A group of Red Army generals engrossed in earnest conversation were jogging together side by side on short-legged ponies and Jakob picked out the pale-skinned face among them without difficulty. The German who had been sent to China as an adviser by the Communist International glanced Jakob’s way by chance as they passed, and the missionary thought he saw a gleam of surprise appear fleetingly in his blue eyes. In that moment Jakob realized that almost three weeks had passed since he had seen a white face.
Against his will, this reflection triggered others, and new waves of misery swept through Jakob at the memory of Felicity’s horrifying death. The physical agonies of the march often numbed his emotions for long periods, driving all coherent thought from his mind, but at least a dozen times each day the painful memories flooded back. He had given up looking for Liang, since the distance he had marched as a prisoner seemed to rule out any hope he might once have had of seeing his infant daughter again. He had struggled to keep his mind from dwelling on her, but fears about her likely fate suddenly pierced his heart afresh and his head fell forward on his chest in anguish.
“Is this anybody important?”
Jakob heard the boy whisper again as a stoop-shouldered figure hunched over the mane of an emaciated brown and white horse came into view. Riding alone down the desolate hillside well apart from the others, the man was huddled in a dripping blanket. He passed quite close to Jakob and the missionary could see the perspiration of a malarial fever standing out on the sallow dome of his brow. His thick black hair was matted and lank about his broad face, he was hollow-eyed from sickness, and he kept his eyes downcast, seeing nothing but the muddy, rock-strewn ground in front of his horse.
“I think that’s Comrade Mao Tse-tung. He used to be chairman of the Central Soviet Government.”
“What is he now?”
“Since there’s no Central Soviet anymore I don’t know whether he’s anything
Jakob continued to watch the hunched figure on the thin horse as he moved on unsteadily down the steep hillside, struck by some indefinable quality that compelled attention. When he turned back to look toward the crest again he was surprised to see silhouetted against the magnesium sky the slender figure of a woman. She was seated on a long-eared mule, her head draped in a cloth, and she appeared to be carrying a bundle in the crook of her arm. The mule and the woman remained unmoving on the hillcrest as Jakob watched, then the dark outline of a single male rose into view to take the animal’s bridle and begin leading it down the slope.
Jakob stared transfixed as the mule and its rider drew near. He had previously seen no women among the vast columns of marching Chinese men and he wondered whether he might be suffering a hallucination. In the gentle attitude of the woman’s head, bent over the shape of a child in her arms, he seemed to see a divine echo of the Madonna and his breath caught in his throat. Then as the mule approached the spot where he stood, Jakob saw that its rider was merely wrapped in a dripping blanket as protection against the rain, like some of the mounted men. In the moment of passing him, the figure on the mule’s back turned in his direction and the movement caused the cowl-like blanket to slip.
In the luminous gray light, the unadorned beauty of the female Chinese face that was suddenly revealed took on the quality of a mirage for Jakob. The dark, almond-shaped eyes met his directly for the briefest instant, and he found himself gazing in disbelief at the golden Asiatic features that had once haunted his dreams. A breeze plucked a strand of black hair across her eyes, and the next instant she lifted the blanket from her shoulder to cover her head once more. As she turned to look forward again, quite involuntarily Jakob sprang forward toward the mule.
“Lu Mei-ling!”
He called the name softly, almost as though he didn’t himself believe his eyes: but whether the mule’s rider heard his cry he couldn’t tell. She did not stop or turn her head and the mule continued to jolt on down the rocky hill at the same pace.
For a moment Jakob stood barefoot in the mud, staring helplessly after her. Incongruously, he had caught sight of the ugly butt of a Mauser machine pistol jutting from a leather holster, and the warring images of the Madonna and a female guerrilla fighter vied with one another in his mind’s eye. The familiar face, beautiful and unsullied in its serenity, had moved him deeply but the fleeting glimpse of the masculine side arm, strapped around her slender waist, added an unfamiliar dimension to his remembered image of Mel-ling. This disturbed him and he- stood rooted -to the spot, watching her. One of his guards swore an angry oath but Jakob (lid not hear, and losing patience, the guard grabbed the rope dangling from the missionary’s shoulders to drag him roughly back into the waiting group of prisoners.
Lower down the slope, the mule was slithering into a gully, its hindquarters jouncing and skittering in the mud. It seemed the animal must fall but somehow it succeeded in recovering its footing, and a moment later both the mule and its enigmatic rider disappeared abruptly from Jakob’s sight, leaving him staring bemusedly down the barren gray hillside.
20
The flickering light given off by a cloth wick burning in a basin of melted lard shone softly on Lu Mei-ling’s naked torso. A rough blanket was draped around her trim shoulders but her bare arms were free and her small, round breasts were deliberately exposed. The dark, purplish whorls of her nipples were distended from the recent attentions of the pale-skinned infant she cradled in her arms but the eyes of the baby were now closed and it slept fitfully with one cheek against the curve of her bosom.
Sitting straight-backed on the edge of a wooden bed in the shell of a derelict cottage that had been gutted by fire, the Chinese girl had an unself-conscious air that testified silently to her pride in her slender, amber body: her black hair, still cut in a long bob, curled down damply over her shoulders, providing a dark frame for her determined face, and even when the fragment of muddied sacking that covered the crumbling doorway was pulled aside to reveal an armed guard with cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed around his chest, Mei-ling made no move to cover herself. Instead she merely dropped a precautionary hand onto the butt of the Mauser machine pistol which protruded from its holster on the bed beside her and looked steadily at the guard.
“A comrade giving his name as Captain Lu Chiao wishes to visit you.” The young General Headquarters guard flushed crimson with embarrassment the moment he realized he had made an untimely entrance, but he struggled to keep his gaze focused, unseeing, above Mei-ling’s head. “The captain claims he is your brother.”
Mei-ling nodded calmly. “Thank you, comrade, let him pass. And as you’re new, try to memorize his face. Then you’ll know him next time.”
Half of the rotting thatch which served as a roof had been burned away, leaving the ruined cottage partly open to the night sky. Intermittent muzzle flashes from the Red Army’s guns mounted high above the village were augmenting the feeble rays of the makeshift lamp and by its dim orange light, Mei-ling saw her brother pull the entrance sacking aside. Like the guard, Chiao was momentarily taken aback by his sister’s nakedness and he stopped abruptly in midstride, his expression startled; then his face relaxed.
“Forgive me, Mei-ling, for staring.” Chiao removed his red-starred cap and sank down wearily onto the end of the bed. “I’m still more used to seeing peasant women hobbling around on bound feet and hearing girls being dragged, weeping, to arranged marriages. I forget sometimes what a spirited daughter of the revolution my younger sister has become!”
Using one hand, Mei-ling rearranged the blanket around her shoulders, covering her nakedness without fuss. In the night outside, the roar of the Communist guns again merged with the enemy’s and the din rumbled ponderously across the darkened heavens, swelling and diminishing like heavy surf pounding a rocky beach. Chiao lifted his head for a moment to listen, closing his eyes in concentration, and when he opened them again to look at her, Mei-ling searched her brother’s face with an anxious expression.
“How is the battle going, Ta ko?”
“Very badly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Defending a static corridor for the Party and government civilians to march through is turning us into sitting ducks. The Seventh Corps has been ordered to hold their positions south of here for three days at all costs. And they’ve lost ten thousand men already. The Ninth hasn’t done much better to the north.”
Chiao stood up and slapped his riding crop exasperatedly against the leather of his boot. Still listening to the artillery barrage, he began pacing back and forth across the earthen floor of the cottage. Despite the lines of fatigue in his face, his movements at the age of thirty were still those of the jaunty, self-confident student whom Jakob had encountered on the decks of the Tomeko Maru — but the three intervening years had wrought as dramatic a change in his outward appearance as they had in Jakob’s. The dutiful son of Chinese tradition who had written and recited an old-style Tang poem at his homecoming banquet had disappeared forever: in his place stood a war-hardened officer of a revolutionary army who, after twelve months of study at the Red Military Academy at Juichin, had led troops in battle on countless occasions in and around the Kiangsi-Fukien soviet. An astute, quick-thinking company commander, he had soon attracted the attention of the leadership and after a year had been transferred to the Red Cadres Regiment, a force which protected the leaders of the Communist Party and the Central Soviet Government. All its fighting men were handpicked officers of company or platoon rank, and two distinctive red flashes on the collar tabs of their otherwise badgeless field uniform distinguished them as an elite force. Chiao’s uniform was patched and begrimed with mud but he wore a broad leather belt and long riding boors which gave him a trim, military appearance. His face, however, once smooth anti well fed, had changed most noticeably: now he had a hungry, weathered look and his experience in battle seemed to have given his once insolently intelligent expression a sharper, keener edge.
“Has a bridgehead been established across the Hsiang yet?” The tension in Mei-ling’s voice showed that she half anticipated a discouraging answer and she displayed no emotion when her brother shook his head.
“Five assaults with sampans have been beaten back. The enemy has heavy machine guns everywhere on the far bank. Three attempts to swim across have failed. Most of our troops were killed in the water — the others were swept away and drowned.”
“Can’t a bridge be built?”
“The Hsiang is more than two hundred yards wide here. in the middle it’s thirty feet deep. The engineer units have been trying to throw a floating bamboo pontoon across but the river’s in flood and most of the rafts have been swept away. Those that weren’t have been destroyed by the enemy artillery.”
“Are they making another attempt?”
“The engineers have been under fire for two whole days. They’ve taken heavy casualties. Almost all their officers have been killed or wounded.”
Mei-ling stared at her brother, aghast. “What’s going to happen?” Chiao stopped pacing back and forth and turned to face her. “I’ve been given command of the engineer companies. I’m making one last attempt to put a floating bamboo bridge across the river at midnight tonight. I came here to talk with Commander in Chief Chu Teh — he’s just approved my plan. Two hundred men are cutting yellow bamboo in the forest at this minute. I’ve ordered them to make triple-tiered rafts that can be anchored to the riverbed. With luck the enemy won’t be able to destroy those.”
“What will happen if your attempt doesn’t succeed?”
“The Seventh and the Ninth won’t be able to hold out indefinitely — and the Kwangtung forces have started to break through the Fifth Corps’ rear guard in several places.” Chiao paused and drew a long, slow breath. “If we don’t start to cross the river soon, we’ll be trapped. The enemy will close in all around us
Mei-ling’s eyes widened in alarm; then she gathered herself and set the sleeping baby aside in a makeshift crib of interwoven twigs and reeds.
“You look tired and hungry, Ta ko. You must eat before you return to the riverbank!”
She rose from the bed, pulling the blanket close around herself, and hurried to a blackened pot that bubbled on an improvised brick stove in one corner of the cottage. She ladled steaming rice gruel into a tin bowl and handed it to her brother, who lifted it straight to his lips. The baby, who had woken as soon as she put it down, began to cough and Mei-ling took it up in her arms again, wrapping it close to her body inside the blanket.
“Is the child ill?” asked Chiao gently, pausing as he supped the gruel.
She nodded and lifted a corner of the blanket to wipe away beads of perspiration gathering on the baby’s pale brow. “He has a fever. It’s getting worse.”
“His father is going through difficult times, too, I expect you know,” said Chiao. “He and Commissioner Chou En-lai devised the strategy for the river crossing. Now that things are going so badly and we are cut off from all contact with Moscow, many other leading comrades are questioning whether we should accept the leadership of a foreigner.”
Mei-ling went on dabbing at the baby’s brow and did not look up: her unchanging expression suggested she was aware of some of the tensions of which her brother spoke and was perhaps resigned to them.
“If we can break out of this trap there’s certain to be a clash among the leadership,” continued Chiao in a somber voice. “There’s no means of telling how it will turn out. In some ways it’s like the Warring States period of our history — they’re all at one another’s throats. Everyone is criticizing everybody else.”
Chiao ate the gruel in silence for a while, his face creased in a pensive frown. Only when the bowl was empty did he lay it aside.
“The comrades who studied in Moscow, including Party Secretary Po Ku, are being labeled the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks’ by most of the other leading comrades. Mao Tse-tung will barely talk to any of them. He’s so ill with malaria that he can scarcely speak anyway, but Chiao paused and his eyes narrowed as though he was wondering whether he should say what was on his lips; then he shrugged. “Well ... the truth is, Mei-ling, whenever he does talk the others seem to listen — and mostly he blames the father of your child for directing a static, positional war with what should be a mobile army of guerrilla fighters.”
“If we don’t succeed in crossing the Hsiang safely, it won’t matter who’s to blame!”
The vehemence of his sister’s words made Chiao look up sharply. Her expression hadn’t changed — she was still gazing down at the baby in her arms — but he sensed a new tension in her. Ladling some gruel into another bowl he trod quietly across the earthen floor and stopped in front of her, a look of affection softening the hard lines of his tired, smoke-grimed face.
“Perhaps you should eat something too, Mei-ling,” he said, putting down the steaming bowl beside her. “We’ll need all our strength tonight. Our father is wrong about many things but we ought to be following the teachings of the Taoist sages he admires so much rather than the leadership of our ‘foreign expert.’ Now’s the time to be soft and yielding, to ‘use four ounces to deflect a weight of a thousand pounds.’ We should be pliable reeds, moving and bending before the storm, but we’ve become just the reverse. We’re rigid oaks planted firmly on the banks of the Hsiang. And we’re in great danger of being uprooted or scythed down once and for all
Mei-ling stood up suddenly. The baby had quieted and fallen asleep again and after setting him down, she slipped the blanket from her bare shoulders to fold it warmly around the child in the rough crib. Bound about her calves she already wore gray leggings into which she had folded her uniform trousers and turning her naked back to her brother, she slipped on her khaki cadre’s tunic to complete the uniform. After fastening its buttons she buckled around her waist a leather belt and a pistol holster from which the butt of the Mauser automatic protruded. When she turned to face her brother again, Mei-ling stood transformed from a vulnerable nursing mother to an armed cadre of Commissioner Chou En-lai’s pe
rsonal staff who, like her male comrades, had also trained to serve as a revolutionary fighter of the General Headquarters guards regiment when it became necessary.
“I’ve never asked before why you became the mistress of our foreign expert,” said Chiao slowly. “I assume you acted out of a sense of duty — of loyalty to the Party leadership.”
“It wasn’t only that.” Mei-ling spoke with a calm dignity but a warning note in her voice indicated that she was not prepared to discuss her reasons, even with her brother.
“Romantic love outside of marriage is still a foreign concept in China, Mei-ling,” persisted Chiao. “Do you ‘love’ our foreign expert?”
A sudden rise in the tempo of the artillery fire filled the derelict cottage with vivid flashes of orange light, and brother and sister lifted their heads to stare out through the roof rafters at the dark mountainside above. The uproar quickly became deafening, then just as suddenly died away, leaving the mountain eerily silent — but still Mei-ling made no reply.
“I ask the question because even if we escape across the Hsiang, I fear a break is coming between our Comintern comrade and the leadership.” Chiao smiled sympathetically at his sister. “You may have to make a choice you didn’t expect — between your country and the father of your half-foreign child.”
“I don’t love him — and the choice is easy. My first wish has always been to help carry the revolution through to victory.” Mai-ling spoke quietly, her dark eyes suddenly alive and intense. “But whatever happens, I will do my duty as far as the baby is concerned.”
Chiao nodded and moved toward the strip of sacking hanging over the doorway. “I understand. Be careful, though — it might be wise to begin to put a little distance between him and yourself.”
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