The Communist's Daughter

by Dennis Bock

  I have already made preparations. I am leaving within two to three weeks. Of course, it will be difficult to abandon this place. And to abandon him, my faithful servant. I am his best hope for surviving this war. I know it and he knows it. But his vulnerability cannot dictate the arc of history. Without me they will likely put a rifle in his hands. The partisans will take him; he’ll go of his own accord. A hundred-pound soldier off to protect the Motherland. Last month we celebrated his eighteenth birthday. He is a man now. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but his voice cracked long ago and is oddly deep, even in this nasal language—and so much more incongruous issued from that weak chest. He puffed himself up and recited a poem composed for the occasion. I clapped when everyone else did, then Mr. Tung whispered into my ear, “It tells of the Great Bethune’s struggle.”

  Clever boy, I thought. But which struggle? What would he think of the Great Bethune if he knew of my excitement about returning to America, and without him? Am I allowed such thoughts? Since making my decision I am rejuvenated, helium-inflated, drunk with joy. But is this joy purely for the good work I shall do there? My aim is to raise for this war effort $1,000 per month in gold, and yet the promise of clean sheets, hot roast beef and French wine crowd my heart. What do you think of that, poor Ho? Have I deceived you? What he does not know of me! Yes, a starved man must replenish himself. But there is more. Of course there is. More than anything else, what awaits is you. And it is to you I shall pass this irregular, green-typed stack of petroleum- and lavender-scented archaeology, so that you will have the truth in your hands, come what may. This is my great optimism. This is the calm silence that now greets these eager peasants as I attempt to impart to them the basic laws and practice of sanitation, physiology and biology. This is the joy that fills me as I walk silently to my brick-and-mud shack after sixteen hours of surgery, rest my aching elbows on this desk and roll another sheet into the machine—the first clack, the ringing imprint upon the refreshed ribbon, like a small stinging bullet. Is life so good that I am to be provided a second chance? Will I find you? Will you love me as a child loves her father? Can I love you, an unknown existence so close to my own? Does a family await, after all? I must finish this story before I can know.

  *

  But now, you ask, am I too happy dreaming of a homecoming and champagne to remember the festering wounds and lice and horror of this place? Am I too enamoured of thunderous, admiring applause to step back into the lion’s jaws? No. With my joy comes renewed energies. I step back into it. You see, you power my heart. You enliven me. By now, what is it I have left to prove?

  We returned to the front, at Hua Ta, on the banks of the T’ang River, and there set up shop, our workhouse of small miracles, in an old farmhouse that had been cleared out and prepared for our arrival on the orders of an intellectual-looking regimental commander by the name of Jao, He was a small man who wore a pair of round black-rimmed glasses on his small nose and walked with an untidy rolling limp in his left leg, making it seem as if he’d been caught in an invisible surge of water that pulled forever to the left. When I received word of an impending attack I decided that this would be the last of my daredevil overland crossings before setting out for the other side of Shensi and Yunan and my glorious homecoming.

  When our team arrived, poor Ho by then dragging his feet, I conducted an inspection of the building and surrounding facilities, then presented myself to the hobbled commander to pass along a list of our requirements. He read through the list, the good man, and handed it to his assistant with instructions that I be provided with all we needed. He then informed me to expect casualties within six hours. I returned to the farmhouse-aid station to oversee the preparations and quickly ate a bowl of rice provided by Ho, along with a pot of tea. On the stone wall of the house, sitting over my emptied plate, I studied the formal portrait of the family that had once lived here, or so I supposed. They were a hungry-looking lot, a mother and father and three small children smiling with rehearsed conviction and dressed in their Sunday village best. I wondered what foods they could have put in their mouths for the price of that professional photograph and those crisply pleated fabrics. They were, unfortunately, nowhere to be seen in the village. Like so many others they had been pushed from their home and now, very likely, were more skeletal than ever.

  When the wounded began to arrive I believed the flow might never stop. It was a large assault consisting of three regiments. For three days we did not rest, the wounded coming in a steady torrent. We ate standing as the next casualty was laid before us. The sharp autumn air, this high up, tingled on my fingertips. My nose, ever active, always alert to the morbid fecal smells of a nicked bowel, rejoiced in the mountain breeze that lifted the curtain of that refugee family’s home. We worked. We ate. We slept in ten-minute intervals. As time moved forward it began, too, to move backward. I stumbled. I began to dream. In these waking dreams I imagined this family. When I saw a small girl’s head encased in the stone wall, unconscious though smiling, a syringe held like a rose in her teeth, I put my own head in a bucket of ice water.

  On the second day, treating a badly broken leg, I was using a chisel that had been taken from a farmhouse near Chi Huei two or three months back. Imagine the creator of, among other instruments, the Bethune Rib Shears humbling himself with a lowly carpenter’s chisel. But I—always adapting, innovating—had discovered certain properties in its construction that proved beneficial for my work. It was nicely weighted and its hardwood handle could withstand long and frequent bouts of boiling, for disinfecting. Primarily, though, it was the tempered steel, forged in Belgium, that made it so useful in cutting through and shaving off bone. How this tool had travelled so far I couldn’t say, but I am glad it did. When I get out of this war you will not find it in my black bag of doctor’s instruments, yet it has proved highly useful over the months. On that particular day, however, this chisel that had sat so comfortably in my hand for so long jumped off the splintered femur of the unconscious man beneath me and dug into the middle finger of my left hand.

  One of the nurses quickly disinfected and wrapped the cut. Hindered, but not grievously so, I tidied up the amputation, put my head in a refreshed bucket of cold water and then, an hour later, had a second nurse re-dress the wound. As she did so I sent Ho for a candle and had him melt it down. He presented the melted wax to me in a rice bowl which, oddly enough, bore a small illustration of a flamingo, and I bathed the wrapped finger in the wax so as to seal it against infection. Another inspiration, really. Luxury of luxuries. This was as close as I’d come to wearing rubber gloves in longer than I could remember. Bandaged like a lollipop, the waxed finger was awkward and heavy, and for the rest of the day I might as well have worked with only the right hand. The following day, after three hours’ rest, when I examined my wound, the cut looked fine. But halfway through the morning I decided I couldn’t continue like this. I peeled the wax off the finger and got back to work.

  *

  This morning I awoke from a dream. It was of the morning the Empress set sail. From the height of the promenade deck, Jean and Charles had been enjoying the view of the dockyards and the city beyond, leaning over the rails, I suppose pretending they had their own send-off party down there, smiling and waving. I attempted to push myself forward into the excitement of the moment but I felt a weight on my chest. After a minute or two I excused myself and went below decks to find my cabin. But when I inserted my key and pushed the door open, the room was occupied.

  Your mother, in the form of the painting I’d made of her at the Santander, was sitting on the bed. In it her shoulders were covered by a blanket, and she smiled.

  I touched my hand to the painting. When I did, her face began to disappear, the paint coming off like dust under my hand until only the canvas remained.

  *

  When I awoke in the pre-dawn morning of the fourth day, only two days ago, Ho looked at me with concern. My body was trembling from lack of sleep
. He himself looked unwell in the struggling light of the small stove-fire he’d set in the far corner of that one-room house to warm my tea. Then Mr. Tung stepped inside.

  “What news have you heard?” I asked. Ho handed me my tea. I sat sipping, both hands shaking.

  “Only that they’re near,” Mr. Tung said.

  “How near?” The tea spilled. “Another cup, Ho.”

  “They will be here soon,” Mr. Tung said. “Before midday. We are falling back.”

  The limp-footed regimental commander summoned me to his quarters and said the line had collapsed. He praised our work, thanking me personally, and then ordered our return to the Base Hospital at Yang Chia Chuang. He saluted, turned and parted, that leftward tide pulling at his body more strongly than ever. Straight-backed, I returned along the dirt path to the farmhouse-aid station. As the rose-coloured sunlight began to warm the western face of the distant Mo-t’ien Mountains, I felt an unusual buoyancy take hold. I felt almost euphoric. Then, entering the building I again saw, and for the last time, the strange face of that dead child framed by the perfect construction of fallen stone that contained her. I stopped to study her. She made a lovely picture. But now she was dead. What Capa might have done with her! I thought. What lasting images he could have produced, those hardened veins reanimated with silver nitrate and mercury, bathed in his alchemist’s bath and introduced to the world as another anthemic tribute to the horror of war. Yes, he was a famous man. Relentless. Driven by the beauty of conviction. “You,” I said. “Yes, you.”

  The dead girl opened her eyes. “Me?” she said.

  Visions of children bricked into standing walls notwithstanding, I am well. Do you doubt my sanity? These spells shall pass. It is overwork, my dear. Physical exhaustion, nothing more. So what do I do in the meantime, as I wait out these small hallucinations? They are no more than a dizzy inconvenience. What do I do? I wonder about you. I wonder what might have been. I wonder what you will make of this history. Will you permit me the idea, the fantasy, that one day, as an older woman perhaps, you will turn these pages with forgiving sighs? The very name, the Border Regions, for all its portent, for all its distant mystery, connotes ambiguity, possibility, breadth. Will I benefit in this undeclared realm? Where certainty fades can there be rejuvenation? Does forgiveness live here in this unknowable terrain? Yet this wide landscape is really only the one small chair that holds me, this one small house. This could be anywhere. Can you see the bejewelled monster that crawls into my dreams as I sleep? Do you share the same monsters? Mornings aboard the Empress, those distant brief mornings with small Alicia, that lovely child, and the poems her aunt read to us while I painted return to me often:

  Among twenty snowy mountains,

  The only moving thing

  Was the eye of the blackbird.

  I wonder now if there could be a more desolate poem, or a quieter life, than that of a poet who brings silence down so absolutely upon an entire mountain range with fourteen simple words. Perhaps this is why I find it comforting, this illusion of company that writing to you now affords me. These words, though hacked and banged out on this old machine, though so crude compared to those of an artist, bring you here to these Border Regions, where I no longer own my past but instead offer it to you. You see, these words mark you as present. With them I can place, see and touch you. You are whole. And in some ways, as I write this I, too, am whole. I find wonder and warmth, and if this world I now occupy lacks anything it is those two dreams of wonder and warmth. You are my last opportunity; you are the moving eye of the blackbird.

  Will I place this package in your young hand and say, “Wait till you are older”?

  The question is this: When will you be old enough to understand me, yet still young enough to forgive?

  *

  The war exists. It is a raven hanging in the clouds over Tu Ping Ti and over the whole of this magnificent land. It picks at holes in the stomach and strips of unclaimed flesh. Tired, I ask myself what difference one man can make. On a beautiful autumn night. I wonder how I ever got it into my head that I might hold down every man who refuses to offer his blood. Can I teach the world how things should be done? Can I change the ways of these people, so backward and noble? Yet those questions pose another: Could I bear to be away from this place? The answer is no. Of course not. But that isn’t good enough. There is no real answer.

  I pick at the truth like some weakened bird of prey.

  With each page I can’t help but think I reduce myself yet another degree in your estimation. Why? Perhaps I can’t stop myself now. Will you hang on long enough? Have I nothing left to recommend me? Perhaps I know in my heart of hearts that you will never lay eyes on your father’s words. Has this solitude led me so wide from my original path that I’m afraid to say what I set out to do? Which was what—to sway you? Elicit forgiveness? Embolden myself? Record the facts? Now none of this matters. The enemy encircles us, bearing down from the north, east, south and west. Their hungry machines eat away at this small oasis with each passing day. The noose closes.

  Yet here I am. More important is my desire to surround myself with the thick blanket of these memories. Only that. I wait for these hours of escape. It warms me, this simple act of memory and reconstruction. I am sustained. I have a voice in this silent land. I return to this darkened house chilled and hungry but almost peaceful. Every night it’s the same. A lonely man’s imagined dialogue with the portraits of you and your mother. On occasions when the war becomes everything, I can hear myself and the anger in my voice, the exhausted frustration. Then I stop writing, alarmed that I’m talking only to myself. Is the great Bethune talking to himself? Is this what I have become? Does Ho listen? Does he scurry off to find Mr. Tung to aid in his eavesdropping? I go days without uttering anything but barked commands and threats of discipline. I send people from my sight like an enraged schoolmaster. Even my own voice sounds strange to me now, as do the things that bring me pleasure. Steamed potatoes mixed with eggs and sugar, for example. This is Ho’s current specialty, which he brings to me wearing the proud face of a master chef. He really is something. This morning, though, I thought I detected a smirk of recognition not very well camouflaged by a smile. The nerve! I think. The little bastard. The servant poisons his king. Is that what these dizzy spells amount to? What secret does he throw into this hash?

  *

  I imagined the terror that would have plagued your mother as she bore down upon that struggling mass within her, knowing that once her body had completed its birthing she would be wheeled out and placed against a wall, or shot there in her bed, still with the warmth of your exit burning on her flesh. It was unimaginable. I could imagine nothing else. It possessed my thoughts. I stood at my hotel window and watched New York City below, wandering in my mind through the maze of possibilities. It was a world of indifference I saw below me, both to the death of your mother and to the war that claimed her. It was one and the same, a tragic absurdity that these people simply didn’t matter. If the death was not in your house, you didn’t bother with it; if death was busy elsewhere, all the better. I could not tolerate these images flooding over me. I imagined the agony of your birth, which your mother knew would signal her own death.

  I know now how unjust were my first thoughts toward you, the result of a madness that took hold of my vile heart.

  How can I even write them now? Only with the belief that you will never see this. Only with the comforting thought that I will fail in this task and my secrets will remain.

  When a child is born we offer expressions of joy, hearty handshakes, even the odd cigar. Here is evidence of nature’s generosity, this simple miracle providing an opportunity to live one’s life over again and to correct one’s errors and to embrace what one failed to cherish the first time around. These are thoughts a man might possess in normal times, but I felt only the terror of your mother’s last days. For me, this was the embodiment of that betrayal of
Spain.

  I could not drive these thoughts away. For months they tormented me. From New York to Seattle, to Vancouver, then on board the Empress and finally into the vastness of this land, I was a man haunted by the terrible fact that I could feel rage against the innocent child whom I’d left behind.

  I imagined it again and again. Your mother glancing over her shoulder as the door swung open. This at the Alemana, at our table. Were these the men who would take her away that last time while I carried my film between Montreal and Toronto?