Travels with Myself and Another Page 7
I planned to go mad. “Stare at the wall.”
Someone, not me, I was past any effort at self-preservation, must have cleaned the bathroom and changed the bed linen. Two pails of water provided le confort moderne. You lifted off the cistern top and poured in water which then thrillingly flushed the toilet; the other pail was for washing in the bowl. I stood in the bathtub and gave myself a daily shower with a teacup.
The thugs remained in the sitting room.
“Who are they?” I asked U.C.
“Probably Whatchumacallit’s bodyguard, seconded to spy on us. Nobody passed them the word that we’re the Representatives of Righteousness and Peace.”
We stayed in Chungking for several weeks but the place returns to me only in flashes. It was never meant to be a capital city, its sole advantage being that the Japanese couldn’t reach it. I see it as grey, shapeless, muddy, a collection of drab cement buildings and poverty shacks, the best feature a lively market. The Japanese bombed when they wished though not while we were there. The citizens fled to caves as air raid shelters; 396 had lately been killed by suffocation and stampeding feet when a bomb closed the mouth of such a cave. Crowds of thin cotton-clad expressionless people swarmed in the streets. Lepers abounded. They were beggars and forgivably spiteful; you hurried to find money in your purse; if not quick enough, they touched your shrinking skin.
U.C. was in fine spirits; I was not. He found entertaining company, all vanished from my memory, and doubtless Embassy whisky. I think he had got the hang of China by then and was, as they say, adjusted. He went off by air to Chengtu, a top secret area in the north where tens of thousands of Chinese peasants were chopping away mountains with hand shovels and spreading the earth in basketloads to make a tremendous landing field for Flying Fortresses. U.C. said it must have looked like that when the slaves built the Pyramids. The good humour of the peasants touched him; they sang at their work; they competed by villages, their pennants flying; the day’s best team set off firecrackers at night in a victory celebration. Given more time and without me around, groaning and sighing steadily, U.C. might have developed into a happy Old China Hand. He did not value cleanliness far above godliness like me, and wasn’t reduced to despair by all the manifestations of disease. He saw the Chinese as people, while I saw them as a mass of downtrodden valiant doomed humanity. Long ago, annoyed by the way I left convivial gatherings before anyone else, U.C. declared as dogma, “M. loves humanity but can’t stand people.” The truth was that in China I could hardly stand anything.
Dr Kung, the Finance Minister, took an avuncular shine to me and presented me with a big box of chocolates from which he had eaten his favourites and a red satin Chinese dress, embroidered in yellow and purple flowers. U.C. said that was no uncle’s dress, it looked like the latest model they were wearing in the Chungking whorehouses. Dr Kung also organized a feast, placing me at his right. With his chopsticks, he selected choice morsels to put in my bowl: sea slugs, bits of black rubber with creepers, thousand-year eggs, oily black outside with blood-red yolks. U.C., unimportant in the middle of the table, had a wonderful time at that luncheon party. He watched me as I grew pale and babbled that everything was too delicious but I couldn’t eat another mouthful, no really I can’t, Dr Kung (desperately coy), you wouldn’t want me to get so fat I couldn’t wear my lovely red dress.
At a party somewhere, I met Madame Kung. She reminded me of stout rich vulgar matrons in Miami Beach hotels. The CNAC pilots were down on her for demanding that they offload passengers to make room for her trunks, whenever she flew to Hongkong. She was good at clothes; I remember her dress as one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It was the classical Chinese model, never bettered anywhere, of black velvet. The little buttons that close these gowns from collar to knee are usually made of silk braid; hers were button-size diamonds. She said she had ruby and emerald buttons too. Sapphires were out because they didn’t really show. I can’t have been suffering too much or I would remember more.
Two visits stand out with rare clarity though I didn’t know at the time how exceptional they were. The Generalissimo and Madame Chiang invited us to lunch, an intimate foursome. The Generalissimo wanted to hear news of the Canton front. Their house was modest, also furnished by Grand Rapids including doilies but clean and thug-free. Display in Chungking was useless. Madame Chiang did not stint herself when abroad, once taking a whole floor at the Waldorf. Madame Chiang, still a beauty and a famous vamp, was charming to U.C. and civil to me. Madame Chiang translated. U.C. and I agreed that the Generalissimo understood English as well as we did. He was thin, straight-backed, impeccable in a plain grey uniform and looked embalmed. I didn’t take to him but felt rather sorry for him; he had no teeth. Reporting this later to an American Embassy wallah, he exclaimed over the honour showered on us; it was the highest compliment to be received by the Generalissimo with his teeth out.
I have been fascinated to find careless, casual notes on that luncheon conversation. As I reconstruct it, the Generalissimo asked U.C. what he thought of some articles that had appeared in the western press about the Chinese Communists; neither of us had read them and anyway had no opinions. The Generalissimo then went on to state that the Communists were “skilful propagandists without much fighting ability. The C.P. doesn’t possess military strength and the government has no need to resort to force against them. If the C.P. tries to create trouble, injurious to the war, the government would use little measures to deal with them as disciplinary questions arose. The Fourth Route Army incident in China was very insignificant. Intensive C.P. propaganda in the U.S. made America believe the C.P. was necessary to the war of resistance. On the contrary, the C.P. was hampering the Chinese army.”
He repeated this, according to my notes, in various ways, four separate times. Madame Chiang then said she got letters from the U.S. saying the Kuomintang (Chiang’s) armies fired at the backs of the Fourth Route Army (Mao’s men) while it was withdrawing according to orders; the Generalissimo said this was not true, his soldiers never fired on the Fourth Route Army and the Communists disarmed Kuomintang forces whenever possible, to get more weapons and territory. Madame Chiang said, “We are not trying to crush them.”
If U.C. understood this talk, he didn’t mention it to me. I would have been bored but I expected powerful political people to be boring; it comes from no one interrupting or arguing or telling them to shut up. The more powerful the more boring. With thirty-five years’ hindsight, I see that the Chiangs were pumping propaganda into us, as effective as pouring water in sand. We had no idea of what was really going on in China, nor that the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, to whom power was all, feared the Chinese Communists not the Japanese. They were not fools. The Japanese would disappear some day; historically the Japanese were like an attack of boils. The true threat to the Chiangs’ power lay in the people of China and therefore in the Communists who lived among and led the people. I didn’t need political expertise to decide, in a few hours, that these two stony rulers could care nothing for the miserable hordes of their people and in turn their people had no reason to love them. An overlord class and tens of millions of expendable slaves was how China looked to me. War wasn’t excuse enough for the terrible wretchedness of the people.
Madame Chiang and U.C. were hitting it off all right until I thrust my oar in. I asked Madame Chiang why they didn’t take care of the lepers, why force the poor creatures to roam the streets begging. She blew up. The Chinese were humane and civilized unlike Westerners; they would never lock lepers away out of contact with other mortals. “China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue.” Which ancestors? Apes or ancient Britons? I was furious and sulked. To appease me, Madame Chiang gave me a peasant’s straw hat which I thought pretty and a brooch of jade set in silver filigree which I thought tacky. I didn’t know how to refuse these gifts and was not appeased. U.C. behaved with decorum until we had done our bowing and scraping and departed. Then he sa
id, laughing like a hyena, “I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China.”
“Why don’t they do something for their people, instead of bragging about their past? All the big shots we’ve met don’t give a damn about anything except their perks and their power. I wouldn’t trust any of them. This is a rotten place. What’s the matter with them?”
“Whatchumacallit. Maybe. More or less.”
In the market, a tall blonde Dutch woman, wearing a man’s felt hat and a flowered cotton dress over trousers, approached me furtively and asked if we wanted to see Chou En-lai. The name Chou En-lai meant nothing to me; I said I would ask U.C. I told U.C. that some sort of loon had sidled up to me in the market with this proposition and he said, “Oh yes, he’s a friend of Joris.” Joris Ivens, a darling man, is a Dutch documentary filmmaker who worked in China in 1938 or 1939. The Dutch woman had instructed me to return to the market with my answer. There followed a scene straight from James Bond but long preceding James Bond.
Our orders were to wander around the next day, until sure we were not tracked by our own thugs or any others, and meet in the market. The Dutch lady then led us through a maze of alleys, further throwing off pursuit. Finally we were bundled into rickshaws and blindfolded for the last lap. Blindfolds removed, we found ourselves in a small whitewashed cell, furnished with a table and three chairs, Chou En-lai behind the table. I was semi-stuffy, as I thought we were playing cops and robbers, and was always quick to disapprove silliness in others. I have no idea what Chou was doing or how he handled his life in Chungking where he was in constant danger.
Chou wore an open-neck short-sleeved white shirt, black trousers and sandals, the dress of an underpaid clerk. He too had a translator. We spoke French but knew by his brilliant amused eyes that he understood without translation. Unneeded interpreters may have been an inscrutable Oriental custom or maybe they served as living tape recorders. In any case, none of the stickiness of translation hampered us. For the first and only time we were at home with a Chinese. We laughed at the same jokes. I suppose U.C. told him about the Canton front. Neither of us could have asked intelligent questions about the Long March, the Communists, where they were and how they were operating, because we didn’t know anything about these subjects, nor know who Chou was. He was a Communist living underground which made sense, thinking back belatedly and dimly to Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, wherein Chiang was depicted ordering Communists to be thrown live into the boilers of locomotives. (I blush to remember my ignorance.)
U.C. was knowledgeable in exact detail about anything that interested him but China had not been on his list. Chou must have thought us brainless boobs of the first water, though that didn’t affect our shared merriment. I wish I had Chou quotations to pass on to posterity but don’t remember a word. Anyway, we had listened to words until we were punch-drunk. It wasn’t what Chou said, but what he was. He sat in his bare little room, in his nondescript clothes, and he was Somebody. We thought Chou a winner, the one really good man we’d met in China; and if he was a sample of Chinese Communists, then the future was theirs. As for me, I was so captivated by this entrancing man that if he had said, take my hand and I will lead you to the pleasure dome of Xanadu, I would have made sure that Xanadu wasn’t in China, asked for a minute to pick up my toothbrush, and been ready to leave.
Months later, we were convoked to Washington to answer questions about China. We went surlily and told those desk Intelligence Officers that the Communists would take over China, after this war. Why? Because the Chiang lot were hell and it was hypocritical bilge to talk about Chinese democracy, there was less than none, and the people would welcome any change, even two-headed men from Mars, but as it happened the best man in the country was a Communist and it was safe to assume he had some comrades like him. We were called Cassandras as usual and branded fellow travellers as usual. I was astonished when Chou surfaced as Foreign Minister of the new China, that lovely man from the whitewashed cellar in Chungking. All documentary films and travel books about Chou’s China show that it is an immeasurable, almost inconceivable, improvement over Chiang’s China. Never mind that it would be deadly for people like us; people like us were a drop in that remembered ocean of human misery.
At some point during this Chungking interval, I got China Rot on my hands. It was a very common and distasteful disease, a violent form of athlete’s foot (I think). Suddenly I observed that the skin between my fingers was rotting away in a yellowish ooze laced with blood. U.C. took one look at this mess and said for God’s sake find a doctor, call the U.S. Embassy, do something; this might be the first step to losing your nose. The details are now hidden in the usual mists of time but the result was that I wore large white motorman-type gloves over a malodorous unguent; the unguent stained the gloves and I was about as alluring as a leper. The doctor had assured me that I would not lose my fingers but the disease was highly contagious. U.C. lacked sympathy.
“Honest to God, M.,” he said, “you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”
Even an unsurpassed and unsurpassable horror journey must one day end, though I often thought it would not. We planned to fly to Rangoon with CNAC, where U.C. would catch the Clipper for home. My assignment was not finished, I had to look at the defences of neighbouring countries and meant to whisk round Singapore and Java and return to the newly glamorous Occident a month later. I skipped down the long steps from Chungking to the river and the plane. Farewell forever to awful China. U.C. was prepared for the flight with half a bottle of gin and his Lily Cup. Where and how U.C. acquired his Lily Cup, I never knew. He carried it, folded in the breast pocket of his jacket; he was inseparable from it; he guarded it jealously; he shared it with no one, it was his dearest private property.
The plane was almost full of Chinese passengers, very jolly to be leaving. For a brief spell they remained sprightly, but the plane was soon behaving like a butterfly in a hurricane, tipping from wing to wing and floating in large zig-zags over the scenery. That quieted the passengers. Then we hit the up and down draughts over the Burma Road. Instead of moving ahead we seemed to be in an express elevator. The passengers began to wail loudly. U.C. and I, not subject to airsickness, admired the pilot. We were well strapped in and U.C. had just carefully filled his Lily Cup when the plane was seized by a colossal current and hurled upwards like a rocket. Despite strapping we rose in our seats. Screams of fear rent the air, mixed with sobs and the sound of violent vomiting. Having soared into outer space, the plane now dropped, like a descending rocket.
Folk wisdom claims (by what proof I’d like to know) that a drowning person sees his whole life in a flash before the final fatal swallow. I can testify that in however many seconds of that descent, I did a lot of thinking. I knew the wings had to fall off. Possibly we would crash before the wings ripped away but, in any case, survival was impossible. I wanted to tell U.C. that I regretted bitterly having nagged him into this horror journey and would never forgive myself for causing his death, cut off in his prime, his work unfinished, his children fatherless; my heart was breaking with sorrow for U.C. and racked by guilt. U.C., in a strange rigid position, held his Lily Cup with both hands, his eyes fixed on the cabin ceiling. Except for the Lily Cup, he might have been praying. In the tumult of passenger shrieks, I laid my oozing gloved hand on his sleeve and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as I had no time to make a speech. U.C. did not hear or notice. I closed my eyes, because I thought I’d rather not actually see a wing take leave of the fuselage.
The plane, close to ground level, slowly rose complete with wings. We regained whatever normal flying height was, though nothing was normal on a CNAC flight, and the plane advanced in butterfly style. U.C. smiled happily.
“I didn’t lose a drop,” he said. “The gin shot out of my Lily Cup and I watched it and caught it after it hit the roof. Not a single drop.”
“Thank God,” I said, breathless at still having breath.
“You know, M.,” U.C. said
, “for someone who doesn’t believe in Him, you’ve sure as hell been in close contact with the Lord since you came to China.”
Rangoon may be the pearl of the Orient for all I know. The heat was indescribable. This must have been the dog days before the monsoon rains. You felt you could cut the heat and hold it like chunks of wet blotting paper. It finished U.C.; he was a beached whale; he couldn’t breathe and I, who love heat, was far from blooming. The only way to sleep or in fact live was to lie naked on the marble floor under the paddle fan in the hotel bedroom. I was never entirely naked since I couldn’t remove my motorman’s gloves even to shower. The catch in China Rot is that you spread it merely by touching your skin; scratch your head and you had another crop of China Rot. I was pretty tired of those gloves and their smell; U.C. tended to stay upwind of me.
I was obliged to visit the airline office but saw none of the famous pagodas, nothing except other heat-crushed people. U.C. had to sign for his ticket so walked beside me once, blinded by sweat, not so blinded that he couldn’t see Burmese priests, languid young men dressed in orange cotton sarongs or orange cloths fastened on one shoulder, brass begging bowls in hand. “Religious bums,” U.C. snarled.
Time resumed its frightful habit of standing still but finally we were gasping through the last night. I wanted to praise U.C. for his generosity, above and beyond the call of duty, in coming to China, his forbearance in not murdering me, his jokes, and let him know that I grieved for his time wasted on a season in hell. My brain was boiled; I couldn’t form sentences. With tears in my eyes, I touched his shoulder and said, “Thank you.”
He wrenched away, shouting, “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!” We looked at each other in shocked silence. Were these to be the parting words between us after all the shared horrors of a super horror journey? Then we rolled on the marble floor, laughing in our separate pools of sweat.