Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (6 page)

They rose from the table, descended dusty wooden stairs, and left the restaurant to be assaulted by the life outside. Mrs. Pollifax revived at once and looked around her with pleasure: at the broad street dense with people and bicycles, at children stopping to stare at them shyly and then smile. Off to one side she saw a line of stalls piled high with shirts, plastic sandals, bananas, sunflower seeds, and nuts. A woman and child sat patiently beside a very small table, waiting to sell a few bottles of garishly bright orange soda pop. Across the street small huts had been squeezed on top of the roof of a long cement building from which the paint was peeling. Flowers in pots stood on ledges, or flowed
down from roof dwellings and apartments to overhang the street. The colors were muted, except for the flowers and the flash of an occasional red shirt. Even the sounds were muted: the persistent ringing of bicycle bells—there were no cars—and the shuffle of feet. It was approaching dusk, and the day’s heat had turned into a warmth that mingled pleasantly with the smells of cooking food.
This is more like it
, thought Mrs. Pollifax, drinking in the smells and sights, and it was with reluctance that she climbed back into the minibus.

This time it was Malcolm Styles who took the seat next to her. As he leaned over to place his small travel kit under the seat a pocket notebook fell out of his pocket and dropped into her lap. She picked it up and handed it back to him, but a solitary sheet of paper had escaped and settled into a niche beside the window. Retrieving this she glanced at it and gasped, “But how lovely!”

It was a sketch—a line-drawing in pen and ink—of a Chinese child, no more than a quick sketch but with lines so fluid and joyful that it staggered her with its delicacy, its aliveness. She looked at Malcolm with amazement. “You’re an artist!”

His grin was rueful, those thick brows drawing together deprecatingly. “Of a sort.”

“Stop being modest,” she told him sternly. “What do you
do
with a gift like this?”

His eyes smiled at her. “I’m not at all modest,” he told her. “Really I’m not. I just feel very uncomfortable when people learn that I wrote and illustrated the Tiny Tot series, and am now the author of the Doctor Styles’ picture books, and—”

“The Doctor Styles’ books!” she exclaimed. “Good heavens, my grandchild adores them, I sent him one at Christmas and—but that means you also wrote
The Boy Who Walked Into a Rainbow?
”

He nodded. “That’s me.”

She gazed at him incredulously. “I thought you were an actor or a fervent businessman,” she told him. “Or a male model—you know, distinguished gentleman who drinks only the best sherry or stands beside a Rolls-Royce smoking a briar pipe and looking owlish.”

“With attaché case?” he asked interestedly.

“Oh,
welded
to one,” she told him.

He nodded. “Then you can understand the shock when people discover that I live in a world inhabited by rabbits that talk and mice who rescue small boys.”

“Well—yes,” she admitted, smiling. “Yes, that could be a shock.”

“It is,” he assured her. “Usually there’s an instinctive withdrawal, then a look of suspicion, followed by a hearty ‘By Jove that’s nice,’ and a very hasty retreat. I must say you’ve taken it rather well, though.”

“Not a great deal surprises me,” admitted Mrs. Pollifax. “Not anymore, at least. It must surely make for a very good life?”

“Oh yes I’m very fortunate,” he said lightly. “I do only one book a year now, and that leaves six months for travel or for anything else that appeals.”

Six months, she mused, turning this over in her mind; yes there were certain possibilities there, and his books made for wonderful cover. “Are you hoping for a book from this trip?”

He said softly, “Oh I think not, but it will refresh me. I’m looking forward intensely to the Qin Shi Huang Tombs—”

“Oh yes!”

“—and the museums and temples. And sketching, of course.”

They had been driving through darkening streets—there
were no street lights—and now as night arrived there were only dim electric lights shining yellow in the apartments along the streets. Glancing up she could look into the windows and see a single feeble bulb suspended from the ceiling, see the dark silhouette of a man standing at a window peering out, glimpse a face seated at a table reading, the light etching the face in chiaroscuro. Hong Kong’s fluorescent lights had been stark clear white; here the color was a yellow that barely illuminated the dark caves of rooms.

“Surely those can’t be more than twenty-watt bulbs?” she murmured to Malcolm, pointing.

“Twenty-five at most,” he said.

Huge dark China
, she thought, moved by the silence, the absence of cars, and the darkness.

The buildings thinned until the headlights of the bus picked out mud-brick walls, then lines of trees with only a solitary light to be seen at a distance—a commune, perhaps—and then at last the bus turned down a graveled road that ran through a thinly wooded area, lights gleamed ahead, and they drew up before a huge, raw, half-finished modern building.

“I hope,” said Mrs. Pollifax with feeling, “our hotels aren’t always going to be
this
far out of town.”

“The question being,” Malcolm said, extending a hand to her, “whether they’re trying to keep us from meeting the people, or the people from meeting us.”

They walked into a huge echoing lobby that was almost a parody of contempory architecture: a few self-consciously Danish chairs, a very Art Deco cobblestone fish pond, with a fountain springing out of its base. They were the only people in the cavernous lobby except for a young woman behind a desk who passed out room keys to them.

“Bags outside rooms at half-past seven,” said Mr. Li. “We do not return here to the hotel tomorrow, remember.”

“It would take hours to get back here anyway,” commented Iris, and received an answering smile from George Westrum.

Mrs. Pollifax entered room 217, found it bland but comfortable, with hot water running from its sink taps, and promptly ran a bath and climbed into it. She carried with her a book on China’s history to read, but she did not read it. She was too busy wondering instead what lay ahead of her in this vast country; she wondered what the others were thinking, and who among them was thinking ahead to Xian, and then to Xinjiang Province lying to the north of them. She was remembering, too, the strange assortment of items that she’d brought into China with her, the stores of vitamin pills and dried fruit, the thermal socks, and chocolate. She remembered Carstairs saying, “It’s almost as impossible to get an agent into China as it is to get a man out of China.”

Out of China
 … this was the question that had occurred and reoccurred to her before her departure; how
did
they plan to get X out of China? It was a question that had sent her to the very good topographical map in her encyclopedia, and the result had chilled her because Xinjiang Province, thousands of miles from the sea, bordered Tibet and Pakistan and Afghanistan, its desert running like a flat carpet to the terrible mountain ranges of the Kunluns and the Karakaroms. Thermal socks, dried fruit, chocolate … the supposition she had drawn still shocked her.

But as she slipped into her robe and headed for bed she knew there was still another, even more shocking suspicion that she had consigned to the periphery of her thoughts, not allowing it entry, stubbornly resisting it because if she
brought it out and looked at it, she would understand Bishop’s fears for her. Turning out the lights she once again refused it entry and succeeded in pushing it far enough away to fall asleep at once.

I
n the morning Iris made her appearance in jeans, and after faithfully escorting her downstairs Mrs. Pollifax could see that emotional support would no longer be needed: Jenny whistled, Malcolm gave her a second calm glance, and George Westrum’s eyes rested on her with a glow that Mrs. Pollifax hoped Iris noticed, but doubted that she did; Joe Forbes murmured, “Well, now,” and even Peter Fox looked mildly appreciative. It was true that at breakfast Iris tipped a plate of peanuts into her lap, with half of them cascading to the floor, but—as Jenny cheerfully pointed out—peanuts were easier to recover than spilled beer. Iris, thought Mrs. Pollifax, was in danger of being assigned the role of comic in the group.

At breakfast and again at lunch Mrs. Pollifax pursued
her responsibility of listing for Mr. Li what each person particularly wanted to see, and in this she found no surprises: Joe Forbes wanted to visit a university, Jenny the second-grade class in a school, and George listed only communes. Malcolm’s priorities were more numerous and entirely cultural. Young Peter repeated his request for a side trip to the village where his grandmother was born, while Iris wanted to see the Chinese Opera but especially the Ban Po Village Museum in Xian because the artifacts reflected a Neolithic society run by women eight thousand years ago. Women’s Lib again. For herself, Mrs. Pollifax wrote down the Drum Tower in Xian and hoped no one would ask why. After consulting her guidebook she added the Bell Tower for camouflage, and any Buddhist temples.

But Guangzhou, or Canton, she found, was mainly a waiting game. She enjoyed their trip to the bank to exchange travelers’ checks for tourist scrip: she watched in fascination as four clerks hovered over her money, carefully checking the amount on an abacus. But tourist money, Mr. Li told them, could not be spent on the streets, at the bazaars, or free markets, only in the government-run shops.

Mrs. Pollifax at once rose to this challenge. “How can I get real money?” she asked him, thinking ahead to possible exigencies, and was told that the Friendship Stores would no doubt give real Chinese currency in change, whereupon she promptly asked for large denominations of tourist scrip, determined to collect as many of the authentic bills as she could. “My new hobby,” she told Malcolm cheerfully.

Aside from this, the Dr. Sun Yet-sen Memorial charmed her with its gorgeously intense blue-laquered tiles, but it smelled musty inside; she obediently oh-d and ah-d at the pandas in the zoo, but the heat there at midday nearly felled her, and once again they lunched on the second floor of a restaurant, with the natives on the street floor below.

Only once was she fully startled out of her lingering
jet-lag apathy. With an unexpected half hour of time confronting Mr. Tung, he offered them a pleasant stroll down a suburban road that held a mixture of older buildings among the brand-new scaffold-laced structures. One building in particular caught Mrs. Pollifax’s eye, creamy-white against the dull cement facade of its neighbors, and of an architecture that she could only identify in her mind as tropical-colonial. Graceful arched windows, each one trimmed in a tender green, were set like jewels into the smooth creamy walls. Next to an open green door hung a vertical sign, and Mrs. Pollifax brought out her small camera and took a picture of the charming vignette: a courtyard, a door, a leafy green tree, a donkey cart parked next to the door.

“What does the sign say?” she called to Mr. Tung, pointing.

Moving to her side he looked at it. “People’s Security Bureau,” he said, and abruptly turned away, his face expressionless.

People’s Security Bureau … the Sepos, she remembered from her reading, and she wondered if, since Mao’s death, the Sepos still knocked on doors at midnight to take people away, or whether the new order had changed this. She hoped so. Bishop had said, “You’ll find many surprising changes happening there, but they’ve been taking place very cautiously, very slowly.” She lingered a moment gazing at the open door, trying to imagine what lay behind its innocent facade, and then she turned and hurried away, made uneasy by a vague sense of foreboding.

“What did he say that building was?” asked George Westrum, catching up with her.

“People’s Security Bureau.”

“Oh, cops. By the way, did you know Malcolm writes kiddies’ books?”

The tone of his voice, she thought, would not have
surprised Malcolm. “Yes, very fine ones,” she told him. “Perhaps your children—are you married, George?”

He shook his head. “Never had children, been a widower for years. Tell me why in hell a man would write children’s books? Hasn’t he grown up yet?”

Mrs. Pollifax glanced at George’s baseball cap, tilted boyishly at the back of his head, and smiled. “Do any of us?” she asked dryly. “And should we—completely?”

He didn’t hear her; he said abruptly, “There’s Iris Damson up ahead. Doesn’t realize it’s almost time to be heading for the bus. Excuse me, I’ll just hurry along and tell her.”

She watched him march briskly toward Iris, passing Joe Forbes photographing workers mixing cement, then Peter and Jenny taking pictures of each other, and Malcolm aiming his camera at children playing. She smiled, thinking George Westrum was showing very definite signs of becoming addicted to Iris.

In late afternoon they reached the airport, where they said good-bye to Mr. Tung. Because there were no reserved seats on the plane, not even for foreigners, there was a mad dash across the tarmac once the plane was announced, and the group found themselves widely dispersed throughout the small two-engine prop plane. Mrs. Pollifax settled herself into an aisle seat with two men in Mao jackets beside her, and realized, now that she had sampled a little of China, it was time she began considering just how she was going to approach Comrade Guo Musu in his barbershop near the Drum Tower in Xian. She found that no inspiration occurred to her at all; she had no idea what the Drum Tower might be, and not even her wildest flights of imagination could conjure up the appearance of a barbershop, which in China would scarcely announce itself with a striped barber pole. It troubled her,
too, that so far the tour appeared to be arranged to prevent even the most accidental of encounters with the Chinese, and up against these frustrations she began to reflect instead on just which member of the group might be her coagent. One of them—
one person on this plane
—knew what Xian meant, and why she was here.