felt much like talking. They waited a long time before an interpreter came in and read out a name from a list. But once they got started, the tent emptied quickly. The interviews seemed mercifully short.

Soon it was Liu’s turn. Three hefty Indian guards escorted him to one of the thirty-two “explanation tents.” Inside, eight tables stood in a row facing the entrance. The three Chinese seated at the center tables confronting Liu must be the Communist “explainers.” The five foreigners on either side would be representatives of the neutral nations. Liu had faced similar boards of examiners before in his university days, except for the array of interpreters that stood at their back. There were two exits behind the tables, one on either side, both with the flaps down. No signs were hung above the exits; there were no signs of any kind in the large khaki tent. The symmetry of the whole picture and the smooth, inscrutable bareness of khaki were somehow a little frightening. The thought flickered through Liu’s mind that if he got too excited he might lose his head and go out the wrong exit.