The Collected Stories (43 page)

Mr. Wong continued. The accused, he said, had photographed a lower-middle peasant lugging a two-wheel cart full of country produce into the city. A boy had been sleeping on top.

Ah, what a picture! China! The heavy cart, the toiling man, the narrow street—once England's street (huge buildings lined with first-class plumbing for the English empire's waste), like the downtown Free West anywhere. In the foreground the photographed man labored—probably bringing early spring vegetables to some distant neighborhood in order to carry back to his commune honey buckets of the city's stinking gold.

This act, this photographing, had been reported by one vigilant Chinese worker incensed by Antonioni's betrayal. Mr. Wong pointed his political finger at our brilliant comrade Frederick J. Lorenz. You! he said. Especially
you
are not a friend.

A general gasp and three nervous snickers. Immediately Ruth Larsen touched Fred's shoulder to show loyalty. Freddy! Not Freddy! Joe Larsen jumped up. He walked to the door. He put his hand on the knob.

We had all assumed that Mr. Wong's guilty man would be Martin, a jolly friend to all revolutions, an old-time union organizer, history lover, passionate photographer. (Before our tour ended, he had taken 4,387 pictures, although his camera had been broken for two days. It was not exactly broken; it had simply closed its eye, exhausted.)

Ruth, Ann, and I had discussed Freddy. Ruth thought he should have been spoken to long ago, but not for his photography. In this China, where all the grownups dressed in modest gray, blue, and green, Freddy wore very short white California shorts with a mustard-colored California B.V.D. shirt and, above his bronze, blue-eyed face, golden tan California curly hair. She didn't think that was nice.

Who are you, Ruth? The commissar of underwear? Ann had asked.

At breakfast Ruth had started to address him: Freddy! Then she'd thought, Oh boy! There you go again—the typical analysis by the old, which is: Rough politics is O.K. if it leans on the arm of bourgeois appropriateness. So she'd said, You sure keep your suntan a long time, Freddy.

Fred closed his eyes in order to think in solitude. We suffered a tour-wide two-minute fear. We waited for Fred's decision. He opened his eyes, then rose in high courtroom style to rebut.

Mr. Wong made a little smile. He looked around at us all. His finger pointed once more: You, Mr. Lorenz, have been accused by still another worker of invading a noodle factory.

Cries of No! No! Christ! Come on! He's kidding! Three young people, who liked to see us older folks caught in political contradiction or treasonous bewilderment, simply laughed.

One of us, Duane Smith, had put his life savings into this trip. He'd studied Chinese for six years in night school in order to come one day to this place and be understood by the Chinese people in Tienanmen Square. He didn't laugh. He whispered, This is serious. What if they throw us out?

Ruth said, Never!

Invading what? said Fred. Joe! he called out. He said, Oh, God! and sat down. What was China talking about?

Joe Larsen chewed sugarless gum very hard. He walked around and around in a little circle of annoyance near the door. Then he moved directly across the room to look at Mr. Wong. He believed in doing that. His politics was based on staring truthfully into the cruel eye of power.

Mr. Wong, he said, you know, in Peking I visited a street noodle factory too. One not far from the hotel.

Joe said he wanted to be absolutely clear. It was his fault that he and Fred had stopped at the noodle shop in the city of Tientsin. He was, when not in China, writing a novel, a utopia, a speculative fiction in which the self-reliant small necessary technology of noodle-making was one short chapter. He had considered it a good omen to have passed this street factory and to have been invited to observe all the soft hanging noodles and, in the bins, the stiff dried noodles. He admired the manageable machine that shaped, cut, and extruded them.

Why is he admitting all that? Duane Smith said. He'll get us thrown out.

Never, said Ruth.

The others had hoped for more interesting admissions. Joe often took long walks when the rest of us were visiting points of cultural interest. At supper he would tell us how he drank tea with old men, a condition he liked to consider himself a member of. He had taken a ferry ride with noisy Chinese families to the other side of a river. There, in an outlying district, two old people—guardians of the street—had shown him how to dispose of a banana peel.

Some of our people with poor character structures were jealous of his adventures. They'd been a little ashamed of their timidity when he spoke, but now that he was being spoken to, they were proud of their group discipline.

Mr. Wong, Joe said, Fred accompanied
me.
He was not alone. It was my idea. I'm crazy about your street noodle factories. Lane factories, I believe you call them?

Mr. Wong looked at Joe. Then he pretended Joe wasn't there and never had been. Mr. Wong did not like to be interfered with right in the middle of a political correction. Also, he did not seem to want to accuse two people at once. Why? Perhaps accusing one person was sharper, required only one finger and one harsh cry. At any rate, he ignored Joe and the interesting socialist question of decentralized neighborhood industry. Instead he said, Mr. Lorenz, why did you choose to photograph that peasant?

What? Me? Me? Me?

Fred said Me? so many times because he was (and is) one of our foremost movement lawyers. He's accustomed to approbation from his peers and shyness from petitioners. He can be depended upon to take the most hopeless case and to construct, out of his legal education and political experience, hope!—along with a furious protesting constituency.

So once more he cried, Me? Oh, take my film. Take it. Take the camera. You'll see. There's nothing … Take it. I don't even
like
to take pictures. I hate the lousy thing.

He tried to jerk the camera off his neck. He failed.

That's true, Mr. Wong, said Martin, trying out a reasonable tone (as one comrade
should
speak to another). My camera was broken last week and he gave me his. It didn't bother him at all.

We are not interested, said Mr. Wong. You will be here twelve more days. We wanted you to know that the Chinese people are vigilant. He made the tiniest bow, turned, and left.

Some of us gathered around Fred. Others gathered as far from Fred as possible.

Later that evening we were invited to share our folk heritage with the Tientsin Women's Federation. We sang “I've Been Working on the Railroad.”

The next afternoon Ruth talked to Ho, one of our guides. We all liked him, because he rolled his pants up to the knee when it was hot. She said, You know. Fred's one of our great poor-people's lawyers.

But you guys aren't into law so much, are you? said Ann. She has always been a little sarcastic.

You deserve this, I said to Ho. Who asked you to invite Antonioni, the star of the declining West? I bet lots of less-known people were dying to make the film.

Let's get off his hack, said Martin, composing us nicely in his lens, snapping a group photograph. Duane Smith said, Please! Leave him alone.

Ho had become accustomed to our harassment. He folded his trouser legs one more lap above the knee. But it's right, is it not? he said. You must ask the people first, do they wish to be photographed.

Yes, I said, but that's not the point and you know it, Ho.

And tomorrow, when you visit the countryside and the fisheries, you will inquire before you take a picture of the poor or lower-middle peasant?

Sure, said Ann.

You will say, even if it is only a child, may I take your photograph?

O.K., O.K., we said. Relax! We heard you the first five hundred times.

About three months later, Martin invited us to a China reunion at his house, full of food, slides, insights, and commentary. Twelve people came. Ann had flown to Portugal that very morning. Duane Smith had written from California to say naturally he couldn't make it but would Martin lend his fishery slides for a couple of weeks and airmail them at once special delivery, certified. Fred was sure he'd see us; he was due in New York for a week of conferences.

The three young people were present, looking lovely. They were friendly. Two were still solemn with hard new politics, but one who had mocked us with sneers and gloom asked would we please begin the evening by holding hands and singing “Listen, listen, listen to my heart's song, I'll never forget you. I'll never forsake you.”

I said, Why not? Let's see what happens.

Ruth said, My God! What's come over you? Anyway, where's Joe?

Someone said we should start either eating or looking. Joe was clearly impossible. He had been undisciplined in two countries. The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

Joe arrived forty minutes late, starved, sweaty. I have to tell you what happened, he said.

You know that nice park in the South Bronx, the one I like, where I've been working on and off this summer? Well, I finished up just a couple of hours ago. The boys I work with had already gone home—we had a great party—and I stuffed the camera and Juan's films of the fiesta into a musette bag.

I knew I was going to see all of you, so I sort of sauntered my way back to the subway, imagining our conversations and, well, excited—you know I get excited.

Those lousy streets. I've been in the neighborhood all these weeks with the summer work kids—not just the park but the lots—building some playgrounds and the kind of giant climber I showed you, Marty. Remember? And filming, getting the kids to see—not that anyone sees. Maybe just to keep a record. Sometimes we're raising a couple of beams and suddenly a building across the street begins to smolder—smoke, big white smoke, then flames out of every window. The Bronx kids usually keep going, but the other boys—they're Puerto Rican too, they come with me from the Lower East Side and one boy from Brooklyn—they're amazed. They can't believe—a block tougher than their own. After the fire engines, after the fire, when everything cools off, they like to see the junkies toss brass pipes, real old brass, out of the windows. Some of those houses were nice tenements once.

I know, said Ruth. I lived in one. Me too, said Martin.

That's right. We have some film if you ever want to see—the block is burning down on one side of the street, and the kids are trying to build something on the other.

Anyway, it's such a great day, I just walked along kind of dreaming. I passed a factory. There was a sign,
EMPLEADOS NECESITADOS.
Took a couple of shots. Women came out of the factory. It was about five-thirty, I guess. They waved, I took some pictures, they waved some more.

Now, you have to understand that on any street there, among a couple dozen abandoned buildings, there's always one or two that look nearly intact. Usually men and boys sit around the front of a building like that. That's what I saw, just a block or two after the factory. I hadn't planned on filming, but we did need a couple of good long background shots—the kids either do that wild back-and-forth panning or they shoot for the eyeball. So I began this slow pan across the top floor—black windows and charred roofs—and as the camera slowly took it all in, I could see out of the corner of my eye a group of guys on one of the stoops. They were a distance away—playing a guitar, leaning on a wall, a mattress, the steps—with a couple of transistors.

I had an awful uncomfortable feeling about including them in the long pan. In fact, I can't remember—did I, or did I stop short? I may have wanted to include them—because I hate those typical exposés, you know. It could have been right—correct—to show that energy those guys sometimes have in the early evening, not just the nodding-out residents of the famous South Bronx.

Still, I know that any non-Hispanic white man with a camera looks like a narc. So I put the camera away. Well, what did I do then? I guess I continued my walk toward the subway—a little quickly, maybe. I knew I'd better move.

About ten seconds after I began to feel safe, I heard a running thud. A human form flew past me, ripping the musette bag off my shoulder. He kept going, swerved, cut across an empty lot to the next street. He was so fast and so violent, but he'd just thrust his arm through the shoulder strap, moving it from my shoulder to his—hadn't hurt me at all, a craftsman—but I was shook up. I stood still. My heart was jumping. I watched him. I turned. Those guys down the block were all laughing. We were the only people on that long burned-out block.

What could I do? I started to resume my lifelong trip to the subway, but I'll tell you I couldn't stand for it to end that way. For some reason I wanted them to know who I was. Also, I didn't want to become scared of walking around that neighborhood. I work there, damn it. I don't know if those are the real reasons. Whatever—I had to talk to them. So I walked back and went up to them. They laughed. I said, Listen, I know it probably wasn't so great to have shot that film over your heads like that, but I don't think I included you.

I told them they probably knew me—I was working a couple of blocks away, and at least a couple of them must have been over there. I said the film I'd shot was not so important, but the other stuff had been taken by the Youth Corps kids and they'd feel bad.

The fellow on the top step said, That's one sad story, old man. I looked up. On the fire escape above us, the guy who'd snatched the musette bag was unraveling the film right out of the camera. Hopping around, dancing, laughing.

That's O.K., I said, like some kind of jerk. I don't really care, but I would like the other film. Can't do it, the guy says. I kept pushing: It isn't mine—it's the kids' on 141st. Then I just stood there looking at them. I didn't move. Couldn't. I must have looked so dumb, or maybe they recognized me. Anyway, they had a small speedy Spanish conference, and the leader, top-step man, hollered up, Paco, bring it down. No, no, Paco says. He was draping the exposed film in and out of the fire-escape bars. Bring it down, top-step said. Paco looked absolutely miserable, but he handed the bag over. He was disgusted.