The Last Supper (40 page)

It took a long time, under the conditions of Christopher’s imprisonment, to write a single word of poetry; he was allowed neither paper nor pencil, so he had to compose in his head. Before
adding his daily word, it was necessary to recall the entire poem and visualize it as it would appear on a printed page. The poem was now 3,569 words long. It was his calendar.

He had actually been in prison 3,753 days—ten years and 100 days—but he had been unable to write for the first 156 days because of the round-the-clock interrogation, and he had been
unconscious or immobilized for 28 days after the wall of his ditch had collapsed, injuring him so gravely that he had been taken to the hospital in Peking.

When the accident happened, Christopher had already been in prison for more than three years. He had been using the mattock, chopping at the wall of his ditch. The earth had shaken itself like a
wet dog—Christopher felt the muscular contortion of the soil through the soles of his canvas shoes—and dirt poured in, burying him. He could not possibly escape; the top of the ditch
was four inches above his head. He slammed the mattock into the lip of the ditch and tried to pull himself out, but the cascading dirt seized his legs and then his throat, and the last thing he saw
was the horrified face of one of his guards as he ran toward him, shouting in Mandarin for Christopher, who was being buried alive, to give him his hand.

When Christopher regained consciousness, he remembered nothing of this. He knew that he was not in his cell. He smelled antiseptic. He was in pain. When he opened his eyes and saw the bandages
and the plaster casts on his body, he thought that he had been injured in the crash of Gus’s plane on the runway in China, and that all that had happened to him in the three years since had
been a dream.

Then he heard voices speaking in Chinese. When he understood what they were saying, he realized that he had been in China long enough to learn the language.

At the foot of his bed, a man and a woman were conversing in Mandarin. Christopher did not understand everything they said; the Chinese did not want him to learn Chinese. They hardly ever spoke
to one another in his hearing, and when they talked to him, they invariably used English. Nevertheless, he listened closely to the Chinese as they talked. It had been more than a year since he had
heard so many human voices speaking at the same time.

The woman was a doctor. The man wore a uniform. Evidently he held high rank: the doctor responded with great deference as he asked a series of questions about Christopher’s injuries.
Christopher learned that he had suffered a broken leg, a broken pelvis, cracked ribs, a punctured lung, concussion. He had been unconscious for eight days.

The man in the uniform asked more questions. He had a clear tenor voice. Currents of humor, detectable even by Christopher’s foreign ear, swirled in his rapid sentences. He inquired, with
anxiety, if Christopher was likely to suffer a permanent loss of memory as a result of the injury to his head. The doctor was not willing to commit herself on this point; her tone was sober and
cautious. Clearly she realized that it was important to tell this man, whoever he was, the absolute truth.

Christopher thought that he recognized the man’s voice. He could not place it among the voices of the Chinese who had interrogated him, prosecuted him, instructed and disciplined him in
the time that he had been in captivity. Had he heard the voice outside of China? It resembled a voice Christopher had heard speaking in another language. But whose?

Christopher saw the female doctor in profile. She was young, with a bespectacled, serious face. The man seemed to sense that Christopher was awake and watching. He turned and looked directly
into Christopher’s eyes, and it was then that Christopher recognized him.

It was Gus, the pilot who had flown Christopher into China. He wore the mustard-colored uniform of the Chinese Army, with colonel’s badges, but under the floppy service cap with its red
star he had Gus’s seamy, mobile face.

Even then, Christopher wondered if he was hallucinating. He tried to speak to Gus, but could not form words.

Gus covered his face with his hand and turned his back. He said something to the doctor, who threw a startled look toward Christopher in his bed.

Christopher coughed. His broken ribs sent a pain running through his body. When, at the end of the spasm, he opened his eyes again, Gus was gone. The doctor was at Christopher’s side.

“How long have you been conscious?” she asked in slow English.

“Not long.”

“What is your name?”

Christopher told her.

“What is your nationality? In what country are you now?”

As she asked these questions and as Christopher answered, she peered into his eyes with an examining light.

“Do you remember what happened?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you remember your work?”

“The digging? Yes.”

“The ditch collapsed. You were buried. There was a minor earthquake in . . . in the place where you have been.”

Christopher had never been told the name of the place where the Chinese kept him. He did not now ask where he was; it would have been discourteous. Besides, it did not matter. The doctor
completed her examination.

“Are you hungry?”

“Thirsty.”

The doctor produced an orange from the pocket of her coat and peeled it. Christopher’s entire head filled with the pungent odor of the opened orange; it was the first orange he had seen in
three years. Droplets of juice sprang from the fruit as the doctor broke it apart. She fed it to Christopher, a section at a time, with the sort of impersonal, efficient goodwill that the Victorian
English called “loving kindness.” This was a common quality among the people of the puritanical new China that held Christopher prisoner.

It was seeing Gus, or imagining that he had seen him, that started Christopher on the systematic recollection of his life. He had begun with an effort to remember the details of the accident in
the ditch. In this he succeeded. Soon he was engaged in remembering every detail of everything that had ever happened to him, everyone he had ever known, everything he had ever said or heard. He
recorded it all, a word a day, in the shorthand of his poem.

In the years of his imprisonment, he had passed through all but the last years of his life outside of China. He understood nearly everything.

But even after seven years of intensive thought, Christopher did not understand why Gus should have been in his hospital room, wearing the uniform of a Chinese colonel. Though Christopher had
never had a hallucination, it was certainly possible that Gus had been a hallucination. However, the doctor had not been a hallucination, the pain had not been a hallucination, the orange had not
been a hallucination: in his memory, Christopher could smell the orange and see the doctor’s nimble fingers as she fed it to him. He could see the colonel’s wrinkled face and hear his
good-humored voice. These belonged to Gus.

Christopher pulled up the quilt and prepared to fall asleep. Though he had dreamed colorful and intricate dreams all his life, he no longer did so. He supposed this was because he exercised his
mind so rigorously when he was awake. However, he still had unbidden thoughts, and as he began to doze, he remembered Molly: a gesture she had made, walking toward him through the Roman evening on
the Ponte Sisto. For a moment, he let himself see her as she had been in the first days of their love for one another. Then he stopped remembering. He never let memories of her run on; he still
found it impossible to say good-bye to her.

— 2 —

Christopher had already been awake for some time when the reveille whistle blew: the season was changing from winter to spring and he could see the morning light beyond the
frosted panes of the barred window set high in the wall. The weak bulb screwed into the ceiling fixture switched on, erasing the glow in the window. The peephole opened with a screech and the guard
looked in.

Christopher rose at once and put on his clothes, a discarded army uniform of quilted cotton that he had patched himself. He then folded his pallet and quilt into the regulation triangles and
waited, standing at attention. In a moment the peephole opened again. Then the door swung open and the guard, a man named Cheng, greeted Christopher with a brisk nod. He did not speak; the guards
were not permitted to speak to this prisoner.

Christopher put on his padded cotton boots and walked ahead of Cheng down a narrow corridor. There were cells to each side, but they were empty. Christopher was the only prisoner in this
installation. Like his school in Switzerland, the prison was a former monastery, built of greenish stone.

Outside, the country, as revealed in the thin morning light, was hilly and empty. Christopher’s ditch, a perfect straight line, ran up and over the nearest hill, vanished, then reappeared
on the flank of the hill beyond. Mist hung in the low places. Birds muttered in the eaves of his prison. The line of the roof was very beautiful. Cheng watched, his Chinese-model Kalashnikov with
its bright yellow stock slung across his chest, while Christopher defecated into the concrete latrine, then sprinkled lime on the droppings.

Inside his cell again, Christopher washed in the two liters of cold water that he had drawn from the outside faucet on the way back from the latrine. When he was through, he wiped out the glazed
pottery washbasin and dried the piece of Sunlight soap, replacing them neatly on their shelf. Then, spitting into the tar-lined slop bucket, he brushed his teeth with a toothbrush, wooden with pink
bristles, and hung it up. He folded his towel into a triangle.

Because Christopher had no relatives in China and was too poor to buy his own necessities, all these items had been provided to him by the government; it was understood that he would return them
at the end of his sentence.

He had two books: the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which he was permitted to keep, and a copy of
Wuthering Heights
, which was one of the twenty-two books in English that he was
given at a rate of one book per month; when he got to the end of the list, he started over again with the first book. He had taught himself to read very slowly. The dictionary was the one material
object he still loved. He read it every day like a breviary. The thought of losing it or having it taken away from him was almost unbearable.

This was Tuesday, the day of the week designated for shaving and for the clipping of nails. Cheng opened the door and gave Christopher a small pair of nail clippers. Christopher removed his
beard with this instrument, one whisker at a time, a task that consumed about an hour. Then he clipped his fingernails and toenails, placing the parings in a small box provided for this purpose.
Every two months, the clippings were collected for use in the manufacture of traditional Chinese medicine.

By now it was eight o’clock. Cheng brought Christopher the first of his two meals. The menu never varied: it consisted of two pieces of rough cornbread, each weighing 150 grams, a piece of
salted turnip, and a bowl of gruel. Christopher ate every bit. He would have the same things again at four o’clock, along with a cup of tea.

Cheng marched Christopher to his ditch. Christopher descended a ladder and walked along the bottom. Cheng stayed up top, looking down on his prisoner. The ditch was Christopher’s principal
labor. He was required to dig 1.5 cubic meters of dirt every day. This advanced the ditch, which was 2 meters deep and 1.5 meters wide, a distance of one half meter. He enjoyed the work, which made
the daylight hours pass swiftly, and took satisfaction in producing a ditch that was pleasing to the eye, with smooth perpendicular walls and a flat bottom.

The ditch was now about two kilometers in length; it seemed to have no purpose. When they reached the end, Cheng measured off the day’s quota of soil, driving a peg into the ground to mark
the place where Christopher would stop digging. Christopher picked up his mattock and his shovel in his callused hands and began to dig. He swung the mattock in a slow, steady rhythm; the blows he
delivered to the loam were the only sound in this empty, windswept place.

Turning his back to the prison so that his moving lips could not be seen, Cheng began to talk to Christopher in Chinese. Christopher, hidden from surveillance in his ditch, replied. This was
forbidden, but the two men had been together in the outdoors all day, every day, for more than ten years. Cheng had begun to speak to Christopher, even though he did not understand, merely to pass
the time. Christopher replied, repeating words and phrases. Now he hardly sounded like a foreigner; when he spoke Mandarin, he sounded like someone who came from a remote part of China, there was
the shadow of another dialect in his speech, but nothing that could be called an accent.

“Go on with the story of the old miser,” Cheng said.

Patiently, grunting with each blow of the mattock, Christopher told the Chinese the story about Eleazer Stickles and his bride, Melody.

Cheng had never heard such stories as Christopher told him. He admired this American. He was an excellent worker. He was forty-nine years old. He had no gray hair. His face was weather-burned.
He weighed 165 pounds. His broken bones had long since mended. He was in perfect health. If he felt the fear of death, Cheng had never seen any sign of it.

Christopher finished the story and began to sing in English. This was not permitted, but Cheng did not order him to stop; the two men, guard and prisoner, were used to each other.

That night, before he slept, Christopher, lying in the dark, worked on his poem. He wrote the 3,570th word. Once again, he glimpsed Molly on the Ponte Sisto; he always saw her there and she
always made the same gesture, touching her heart with her fingertips. She was always twenty-four years old. He never remembered her unclothed, never (now that he had ceased to dream) saw her as she
had looked in any of the hundreds of moments in which they had made love.

— 3 —

In the morning, after breakfast, Christopher had his weekly meeting with Ze, his interrogator. Every Wednesday, for ten years, Ze had spent the day with Christopher, who looked
forward keenly to these encounters.