Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  “You have to remember that all published writing in the People’s Republic of China has to serve socialism,” said Jakob quietly without looking up from the sheaf of translations spread across his own desk. “Mao laid the law down on that in the early 1940s at Yenan. All fiction since then has extolled the workers and peasants with a heavy propaganda bias.”

  “And yet sensitivity does shine through in a lot of places,” said Abigail, bending over the file again. “It can’t be easy to write under those conditions.”

  Jakob looked up from his work and watched his daughter turn the pages of an old literary magazine published in Peking. She was utterly absorbed in her task and she did not see the look of consternation on her father’s face. “Some of her early stories tried to deal with difficult subjects like the emotional role of women in revolutionary times — but they were attacked by Party activists at Yenan. Since then, as far as I can see, she’s played safe and followed the Party line.”

  Abigail continued reading in silence for several minutes, then picked up the magazine and held it out toward her father. “There’s a photograph here of her. It’s a little blurred but she looks as if she might be very beautiful.”

  “Yes, that’s right — her appearance is striking.” Jakob glanced at the magazine, but turned back to his papers almost at once, pretending he was engrossed by a translation.

  He was already familiar with the photograph, of a group of writers taken at a Party conference. Like the other men and women in the picture, Mei-ling wore the dark, high-collared cotton jacket and trousers which had become an almost universal official uniform in Communist China. Her short hair was scraped unflatteringly back from her face, but despite her drab clothes, the fineness in her features was still recognizable. When Jakob had first seen the photograph two or three years earlier, it had stirred his emotional memory of Mei-ling with a surprising force. In the weeks that followed he had sometimes taken out the file to look at the picture when alone in the office late at night, but eventually the sight of it had only saddened him and he had put it from his mind.

  “There’s a suggestion of refinement about her, Daddy. What kind of background do you think she comes from?”

  Jakob found Abigail looking expectantly across the room at him and he dropped his pen and leaned back in his seat. “She was born into a rich Shanghai family. I believe her grandfather was a comprador for one of the British trading houses and her father already owned several textile factories in the thirties. She and her brother were appalled by what was happening to China and they rebelled against the family. Her father and mother fled to Formosa before the Communists took over. Her brother, Lu Chiao, has become a senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, he was made a marshal recently along with a handful of other illustrious heroes —.“

  A knock on the door interrupted Jakob, and his senior translator appeared holding a thin paperbound volume with a pictorial cover showing an endless column of Red Army soldiers toiling up a precipitous mountain crag under a great red flag.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Kellner,” said Wu, smiling apologetically. “I offered to check our cross-references for Miss Kellner, to see if we had anything to add to the file on the writer Lu Mei-ling. I’ve found an old volume of short articles by a dozen different contributors about the Long March.” The translator advanced into the room and laid the booklet tentatively on Jakob’s desk. “One of them was written by Lu Mei-ling and I thought you’d like to have it straightaway.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Wu.” Jakob picked up the booklet and flicked through its pages with an abstracted expression until he came to the start of Mei-ling’s article. He began to read the text beneath her name, then, realizing the translator had left the room, he closed it hurriedly and turned to his daughter again. “As I was saying, in the meantime, Lu Chiao has become one of the top officers in the People’s Liberation Army. But not only that, he’s now also a leading member of the Party’s Central Committee. . .

  Abigail’s forehead crinkled in puzzlement. “How did Lu Mei-ling manage to take care of me? All you’ve ever told me before is that she helped your cook boy, Liang, in some way. Will you tell me the whole story?”

  Jakob pulled back the cuff of his jacket and made a show of glancing at his watch. “I haven’t much time right now, Abigail. There are still a lot of translations for me to check through ... May we talk about it later?”

  “Can’t you just give me some idea what it was like?” There was an almost desperate, beseeching note in Abigail’s voice and her face was taut as she looked across the office at her father. “It’s all so tantalizing now that I can see a picture of her.”

  Moved by the intensity of his daughter’s curiosity, Jakob relented. “I’ll try,” he said slowly, “but I’ll have to be brief Again he hesitated, considering his words with great care before he spoke. “At dawn on the morning your mother died, we hid you in a stable where we’d slept. We were taken to a hillside outside the town — but the execution was interrupted by the arrival of Nationalist troops. That’s how I survived.”

  Jakob closed his eyes momentarily and pinched the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb. “I was hurried away from that terrible place by guards but I managed to send Liang back to find you. He didn’t catch up with the column of soldiers holding me prisoner for many weeks and during that time he hid you in his shoulder baskets. He fed you mainly on crushed soy milk we’d given him. His two young sons were with him and helped him look after you. . .

  Abigail was sitting rigid in her chair, her expression tense as though she were mentally reliving the experience. “What happened when Liang caught up with you?”

  “He hid near the column and smuggled a message to me. I managed to escape and we all spent a night together, sleeping in a barn. I was overjoyed. I could hardly believe you’d survived. I thought all our troubles were over then. But we were attacked by a band of wild mountain dwellers who called themselves spirit soldiers. We got away from them, still carrying you in one of the baskets. But unfortunately the Red Army soldiers pursuing us heard the commotion and we were recaptured.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible that I went through all that without knowing anything about it,” said Abigail in a half-whisper. “What did they do to us after we were recaptured?”

  “My jailers separated us. Liang had to prepare my food and look after you on his own. I wasn’t allowed to see you at all. Food of every kind was short, we were all close to starving, and Liang got desperate when he began to run out of soy milk.” Jakob stopped and drew a deep breath. “So he approached Lu Mei-ling secretly one night and she agreed to care for you.”

  “Did she look after me for long?”

  “For about six or seven months altogether. On the march she either carried you herself or led you on her mule in a basket. You traveled with her all across the Snow Mountains and the Great Grasslands, the wildest parts of the whole trek.”

  “I never imagined it was anything like that.” Abigail’s eyes were wide with surprise. “I had no idea.”

  Jakob looked uneasily at his wristwatch again, and shuffled together some of the papers on his desk. His daughter’s questions had begun to make him feel on edge and he was anxious to escape further probing.

  “Lu Mei-ling and your cook boy, Liang, really saved my life,” she said, looking up suddenly with a wondering expression in her eyes. “I wouldn’t be here now without their help, would I?”

  “No, that’s true.”

  “What became of Liang, do you know?”

  Jakob shook his head quickly. “He joined the Red Army eventually. He fought heroically at the Luting bridge. But after that I’ve no idea what happened to Liang, I’m afraid.”

  He stood up, gathering his translations together. Abigail was staring again at the magazine photograph of Mei-ling and he could see that her mind was beginning to seethe with new questions. When he was sure he was unobserved by her, he concealed among his papers the old booklet on the Long March which his tran
slator had discovered and crossed quickly to the door.

  “I have to check something in the archives,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll leave you here to browse through the rest of your file.”

  Without waiting for an answer Jakob hurried through the outer office to the institute’s archive, where long rows of indexed shelves held back copies of newspapers and folders of old translations. Seating himself at an empty desk by a window, he spread out his papers and opened the Long March booklet. He noticed, thumbing carefully through it, that its pages contained the kind of idealized drawings of triumphant Red Army troops that were already familiar to him from other Communist publications dealing with the Long March. Its texts too were unrelieved eulogies of revolutionary heroism: cooks described how they had braved hails of enemy fire to deliver food to beleaguered units, peasant soldiers testified to acts of valor in which comrades had sacrificed their lives selflessly for the revolution, and Red Army commanders gleefully detailed the wily guerrilla strategies with which they had repeatedly duped foolish Kuomintang officers. The dog-eared publication, printed in Chinese on coarse, yellowing paper, was at least a dozen years old and had obviously been printed during the Yenan period of the revolution. It seemed likely that it had passed into an obscure file on arrival at the institute without having come to his desk for scrutiny. Some of the articles he remembered reading in more recent anthologies of the revolution, and he realized that Mei-ling’s contribution had probably been dropped from later editions.

  When he came to her article, he ran his eye swiftly down the rows of printed Chinese characters, noting that the same dutiful thread of positive propaganda ran through all the descriptions of incidents she had witnessed. He skimmed quickly to the last page without discovering anything very illuminating; then, near the end, an abrupt change to a more intimate style of writing caused him to slow down.

  In the final paragraph she had departed from the propaganda conventions and introduced an unusual personal note, saying how she felt strongly that her own individual experiences had “echoed the significance of the great Long March.” His interest aroused, he read on more slowly, jotting down a rough translation as he went.

  “From the suffering and sacrifice of thousands of brave comrades in the Central Red Army, a new revolutionary China has sprung gloriously into being,” she had written.

  And after much suffering and privation, my own almost exhausted body achieved its own modest “revolutionary” successes. It was not only able to endure privations previously thought impossible for a

  woman, it both sustained and produced new life during the most arduous final stages of the historic trek. Because of the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the oppressed masses of China came to realize for the first time that a new era lay before them — an era in which they would seize control of their own destiny! Both as a revolutionary and as a woman, I was glad to have had the privilege of playing a minor role in this great achievement.

  Jakob sat and stared for a long time at the last few lines, reading the printed characters and his own translation over and over again, trying to wring the most precise English translation from the Chinese text. But try as he might, from the oblique language he could not be certain beyond all doubt of Mei-ling’s final meaning. Had she, he wondered, meant to convey merely that she had borne and succored her own child, the one that had died so tragically? Or was she making an obscure reference also to the efforts she had made to save Abigail? As he wrestled with the puzzle, he remembered again those desperate, sublime moments they had shared on the blizzard-swept Snow Mountains and suddenly he found himself wondering whether Mei-ling’s words could possibly be interpreted to contain another meaning.

  His pulse quickened as he reread the last paragraph — but, tantalizingly, the Chinese characters continued to resist his efforts to establish a definitive meaning. Closing the booklet, he sat for a while gazing out of the window without seeing the stark, saddle-backed bulk of Victoria Peak framed beyond the glass. Gradually what he had read inspired a new feeling of resolution, and he forced himself to check and annotate the routine bulletin translations before him as rapidly as possible. As soon as he had finished and delivered them to the senior translator for printing, he hurried back to his office. Abigail was still engrossed in her reading, and he spent a few moments tidying his papers. Then he perched himself on the corner of the desk at which she sat.

  “You know, Abigail, that I received an invitation to go to Peking yesterday,” he said quietly. “What you don’t know is that I’ve been wondering hour by hour ever since whether I should accept or not.”

  Abigail looked up, surprised by his unusual tone of voice. “And have you made up your mind at last?”

  Jakob nodded. “Yes, I have. I’m going.”

  Abigail closed the file she had been reading and pushed it to one side. “Does that mean that you’re ready to face up to what your friend Joseph Sherman called ‘ghosts from the past’?”

  “I don’t know exactly what Joseph meant by that. Perhaps he meant that we sometimes find ghosts of our past selves when we return to places that were once important to us. If so, I think I’m ready.”

  “I’d like you to take me with you,” said Abigail, raising her eyes to his. “Will you, please?”

  Startled by the request, Jakob stood up and shook his head. “I don’t think it would be at all suitable for you to come . .

  “You might find it more painful than you think, going back to the place where you and my mother were happy together,” said Abigail insistently. “And if you do, it might help if I’m there.”

  Jakob did not answer but she could see that he was thinking over what she had said.

  “If you asked your hosts to extend the invitation to your daughter, they could hardly refuse,” she added gently. “Will you do it — for my sake?”

  Jakob looked perplexed. Then he turned away to look out of the window at the towering Peak again.

  “I won’t make any promises,” he said in a subdued voice. “But I will ask.”

  6

  From the balcony of his hotel room overlooking the gnarled gray stonework of the old Tartar Wall, Jakob stared sadly out at the plumes of smoke belching from factory chimneys in Peking’s recently industrialized suburbs. Although it was still early morning and the sun was barely risen above the eastern reaches of the ancient capital, new iron and steel foundries were already creating a sooty haze in the autumn sky. This curtain of murk almost blotted out the distant azure roofs of the Temple of Heaven, and as he stood looking southward, Jakob suddenly saw the smoke as a symbol of his mood. A dark, indefinable feeling of regret, he realized, blurred his senses and obscured his past in Peking as surely as the industrial smog screened the Temple of Heaven. Since arriving five days earlier he had attempted to focus his mind unfailingly in the present in order to absorb all that was new. In the quarter of a century that had passed since he had first come to Peking, the capital of what was now the world’s largest Communist nation had changed greatly and at every turn he had consciously resisted the temptation to slip into maudlin reflections on the past.

  Fortunately, there had been much to distract him and for most of the time, he had succeeded in keeping his mind on the present. From the viewing stands flanking the vermilion-walled Gate of Heavenly Peace, he had stared out across the vast concrete plain that had been cleared in front of it, watching half a million Chinese — youths, workers, women, and soldiers — parade before Mao Tse-tung and the other Communist leaders on China’s National Day; during a crowded program of visits to factories, schools, and agricultural cooperatives in the days that followed, he had forced himself to concentrate on the unending flow of facts and figures provided by the Communist Party cadres who were his hosts; at a succession of banquets and receptions he had listened dutifully to repetitive antiwar speeches attacking the United States, although with each passing hour he had felt increasingly at odds with the mainly Soviet and East European delega
tions invited to Peking by the Chinese Committee for World Peace. At first he had watched carefully for some hint of a special greeting that might explain his mysterious invitation — but the unfailingly anonymous faces of the Chinese officials who escorted the delegates had so far given nothing away.

  Now, despite his previous good intentions, as he stared into the industrial smoke Jakob found himself visualizing the terraces of dazzling white marble around the Temple of Heaven and the shady groves of ancient cypress trees where he had strolled with Felicity on that spring day in 1932 when she accepted his proposal of marriage. He conjured up from memory the simple grandeur of the historic enclosure where the altars, halls, and pavilions had been erected with great precision, in accordance with the mystical beliefs of antiquity. In his mind’s eye he saw the rose-pink walls of the temples, the bright cobalt blue glaze of the roof tiles, and wondered whether he would ever feel again that unique sensation of having reached out to touch the ancient past that he had first experienced at the Temple of Heaven as a carefree young man. As these thoughts drifted through his mind, Jakob suddenly felt desperately wearied by the drab, utilitarian modernity of Communist Peking and a strong desire to immerse his senses in the rich, restful atmosphere of the past welled up in him. He sighed involuntarily, jamming his hands deep into his trouser pockets, and at that moment a door to an adjoining room opened and a soft footfall sounded behind him.

  “I sense you’re beginning to get a little tired of all the heavy_ handed propaganda and the official smiles. Am I right?”