“My support for Chairman Mao’s line has never faltered,” replied Kao stiffly. “I’ve always believed that the class struggle is the key to progress.”
“I’m very glad to hear you say that, Kao. Your support will be invaluable when the time comes to neutralize the generals and set Hua the Incompetent aside. We must prepare contingency plans with the factory militia
Her voice trailed off and her expression became thoughtful, but after a moment of silence Kao gestured uneasily toward the papers he carried. “More reports are arriving from the Seismology Bureau. Shouldn’t we warn the chairman that an earthquake might be expected? The shock could worsen his illness.”
She shook her head quickly, her mind obviously distracted by other thoughts. “The chairman is barely aware of his surroundings most of the time,” she said absently. “Giving such information in itself might have harmful effects
The telephone on Chiang’s desk rang and she picked it up with an exclamation of exasperation. After listening for a moment, she pressed a switch on the telephone console before turning back to Kao.
“An urgent personal call for you has come in from Marshal Lu Chiao. It’s being held by the switchboard operator.” Her face darkened with distaste. “Your uncle was one of the prime movers of the generals’ meeting, according to my information. What are your relations with him?”
“I’ve not exchanged one word with him since his rehabilitation,” said Kao. “And I have no wish to do so.”
“Marshal Lu is calling from the institution caring for your mother.” She smiled ambiguously. “He says you should go there at once if possible. Your presence is urgently required.”
Kao looked at his watch and saw it was almost three AM. “I still have a lot of important work to do here. And I don’t wish you to think I want to have dealings with a man with my uncle’s record of betrayal.”
“Don’t be so hasty. Take the call and go to meet him. You might be able to discover what happened at the meeting.” Chiang’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. “You also have my authority to sound him out about the future when the right opportunity arises. You can mention that the post of minister of defense could be filled by a marshal who shows exceptional loyalty to Chairman Mao’s line in a crisis.”
Kao’s eyes widened in surprise; then he nodded obediently.
“Go and take the call in your office. Agree to meet him as soon as possible at the asylum — don’t waste any time.”
12
Kao ran almost all the way from Chung Nan Hai to the asylum through the subterranean tunnels. He decided to take the risk because the temperature below ground was much lower. But when he climbed to the surface again through a trapdoor in the corner of a covered market, the dank, stagnant air seemed almost suffocating and his shirt was soon sticking to his back. Families living in the narrow hut’ungs through which he passed had dragged their beds out into the open, but since they still could not sleep in the clammy heat, many were squatting on the dusty ground in groups and they stared curiously at Kao as he hurried on his way. In his mouth and nostrils the saturated air seemed to have taken on a metallic taste and he wondered whether the air purifiers in the tunnels had broken down.
It was just after three-thirty A.M. when he entered the asylum. Half the lights in the dingy corridors had been switched off and he did not see Chiao until the aging marshal stepped suddenly from the shadows in the corridor leading to his mother’s room. Through the open door a few yards away, an animalistic moaning noise was intermittently audible. A male nurse stood at Chiao’s shoulder, watching and waiting to answer their questions or carry out orders.
“Your mother’s been calling your name like this since midnight,” said Chiao. “I’ve already spent half an hour with her — but I’ve been able to do nothing. If you listen carefully you’ll hear she’s not calling ‘Chiao.’ She’s calling ‘Kao.’
Kao gradually began to distinguish the sound of his name being repeated incessantly on the same haunting, monotonous note. The inflection was agonized and despairing and a shudder ran through Kao despite the heat. The male nurse behind his uncle was standing close enough to hear their conversation, and on realizing this, Kao made a sign for him to retreat beyond earshot.
“I’ll go in,” said Kao uneasily. “But lm not sure I’ll be able to do anything.”
In the half-light Chiao’s expression hardened. “You might at least put some effort into the matter, Comrade Nephew. You haven’t exactly sacrificed yourself in your mother’s interest in the past”
Kao returned Chiao’s gaze defiantly. “There’s little point, Uncle, in raking over the past again and again there are too many pressing matters to deal with. I’d like to talk to you soon about some questions of mutual interest.”
Chiao did not reply immediately but looked searchingly at his nephew. In the silence, the eerie moaning from Mei-ling’s room suddenly grew louder. “I didn’t hear much talk of ‘questions of mutual interest’ the last time we met, on that platform in the Workers’ Stadium. So I doubt whether what you have to say now would be of much interest to me.”
“You would be most unwise to ignore this approach, Uncle,” persisted Kao. “It could result in a considerable advantage to you.”.
“You’ve been living on borrowed time for many years,” said Chiao in a level voice. “I think perhaps that time’s nearly run out now. You were summoned here on a personal errand, to help your mother. She needs you — so go to her while you can.”
Chiao turned and strode away along the shadowy corridor without another word. Kao watched him go, his own face taut with tension, then, gesturing to the nurse to follow him, he stepped into the room. Inside he found his mother struggling on her bed in the grip of a female nurse. Her face was turned from him but she continued to moan his name, and Kao stood watching for two or three minutes, a helpless feeling growing inside him.
“Tell her you’re here, Comrade Kao,” prompted the nurse, at his side. “She’s perhaps not yet aware of your presence.”
Kao moved slowly to the middle of the room and stopped. “It’s Kao, Mother,” he called in an uneasy voice. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
At first his intervention had no effect at all. Then, without any warning, Mei-ling ceased to struggle and lay still. The nurse holding her sat back, wiping her sweating brow, and slowly Mei-ling shifted into a sitting position. When she turned toward the middle of the room her gaze was still vacant and unfocused, as if she continued to live in a world of fog, but she seemed somehow to register a new presence and she allowed the nurse to straighten her disheveled tunic and smooth her hair.
“I came because they told me you were upset,” said Kao haltingly. “Please be calm now.”
Mei-ling stared blankly at him without seeming to see him; meek and docile suddenly, she sat upright on the edge of the bed. Her lips moved once but no sound emerged, and Kao took a step nearer in an effort to hear what she might be saying. As he did so the floor of the room bucked wildly beneath his feet. It seemed to rise like an unsteady boat under which a massive wave was passing; at the same time a terrible rumbling filled Kao’s ears. The shock of the earth tremor brought him gasping to his knees, and beyond the uncurtained window a flash of elemental light illuminated Peking for an instant as brightly as day.
The male nurse who had remained at Kao’s side staggered sideways, clutching wildly at the wall for support, and Kao saw the woman who had been restraining Mei-ling tumble helplessly to the floor. The room continued to shudder as if it were a ship being buffeted by wave after wave, and the rumbling grew louder. The chairs and table toppled over, the vacuum flask exploded, and the bed slid into the middle of the room with Mei-Iing sitting on it, staring open-mouthed at Kao.
Kao’s own face registered the greatest extremes of human fear, and when Mei-ling struggled off the bed and flung herself toward him, he clutched at her like a drowning man. As they clung together, a wide crack slowly sundered the dingy green wall before them, creeping diago
nally upward from the floor, accompanied by an awesome groaning sound. Plaster and dust burst from the fissure in great clouds and Kao stared at the widening gap in horror, waiting for the walls and ceiling to collapse and bury them.
13
All over Peking, modern high-rise apartment blocks were swaying like bamboo thickets in a strong wind. The walls of ancient gates shivered and crumbled; the lakes of Chung Nan Hai, which had previously lain black and viscous in the oppressive heat, boiled up with sudden turbulence; and inside the Forbidden City golden tiles cascaded from the curved roofs of the Ming pavilions to smash deafeningly in the courtyards below. Outside its high, crenellated walls the old dwellings of imperial courtiers were collapsing like houses of cards and in the industrial suburbs people rushed into the streets to stare up in terror at the black sky.
A hundred miles southeast of the capital, nightmarish chasms were opening to swallow people, buildings, and a whole moving train.
The heavily populated coal towns of the region were being devastated, entire streets were subsiding into rubble, hospitals and public buildings were slipping into gaping canyons, and in the mines night- shift workers were dying instantly in their thousands as miles of seams collapsed and entombed them. Gushing fountains of foul liquids and sand were spouting from the ground to inundate great tracts of farmland, and all across a wide region of northeast China hundreds of thousands of people were dying and suffering injury as the earth’s surface underwent a massive convulsion.
In Peking it seemed as if the tremor would never end, and on the seventh floor of the apartment building in the eastern suburbs where she lived, Abigail was awakened by the first incandescent blaze of light that flared over the city. The whole of her bedroom was rocking violently and a roaring noise filled her ears. Scrambling from the bed, she snatched up a bathrobe to cover her nightdress and swayed dizzily across the room to the window. Another blinding flash of light lit the city like a photographer’s sodium flare and a frozen image of the roofs and streets of the darkened capital imprinted itself like a film negative in her mind. A power station has exploded, she told herself dazedly, and began to imagine she might be about to die.
She rushed unthinkingly into the adjoining room and stepped out onto the small balcony which overlooked the apartment gardens. There she found that the whole building was swaying crazily. Suddenly all the streetlights below went out, the rumbling of the shifting earth grew louder, and in the pitch-blackness Abigail stood holding on to the ledge of the balcony with both hands, paralyzed with fright.
After what seemed an age, the tremor ceased and calm returned. For a few seconds in the darkness there was a deathly stillness and Abigail felt suffocated and dazed as though time and her heart had stopped. A faint cry of pain from somewhere inside the building broke the unearthly stillness, releasing Abigail from her paralysis, and she stumbled back into the apartment. The air in all the rooms was filled with acrid dust, but she managed to grope blindly into the kitchen and locate a flashlight in a drawer. Although the dust was making her cough and choke, she found her way shakily back to her bedroom and struggled into a pair of trousers and some tennis shoes; while she was dressing, she saw that part of the bedroom ceiling had collapsed onto the bed where she had been sleeping.
From the hail outside she suddenly heard sounds of shouting and running feet; snatching a sweater from a drawer, she tied it around her shoulders and hurried to the door of the apartment to find that it had split and fallen open. The building was one of a cluster in the eastern suburbs reserved for foreign residents, and Abigail saw several of her fellow tenants running helter-sk1ter down the stairs outside, many of them barefoot and still in their nightclothes. When she directed the beam of her flashlight above their heads she discovered that wide cracks were appearing in the walls and ceilings of the stairwell; the structure of the whole building was creaking and groaning alarmingly and Abigail was about to dash down the stairs herself when she heard a faint thudding sound.
The neighboring apartment was occupied by a young, newly arrived Polish teacher and Abigail noticed then that although it was cracked, the door remained closed. On finding it locked, she drew back and kicked the damaged door hard with the sole of her foot. It collapsed inward immediately and inside the hall of the apartment she found that the thudding noise was corning from the other side of an internal door that had jammed in its frame. The sound of hysterical weeping became audible above the banging and Abigail called out loudly for her neighbor to stand clear. Then she repeatedly kicked at the flimsy door until it flew back on its hinges. When the dust-covered girl emerged, sobbing, from the darkness, Abigail led her quickly down the stairs into the forecourt, where dozens of other frightened tenants had gathered.
Dressed still in their nightclothes or hastily seized garments, all the tenants were pale-faced with shock, and only after Abigail’s flashlight revealed that wide cracks were visible in the facade of the building did they move to safety in the middle of the gardens surrounding the block. There Abigail helped organize a head count, and when officials from the Public Security Bureau arrived, she was able to tell them that nobody was left in the damaged building.
Many of the tenants were clutching fearful children and when it suddenly began to rain torrentially, Abigail took the sweater from her shoulders and placed it around a little French girl who was shivering and sobbing in her mother’s arms. The girl was no more than four or five years old and the gift of the sweater soon quieted her. But as Abigail looked at the child, a thought struck her. Without offering any explanation, she turned and ran to the cycle racks at the rear of the apartment block; taking the first machine she came to, she leapt into the saddle and began pedaling furiously through the downpour toward the center of the capital.
14
On seeing the first blinding flash of light outside the asylum window, Kao imagined that a long feared Soviet nuclear attack had at last been launched against Peking. Then, as the rumbling and shaking gradually subsided and the terrible crack in the wall before their eyes ceased to climb toward the ceiling, his primal fear lessened and inside his head his rational mind began silently repeating the words te chea — “earthquake” — over and over again. In the same moment he heard Mei-ling speaking once more close to his ear — but she was no longer shouting his name.
They still stood together with their arms linked in the middle of the room, but her utterances were now being made in an urgent and imploring tone and she was plucking agitatedly at his sleeve. She seemed to be striving to pronounce the same word again and again, pausing for several seconds each time, but her voice was indistinct and Kao could not put any meaning to the sounds. Looking down at his mother, -he saw that her eyes were still bafflingly glazed and it was impossible to judge whether the earthquake had registered on
her senses.
The two nurses, white-faced with shock, stared uncertainly at Kao. If he had not been there, lie was sure, they would have raced from the room in panic. But within seconds they regained their composure and, with sideways glances at him, they quickly moved the bed back to its normal position by the wall and righted the table and chairs. Although some confused shouting could be heard along the corridors, they ignored it and approached Kao politely to take charge of Mei-ling again. To his surprise she offered no resistance and allowed the nurses to lead her back to her chair. Kao realized with a feeling of embarrassment that she had not shown any signs of fear throughout the tremor; when she flung herself toward him, her arms had encircled him in a protective fashion and he had clung to her instinctively. Yet as soon as she was seated, she resumed her monotonous repetition of the single word and Kao turned to the nurses in desperation.
“What do you think she’s saying?” he demanded.
At first both nurses shook their heads; after listening again the woman looked up at Kao. “Could she be saying mao tzu — ‘hat’?” she asked diffidently. “Would that make any sense?”
Kao made a negative gesture. “It makes no sense at
all.”
Mei-ling had fallen silent again and he looked at her in bafflement. Then, as he watched, her lips moved once more, very slowly, as though she were making a supreme effort, and she framed a single word with near-perfect clarity.
“Ming!”
Deep sorrow and yearning seemed to combine in the strangled utterance and Kao stared at her, transfixed, scarcely able to believe his ears. His few visits to the asylum over the years had been brief and uncomfortable. Whenever he sat beside the frozen, silent figure of his mother, he had experienced deep feelings of unease, which had made him ever more reluctant to return. She had never spoken to him or looked at him with any comprehension in her eyes, and lie had never been able to offer anything more than the truncated details of his austere personal life. He had spoken haltingly of his marriage and later the birth of Ming; he must also have passed isolated remarks, he realized then, about the boy’s growth and progress but he had never imagined that any of his words had ever registered. To hear Ming’s name on her lips now astonished him, and in the same moment the mental numbness induced by the earthquake left him.
“My wife and son are alone,” he gasped, staring first at his mother, then at the nurses. “I must go.”
He rushed to the door, but on the threshold he stopped and looked back. Mei-ling had slumped into an exhausted attitude in the chair and her head had fallen slackly forward.
Anthony Grey Page 74
