Ocean of Words (23 page)

“Certainly, he had his chance already. How about —”

The door burst open and somebody rushed in. It was Ma Pingli, our youngest boy, who was to stand the three o’clock shift at the storehouse. “Platoon Leader, Liu Fu is not — not at the post.” He took the fur cover off his nose, panting hard. “All the telephone wires are cut. We can’t call anywhere.”

“Did you go around and look for him?”

“Yes, everywhere.”

“Where’s his gun?”

“The gun is still there, in the post, but he’s gone.”

“Hurry up! Bring over the horses!” I ordered. “We’ll go get him.”

Ma ran away to the stable. I glanced at Old Li. The look on his face showed he understood what was happening. “Take this with you.” I handed him a semiautomatic rifle, which he accepted absentmindedly, and I picked up another one for myself. In uneasy silence, we went out to wait for Ma.

The horses sweated all over, climbing toward the border. I calculated that we would have enough time to stop him before he could get across. He had to climb a long way from the southern side of the mountain to avoid being spotted by our watchtower. But when we reached the Wusuli River, a line of fresh footprints stretched before us, winding across the snow-covered surface of the river, extending itself to the other side, and gradually fading in the bluish whiteness of the vast Russian territory.

“The beast, stronger than a horse,” I said. It was unimaginable that he could run so fast in the deep snow.

“He’s there!” Ma Pingli pointed to a small slope partly covered by gray bushes.

Indeed, I saw a dark dot moving toward the edge of the thicket, which was about five hundred meters away from us. Impossible — surely he was too smart not to put on his camouflage cape. I raised my binoculars and saw him carrying a big stuffed gunnysack on his right shoulder and running desperately for the shelter of the bushes, the white cape secured around his neck flapping behind him like a huge butterfly. I gave the binoculars to Old Li.

Li watched. “He’s taking a sack of
Forwards
with him!” he said with amazement.

“He stole it from the kitchen. I saw the kitchen door broken,” Ma reported. We all knew our cooks stored
Forwards
, the newspaper of Shenyang Military Region, in gunnysacks as kindling. We had been told not to toss the paper about, because the Russians tried to get every issue of it in Hong Kong and would pay more than ten dollars for it.

“The Russians may not need those back issues at all,” I said. “They’ve already got them. They only want recent ones. He’s dumb.”

Suddenly a yellow light pierced the sky over the slope. The Russians’ lookout tower must have spotted him; their jeep was coming to pick him up.

Old Li and I looked at each other. We knew what we had to do. No time to waste. “We have no choice,” I muttered, putting a sighting glass onto my rifle. “He has betrayed our country, and he is our enemy now.”

I raised the rifle and aimed at him steadily. A burst of fire fixed him there. He collapsed in the distant snow, and the big sack fell off his shoulder and rolled down the slope.

“You got him!” Ma shouted.

“Yes, I got him. Let’s go back.”

We mounted the saddles; the horses immediately galloped down the mountain. They were eager to get out of the cold wind and return to their stable.

All the way back, none of us said another word.

Zhou Wen’s last year in the People’s Army was not easy. All his comrades pestered him, because in their eyes he was a bookworm, a scholar of sorts. Whenever they played poker, or chatted, or cracked jokes, he would sneak out to a place where he could read alone. This habit annoyed not only his fellow soldiers but also the chief of the Radio-telegram Station, Huang Peng, whose rank was equal to a platoon commander’s. Chief Huang would say to his men, “This is not college. If you want to be a college student, you’d better go home first.” Everybody knew he referred to Zhou.

The only thing they liked about Zhou was that he would work the shift they hated most, from 1:00
A.M.
to 8:00
A.M.
During the small hours Zhou read novels and middle school textbooks instead of the writings by Chairman Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Often in the early morning he watched the eastern sky turn gray, pale, pink, and bright. The dawn was driving the night away from Longmen City bit by bit until, all of a sudden, a fresh daybreak descended, shining upon thousands of red roofs.

If not for the help of Director Liang Ming of the Divisional Logistics Department, Zhou’s last year in the army would have been disastrous. Liang and his family lived in a grand
church built by nineteenth-century Russian missionaries, which was at the southern corner of the Divisional Headquarters compound. A large red star stood atop the steeple. Within the church many walls had been knocked down to create a large auditorium, which served as the division’s conference hall, movie house, and theater. All the fancy bourgeois pews had been pulled out and replaced by long proletarian benches, and Chairman Mao’s majestic portrait had driven off the superstitious altarpiece.

The Liangs lived in the back of the church, as did the soldiers of the Radio-telegram Station. Because the antennas needed height, the radiomen occupied the attic, while the director’s family had for themselves the three floors underneath. Whenever there was a movie on, the men at the station would steal into the auditorium through the rear door and sit against the wall, watching the screen from the back stage. They never bothered to get tickets. But except for those evenings when there were movies shown or plays performed, the back door would be locked. Very often Zhou dreamed of studying alone in the spacious front hall. Unable to enter it, he had to go outside to read in the open air.

One evening in October he was reading under a road lamp near the church. It was cloudy and a snow was gathering, just as the loudspeaker had announced that morning. Zhou was so engrossed he didn’t notice somebody approaching until a deep voice startled him. “What are you doing here, little comrade?” Director Liang stood in front of Zhou, smiling kindly. His left sleeve, without an arm inside, hung listlessly from his shoulder, the cuff lodged in his pocket. His baggy eyes were fixed on Zhou’s face.

“Reading,” Zhou managed to say, closing the book and reluctantly showing him the title. He tried to smile but only twitched his lips, his eyes dim with fear.

“The Three Kingdoms!”
Liang cried. He pointed at the other book under Zhou’s arm. “How about this one?”

“
Ocean of Words
, a dictionary.” Zhou regretted having taken the big book out with him.

“Can I have a look?”

Zhou handed it to the old man, who began flicking through the pages between the green covers. “It looks like a good book,” Liang said and gave it back to Zhou. “Tell me, what’s your name?”

“Zhou Wen.”

“You’re in the Radio Station upstairs, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you often read old books?”

“Yes.” Zhou was afraid the officer would confiscate the novel, which he had borrowed from a friend in the Telephone Company.

“Why don’t you read inside?” Liang asked.

“It’s noisy upstairs. They won’t let me read in peace.”

“Tickle their grandmothers!” Liang shook his gray head. “Follow me.”

Unsure what was going on, Zhou didn’t follow him. Instead he watched Liang’s stout back moving away.

“I order you to come in,” the director said loudly, opening the door to his home.

Zhou followed Liang to the second floor. The home was so spacious that the first floor alone had five or six rooms. Down the hall the red floor was shiny under the chandelier; the brown windowsill at the stairway was large enough to be a bed. Liang opened a door and said, “You use this room. Whenever you want to study, come here and study inside.”

“This, this —”

“I order you to use it. We have lots of rooms. From now on, if I see you reading outside again, I will kick all of you out of this building.”

“No, no, they may want me at any time. What should I say if they can’t find me?”

“Tell them I want you. I want you to study and work for me here.” Liang closed the door, and his leather boots thumped away downstairs.

Outside, snowflakes suddenly began fluttering to the ground. Through the window Zhou saw the backyard of the small grocery that was run by some officers’ wives. A few naked branches were tossing, almost touching the panes. Inside, green curtains covered the corners of the large window. Though bright and clean, the room seemed to be used as a repository for old furniture. On the floor was a large desk, a stool, a chair, a wooden bed standing on its head against the wall, and a rickety sofa. But for Zhou this was heaven. Full of joy, he read three chapters that evening.

Soon the downstairs room became Zhou’s haven. In the Radio Company he could hardly get along with anybody; there was a lot of ill feeling between him and his leaders and comrades. He tried forgetting all the unhappy things by making himself study hard downstairs, but that didn’t always help. His biggest headache was his imminent discharge from the army: not the demobilization itself so much as his non-Party status. It was obvious that without Communist Party membership he wouldn’t be assigned a good job once he returned home. Thinking him bookish, the Party members in the Radio Company were reluctant to consider his application seriously. Chief Huang would never help him; neither would Party Secretary Si Ma Lin. Zhou had once been on good terms with the secretary; he had from time to time helped Si Ma write articles on current political topics and chalked up slogans and short poems on the large blackboard in front of the Company Headquarters. That broad piece of wood was the company’s face, because it was the first thing a visitor would see and what was on it displayed
the men’s sincere political attitudes and lofty aspirations. The secretary had praised Zhou three times for the poems and calligraphy on the blackboard, but things had gone bad between Zhou and Si Ma because of
Ocean of Words
.

The dictionary was a rare book, which Zhou’s father had bought in the early 1950s. It was compiled in 1929, was seven by thirteen inches in size and over three thousand pages thick, and had Chinese, Latin, and English indexes. Its original price was eighty silver dollars, but Zhou’s father had paid a mere one
yuan
for it at a salvage station, where all things were sold by weight. The book weighed almost three
jin
. Having grown up with the small
New China Dictionary
, which had only a few thousand entries, Secretary Si Ma had never imagined there was such a big book in the world. When he saw it for the first time, he browsed through the pages for two hours, pacing up and down in his office with the book in his arms as if cradling a baby. He told Zhou, “I love this book. What a treasure. It’s a gold mine, an armory!”

One day at the Company Headquarters the secretary asked Zhou, “Can I have that great book, Young Zhou?”

“It’s my family’s heirloom. I can’t give it to anybody.” Zhou regretted having shown him the dictionary and having even told him that his father had spent only one
yuan
for it.

“I won’t take it for free. Give me a price. I’ll pay you a good sum.”

“Secretary Si Ma, I can’t sell it. It’s my father’s book.”

“How about fifty
yuan
?”

“If it were mine I would give it to you free.”

“A hundred?”

“No, I won’t sell.”

“Two hundred?”

“No.”

“You are a stubborn, Young Zhou, you know.” The secretary looked at Zhou with a meaningful smile.

From that moment on, Zhou knew that as long as Si Ma was the Party secretary in the company, there would be no hope of his joining the Party. Sometimes he did think of giving him the dictionary, but he could not bear to part with it. After he had refused Si Ma’s request for the second time, his mind could no longer remain at ease; he was afraid somebody would steal the book the moment he didn’t have it with him. There was no safe place to hide it at the station; his comrades might make off with it if they knew the secretary would pay a quarter of his yearly salary for it. Fortunately, Zhou had his own room now, so he kept the dictionary downstairs in a drawer of the desk.

One evening as Zhou was reading in the room, Director Liang came in, followed by his wife carrying two cups. “Have some tea, Little Zhou?” Liang said. He took a cup and sat down on the sofa, which began squeaking under him.

Zhou stood up, receiving the cup with both hands from Mrs. Liang. “Please don’t do this for me.”

“Have some tea, Little Zhou,” she said with a smile. She looked very kind, her face covered with wrinkles. “We are neighbors, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are.”

“Sit down, and you two talk. I have things to do downstairs.” She turned and walked away.

“Don’t be so polite. If you want tea, just take it,” Liang said, blowing away the tea leaves in his cup. Zhou took a sip.

“Little Zhou,” Liang said again, “you know I like young people who study hard.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Tell me, why do you want to study?”

“I don’t know for sure. My grandfather was a scholar, but my father didn’t finish middle school. He joined the Communist Army to fight the Japanese. He always wants me to study hard and says we are a family of scholars and must carry on the tradition. Besides, I like reading and writing.”

“Your father is a good father,” Liang announced, as if they were at a meeting. “I’m from a poor peasant’s family. If a carrying pole stood up on the ground, my father couldn’t tell it means ‘one.’ But I always say the same thing to my kids like your father says. You see, nowadays schools are closed. Young people don’t study but make revolution outside school. They don’t know a fart about the revolution. For the revolutionary cause I lost my arm and these fingers.” He raised his only hand, whose little and ring fingers were missing. The stumps quivered in the fluorescent light.

Zhou nerved himself for the question. “Can I ask how you lost your arm?”

“All right, I’m going to tell you the story, so that you will study harder.” Liang lifted the cup and took a gulp. The tea gargled in his mouth for a few seconds and then went down. “In the fall of 1938, I was a commander of a machine-gun company in the Red Army, and we fought against Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in a mountain area in Gansu. My company’s task was to hold a hilltop. From there you could control two roads with machine guns. We took the hill and held it to protect our retreating army. The first day we fought a battle with two enemy battalions that attempted to take the hill from us. They left about three hundred bodies on the slopes, but our Party secretary and sixteen other men were killed. Another twenty were badly wounded. Night came, and we had no idea if all of our army had passed and how long we had to stay on the hill. At about ten o’clock, an orderly came from the Regimental Staff and delivered a message. It had only two words penciled on a scrap of paper. I
could tell it was Regimental Commander Hsiao Hsiong’s bold handwriting.