by Marlene Lee
“Your speech was very fine,” Lily Wu said in fluent English later that evening. She had invited Agnes to her cave. “Everything in China is confused, but you are not confused.” In the lantern light she rose and poured tea. Agnes was opening her notebook to record the conversation when footsteps sounded outside on the narrow terrace that snaked up from the river bank, passed the caves of Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Mao Zedong, went into a hairpin turn, and continued on to the second level which held more caves, Lily’s and Agnes’ among them.
“It is Mao,” Lily breathed. “He wants to meet you.”
The footsteps stopped. “Miss Wu?”
Lily stood and pulled back the padded cotton drape that fit over the mouth of the cave. The moon seemed exactly suspended above the mountain, and the night sky was bright with stars. There was a smell of snow in the air. A tall man in a great coat stood in the darkness. He bent his large head, stepped into the cave, and looked at Agnes with still, distant eyes.
“How do you do,” she murmured in Chinese, omitting any title. “Thank you for the opportunity to visit the Red Army.”
Mao Zedong reached for both her hands. His own were long and slender, like a woman’s. His lips were full, and the small brown mole just above the upper lip looked oddly like a beauty spot. Lily pulled a straight chair toward him. He motioned for the two women to sit first. When they had settled themselves at the table he loosened his great coat, sat down, and looked into space with a remote expression on his large face, as if he gained nourishment not from food but from his own thoughts. Agnes waited for him to say something. When she had studied his sensitive face, studied Lily Wu’s pretty features again, studied the white-washed walls of the cave upon which the flickering lantern light projected Mao’s profile, she spoke.
Lily translated. “It is not easy to reach Yan’an.” Mao looked mildly interested. She continued. “The military blockade and the news blockade are both effective.”
There was a long silence that she was just getting ready to break when he said, in a voice that was higher than expected, “It appears there are few blockades that can stop you, Miss Smedley.” He smiled coolly and continued. “The blockade does us great harm.” As soon as Lily translated he looked directly at Agnes. “We welcome our journalist friends to Yan’an. We welcome the end of the blockade. I solicit help from the West for China.” He moved his head slightly, as if to affirm his own statement.
“I will write letters and articles,” Agnes said. “We will take the story of the Red Army to the world.” She knew several writers who would come to Yan’an if safe passage were offered. “Can you provide an escort from Xi’an?”
“We will provide an escort.” He turned to Lily Wu. “The American woman is far from home.”
Agnes understood without translation and answered quickly, hotly, “My home is wherever people resist oppression.”
Mao seemed unmoved by her emotion. “I believe you have spent several years in Shanghai.”
Agnes nodded.
“You were in Germany.”
“I have lived in Berlin.”
“Many of our comrades have studied in Germany,” he said thoughtfully. “I, myself, have never been outside China. I understand my country. I talk to the people about China, not about Marx and Lenin.” He studied Agnes more openly. “You have been away from America for many years. Do you still understand your country?”
“Yes,” Agnes said. “I understand that America gives aid to Chiang Kai-shek. I understand that she sells scrap metal to Japan.” She looked into the lantern, eyes narrowed against the direct light. “But there are many Americans who would understand your reform movement if they knew about it.” She leaned forward and looked closely at Mao. She was not sure she liked him. There was something soft, almost effeminate, about him. She liked men who were physically tough. Men who had their feet on the ground, like the cowboys she remembered from Colorado and Arizona. Like Big Buck and other men her father had known.
“There is another great country struggling for independence and unity,” she said. “Do you know India? Do you know Nehru?”
“I do not know this great leader.”
“I became acquainted with him in Berlin. I will write him a letter of introduction to you. Perhaps India can contribute to China’s efforts.”
“Have you been to India?”
“No, but my husband was Virendranath Chattopadhyaya.” She waited for recognition. “Perhaps you have heard of the Indian nationalists who lived in exile in Berlin?”
Mao made a noncommittal gesture with his slender hands. “You are an internationalist, I believe.”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“Your speech interested us tonight.” He wrapped the skirt of his great coat closer about his knees and studied her. “Like the poor of China, you are turning your weak position into a position of strength.”
Agnes was stunned by the insight. Did he guess that she hadn’t finished grade school? That her family was the poorest of the poor? She looked into his face. This man knew too much. He seemed to know that she, like his soldiers, had no home. That she lacked what they had: the Red Army for a family. She stared down at her notebook. When she looked up again, Mao and Lily were talking. The expression on his face was animated.
“Ask Miss Smedley if she is married,” Mao said. Agnes waited for the translation.
“No,” she answered. “I have been married in the past. But I do not believe in marriage.”
Mao frowned.
“The benefits go to the husband. He can love other women, but the wife must remain faithful.”
“I have read of love in Western novels,” Mao said after a silence. “Have you experienced this one, true love?”
“My Indian husband was the love of my life,” Agnes said, surprised at herself for saying so, and knowing it to be true. Surprised, too, at Mao’s childish curiosity about men and women.
“Why?” he asked.
“We combined work and love,” she answered. “Still, I suffered.”
“How did you suffer?”
“He wanted to control my thinking.”
Mao sat in silence for a moment. “In a marriage of equality,” he said, “who makes decisions when there is a disagreement?”
“Whoever can marshal the best evidence.”
Mao smiled slightly. “Political theory.” In the flickering light he turned toward Lily again. Longing was in his face. Agnes hoped Mao’s wife was not sitting in a cave waiting for him to return. She hoped the wife was visiting a lover this very moment. The lover would be wearing Red Army fatigues. He was probably shorter than Mao. Most Chinese were shorter than Mao. The two of them would be sitting in a cave, talking, like Mao and Lily. There would be a bed in the shadows. Agnes’ eyes wandered to Lily’s bed. She wondered if, when she left tonight, Mao would stay.
“I received a Victrola from an American friend,” Agnes told Lily Wu and Zhu De as they sat outside drinking tea in early spring sunshine. The American friend was Margaret Sanger. She’d sent records, too, western songs Agnes had requested: “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Streets of Laredo,” “Red River Valley,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Around the Mountain When She Comes.” Below the terrace, the river cracked and thawed, and soldiers drilled on the parade ground on the opposite bank. “The Victrola arrived yesterday with the trucks. Shall we have music tonight?”
Zhu De grinned. His teeth and gums showed. Laugh lines in his leathery face were deep. “We will have an American party.”
“I’ll teach you to square-dance,” said Agnes.
“I am eager to learn.”
“And Mao and Zhou Enlai and the others?”
“We will see if they have two feet or three.” Zhu De’s smile was broad, like his stance when he stood in the center of a circle of seated soldiers, broad as the space he filled when he rested his fists on his hips and turned this way and that, seeming to address each soldier individually. His soldiers loved him and he loved them. They came from poor farms, poor village
s. Their talk was earthy They understood their Commander and their Commander understood them.
On a particular night in late March when he arrived for his daily interview with Agnes, he stepped into her cave and began with a question: “Can you help me solve a problem?”
Agnes looked up quickly from her notebook. He was speaking a simple Mandarin that she could understand. Somehow she knew he did not want Lily to translate.
“The wives of my square-dancing comrades”—he hesitated—“ask why the leaders of the Red Army spend their evenings dancing with the American woman.”
“They are free to join us,” Agnes said. “Isn’t it bourgeois to think that there is only one thing men and women are interested in when they are together?”
“I do not think they wish to dance with their husbands.”
“Why not?”
“Husbands are not for dancing with.”
Agnes’ eyes narrowed. “Marriage is”—she did not know the Chinese word for “confining,” and so she demonstrated by putting her hands around her neck and squeezing.
“In America is marriage…?” Zhu De put his hands to his own neck.
“Oh, yes,” Agnes said decisively. “Marriage is the same all over the world.”
“I see you are a worldwide expert,” said Zhu De. He returned to the local matter. “My wife asks why I talk to you every evening and what you are writing on your typewriter keys which everyone hears day and night.”
“News reports to the West.” Sensing a delicate problem behind his words, she laid her pen aside and waited for him to get to the heart of the matter.
“Mao’s wife is unhappy,” he said.
Agnes’ distaste for the institution of marriage overrode feminist sympathy. “If the Red Army leaders cannot free themselves from the control of their wives, how can they free China?”
Zhu De laughed outright. Agnes thought he was going to slap his knee.
“That is a good observation, but I will not tell Mao what you have said.” He added more quietly, “The women have had a difficult life in the Revolution. They endure great physical hardship. They want to make homes here for as long as possible.”
“It is a historic time,” Agnes said with feeling. “We are part of a movement which is changing the world. It is not a time to follow the old wisdom. Perhaps Mao can solve his problem,” she added pointedly, “by showing less interest in Lily Wu.”
She picked up her pen and began the interview, made restless by the mention of wives and of Lily Wu. Later, it was she, not Zhu De, who cut short the session. She wandered outside. It was still light; the days were growing longer. She followed the terrace down to the river where the water ran faster each day now, gurgling sluggishly as it ate into the thick plate of ice at the center. Spring was a moist, fresh scent in the air.
She crossed the footbridge and set out across the parade ground. A warm wind from the south and southwest, from the gorges of the Yangtze, from the South China Sea, perhaps even from India, blew through her hair. She felt as if a lover’s hand, Chatto’s, or perhaps the hand of a man she didn’t yet know, was stroking her. She experienced a startling desire for unity with him and with China. She was tired of knocking about the world on an individual basis, freelance revolutionary, depending on her personal energy alone to thaw, like the warm water at the river’s edge, the thick ice plate of the world’s troubles.
“I have applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party,” she told Zhu De the next evening when they met again. Her face beamed. There was a soft expression of fulfillment in her eyes. “I appeared before the membership committee. They will give me their answer in a few days.”
Zhu De took a soiled photograph from his pocket.
“Do you think I will be accepted?”
Zhu De fingered the photograph and said nothing. Agnes turned to light the kerosene lamp. “Who is the woman in your picture?”
“My wife who died.”
Picking up a pocketknife, she began to sharpen her pencil, collecting the shavings in a neat pile on the open notebook.
“It is pleasant here in Yan’an,” he said. “It is not often so pleasant.” He began to speak of sons and daughters disobeying their parents to join the Red Army. Of the death of husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters. Agnes listened and made notes.
Twilight came, then darkness fell. Zhu De left. Agnes lay down for the night, lulled by the soft running of the river and the distant laughter of soldiers smoking at the footbridge.
A few days later, compelled by the procedures of Party membership, by signs of spring all around, by the power of her own personality, Agnes appeared before the membership committee. The meeting was held in the open air. Wild apple trees had put out leaves, and soon they would be in full blossom; the river was rising in its banks from melting snow higher up. Agnes approached the committee like a bride, like a girl at her first communion. She should have been wearing white instead of clean army fatigues. Her hair, freshly washed, lay softly on her wide, pale forehead. The committee spokesman said a few words to her. It took a moment for Agnes to understand.
“We believe you will be more persuasive to your fellow countrymen if you are not a member of the Party,” he said. “You will not so readily be accused of partisanship.”
Agnes stared stupidly at the spokesman’s mouth, as if the words had not been said and she was waiting for his lips to open. When she understood, she turned her back on the committee and began walking away. She reached the footbridge before stumbling. Her legs didn’t work correctly but her heart made up for it by pumping too hard. She leaned against the bridge’s rail and looked down at the narrow, now deep, river. The committee had not been honest with her. It was not a question of unbiased reporting. It was a question of trust. They thought her impulsive, individualistic, uncontrollable. She was being used without being accepted. She wanted to drown.
Agnes fell on the terrace at the hairpin turn and began to cry. She could not stop. She knew someone was crying too loudly, and suspected the sounds were coming from herself, but it did not feel worth the effort to try and stop. Even when Lily came running, with another woman behind her, and then Zhu De, still she didn’t quite realize she was the only one who could bring an end to the embarrassing shudders and cries.
Finally Lily shook her and she stopped abruptly. Lily, Zhu De, and the others gathering around looked like strangers. An hour before, they had been her brothers and sisters. But within a moment her family dissolved. She had lost her place. She’d been put outside the warm circle to make her own way again, alone, thawing the world around her with nothing more substantial than her wit, personality, and typewriter.
Lily helped her inside. The cave was dark. She asked Lily to leave and pull the padded drape across the mouth of the cave behind her. By herself she must become reacquainted with the absence of light. She would never be permitted to join in comforting assumptions. She was doomed to be an outsider.
On a late June night, shortly before outright war with Japan, Agnes lay on her sleeping platform listening to the sounds of children’s voices down by the river. Her Xiaogui — Little Devil—one of the young boys adopted, trained, and educated by the Red Army wherever it went, was still out playing. During the day her Xiaogui took his pet duck to swim in the river. Now the duck slept not far from the boy’s cot at the back of the cave, stirring occasionally. Agnes turned on her bed. She was careful about what thoughts she allowed to occupy her. It was permissible to think about writing, to think about the Lu Xun library she stocked with foreign books and publications, to think about her garden and about her Xiaogui. She forgot, for short periods, that she was not Chinese after all, that she was not American. That she was really nothing at all.
She considered whether to step onto the terrace and call her Xiaogui to bed. She enjoyed playing mother. However, the boy had been without mother and father for most of his eleven years and hardly needed to be called in for the night. In his harsh young life he had slept on the ground, in str
ange beds, sitting up, perhaps even standing. Still, like the other Little Devils, like the peasant soldiers and leaders themselves, he had a ready smile and a certainty of purpose. He was happy.
Agnes heard running footsteps on the lower terrace. They paused at the hairpin turn, continued, passed her own doorway, and stopped in front of Lily Wu’s cave.
“Come out, bourgeois bitch!” a woman screamed in Mandarin. Agnes shot up from her bed, threw on her khaki jacket, ran barefoot along the terrace, and rushed past the guard at the entrance in time to see Mao Zedong’s wife lift a long-handled flashlight over her seated husband and come down hard with it again and again. Mao shielded his large head with his hands. The guard ran to his side, unsure how to handle the domestic fight. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Mao stood.
“Be quiet, Zizhen,” he said. “There’s nothing shameful in the friendship between Comrade Wu and myself. We were just talking. You are ruining yourself as a Communist and are doing something to be ashamed of. Hurry home before other Party members hear of this.”
Lily had backed up against the wall of the cave. Mao’s wife, a big, flaccid woman, now turned her attention to the actress.
“Dance-hall bitch! You’re making a fool of the Chairman!” She raised the flashlight, but at the last minute dropped it in favor of scratching and pulling hair. Lily tore herself loose and ran to hide behind Agnes, who stood amazed in the center of the cave.
“Imperialist bitch!” Mao’s wife shrieked. She picked up the flashlight from the ground and struck Agnes over the head. Agnes reared back and punched the Chairman’s wife in the nose. Zizhen lay screaming on the cave floor. Mao ordered the guard to get her on her feet.
“You’re acting like a rich woman in a bad American movie!” he said. But his wife refused to leave until he called for two more guards who came and led her down the hill. Mao followed in silence.
