The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  “But you want power yourself,” Yang protested. “You want to make a privileged class of revolutionaries.”

  “I want to destroy power! What man has a right to power over another? And as for a privileged class of revolutionaries, their privileges are poverty and exile and jail and torture and firing squads!” Then the Indochinese said more reasonably, “Someone must lead. Someone must make a society run. The question is, What is it to be run for? Those who are most selfless must lead; those who demand nothing for themselves, only justice for others. Their reward will be pain and sorrow and, in the end, freedom.”

  Pain and sorrow and, in the end, freedom. Yang did return to China, in 1919. There was no sign of serious socialism in North China, only a few professors, a debating society. There were adventurers, ignorant and barbarous, who became footnotes to history before his eyes, or warlords who lasted many years and were fascinated by certain aspects of the Occident, like flashlights and motorcars; not adventurers but true warlords, with roots in the region and limited territorial ambitions, but nevertheless ignorant and barbarous, they too.

  Yang pursued his studies and conferred with his father. This pleased both men, the elder naturally flattered and the younger happy to give evidence of filial devotion and to receive what proved extraordinarily often to be wisdom. Yang’s father was neither surprised nor angered by his son’s political perplexity, and was gently relieved that the boy—nudging thirty now, but still his boy—was having second thoughts: could the political theory of nineteenth-century industrial Europe have any bearing on, or use in, a divided country—a divided colony of Europe and America, really—of four hundred million peasants, an ossified Confucian bureaucracy and generals and admirals from a comic opera? If there were universal principles governing all societies, then China must help to discover or confirm. If each society developed in its own manner, depending on the land, population, flora, fauna, history, means of production and distribution and communication available in successive periods, then could China learn at all from the Occident?

  Debating these matters over tea and cigarettes, father and son decided that the young officer had advanced, and not prejudiced, his career by running off to Canton and then France; that China might indeed be unified in his lifetime and that he might play a hero’s role in that process; and that perhaps Sun Yat-sen, who seemed to be making headway, represented a synthesis of East and West that might survive.

  In 1921 Yang bade a dignified, highly emotional and correctly formal farewell to his father, boarded a train for Tientsin, and took passage on a coaster for Canton via Shanghai and Hong Kong. In Canton he rejoined Sun Yat-sen, who remembered him, complimented him on his service and decorations (Yang had added a Victory Medal and a Good Conduct Medal), questioned him shrewdly about North China, and commissioned him a captain.

  Yang remained a military man in search of a government he could conscientiously serve. Sun died in 1925; faction reigned, and Yang faced a grim choice, not his first, not his last: join a beleaguered Communist minority directed almost contemptuously by Russians and Germans and an occasional Frenchman, or join an ignorant and humorless thug called Chiang Kai-shek who had laid out a detailed and feasible campaign to unify China. He joined Chiang. This unfortunately required him to butcher unarmed Communists in the larger cities of the Yangtze valley. He had never before killed, or caused to be killed, his countrymen, and it came hard. He had joined Chiang, after all, because the man was Chinese.

  And now it was December of 1949, and the descendants, real or political, of those slaughtered Communists were chasing Captain Yang, now a full general, into permanent exile from a finally unified China. He sat in the gloom of a canvas-roofed American truck, on one of his precious footlockers, using the other as a desk on which, with the aid of a Coleman lantern, he perused detailed maps of Yunnan and Burma. Cities and towns, rivers and railroads, yes, even villages and major roads; but outposts, fords, ambushes, country lanes and mountain trails, no. “Major Wei!”

  The sleepy major poked his head over the tailgate. “General.”

  “Fetch me the colonel, please.”

  “He won’t come, sir.”

  “Try him. Oblige me. Remember, I am venerable.”

  Major Wei’s head withdrew.

  Amazing how whole cities ignored this convoy. Yung-p’ing had turned its back as one man. Tomorrow Pao-shan. A bad season for forage but soon they would be in game country; shooting parties might stock the larder with deer, hare, wildfowl. A few miles only, and it was taking weeks! Thank God for Virginia tobacco and Nicky’s nose. A scrounger, as the Americans said, a born scrounger. These hills would be grim, an arduous march. Well, if Mao could cross half China with his thousands, I can cross a ridge with my verminous company.

  Less than a company now. Fewer mouths to feed. Eventually, of course, they would all be wiped out, but by then he himself would be in Mandalay with—

  “The colonel begs to report himself ailing, and asks to be excused.”

  General Yang sighed musically, richly. “Major, go back and tell him I need him. Tell him he’s been sick long enough and I wish him a speedy recovery. Tell him if he isn’t here in three minutes, decently dressed and disinclined to insolence, I’ll have him shot immediately.”

  “Oh, he won’t like that.” Major Wei was delighted.

  “His likes and dislikes are not my concern. Go now.”

  “Sir.”

  Insolence. If Nicky was drunk? He heard the voice of a round middle-aged Scottish dame: “flown with insolence and wine.” Flawn and wain, she said. Render into Mandarin, please. Well, Olevskoy had better not be flawn. The colonel was shortly to become superfluous. That was a bad thing for a man to be in pinched times. Though there was still a good day’s work for him.

  “Was the invitation really so elegant, or did the major exaggerate?”

  Yang favored Olevskoy with a grand grin. “He did not exaggerate. Il y a du boulot. I don’t care what you do or don’t do in your private whorehouse, but when there’s work to be done you’re a colonel again. Hop in here and take a look.”

  Olevskoy swung aboard and came to stand at Yang’s side, leaning over his left shoulder to examine the maps.

  “You smell awful,” Yang said. He suppressed an ancient, persistent folk prejudice that foreigners tended to stink, or at least to radiate alien aromas. Vaguely he recalled garlicky cubicles in France. Greenwood, who spoke freely about most human vagaries, had once informed him that Chinese breath often smelled of ginger and red pepper.

  “I want a hot bath,” Olevskoy explained.

  “You want half a dozen. Sponge yourself before you come into my presence again, my dear Prince.”

  “Yes, yes, pride,” Olevskoy said, “all right, my apologies. Where the devil are we?”

  Yang dotted the map once. “Here, between Yung-p’ing and Pao-shan. I don’t want to draw the route, but follow the tip of my pencil. You see here, about seventy-five miles past Pao-shan, this is Fang-shih. It’s a Chinese Shan State, quite civilized. There’s a sawbwa and some Europeans, or used to be, and maybe even a hot bath.”

  “Rest and rehabilitation?”

  “No time. Lin has Meng-tzu and he’s still moving, and there’s an army driving southwest from Ch’eng-tu.”

  “We’ll beat them to the border, I hope.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any aircraft at Lo-wing? Or fuel?”

  “We shall not even approach Loi-wing.”

  Olevskoy refrained from insolence, only asking in a flat and therefore ambiguous tone, “And why shall we not even approach Loi-wing, which is a large air base and quite close to the border?”

  “Because,” said the general, “the rascally Chinese Communists, those brave but childlike agrarian reformers, now number several former Nationalist pilots and even a battalion of paratroopers, though I confess”—he sounded truly wistful—“that I should love to see them in action, a mass drop, think of the number of things that might go wrong! If there’s
one spot down here they may leapfrog into, it’s Loi-wing. Besides that, the Burma side of the border is six deep with Reds. They’ve got White Flag Communists and Red Flag Communists and Trotskyite Centrists and for all I know Vegetarian Mensheviks. And besides again, Pawlu is in another direction.”

  “Ah yes, Pawlu. Show me. That is, please.”

  “Well, I can’t show you Pawlu. I dashed through Pawlu in nineteen forty-four and an old foreign comrade—allow me the word; why should you let them preempt it?—saved my head, and I mean that literally, the place swarms with headhunters, and at some point I crossed into China. It was a sideshow and a splendid dash, but we moved fast, so all I can tell you is that Pawlu is on one side of the border or the other, and even on these American army air corps maps the border is marked ‘indefinite,’ as you see. It’s somewhere up there not far from Nan-san.”

  “Good God. No roads.”

  “No roads. Which is why I sent for you. I want to take the column south from Fang-shih.”

  Olevskoy studied the map in silence, saying finally, “That’s a climb of ten thousand feet.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. We start at two thousand. And to the man of stout heart—”

  “And then the Salween.”

  “And then, as you say, the Salween.”

  “You’re mad. With respect, sir, you’re mad.”

  “Come now. That’s twenty miles to the inch. Which means perhaps thirty miles to the Salween—”

  “Uphill all the way, one of the steepest valleys in Asia and no road—”

  “—and—”

  —“excuse me,” General, but it’s thirty miles uphill to ten thousand feet, and then down to two thousand to cross the river and up to seven thousand again, and you’re really talking about several days’ march.”

  “I don’t think I want you to interrupt me again,” General Yang said.

  “Sorry, sir. But up and down all the way, and half the men deserted and the rest mutinous, and how do you know we can ford the Salween? That’s a prehistoric gorge in terra incognita and you mentioned headhunters.”

  “We shall find a way,” the general orated. “An epic. History will not forget this loyal band.”

  “Oh stop that,” Olevskoy said. “I need a drink. Can we have a drink?”

  “But absolutely. We shall drink to the memory of that poor sniper. Cheers. Why did you murder the boy?”

  “Because Communists sicken my nostrils,” Olevskoy said calmly. “His very existence was an insult to me.” He had shifted to French. “Forget him. You really intend to cross this range and find your little village. Ah, this is good stuff! I can’t imagine life without alcohol.”

  “The exhilaration induced by liquor restores the humors and balances,” Yang assured him in Mandarin. “We won’t have more than fifty or sixty men left by the time we leave Fang-shih. They simply melt into the population. But I thought you might like to review the survivors, and put them on ponies, and be a colonel of cavalry again.”

  “A colonel of cavalry,” Olevskoy repeated softly. And a village of my own. I shall be a prince again, among brown-skinned peasant girls, who bloom early in the tropics. Sobolyevo in Burma! “Ponies!” He shed years, and laughed aloud. “Wee little ponies!” He waved a jubilant salute. “Yours to command, General!”

  7

  A Wedding in Pawlu

  At dawn a toktay croaked incessantly and Loi-mae dreamed of her childhood. She dreamed of herself at five or six sitting naked in the small branch of Lower Stream while the women pounded garments and retold ancient stories; and then of many Wild Wa, identical of feature, grinning in a circle; and then of Green Wood and the golden hair and the long bone milky white. At this she was torn by remorse, and cried out. A voice soothed her: “Be easy, woman.” Green Wood faded, and the dark glimmered to rose gray. She knew that she was in her own house before sunrise, and Naung was stroking her breast and murmuring comfort, and the toktay croaked and croaked.

  “It will wake the bridegroom too,” Naung whispered, “and he wll have a longer morning to regret his foolishness.”

  “As you regret yours.”

  “Never,” he said, “never,” and his hands flowed on her flesh. “We have never been together too often or too long.”

  “Never,” she said, “never,” and hugged him close. Her breast glowed, and she pressed it to Naung’s hand, and pressed her body hard against his. What a joy a man was! Even Naung, who was sullen in the bed, timid, often held back by inner demons, scarred perhaps by failures and humiliations in Indochina, now and then hasty or rank or rude, resentful perhaps of Green Wood’s shadow; nevertheless, when his good times came he filled life’s hollow as honey sweetly fills the hollow tree. “O, o, o,” she sang. “O my Naung!”

  “Once for each croak of the toktay,” he teased her afterward.

  “Braggart!” Her fingertips brushed his smile; she smoothed back his sparse beard. His brows were rich and handsome, and his teeth were healthy, a complete mouthful, not common in Pawlu, and bone-white; Naung took a cheroot often but did not chew betel or smoke opium, barring purely ceremonial occasions.

  “An omen for Cha and Ko-yang,” he said. “Let them be happy as long as the toktay croaks in these hills.”

  The toktay chose that moment to fall silent. Loi-mae and Naung giggled. They heard Lola stir behind the hanging straw mat, and her light barefoot patter receding through the brushy grove; and then she was back, dancing around the mat, peering excitedly at them and, once sure of her welcome, sprawling atop them.

  Naung and Loi-mae pinned her down and tickled her. “O stop! O stop! Or I will laugh all through the wedding! And how will I dance?”

  They subsided then, all three, and watched the light grow and their house take shape. Comfortable familiar bulks and shadows were springing into sight: bunches of watercress strung from the bamboo, the tea box on the low teak table, a string bag lumpy with potatoes hanging from an oaken post. This, Loi-mae could wish for Cha and Ko-yang: a house like her own, ruled by generous nats, a house where even the pigs and chickens, doomed to be eaten, seemed willing and cheerful. A house, man, woman, child, perhaps many children. She had not yet conceived by Naung, who was suffering some inner wound. She hugged him closer. The three bodies lay enlaced, pressing warmly with the rise and fall of breath. Naung groaned: “Well, well. To work. The sentries are all asleep, no doubt. Sunup soon, so better give me a bite to eat.”

  The woman and child rose and washed and built up a small cooking fire while Naung sauntered briefly out through the brush. Naung must be fed and loved. He was First Rifle. His work never ended.

  Mitraillette slung, his binoculars hanging in their leather case, Naung trudged up West Slope and found the Sawbwa staring into the sunrise and chewing absently at strips of dried fish. “No news in the night,” Naung told him. The Sawbwa grunted. The Sawbwa’s turban was awry and his good eye rheumy. “I must make my rounds,” Naung said, and waited for comment, orders, approval, a dirty joke, a prophecy. The Sawbwa grunted again and champed at his fish.

  For a moment, an uncomfortable moment, once rare but less to each season, Naung squatted and scrutinized this malformed chieftain. Too often treachery had worked its way to the surface of Naung’s mind. That his people should be led by this abortion! The Sawbwa had altered much since Naung’s departure in the year he had learned to call 1939; the Sawbwa had aged in mind and body, but his authority was undiminished. He was, for one thing, a rainmaker. “In the second night I shall bring rain,” he would say, and rain would come. Naung tended to atheism and suspected a trick; the Sawbwa perhaps smelled clouds forming, or sensed a shriller note in the jungle fowl’s shriek. The visions were more difficult to account for: the Sawbwa saw distant wars, tall foreigners, railways in the jungle.

  Naung too had seen distant wars, tall foreigners and railways in the jungle, and what the Sawbwa conveyed was logical, reasonable and not easily verified. Yet the village believed him always. He spoke with gods, with the Lord Buddha and the
nats of the hearth and forest, the gods of the mountain and the river, spoke to them in the village tongue and in Chinese; and he transmitted messages—early monsoon, much thunder, excessive rainfall, a plague of speckled scabs on the whiskered fish, plant now, reap now, send no opium to Nan-san this year. Yet it was perhaps a long series of meaningless predictions and instructions, a run of accidental triumphs, that had elevated this outlander to the ranks of seers and demigods.

  Naung said never a word of this aloud, not even to Wan, his Second Rifle, who was over forty and remembered well the Sawbwa’s arrival, half dead, half blind, raving on the road. Now and then Naung caught a dubious frown flitting across Wan’s face as the Sawbwa pronounced. “Perhaps … These were modern times. And Naung was a traveled man, who had seen steamships and French ticklers. His sergent-chef, his sergent-instructeur, had not functioned by rolling on opaque eye and muttering in whispers; nor had the Japanese.

  Gazing thoughtfully upon his Sawbwa, Naung wondered which was working within himself, ambition or reason.

  Both. He would like to be sawbwa, but principally because he believed the position required intelligence and forcefulness rather than trances, mystical communications, murmured vaporings. The life of a village lay in the hands of its sawbwa; Naung’s hands were not palsied.

  Now, however, he had a day’s work to do.

  Lola’s hair shone sometimes like polished teak. Loi-mae plied the Chinese brush, an elegant brush of hog’s bristles and rosewood, purchased by a barter for a lump of amber the size of a hen’s egg. “No, Weng-aw should not touch you there,” she said.

  Lola giggled.

  “You have so much time,” Loi-mae said gently. “A year, perhaps two, before your moon cycles begin.” In the still morning the house was pleasantly redolent of pork and peppers.

  “Cha says it is like hearing birdsong, with a man inside you.”

  “And sometimes it is like being bruised in some crazy game. Besides, Cha has room for a man. Cha has been a woman for four years. And now she will marry Ko-yang. You must try, when your time comes, to marry an unmarried man, as Cha is doing. It is always best to be first wife.”