Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (17 page)

“Ah!” she cried, understanding, and brought out the kerchief she’d just purchased. He nodded eagerly and she held it out to him while he poured water over it; she placed
it on her head, delighted by its coolness, and thanked the man profusely with gestures.

“That bad, huh,” said Peter, joining her. “Look, I want you to meet my friend over there, he speaks a little English and I’ve got a deal going with him that includes you. In fact it seems to
depend
on you.”

“On me!” she exclaimed, and as the sun struck her again she recoiled. “Peter—”

But he was already saying to the young man, “Sheng Ti, here is my grandmother.”

Mrs. Pollifax gave Peter a reproachful glance. “Not
another
grandmother, Peter?”

“Ah yes,” cried Sheng Ti, bowing and smiling, and she looked at him with interest.

His face was at variance with his clothes, which were disreputable: neatly patched pants, a sweat-stained dirty undershirt, and sandals repaired with string; his face, however, shone with intelligence, and his eyes were bright and eager.

“Now that you see my grandmother you will do this for us?” Peter asked him. “To win the bet—the wager?”

“Bet, yes. For the lady yes, I understand now,” he said, nodding vigorously.

“Okay, then. Outside the Guesthouse. Wait down the street at the corner, okay? Very secret. Ten o’clock tonight.” Peter counted out change and placed it in the young man’s palm. “Ten o’clock, Sheng Ti,” he added, holding up all of his fingers.

“Ten,” repeated Sheng Ti.

As Peter led her away Mrs. Pollifax glanced back and said, “Peter, what on earth—what was all that about?”

“He wouldn’t do it for me,” Peter told her, “so I tried him out on you and it worked. An authority figure, that’s you,” he said, grinning. “I think he’s what’s called a
‘hooligan’—no visible means of employment so I took a chance on him, he ought to be relatively safe.”

“Safe for what? Peter, you didn’t speak Chinese to him!”

“God no,” he said. “I’m just a crazy American tourist wanting to win a bet, a bet that I could drive a donkey cart for a couple of hours without the guides hearing about it. I had a hunch he might be open to something illicit. We’ll need to hide our foodstuff and sheepskins in the desert, and how else could we get them there? Besides, you’re not used to missing all the fun, are you?”

She laughed.

“Disguises later, after we leave Sheng Ti behind tonight,” he went on. “A kerchief for you, that quilted jacket you bought in Urumchi—”

“Very observant of you,” she said dryly.

“—cotton slacks, and I’ll slant your eyes for you after we’ve left Sheng Ti, in case we’re stopped.” He signaled to an ancient man with a seamed face sitting patiently over his cart and donkey. “Hop on, he’s a cab driver, Turfan style, and you’ve got to get out of this sun.”

She gratefully pulled herself onto the shelflike rear of the cart, smiled at the driver, and waved good-bye to Peter, thinking how confident and thoughtful he was becoming—and also quite dear, she added, startled by this realization. How unbelievable this would have seemed to her in Hong Kong and Canton, or even in Xian when he was being irresponsible and hostile, and with this there came a strange feeling, not unfamiliar to her, that all of this had been intended to happen, and that her meeting with Peter held a significance that was not apparent to her yet. She was delivered to the entrance of the Guesthouse, gave the driver a handful of
feng
, and returned to face the heat of her room, passing Jenny and Forbes seated talking under the luxurious grape arbor. She felt only a little giddy as
she examined her treasures from the bazaar and put them away but when she left her room for lunch and sightseeing she wore a dripping wet towel wound around her head. She did not plan to nearly faint again under Turfan’s sun, and if her day had just been extended by a cart ride into the country with Peter, it would at least be cooler by night.

There were no keys to the rooms here, so that when Peter knocked softly on her door at ten that night he followed this by quickly slipping inside. Speaking in a low voice he said, “We can leave by your window.” He was carrying his dufflebag and he placed it now on her bed. “What do you have?” he asked.

“A second padded quilted jacket from Xian,” she told him crisply. “In Urumchi I bought two sheepskin vests, one small blanket, and of course, there are the vitamins and dried foods I carried with me. And to fit all this into my suitcase,” she reminded him, “I had to leave almost everything behind in Urumchi except my pajamas. Even,” she added sternly, “my hairbrush.”

“I’ll lend you mine,” he said dryly. “How are you carrying it all?”

“Rolled up in a bundle.” She pointed to it sitting on the floor beside the chair.

“And may one ask what’s happened to your two lower front teeth?” he asked with interest.

“Ah,” she remarked happily, “that was a dental bridge. I noticed an old lady in the bazaar this morning with missing teeth, and I thought it would add an authentic note to my disguise.” She knotted the plain cotton kerchief around her head, patted her cotton jacket and leaned over to adjust the buckles on her cloth shoes. “Shall we go?”

Peter unlatched the screen, removed it, helped her over the sill and followed, replacing the screen behind them. In single file they stole up the path in the darkness, passing
the lighted rooms of the others and coming to a stop at a certain place in the wall where the top had crumbled, releasing the pointed shards of glass embedded in its cement to repel intruders. Tossing both dufflebag and bundle over the wall, they were soon outside the compound and moving toward the street’s corner.

The cart was waiting with Sheng Ti beside it. A fuzzy moon dimly illuminated his features; he gave them and their luggage a glance that unsettled Mrs. Pollifax by its thoughtful speculations. He said, “I go with you?”

Peter smiled and shook his head. “No, we’ll be okay. Back in two hours.”

“I did not steal it,” Sheng added, his eyes running curiously over Mrs. Pollifax’s cloth shoes, pants, and quilted jacket.

“Good,” Peter said and tossed their baggage into the rear, handed Mrs. Pollifax up to the seat with a flourish and squeezed in beside her.

Sheng Ti handed him the reins.
“Zaijian
,” he said, and stepped back into the shadow of the wall.

The donkey moved, the cart lurched, the wheels gave one outraged groan and they were underway; when Mrs. Pollifax glanced back Sheng Ti had vanished. A lone cyclist pedaled toward them in the darkness and called out a greeting; Peter returned it, slipping easily and gratefully into Chinese. “But I think we stop now and make our eyes slant before we run into anyone else,” he said, and pulled up beside a vacant stretch of wall.

“What a peculiar contraption,” said Mrs. Pollifax when he shone his flashlight once and very quickly, after inserting it under her hair.

“The amazing thing is that it doesn’t hurt and it can’t be seen—and now you are a true Han,” he told her, and she saw the flash of his smile in the faint moonlight.

Slowly they proceeded down the road and out of Turfan,
occasionally meeting cyclists as they returned from work or pedaled to work, the pale moon etching black shadows of walls and trees across the darkness of the road. A dog barked. A voice was heard from behind a wall. Other than the clip-clop of the donkey’s hoofs and the movement of the wheels there was only the silence of the desert around them.

“How absolutely beautiful to be free for a couple of hours!” said Peter with a happy sigh.

Since Mrs. Pollifax was already experiencing this same reaction—a sense of elation at being out and into the space around her and free of Mr. Li, Mr. Kan, and the tour group—she said with feeling, “Pure bliss! It’s safe to speak English now?”

He gestured around them at the empty pale countryside. “Who’s to hear?”

And so they began to talk. Of families. Of what they had left behind to come to China. Of the desert. “The Taklamakan desert,” Peter told her, “has been called a hungry and ravenous monster. It’s considered far more treacherous than the Gobi, it eats people and cities, swallowing them whole.”

“Cities?
” she said incredulously.

He nodded. “Entire cities that flourished in the days of the Silk Road. They find them now and then, the archaeologists, and there are probably more treasures buried there still than you or I could ever imagine, as well as the bones of men and animals caught in its violent dust and earth storms.”

She shivered. “We’re not on the desert yet, are we?”

“No, and won’t be. Only its rim.”

“And you and X—you won’t cross it, will you?”

“No—skirt it.”

As they talked, their voices low in keeping with the
rhythm of the plodding donkey and the clouded moon binding them in its spell, she thought and spoke of Cyrus.

“Why don’t you marry him?” asked Peter bluntly.

“If we get out of it—if I get out of this in one piece, I intend to,” she announced with a firmness that startled her. “It seems to me now that I hesitated—oh, for all the wrong reasons. Foolish ones.”

“Someone said that if the heart is engaged—”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “And mine is. I hesitated, wanting to be sure, feeling—oh feeling that life would be different, changed, if I married, and that I might have to give up—all this.”

“All this,” murmured Peter, and suddenly smiled. “So you’re an adventurer, too!”

“Yes—no—yes, of course I am,” she admitted, laughing. “But what I overlooked—”

“Yes?” he asked curiously.

“What I overlooked,” she said simply, “is
change
 … Meeting Carstairs and becoming useful to him changed me so that nothing was or ever could be the same again.”
Like a kaleidoscope
, she thought, remembering that simile following her first adventure. “But meeting Cyrus also changed me so that nothing will or can be the same ever again.
Nothing
. Not even this,” she added ruefully. “Which is what I didn’t see clearly until now.”

“You’re not sorry you came?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Oh no! There were things I had to learn, as you can see. Important things. Even at my age!”

He said with a sigh, “I think my parents stopped learning a long time ago, which made me a misfit, a changeling, and restless. A very conventional middle-class family, except they did send me to Harvard where I didn’t belong either but—”

“But where you learned to speak Chinese.”

“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? It came so easily to me, without
any classes or lessons at all, as if I’d spoken and read it before and it was already etched in my subconscious waiting to be rediscovered. You must know the very Eastern theory that we’ve lived many lives; can you believe in that at all?”

“Easily,” she said, nodding. “For a long time I’ve found it a very supportive, meaningful explanation for the curious things that happen to people: the tragedies, the uncanny rescues, and coincidences in life.” She laughed suddenly. “And Cyrus has a rather mandarin look about him; he’s a large man and very American, but there’s an oriental cast to his eyes that drew me from the beginning. Just as I’ve been drawn to the country of China itself,” she added meditatively.

“Think we’ve known each other before?” asked Peter, with a chuckle.

She thought without saying it aloud:
yes it’s possible, why else do I feel so connected with you—suddenly and inexplicably—and so alarmed about what lies ahead for you? There’s an understanding between us, unspoken but familiar, that I’ve experienced only with Tsanko and with Cyrus
. Aloud she said quietly, “It’s quite possible, yes. A sense of fatefulness—of stars crossing—happens rather frequently to me these days. I lived a very prosaic life, you see, and then suddenly I too met Carstairs, and I’ve often wondered if this strange new life was waiting for me all the time during those years I lived so quietly. I’ve wondered,” she added softly, “how much choice we really do have about some of the large events in our lives. Is Peter Fox your real name?” she asked abruptly.

He shook his head. “Peter’s my name but not Fox.” He glanced down at his luminous digital watch and said, “We’ve been in transit exactly fifty-five minutes, I think it’s time we stop and look for a place to hide all this gear.”

She looked around her at the low, hunchbacked surrealistic mountains off to their left. They had to be sandstone, she thought, to have been whipped into such frenzied, angry shapes by wind and rain, and to have created the gulleys and earth cleavages among which they were riding now. “It’s certainly a good place to hide things, but however will you find your cache again?”

“By compass, by noting distance and direction of travel, and by making a map of the shapes and contours. C’mon,” he said, bringing the cart to a halt. “I really need your help, we’ve only a few minutes to do this.
You
pick the place. Take the flashlight.”

Mrs. Pollifax said sharply, “No, Peter, no flashlight.”

Startled he asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” She stepped down from the cart, gave the donkey an absent pat on its flank and moved off the road toward three jagged rocks about six feet high. “I think here,” she called.

Peter was already lifting out his dufflebag. She went back and retrieved her own bulky package and when she joined Peter she could see him nod in the dim light. “Good,” he said, and bringing out his knife he worked away at enlarging a hole under one of the rock formations. Into this he pressed the small items: vitamins, melons, two filled water pouches, the dried fruit, and the socks, finally sealing the gap with a stone. On the surface between two of the rocks he laid out the bulkier items—the two pairs of boots and the sweaters—and then covered them over with the sheepskins and at last the rug. With his knife he scraped enough dust from the earth to scatter over the rug until it looked a part of the earth.

“Not bad,” commented Mrs. Pollifax. “But let’s not linger.
Please
.”

He gave her a sharp glance, found several loose stones
to weigh down the rug and nodded. “Okay, let’s go. We’ll both pace off the distance to the road, okay?”