by Dennis Bock
She also proved to be a useful interpreter of language and customs. On the second day of the bombardment I remember a wounded boy was delivered to me. The barge that had carried him across the river had received a direct hit. Dozens of women and children had been killed outright or drowned. This boy’s mother, a woman of no more than twenty, had survived the attack and somehow managed to pull him to shore. Wet and shivering, she stood before us and begged us to save her son. Jean told her that we would do all we could, and then an orderly led her out. Not much later we heard a strange, primitive howl echoing down into the depths of the cave.
When asked what was happening, Jean said, “The boy’s mother is calling his soul back. She thinks it’s lost out there, wandering in the hills.”
It took four days to evacuate the east shore of the Yellow River. On the morning of our departure the day broke sunny and clear. As we emerged from that cave for the last time I wondered about the many souls that would be left behind there, including that boy’s, trapped between the steep walls of that valley.
I asked Jean if she believed any of that business about scattered souls. A contemplative mood had seized me. She shrugged and looked down across the river into occupied China and said, “I don’t know what I believe any more.”
At Han-ch’eng, after a full day’s walk, we slept in a village house, provided for us by the military council of the region, on beds of wood and straw that were at least dry if not warm and comfortable. Sheets of stiff white paper served as windowpanes. Our only source of light was a single candle propped up in a wine bottle. The label, though mostly obscured by wax, looked impressive.
“Where would you find a bottle of wine like that in the middle of this war?” I said, wishing it were still waiting to be drunk. “It’s French.”
“It’s probably been empty for twenty years,” Jean said.
Some minutes of silence passed between us.
“You’re still young,” I said. “You have something to look forward to when you get back.”
“That seems very far off.”
A light wind rattled the paper window.
“Yes, it does,” I said. “What will you do when you get home?”
“Who says I’m going home?”
Outside there was no noise to indicate fighting in the area, only the sounds of the nighttime village. Doors closing. Distant calling. A dog.
I said, “You like it here that much?”
“I think I do,” she said.
“Tell me something about Shantung. Why there? Why not somewhere else?”
“Where would you have me go?”
“That’s up to you,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyes glowing in the candlelight. “I’ve been thinking about what Charles said that day.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Something about Madrid.”
“Parsons wasn’t in Madrid,” I said. “Madrid is long gone.”
*
Here I am, Christmas in China. Not a soul around here has heard of it. It came and went yesterday without a peep, and truthfully I wasn’t bothered. It was possibly the most peaceful Christmas I have ever experienced, though likely the coldest one, too. Some things are best kept to oneself out here. That’s what I decided. I sat with my memories for as long as I could stay awake, watching my small fire, and that was enough. Maybe I’m getting used to it out here. Perish the thought!
We were stalled in Han-cheng for a week, waiting for transport to be sent down from Sian. The two-hundred-mile journey took another two days, and when we arrived we were presented to Chu Teh, Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Route Army. It was a great relief to see with our own eyes the capable intelligence of this man after so many days of chaos and retreat. My confidence in the ultimate success of this struggle had not been dashed, but it had been severely tested under those trying conditions. Here was a man who inspired those around him.
At the conclusion of our meeting, the Commander promised to augment the field hospital that I thought was still waiting for us back in Hong Kong with any supplies presently at his disposal. When I told him of my concern for our field hospital, and how it would be safely transferred over that great distance, he informed me that it was already on its way under military escort.
*
Weary but excited as we set out, I pondered the vast fields of wheat that reached to the horizon, up some inches already, and their graceful dance beneath the endless sky. We were nearing the end of our journey; it was already late March 1938. We were among a caravan of supply trucks moving north to Yan’an that would reach that city after three days of slow, steady driving. When we passed over the loess plateau of Chin-kang K’u, where pale-yellow silt, like fine gold dust, collected along ridges to form terraces of astonishing geometrical precision, I imagined a painter’s delight in the face of such beauty, and remembered the paleness of your mother’s skin, and my failed attempts at capturing her likeness. It seemed already that a lifetime had passed.
We were greeted in Yan’an by a group of children who crowded up singing a happy greeting I was unable to understand. I embraced the smallest of them, who seemed no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and he held on to me as a son would a father. The frozen town had heard of our impending arrival. There was excitement afoot. It was known a man had crossed an ocean in his efforts to join them. But my journey had spawned rumours. This man had been killed—not native here, he was sadly untested on the treacherous footing—first by rock slide, then machine-gun fire, mortar barrage, dysentery and diphtheria. They said, too, that he’d died of starvation, his leg pinned beneath a shifting boulder.
So it was as if a ghost or a minor god appeared before these people on that cold March afternoon sixteen months ago, bearing what supplies a small fleet of trucks—guarded by fifty soldiers—could carry. At my side was Jean Ewen, by then more exhausted from our journey and my relentless ideals than I was able to tell. My brave Florence Nightingale. Many of these children had never seen white people with their own eyes, apart from an American doctor named George Hatem who’d lived among them for more than a year. Here he was known as Ma Hai-te, and he now stepped through the gathering crowd.
“You’ve made it, Doctor, wonderful,” he said.
We eagerly shook hands. “The excellent nurse, Miss Jean Ewen,” I said.
“I’m honoured,” he said.
“This is a wonderful welcoming party,” Jean said. “Thank you.”
“Entirely spontaneous, believe me. It’s not every day we get visitors from the outside. You coming up here is a real morale-booster. It’s a sign that the world is listening.”
“I wish it were true,” I said, “but we shall change that, the three of us.”
As Dr. Hatem led us around the centre of the town, the crowd of children followed, sniggering and laughing whenever we spoke. When we turned our attention to them, rubbing heads and embracing them, they swarmed even closer, as if eager to be touched by the mysterious foreigners. It was a wonderful moment for us, our grand arrival. But it was also a sad reminder of the war surrounding us. Despite their high spirits, we saw immediately the malnourishment in their eyes and skin. It was a starving population. When I touched one boy’s head, he took my hand and held it tightly, then began pulling me. It was, it seemed, an offer to lead me around town. We laughed. “You’ve found your guide,” Dr. Hatem said. “Hang on to him, you’ll need a boy.”
He was a delicate child, his face terribly thin. I wondered whether he would even survive the last of the winter snows. But his smile was radiant.
“Ask him his name,” I said.
“Ho Tzu-hsin,” Dr. Hatem told me.
“And how old is he?”
He and Jean spoke with the boy, and then Jean said, “He’s sixteen. He says he has no one left. His parents were killed at the start of the war.”
“All right,” I said, “tell the boy he’s hired.”
The good doctor did so, and directed him to deliver our things to the Yan’an Guest House. This is where all visitors stayed their first days here. We walked ahead, through the narrow winding streets, and found our lodging at the base of a small hill on the edge of town. It was an ancient wooden building in what looked to be the signature architecture of ancient China.
“The Han Dynasty,” our host corrected me.
Its soffits ran sloping off its clay roof like a curling moustache. Its doors were heavy as trees and painted a bright red. In the reception room, small carved dragons licked out at passersby from the door frames. Near the end of the tour, we were shown our rooms, and the boy appeared to await my instruction. I gestured for him to enter, and to place my bags on the floor. After he did, I thanked him in Chinese. He nodded and smiled, then withdrew.
*
Yan’an is a dry, dusty city; it is completely treeless, in fact, and so you might imagine it as a rather hard, cheerless place. Nothing could be further from the truth. What it lacks on the one hand is more than compensated for by the revolutionary hopes of all those who flock there. It is a city whose inspiration and ideals are not for a moment contained by the ancient walls that run around its perimeter.
It was there that Mao Tse-tung’s Long March ended in triumph only three years ago, and there the Great Leader still resides. It claims its own university and military college and functions as the operational centre of the war against Japan. In those three short years its population has swollen from less than ten thousand to perhaps three hundred thousand, due to the influx of Chinese and internationalists, workers and intellectuals, eager to take up the anti-Fascist struggle. As a protection against aerial bombardment, student collectives dig their own dwellings into the gritty loam of the hills that surround this town, and there they live and study, wholly devoted to the improvement of self and society. There is not an idle hand to be seen there. Not once did I witness the inhumane degradation of beggar or vagrant, for all are swept up in the greater cause.
After a very brief tour of the hospital, Dr. Hatem took us to a co-operative noodle house busy with diners, women and men alike dressed in bulky uniforms of grey cotton that looked very warm and well suited to the harsh conditions of rural life. They all seemed exceptionally lively, despite appalling dietary realities. Over our meal of wheat noodles, Dr. Hatem explained that each man in Yan’an was provided with four cents a day for basic foodstuffs, and students or soldiers double that. As five hundred grams of meat cost forty cents, one’s daily intake was dangerously lacking in certain proteins and fat-soluble vitamins. Added to these concerns, the extreme cold and overcrowding in the caves produced ideal conditions for TB. He had already treated dozens of cases this month.
After dinner the doctor showed us the cave in which he lived. It had the dimensions of a large living room, going back into the hill some twenty-five or thirty feet, with rounded ceilings that, like the walls, were painted white. It was heated by a charcoal-burning stove. By the light of a kerosene lamp he prepared coffee captured, he explained, along with a Japanese officer. We took our cups and sat on low wooden benches. Outside the temperature was no higher than minus ten degrees centigrade, but inside it was considerably warmer. Even before the war, Dr. Hatem told us, people preferred these caves to the houses in the town, which often were much more difficult to heat. He then said he’d heard that our team included three medical personnel, or had he heard wrong?
“No, you didn’t,” Jean said. “We started as three.”
“What happened?”
“There was some trouble during the crossing. The man was an alcoholic. A sad case, really. He drank and, to continue his drinking, stole money. The money he was holding for us. I put an end to it.”
Jean looked up at me sharply when I said that.
“Good for you, Doctor,” he said. “Shameless S.O.B., it sounds like.”
“Shameless enough, yes,” I said. “We turned him around at Hong Kong. We won’t be hearing from him any more.”
We were walking back to the guest house, just the two of us, when Jean said, “You weren’t talking about the telegram, were you, when you said that about putting an end to it? You took the money, didn’t you.”
I didn’t deny it.
“Of course you did,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t see that right away.”
“You knew just as well as I did that someone had to get that money back. I wasn’t going to wait two weeks for a telegram.”
“And you led me to believe—”
“I led you to believe nothing you didn’t already choose to believe. I only wish I’d taken it sooner.”
“And Charles? You cared nothing for him. You helped him believe he was a criminal. I think he actually believed you in the end.”
“Was I supposed to care for him?” I asked. “He believed what his conscience told him to believe. At least he had that, a conscience. I myself didn’t make him believe anything.” We were standing face to face.
“Forget about that. It’s over. Look where we are now. Look there,” I said, pointing to the hundreds of cave dwellings. Each door, painted white, shone like a pearl against the dark cliff. It was a beautiful, cold night, and our breath was steam at our mouths. “Behind each of those doors up there, do you know what you have? You have the heart of the revolution waiting for our help. This is the centre of it all. Don’t waste the opportunity with pointless moralizing over Charles.”
“At any expense?” she said.
“Expense? I committed no crime at all. Don’t you understand that? It wasn’t his money. It belonged to these people here, and it’s because of me they’ll have access to it now. I can save dozens of lives with the money I retrieved.”
She turned and strode angrily up the hill to the guest house. I followed along, but I was in no rush. If my point hadn’t been clearly made here, once and for all, it never would be. There was nothing more to say. I was relieved to be turning in for the night, and relieved to be rid of her. Her temperament was beginning to wear on me. Naturally, she was troubled by the business with the money. But did she now believe she couldn’t trust me? It seemed some kernel of doubt would never go away. She was tender, even immature. I wondered if perhaps I’d misjudged her preparedness for what was to come, because what we’d seen and done to this point was scarcely the tip of the iceberg. She had, thus far, been very brave indeed, but in a short time we would see hardships much greater than these brief clashes and occasional aerial bombings.
The day had been exhausting, and perhaps the long journey had exacerbated her reaction upon finding out what had really happened on board the Empress. In any case there was not much I could do now. Once in my room, I stripped down and rolled into bed. But then, too excited to sleep, I got up and stood at the window, looking at the surrounding caves and hills and the ancient pagoda bathed in moonlight under the great dark sky of China.
I have arrived, I thought. I am finally here.
I must have just dozed off when a knock sounded at my door. For a moment I supposed it was Jean, though I could think of no reason why she’d be calling so late. And when I opened the door, a slight young man was standing before me. He spoke softly, and while understanding nothing of what he said I could guess from his manner that he was sorry for the late disruption. He indicated that I should follow him, waving me forward. I dressed quickly, stepped across the hall and knocked on Jean’s door. “We are being summoned,” I said. It took her only a few moments to ready herself. I could hear her moving about in her room, and when she joined me it was without a word.
The man led us to a cave on the north cl
iff. It was a steep climb. He didn’t speak. Naturally, I presumed we were being called to a medical emergency and hoped all the supplies we might need would already be there, wherever we were going. He knocked once at a white door that bore no marking or insignia. No guards were stationed there, nothing out of the ordinary. As we waited I watched the town below, in its mountain cup of darkness. A ringed moon seemed only moments away from dipping behind the walls of the ancient city. I turned when the door was opened, and we were ushered in. Halfway toward the back of the cave I saw a tall man standing in the light of a single candle. He turned to us casually, as if surprised by our presence, his face still shrouded in shadow. He was dressed in a blue uniform no different from any other I’d seen in the village. He was, though, unusually tall.
