Time passed. The crowd moved slowly, hushed and anxious. He watched Chang’s men rigging the supports with dynamite from the Burma side. Then, when all was finished, they made their way over the bridge. The two of them— Li Ang and General Mao—were among the last in their group to cross.
Safe on the China side, Li Ang heard the faraway sound of gunfire. He stood at the checkpoint with Chang and stared at the sun-brightened cliffs, at the dark river that moved below in shadow. He couldn’t stop thinking about the boy and his mother. The boy’s thin lips, long chin, and big ears had been uncannily familiar; he resembled Li Ang’s brother at that age.
“Hey,” said Chang, “look at that guy over there.”
“What guy?” Li Ang took Chang’s binoculars.
“That guy in the blue smock.”
Li Ang searched the crowd. Then it stood out to him: a small man crossing the bridge. It was something in the walk, he thought, that had alerted Chang. Within the peasant’s clothing, he made out the stiff, implacable rhythm of the enemy.
“Japanese dressed as peasants,” Chang said. “They’re crossing. They’re already here.”
Without another word, he plunged the lever. Later, Li Ang remembered a sort of pause—a moment when nothing happened—and then a sharp explosion. For a moment the bridge appeared to float, weightless in the air. Then the middle section buckled—wood swaying, breaking, falling sideways—and a thousand screams filled their ears. Through Chang’s binoculars, Li Ang watched the blue-clad man take one more stiff step, then tilt, fall to his knees, and slide off of the bridge. Around him, flailing, men and women dropped, some head-first and others at odd angles. A woman in an indigo blouse, clinging to a sliding timber, dropped her bundle—a child—and jumped after it into the water.
Near the Chinese side and close to safety, the small figure of the woman in a pink kerchief slipped, fell back, dangled over the edge. Her full bag, harnessed to her waist and shoulders, dragged her down. But she was tied to something on the bridge—another figure, straining, holding to the wooden railing. Then slowly, as Li Ang watched, the son’s grip failed. He slipped and hurtled after his mother.
On the Chinese side, the crowd surged off the road. Shouts rang out as people were trampled, separated.
Li Ang stayed where he was. He was one of the few who’d been protected by the knowledge of what was about to happen. This fact weighed upon him, rendering him unable to take a step. He understood that there was nothing lucky about him. There had never been. He would survive to old age, and he would remember everything that he had ever done.
LATER, ONE OF the men picked up a straggling dog and refused to let it go. He fed it scraps of food, gave it precious water, petted it. Li Ang and Pu Sijian argued privately about whether General Kwang should leave the dog behind. There were twenty-eight survivors, including four wounded, all of them suffering in various degrees from exhaustion, terror, and malarial fever. They had shed all but the essentials. How could they be wasting precious food upon a dog?
The roads were terrible. Around him Li Ang saw the detritus of an empire: washbasins, clothing, birdcages still containing expired cockatoos and parrots. Empty marmite jars. A teddy bear face down in the dust. Discarded, bloodstained bandages. Dust. Abandoned shells of vehicles lying like fossils in the road, burned out by those who’d reached this place before them and were trying to ensure that they stayed ahead of the enemy. Behind them were the Japanese, moving, someone said, more than twenty miles a day. Li Ang and Pu Sijian were assigned rearguard duty and the care of stragglers. Two of the wounded men died after a few days. Two more held on, limping. Li Ang went back repeatedly to round them up. He couldn’t bear to let them go. But apathy, fright, and disappointment humbled him. Somehow he had cut his left foot. The toes were red and swollen and would not bend.
Mao had been trampled by the crowd rushing off the bridge. Pu Sijian was thin and shaking from malaria. Then General Kwang was bitten by a snake. Li Ang was the only officer fit enough to take his place. He struggled to hold on to the remaining men, but almost every morning someone was dead or missing. Men died of chills, bundled in rags despite the balmy weather. Or men wandered off in search of privacy, only to find themselves surrendering amid the dripping trees, the elephants and monkeys, flies, mosquitoes, termites, and ants. They gave in to swollen, dripping, pus-filled wounds, scabies, dysentery, and beriberi. One evening, the dog’s caretaker disappeared. Another soldier shot the dog and roasted it.
Red streaks ran up Li Ang’s foot. He scanned the corpses as they passed, searching for a larger boot. Meanwhile, Pu Sijian sank deeper into fever. He fell and lay with his Bible tucked into his jacket, his thin hands twitching in delirium. Before the fever took his mind, he reminded Li Ang to look after his wife and son, and Li Ang promised that he would. He tried to keep his friend alive, taking turns with the twelve remaining men to carry him on the makeshift pallet of bamboo and rags. The fever stammered Pu’s bones, shaking him so hard the bamboo pallet poles rattled in their hands.
In his last days, waves of delirium overwhelmed Pu’s orderly mind. He believed he had been captured and was being hauled away by the enemy. He believed he would soon be ransomed, traded for an airplane. He stopped quoting the Bible and began to cry out for Li Ang to rescue him, struggling powerfully against his captors. However there came a time when this manic power faded. He shrank tight against his bones, and he grew tiny in his pallet.
“Li Ang!” he called, hoarse and high and haunted.
“I’m here.”
Pu gave no sign of having heard him. “Li Ang! Come after me!” Then he took one last great shiver and departed.
LI ANG WAS brought to a hospital in Kunming where he knew nobody. There, four of his toes were amputated and the nurses treated him as if he’d had his testicles removed, chanting silly rhymes as they spooned gruel into his mouth and turned him over on the cot. His friend had died; his brother was lost. He couldn’t sleep. His missing toes throbbed, then itched, then throbbed again. Although he was given quinine, his malaria lingered, and he floated in his bed like a leaf on water, wobbling around a spout of images. He saw a child’s crying face. A snaggle-haired woman nursed a baby at her breast. A mother and son, roped together, fell over a bridge.
“Li Ang!”
It was Hu Mudan. Her small face floated in front of his.
“Go away,” he said.
“Li Ang! I know you’re awake.”
“Leave me alone. I’m taking quinine. “
“Listen to me, you fool—”
She didn’t like him. Never had.
“Do you hear me, Li Ang? You must see Yinan when you come back to Chongqing.”
The whirling stopped upon her name. “Yinan,” he said.
“It is important.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “We have an agreement.”
Finally she left. She did not return, and he grew sorry he had wished her gone.
His feet ached and itched. His fever broke and receded, leaving him light-headed and glazed with weakness. Echoes sounded in his mind. Every night he dreamed. He and Li Bing stood on the bridge. Around them, the world was shattering. Then the bridge cracked open between them and Li Bing vanished.
Junan came to visit him in Kunming. She set a framed photograph of his daughters beside the bed. She refused to bring the newspaper, but read him poetry and kung fu novels. Whenever his fever returned, she was always sitting by the bed, calm and strong, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth.
One afternoon, he tried to tell her. “It’s as if something is missing.”
“Your foot will heal soon. They’ll put a cushion in your shoe and you should walk quite normally.”
He didn’t mention it again.
The winds of history passed over him. The American general Joseph Stilwell took command of the regiments that had escap
ed to India. There, he and General Sun planned a new push through the Japanese line in a startling offensive from the west. Meanwhile, the Japanese approached from the east. Once again they had tanks, artillery, and supplies. The Chinese foot soldiers had no vehicles and a mishmash of weapons of indeterminate age and origin. Each soldier marched with a rice ration tied around his neck. Refugees crowded the trains; they clung to cowcatchers and slept upon the roofs of cars. When Guilin fell, the boarded doors of empty buildings were pasted with black and red strips of paper calling for resistance.
He was training troops in Kunming when the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the Japanese surrender, he was promoted to general and rewarded for extraordinary valor. But there was little time to celebrate. With the defeat of the Japanese, a new war had begun. Li Bing and his comrades had done well in the countryside, and the country lay on the verge of falling to the Communists. Li Ang was given a job training Nationalist troops. They would try to hold the country for as long as they could. But the possibility of defeat, of flight, became inevitable. In the spring of 1948, Li Ang was transferred, “temporarily,” to Taiwan. There he had regular messages from Junan and sometimes from his daughters. There was no word from Yinan or from his brother.
IT WAS WHILE STATIONED IN TAIWAN THAT HE GREW CERTAIN some part of him was missing. No crisis brought on this clarity. It was more like a calming period, with the world growing clear and light, his perceptions gradually more lucid. He became aware once more of his singular dilemma. He didn’t miss his old belief that he would escape the world unscathed. This had gone away with his sure step and unthinking vigor. Those gifts had never belonged to him. Something else, something more essential, had been stolen.
When he remembered Chongqing, with its heat and its steep, crowded steps, the houses and streets so quickly built and rapidly destroyed, those memories were more distinct and vivid than the world outside his door. In that time he had been present and alive, in the possession of some understanding that was now withheld from him. He remembered Chongqing day and night; his memories were like an illness that caused everything around him to fade into the world of a dream.
She had said she was in love with him. He had known that this was true, but her artlessness, her candor, had unsettled him. Once she had made her declaration, there was no way to disregard what had happened.
“You musn’t come to see me,” she had said, and he had not gone after her; and yet his soul had followed her, somehow faithful to a bond he hadn’t recognized. He didn’t know exactly when she had begun to haunt his mind. It was simply that he’d come, over the years, to think of the time following his affair with Wang Yinan—when he’d left Chongqing and gone into the field and everything that followed—as a kind of aftermath. Nothing of those years was worth his interest, not even his promotion to general. Only a certain time held power: those months when he and Yinan had been together in Chongqing.
He wrote to Junan, “Have you had word from your sister?” It was as far as he dared go. Her replies were blithe and filled with news—news of her house, of their two growing daughters, of Pu’s widow—but there was no mention of Yinan. There had been no reconciliation.
Most likely Yinan had found another man. He hoped she’d done so. Even so, he wondered, and his wondering was like a phantom pain. He was a boy again, marked proudly with his shallow scars, anticipating some quick cash at the paigao game of a local merchant. He was a young man on his wedding night, with his watertight confidence and high hopes, his heart beating rapidly, peering in at windows. In the next room awaited his fate dressed in a shimmering bridal robe. Instead, he found himself looking through the window at a young girl wearing moth-colored pajamas.
She had taken something from him. She held in her hands a piece of his desire. Without it he was crippled.
JUNAN WROTE THAT the family would soon join him in Taiwan. From this calm message he understood that the situation in Shanghai had grown acute. The city would soon fall. They would be together at last, she said.
He drank too much to celebrate the Lunar New Year. He lay adrift in his room, entertaining the cacophony of voices, young men carousing outside his window. Perhaps they were his own men, who might not suspect that they had been uprooted from their homes for good and that they had already embarked upon the lives of emigrants.
“Li Ang! Li Ang!” Once again, Hu Mudan’s small face floated before his.
“What is it?”
“You drunken fool, you need to hurry. You still have this chance to find her.”
“Yinan is on the mainland. Far away now.”
“You know your side will lose the country. If you don’t go see her now, the Communists will cut you off.”
Hu Mudan had aged in the last few years. Her small, almond eyes had sunk into her face; there were deeper lines in the corners of her mouth. Time had worn her down, as it would wear them all down.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK he flew to Shanghai. An American he knew from Kunming, a pilot for the old National airline, was flying in to get some friends out of the country. Li Ang arranged to fly with him. He wouldn’t tell Junan. He planned to send a telegram to the Hangzhou Methodist Church. Then he would take the train to Hangzhou, where he would go to the church and ask for the American woman. She would know where Yinan was. He did not rehearse what he would say to Yinan when he saw her. He wasn’t even certain as to the purpose of his visit. He wished to see her, that was all, and his need to do this superseded any message.
The plane approached the Yangtze, following the wide delta inland. Below he could see the Communist Eighth Army gathering. There were thousands massing on the north bank, waiting. The land was black with them. In the river itself a few dozen junks and barges gathered. South of the river, he saw nothing.
As he watched the collection of the army that would bring down the city, Li Ang recalled, from years before, the story of Wu Shao, the boy who had stolen Wang Baoding’s lunch in the fourth grade. He remembered Baoding leaning toward him, his pinched face marbled with wine, his long, shrewd eyes and pale lips. “This was a boy with no decent family, no education, no property, no money . . . He was hungry.” Li Ang knew now that Baoding had been speaking of him. Li Ang wondered what Baoding would have thought now. But Baoding was long vanished, killed, or scattered by the Japanese he had discounted.
Li Ang’s foot throbbed. The blood vessels had been injured and it was painful to sit still. The ghost toes tingled and he longed to wiggle them, to scratch them. The air was thin; his eyelids twitched; he drifted into sleep. Again he saw, this time from above, the banquet table. He saw his brother listening and watching. “Young man. Do you know what makes me so curious about your Army’s arrangements with the Communist Party? It’s that you don’t seem to know that as soon as the Japanese threat diminishes, the Communists will not hesitate to turn and stab you in the back.”
And then he was no longer at the wedding. Or perhaps his thoughts simply abandoned him, following a wandering path that had been made by the malaria. To the north, the Communist foot soldiers were still gathering in orderly groups, the junks and barges collecting on the river. Closer to Shanghai, the land was terraced into painstaking paddies green and lush. He saw below him rows of peasants in their blue and brown rags, digging trenches and erecting bamboo palisades around the city. Within the city itself, he saw department stores; the embassies, besieged islands in the turbulence. He saw the smoke from small coal fires as people warmed their hands; he saw beleaguered banks assailed by throngs clamoring for gold.
The peril in return was that it made you think. Watching from above, Li Ang wondered at the path his life had taken. If he’d remained in the countryside where he was born, would he have joined the Nationalists? Or would he be on the other side, clustering north of the river, waiting to rush into the city and reclaim it for the countryside that fed it? He recalled his brother pressed against the wall of the stu
dent dormitory, the curve of his ear, the shape of his head barely visible in the morning light.
HOURS LATER, on the ground, Shanghai flew before his eyes in vivid splinters—tragic and absurd, half familiar, half strange. He saw a young woman—slender and familiar, dressed in an old pair of trousers and a loose blouse. He hurried closer, but when the woman turned, her face was that of a stranger. “Got anything to sell?” she cawed. He exchanged his gold coin for a stack of soapy dollars. They had been washed and ironed in order to fetch more money at the exchange. He passed a small stationery stand and entered it. Inside, the familiar smell of paper and ink made his hands tremble.
“Where can I send a telegram?”
But the man only frowned; perhaps he spoke another dialect.
He left the store and wandered back into the street. The city was filled with trouble: broken people, broken faces. He considered his next move.
It was then when he thought he heard someone call out to him by name. “Li Ang! Li Ang!” He shivered and walked faster.
“Li Ang!” Closer now. Slowly, Li Ang turned.
A small, middle-aged man flew toward him, ignoring traffic signs and dodging other pedestrians. Not a military man; this much was clear from his excited face and his open manner. He seized Li Ang’s hand in his. “Chen Da-Huan,” he said. “It’s me, Chen Da-Huan, from Hangzhou, long ago, before the Occupation. It’s a small wonder you don’t remember me. It’s been over ten years.”
Gradually the name rose through the layers of years past. The Chens had been neighbors of Junan’s family in Hangzhou. The father, Old Chen, had been at the paigao game and he had also been the witness at the wedding. Staring now at Chen Da-Huan, Li Ang recalled the father, a small man in a perfectly pressed British double-breasted suit, waving a pigeon’s egg in his chopsticks.
Inheritance Page 20
