Greenwood said, “Yes.” He was observing Mong, who had decided to cast an inquisitive glance upon the colonel.
The colonel’s chin rose; distaste warped his features, as if Mong smelled bad.
Mong’s chin rose; he mimicked the colonel perfectly.
“You must present me to your colonel,” Greenwood said quickly.
The colonel, a head taller than most, the officers’ kepi lending him a rigid, posed appearance, snubbed Mong and said to Greenwood, “Colonel Prince Nikolai Andreevich Olevskoy. Your servant.” “Colonel,” he said, and he was obviously, icily, nobody’s servant. He was taller than Greenwood and fairer, his hair almost platinum, his eyes blue-gray.
“I’m Greenwood.” Neither offered to shake hands.
Behind Greenwood the Sawbwa asked, “Is this an Englishman?”
Greenwood said, “No, a Russian.”
For another startled instant no one spoke. Then, even more startling, the Sawbwa burst into a flood of some language not Shan.
“What says the Sawbwa?”
Yang spoke: “That Russians are good, according to a certain Shang, who revealed this to him long ago. Odd that he should suddenly break into Yunnan Chinese. He is positively vehement at this grand conjunction—Green Wood! The Smiler! And a Russian!”
Greenwood asked, “Who is Shang?”
“His nat,” Naung said, “his demon and familiar spirit.”
Greenwood explained this to the visitors.
Meanwhile the Sawbwa made his way to Olevskoy, placed a trembling hand on his shoulder and spoke in Shan.
Naung snarled. They all heard it.
Olevskoy seemed to find the hand repellent, soiled or diseased. “What was all that?”
Greenwood answered. “He says that Pawlu is your home.”
“Good God,” said Olevskoy. “Thank him for me.”
Greenwood did so, with ceremony, and then said, “Let us sit upon the ground. Za-kho, will you will see to a fire and beer, and some pineapple? Mong, will you ask Jum-aw to tend the ponies?”
After the beer and pineapple Ang-ang the Woman-in-Common served sizzling strips of gingered goat, bowls of boiled rice, tea and rum. A ring of spectators gathered: half the village. Greenwood saw with amusement that the Russian prince was fretting.
“They’re a friendly people. Only curious.”
“I am unarmed,” Olevskoy brooded, “on new ground.”
“You won’t need arms. You have no enemies here.”
“On a frontier there is always an enemy.” The Russian sucked at his rum. “Even among the salt of the earth.”
“They are folk of good bones,” Yang said, “and much honor among them.”
“Savages. Tattoos.”
Greenwood let his jacket fall open.
“Good God,” Olevskoy said again. “A man of the people.”
“Exactly right. They call themselves ‘the people’ and they have made me one of them.”
“How democratic. You Americans, treating all the world’s ills with your clammy liberal poultices.”
Leebral pawltices. Probably this prince heard his own voice as that of an English gentleman. “Not quite,” Greenwood said. Hating America was an international pastime; he had learned that since the war. If you want a man to hate you, save his life. “We do ténd to meddle, but we pass along a little science and art and home rule. Not to mention money.”
“All commerce and gasconade,” Olevskoy said. “There is only fucking and dying.”
The shock of it, the searing flash of profound, appalling truth, stopped Greenwood’s breath. He recovered: “The rest is so everybody can do both well.”
The Shan listened intently. The ring of them was denser. Greenwood stroked Lola’s hair.
“Look at them!” Olevskoy was enraged. “Regardez-moi ces sauvages. Et ce sawbwa qui n’est pas sawbwa. C’est un starosta, un petit chef de village, et de plus imbecile.”
Naung was puffing at a cheroot, his face blank.
“English, Colonel. No secrets from Greenwood.”
“No French?”
“Sorry.” Greenwood was curt. “What was all that?”
“This sawbwa is no sawbwa, only a half-witted village headman.”
“The conversation has taken a low turn,” Yang complained. He smiled at the Sawbwa, who dithered happily.
“Avec mes trente hommes je vais prendre ce village,” Olevskoy muttered.
Yang said, “No more war, Colonel.”
The field was sunny and warm; children scampered and shouted. To the Sawbwa Greenwood said, “Yang and I would share a house. Can that be?”
Naung said, “The Russian does not sleep in Pawlu,” and the warriors stiffened at this rude disregard of the Sawbwa.
Olevskoy asked, “What was all that?”
“I asked if you could sleep here,” Greenwood lied. “I’m afraid they won’t have it.”
“I sleep with my men,” Olevskoy said. “I don’t require the company of savages.”
Yang said, “Poor Nicky. What a foul mood. How grumpy and unTolstoyan.”
“That one!” Olevskoy spat.
Greenwood, ever the diplomat, said, “One of the glories of Russia, isn’t he?”
For an instant Olevskoy left them, and traveled far; melancholy crossed his face, and unmistakable anguish. Then he said, “A fool. In the greatest novel ever written about a woman he had Venus rising in the west!”
From the edge of the field Loi-mae called: “Lola! Lola!”
Lola glanced casually in other directions and settled back against Greenwood’s shoulder.
Naung said, “Lola. Go to your mother.”
Lola pouted.
“Do as Naung says,” Greenwood told her.
Naung scowled.
Lola hopped up and made tiger faces, growling and clawing the air before Greenwood.
“There is no doing anything with the children these days,” Wan said. “Shall I beat her?”
Lola dashed at Wan, fell upon him with a hug and knocked him backward. She then sprang up, bowed to the Sawbwa and danced three romping steps, arms outflung, braids spinning and glinting rusty gold in the sunshine, eyes alight with youthful excitement, moist lips parting over perfect white teeth unstained by betel. She danced back to the crowd of warriors and, as they parted, down the lane they made to Loi-mae. The Shan warriors chuckled and murmured, “Good! Good!”
Olevskoy shook a long cigarette from a cardboard box, dropped it, retrieved it, thumbed his wooden match. It flared. His lips were dry on the paper mouthpiece.
“Thirty-two men!” Greenwood, Yang and the footlockers were alone at last, at sunset in the House of the Dead.
“How could I know what lay before me?” Yang demanded. “Communists. Bandits. Ambitious police. How many letters reached you?”
“Three. Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo.”
“I sent six. It was the only way, you know. We were well and truly cut off. January now; my last chance of air transport was Shanghai in May. To Formosa, where the high command would have abused me for a common criminal and whisked those footlockers away. Je suis mal vu à l’archêveché, tu sais.”
“Oh, stop the French. What was that?”
“The brass hats have always hated me.”
Greenwood said, “You’re grayer. White-haired, even.”
“Venerable! You’re softer, laddie.”
“The academic life. This Russian.”
“What of him?”
“I dislike him. Dog and cat. Also he looked at my daughter in a man’s way. Is he insane?”
“No, only a prince,” Yang said. “I too dislike him. I have never met a Russian that I liked. They are either bullies or bores. I trust they will not let him cross the road again.”
“Does he know?” Greenwood indicated the footlockers.
“No one knows.”
“Incredible. Shall I ask how you found them?”
“A Japanese. He wanted his freedom.”
“You freed him?
”
“Forever.”
Greenwood sighed at the world’s rude ways. “The padlocks?”
“My own. I sawed through the old ones. As I understand it, these bones were dug out of a hill called Chou Kou Tien near Peking, delivered to your marines in nineteen forty-one and run down to Tientsin for shipment to the States from Chinwangtao.”
“Somewhere they vanished,” Greenwood said. “They were to be loaded aboard a liner, the President Harrison, on the eighth of December.”
“Of all days. Remember Pearl Harbor.”
“Of all days. The Japanese fleet chased the Harrison and ran her aground down around Shanghai somewhere. As far as we know, these little boxes sat in a warehouse—”
“In Tientsin,” Yang said, “behind several tons of civilian furniture, beds, cupboards, armoires, Western stuff that no Japanese would have in his house. My own Japanese was a colonel, but he was one of those fellows who keep track, the sort of man who likes to go through his own garbage for the thrill of finding a bent spoon or half a comb.”
Greenwood’s finger traced the letters, USMC. “Do you know what a benefactor you are? Do you know what you’ve done? What it means?”
“All in a day’s work,” Yang said. “Any boy scout would have done the same. All I ask is half a million dollars.”
“I don’t see how you managed.”
“Nor do I. Two small children could not have been more trouble.”
“Well,” Greenwood said, “shall we?”
“You have photos?”
“Better.” Greenwood unstrapped his pack.
Yang drew a metal necklace over his head. Keys clinked. He squatted. He opened one chest, then the second. He tossed aside paper wadding and uncovered cardboard boxes. He opened cardboard boxes and plucked out wads of cotton. He held up a bone. He sniffed at it.
Greenwood passed him a sheaf of photos and two plaster casts, and set aside a thick manila envelope.
“A skull,” Yang said, raising it into a shaft of dying sunlight, “and this long one. A thighbone?”
“Yes.” Greenwood took the skull with reverence. Side by side, skull and cast were identical, a small dent precisely where it should be. “My God,” Greenwood said. “My God, my God.”
“Switzerland,” Yang said, as his smile bloomed.
Greenwood said again, “My God.”
Yang seated himself, leaning back against the north wall. “A long journey we’ve had, he and I. Tell me about him.”
“Them. Little bits of about forty people.” Carefully Greenwood rewrapped the skull. “Half a million years old next month.”
Yang said, “They don’t look a day over three hundred thousand.”
“Sinanthropus pekinensis,” Greenwood said. “Chinese man from Peking. Not Homo sapiens, but well on the way. I know a professor who has a reconstruction hanging behind his desk, like a skeleton in a doctor’s office. He calls it Sin.”
“Because it’s Chinese.”
“And because it’s what everything is as old as.”
Yang liked that.
“They were little fellows,” Greenwood said. “About five feet. Not deep thinkers but had a fair-sized brain for the times. They knew how to make fire. We have reason to believe they experienced love.”
“Poor fellows. And look at the result: half a billion Chinese.”
“Not just sex,” Greenwood said. “Bonds. Emotions. Let me catch my breath.”
It was a moment beyond speech. Greenwood and Yang and these old friends; old bones. In the mortuary hut: fitting.
The two living men communed in silence. The bones slept on.
Yang asked, “How do you know they loved?”
“Inference,” Greenwood said. “Riddles within riddles. They used fire. Lived in groups. Gathered and hunted and cooked, cooperated and crowded into caves, overcame a bad climate somehow, and survived. There must have been likes and dislikes, attachments, protective feelings. Maybe there were other tribes, another species even, that were the enemy and reinforced the bonds.”
“On the frontier there is always an enemy,” the general murmured. “Now what?”
Still dazed, Greenwood said, “Yang’s luck. At noon tomorrow a plane will make its first run over Pawlu. I think tomorrow anyway. Is today Wednesday the eleventh?”
“I believe so,” Yang said. “Dates don’t seem to mean much in the presence of these bones. Will there be trouble with the Shan? That Naung is a tough soldier.”
“All they want is to be rid of us. But there is plenty of trouble. Mine, not yours.”
“Nonsense. One for all and all for one. We’re veterans of the old Fifty-fifth.”
Greenwood handed him the manila envelope. “Letters, from the State Department and the university. If we’re separated …”
“You have more to say.”
“I can’t leave my people with soldiers outside Pawlu and the Wild Wa prowling the woods. My daughter, my little woman, my brothers, even if that sounds foolish. I can’t leave Pawlu under two dangers. Your troops: will they follow orders?”
“Not for long. Until today there was … mutual need. More: loyalty. They came here expecting to resupply, move out and when practicable go their own ways.”
“With you or without you?”
“Without me. I was mysterious but not deceptive. I have now abdicated and they know it. Although …”
“Well?”
“They probably expect me to do something for them. Make these Wild Wa go away, provide an escort into Burma, something.”
“Failing which, they’ll turn to the colonel.”
“That or disperse.”
“They can’t disperse,” Greenwood said. “The Wild Wa would take thirty-two heads. And Naung won’t let them into Pawlu.”
General Yang bowed his head.
Naung said, “We should have killed all three in silence and attacked the Chinese immediately.”
“You talk like a barbarian,” the Sawbwa said, lucid tonight and even stern.
Wan spat betal juice. The fire hissed. Half a ten of grim captains, cold sober now, were trying to recall past lessons and forestall present dangers. Kin-tan and Shwe had seen a bearded vulture coast across the red sunset.
Kin-tan said, “We must narrow the heart here, and slip between two fires. The Wild Wa never edged so close; and these cursed Chinese are real soldiers.”
“Survivors, they are,” Wan said. “The boys fled; the men stood.”
“It is the Chinese who will be scorched,” Naung said. “They want Pawlu, I tell you. We shall pin them down and let the Wild Wa play among them.”
This lightened the council’s spirits.
“You would violate the laws of your ancestors,” said the Sawbwa. “Would you cease to be Shan?”
“Bugger!” Naung said. “Never again admit a foreigner. Shoot them on sight.”
“Green Wood and Yang want only to leave,” Kin-tan said.
“Now that they have brought these plagues upon us!” Naung flared. “Running out! Well, let who will, leave Pawlu; let none enter.”
“That is sound,” Wan said. “How painful is life. Green Wood is one of us.”
“Green Wood is not one of us,” Naung said. “Green Wood’s is a world of machines and paper money and women for sale. It is a world I know. He is a buggering sightseer and no more.”
“He has his tattoo.”
“And his general and his footlockers—and what are those to us? Worse than nothing: danger. Green Woods come and go like the black flies in the tiger heat.”
“They destroyed a whole Japanese village with one bomb.”
“A town.”
“Bigger than Kunlong.”
“This one is no black fly,” said Kin-tan, “and no destroyer of towns. After the war I rode with him to Kunlong and he grieved for that Japanese village. He wept for his own woman and child, and cried out for the Japanese women and children.”
“That is long past and of no importance,” Mong sai
d. “It is time now to speak of seeds and not rind.”
“Naung was a long time away,” said Wan.
“Green Wood has a claim on Pawlu.”
“Green Wood was more Sawbwa than the Sawbwa,” said the Sawbwa.
“Green Wood has killed his Wild Wa.”
“Green Wood, Green Wood, Green Wood!” Naung exploded. “Perhaps I should restore Loi-mae to this god!”
They smoked in silence.
“It is not for any other man to say,” the Sawbwa declared. “But it is not contrary to custom or law, and generosity is in order and would please the gods.”
“He could be useful tomorrow,” Kin-tan said.
“He fights like a tiger.”
“He did five years ago. Now he is a schoolmaster and seeks eminence.”
“For eminence what would a man not do?” asked Mong.
They pondered this foolishness.
“He will run out,” Naung repeated.
“We had better talk to them.”
“Yes,” Naung said bitterly, “and I must fetch them myself. One does not send for a former First Rifle.”
At the Chinese camp Olevskoy too had summoned a council, every man of his command. In the gathering dusk he had traced upon the ground what his soldier’s eye had seen of Pawlu, the valley, the slopes, the upper stream and the lower, the great field, the Sawbwa’s house. He sat between Majors Wei and Ho, and the men made a half-moon before them. “I warn you all,” he said, “we have been abandoned. The general and the American have plans of their own. We will not see Yang Yu-lin again.”
“Forgive me, Colonel,” said Wei. “After so many years with the general I cannot immediately believe in this casual defection.”
“It is not casual,” Olevskoy said. “It was planned. And it is no defection because there is no China. There is consequently no Chinese army. He is not a general and I am not a colonel and you are not majors and sergeants and corporals. We are a band of homeless men who have done our job with some honor and are fighting our way across a border; and who is not our friend is our enemy.” Matthew. An aged priest rose before him, and an ikon of Saint Matthew—he who is not with me is against me—an aged priest at Sobolyevo. An image of the girl blotted him out: Lola, budding. He drew in a deliberate, therapeutic breath of mountain air.
The Blue-Eyed Shan Page 23
