The Communist's Daughter
Page 26
He shook his head. “I met with Kajsa once a couple of months after you left. She said it was Sorensen who’d alerted the authorities about all the foreigners coming around to the clinic. And the maps, the photographs. If he believed it, I don’t know. But it worked. He got their attention. You saw how they swooped down. That was the first real strike against you.”
“They drummed me out.” I said. “You think I don’t know that? I’m glad I had the film to fall on. Better than a sword.”
“The next step was to bring her into it. She was the perfect humiliation. She worked with the Mujeres Libres, a branch of the anarchist FAI. The anarchists scared the s——t out of the Popular Front alliance. You know how it went in Madrid. If they wanted to take you out of the picture, discredit you completely, the easiest way was to set Kajsa up as an anarchist, even a spy.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“I know it is.”
“Where is she now?”
“After you left she told me she was worried about getting taken in again. She said you were the only person who could protect her. I told her it was dangerous even talking. I’d never seen her like that. ‘Just get out,’ I said. ‘Get up to France.’”
He picked up his glass and swished the liquid, but didn’t drink.
“Where is she now?” I said.
*
I was greeted by three men at the entrance to the clinic the morning after meeting your mother at the Retiro Park. I recognized one of them from that encounter my first morning in Madrid the previous November, when I was detained on account of my suit and moustache. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. It was just luck, and bad luck at that, for our paths to cross again. He and his two colleagues were accompanied by four armed guards, two down below in the street, the other two standing beside the lift on the third floor. My assistant, who hurried to the door when I appeared, was told firmly to return to her business. We by then had a staff of no less than twenty-five, and in full view I was led into my office. The door was closed behind us. The leader, whom I’d never seen before, motioned to a man carrying a briefcase to flip it open, and he produced the bottle of perfume and the card I’d given Kajsa the day before. In English he said, “Please sit down.” He paused, as if considering something from a number of different angles. “Yes, you see, this is interesting. Here I see you have written some words about love. You are a man of many talents, Doctor.” He held up the card. “These are your words?”
“What is this?” I asked.
“What is this? You will tell me now.” His English was clear but heavily accented. “I can ask the same. What am I looking at?”
“Perfume,” I said. “A gift. A token.”
“And this?” he said, holding up a series of photographs.
“Where did you get them?”
“Of course you know where,” he said.
“Pictures. Bridges and roads.”
“And tank columns. A doctor interested in tanks?”
“That photograph is incidental.”
“And to whom do you pass these photographs? Only the Swede?”
“They are for our purposes. They are for study. To minimize travel time.”
“Whose travel time?”
“The travel time of this unit.”
“We know this work you do, Doctor. The Spanish people thank you. Yes. But it is something else to distribute these photographs, considering this company the Doctor keeps.” He lifted his eyebrows. “What can we think of this situation?”
He pointed at the perfume and card, which he’d set on the desk. “It’s a wonderful thing to be loved. To have a woman. But we do things for women, too often stupid things. We cheat for them, we lie for them, we commit criminal, illegal acts for them. We betray our friends for them. For what? Only to be with the Swede? Two times more. Ten times more.” He repeated this in Spanish for the benefit of his colleagues, and I recognized a vulgar word. “When you have so many nice Spanish girls to go with, you go with the Swede, and then you talk to her about bridges and tanks?”
*
The village is quiet. Nighttime in Shin Pei.
They are shooting dogs up in the high villages and eating them with what little rice and millet the peasants left behind, spilled from pockets and hastily packed bags. At least the enemy is starving too, that is our one consolation. When it is known they are near, the last of the peasants move off into the night toward the next village, some fifteen or twenty miles away. Then, when that village falls a day later, those who looked upon the fleeing souls with pity now scoop up what can be carried and join the exodus, and so grows the wave of refugees washing down from the mountain villages of north China. Soon Wu-t’ai and all of Shensi and Hopei provinces will be empty but for the partisans and remaining dogs and the invading Japanese. The lucky peasants will find the Peiping-Hankou rail line, eighty miles to the east, and travel down along it to wait out the war in the south, in Sian and Louyang.
To the west and east it is no different. It is rumoured that the southern corridor that connects us to the rest of China will close by late summer. The war is all around us. It is a noose. But here, in the quiet of this mud-brick house, I am in an untouched oasis. When I’m not leaning over a casualty in one of our makeshift surgical huts, I can close my eyes and wonder what the air would taste like if unspoiled by the smell of suppurative wounds and camphor and cordite. What would this world be like if I were with you back in Spain or Montreal, or wherever they took you?
*
First, imagine a mountain stream at first light, carrying with it one living man and one dead. The living man is your father; the other, his guide. I hear the stream that we rode down the mountain on only four days ago. Its splashing still echoes in my head. I hear it through the night, in the still air. How impossible the war seems on nights like these. It is as quiet as a conversation with the dead.
We’d been waiting for our guide at an assigned meeting point for less than an hour when he stepped out of the dark like some ragged phantom, a thin wisp of a boy, very near starving. He didn’t look relieved to see us, only troubled. We welcomed him and gave him tea and rice. The medical unit consisted of Ho, Mr. Tung, two student surgeons and two armed escorts. We watched the boy eat and drink and waited for the night to deepen. Clouds crossed over a bright moon. It was prudent to travel in this part of the country only after dark. The boy was troubled because he knew well enough that it was much more difficult to lead a troop of seven up into the mountains than it was to come down alone from there. He finished his meal, and when he sat back, one of the student surgeons offered him some tobacco and he rolled a cigarette in his thin fingers and smoked it until the ember died. We waited another twenty minutes until the darkness was almost complete. The boy spoke to Mr. Tung, who then asked me if I was ready, and we set out in single file, the guide and an armed escort first, then me, then Ho and Mr. Tung, then the two student surgeons, each member of my team leading an animal, and finally the second escort. Up we started into the Wu-t’ai Mountains.
We walked at a steady pace for two hours without stopping to rest, pausing only when the boy slipped into the darkness ahead to make certain that the area was clear for us. Ten minutes later he would reappear and indicate the way and off again we would walk, a silent column of men and beasts moving into the deepening darkness of the mountains. The night was warm. There was very little breeze and the air was comfortable and smelled of sage and wild mint. The boy held us up with only a single word to Tung, who would look at me, and the rest of the column would halt as the boy slipped out again and left us waiting there. This occurred seven times. On the eighth, the boy did not return. It was past midnight.
“Mr. Tung?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.” he said.
“Ten more minutes. Then you will lead the others back to where we started. I’ll wait here for the boy.”
“And you?” he said.
“I will find you in the morning.”
I watched their faces as Tung translated my orders. Ho would not show his face to me, as he expected I’d think less of him if I saw terror or tears or both in his eyes. I handed him the reins to my animal and he walked the horse back down the trail.
After they left I sat quietly in the dark and watched the moon move through the high clouds. When they parted there was light enough to see by. The guide would know where to find me if he was still alive and he hadn’t abandoned us. It was now past two o’clock. I believed I was the last man fighting this war. The last man in China. So immense was the quiet and solitude that I might as well have been the last man on earth. The enormity of the sky felt larger than the vastness of all oceans and all memory. The stars were infinite, and below them the silence was suddenly broken by a sound that might have been the boy returning from his reconnaissance. I didn’t move, just sat looking up into the infinite sky and listened and waited for a sign. I waited ten minutes. My heart raced. The sound did not come again. I waited another half hour and the boy did not appear.
I dozed off and it was nearly morning when I awoke. I stood up and moved about. It felt good to stretch my legs. With my pack I moved slowly outward in the direction the boy had gone. I heard another sound. This time it was closer, and it wasn’t the sound of a footfall or a dull thud but the human sound of a sob or groan. I moved toward it, despite telling myself this was a baited trap, remembering the night I’d carried Robert Pearce on my back. But as I moved forward now the sound came again with more clarity, and I stopped in order to place it. I walked another fifty yards into the darkness, low to the ground, and there I found it. I practically stepped on it.
This boy was no older than our guide. His Japanese uniform was in rags. He was sitting up against a rock, his right hand pressed against his neck, eyes bulging with pain and dehydration. The stab wound was just above the collarbone. Blood dripped onto his chest and pooled in his lap. He watched me approach without making a sound. He was unarmed. Then I saw the body of our guide, lying not far from the soldier. The bayonet had pierced his chest, and it seemed incredible that he’d been able to turn and slash the man who’d stabbed him before he died. The rifle and bayonet lay on the ground beside him. I positioned the boy face up, crossed his hands over his chest and rolled his eyes shut, then returned to the Japanese and examined the wound. He did not resist as I pulled open his shirt.
“You will die very soon,” I said, “like the boy you killed. I know you don’t understand me.” I pointed to the boy lying beside the rifle and bayonet. “Like him.”
It seemed his slight nod was meant to offer acknowledgment or agreement or resignation. He didn’t say a word.
I sat beside him while he died. It took only a few minutes. He whispered softly, and I touched his face and said, “There you go.”
I hoisted our guide over my shoulder and started down the hill. It was easy going at first. He was so slight that I barely noticed him. Returning to the stream where we’d begun our expedition the evening before, I walked over the hard, uneven ground, and soon began to feel his weight in my knees, then as a pain in my shoulders. I laid the boy on the ground and sat down for a minute, breathing heavily. I didn’t know how much farther I had to go before I would find Tung and the others in my party. I was wondering about the odds of my survival, alone and unarmed, with very little food and water, when again I thought of that nighttime journey through the mud-fields of Belgium a full lifetime ago. Was it my turn to die now? Why had I survived these extra twenty years when others had been in the ground all this time? Why, in my third war, was I still alive?
I pulled the boy back up onto my opposite shoulder and started walking again, as fast as I could, no longer certain that I wasn’t moving deeper into the occupied north. The dead boy’s head was bumping against my midsection, legs kicking against my back. The rhythmical bouncing of his knees and feet began to play on me and I started hearing his voice echoing up through my body. He didn’t like being held upside-down for such a long period of time, he said. I should stop so we both could rest. I did not listen to him. I kept on, and he kept asking to be put down. I said my first words to the boy. “Shut up,” I said. “You’re no longer living and have no right to speak. Just stay as you are, and I’ll get you back so they can do what must be done. But just stop talking so much, someone’s going to hear us.”
He fell silent for a time. I tried to walk with less of a bounce to keep him quiet. But the path grew difficult and again his feet pounded into me and his voice rang into my gut and up into my inner ear.
“No,” I said, “I believe I have every right to be here. No, I shouldn’t have died twenty years ago. No, it’s not just that others died and I lived. Of course not. There’s no plan out there. There is no fairness. You step into a roomful of Spanish flu and come out with not so much as a cough. Some people get out without a scratch. It’s not about being deserving or skillful or even lucky because luck implies something too. It’s only about random chance. It’s a roulette wheel, this world.
He didn’t answer, and I just kept walking. I came to what I believed was the stream where we’d met this boy the night before. I didn’t know if he was still talking. I’d stopped listening. I stood on the bank, wondering if my remaining strength would allow me to ford the stream. I stepped in and began the crossing. The stream was rocky and swift but not deep. In the middle I stopped, exhausted, and sat down in the water. I leaned back on the boy to end his talking for good. His mouth filled with water, and then I fell asleep, my face turned up to the sky.
In the morning I dug his grave beside the stream with the five members of his band who’d discovered me bobbing in the shallow water, still hoisted up on his body. They shook my hand to thank me for returning their comrade to them. They knew of me, the White One Who Comes. It was their camp we’d been destined for, fifteen miles west of where they found me. I examined each of the men after we put the boy in the ground. They suffered from malnutrition, two of them from abscesses in the teeth, one from an improperly dressed flesh wound on the hand. I administered what care I could with the few supplies I carried. Then we sat and fed ourselves, not far from the fresh grave. I kept looking over at it, wondering if he was listening to his friends’ conversation. In the daylight it all seemed ludicrous, and I dismissed the night as an eventful hallucination. I had been close to an exhausted collapse for two weeks. The partisans took me to Chin-kang K’u, eight miles downstream, transferred me to the care of a medical team Id recently inspected there and bade me farewell.
I have not thought of that boy’s words until now, tonight. The dead do not have words. I know that. Only the dying have words, and those who are still to come.
*
No sleep again tonight. It is past two in the morning. Today I operated for seventeen hours. How strange it is that the mind controls the body so, even when the body can barely hold itself upright. But I am thinking, of course, always thinking.
I can see your mother now as she would have awoken on the morning of my interrogation. The thugs were coming.
She sat up when the door was thrown open. The men occupied the room with a borrowed authority. The questions began immediately, from a bespectacled, leather-coated man who bobbed on his toes as he waited for the preferred response. He leaned into her face, smiling and threatening as he looked into the eyes of a woman who, before the war, he would have approached—if he’d dared to at all—like a timorous boy. Who would have caused him more fear than outrage. The war is a lucky place for some, as he might have known, a field of opportunity. What delightful turns of fortune we find in these times. A woman alone in her room.
His associate, a shorter, uglier man, sifted through her possessions.
Her clothing, books and toiletries came alive most pleasurably in his hands. When he picked up Kajsa’s hairbrush from beside a half-full glass of water, he noticed on the pale pine desk by the bathroom door a book that held the envelope containing the photographs.
*
I have been thinking much about how value is ascribed to one’s life after the act of living is done. Not deeds or accomplishments. What I mean is that a part of me will live on in you even though I will not have had the privilege and responsibility of being part of your life, at least not fully. Even if I live to meet you there will always be this gulf, which is why I need to write this history for you. That is a failure of the first order. You see, there are so many things I will miss telling you, as a father would, through the years as you grow into adulthood. The small and inconsequential things and moments that make up the great quilt of your existence. What would we have learned from each other had we shared but one walk through an August rainstorm? What infinitesimal yet lasting truth would you have taken with you and remembered over my grave had we tossed a baseball back and forth on a Sunday afternoon? Well, what do you have now? You have none of that. Only the dry touch of these pages.