Ocean of Words Read online

  On these occasions Kang would let out a sigh. He dared not tell anybody about the ridiculous “affair.” He was afraid that he would be criticized for having contracted bourgeois liberalism or become a laughingstock.

  One morning during the exercises, the telegraphic instructor, Han Jie, looked at Kang’s transcription and said under his breath, “No wonder the Confidential Office complained.”

  Suddenly it dawned on Kang that he had become a nuisance in the Wireless Platoon. A pang seized his heart. No doubt, the confidential officers in the Regimental Headquarters were dissatisfied with his work and had reported him to the company’s leaders. It was this stupid “affair” that had reduced him to such a state. He had to find a way to stop it — forget that woman and her bewitching voice — otherwise how could he survive? Although in his heart he knew he had to get rid of her, he didn’t know how. Neither did he want to try.

  On Thursday evening two weeks later, Chief Jiang held an urgent meeting at the station. Nobody knew what it was about. Kang was scared because he thought it might be about him. The secret would come out sooner or later. Had he babbled it during his sleep at night? He regretted drawing three pictures of women on the back of a telegram pad. Chief Jiang must have seen them. What should he say if the chief questioned him about those drawings?

  The meeting had nothing to do with him. When Jiang asked Shi Wei to confess what he had done in the small hours, Kang at last felt relaxed. But like Shun, he was baffled about what had happened. Shi protested that he had not done anything wrong.

  “You’re dishonest, Comrade Shi Wei,” the chief said.

  “No, no Chief Jiang.” Shi looked worried. “I did all the work well.”

  “You know our Party’s policy: Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse. It’s up to yourself.”

  “Why?” Shi seemed puzzled. “This policy applies only to the class enemies. I’m your comrade, am I not?”

  “Stop pretending you’re innocent. Tell us the truth.”

  “No, I really didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “All right, let me tell you what happened.” The chief’s voice grew sharper. “You were caught by the monitoring station. You thought you were smart. If you didn’t want us to know, you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Look at the report yourself.” He tossed the internal bulletin to Shi and handed Shun and Kang each a copy.

  The title read: “Radio Operators Proffered Love in the Air.” Kang’s heart tightened. He turned a page and read “From February 3 on, from 1:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M., a radio operator in the Fifth regiment and an operator at the 36th station of Shenyang Military Region have developed a love affair in the air.…”

  Kang was stunned, and his thick lips parted. He could never imagine Shi would make such an unlawful move. A small part of their love talk was transcribed in the report:

  I am Shi Wei. Your name?

  Lili. Where are you from?

  Dalian. And you?

  Beijing.

  Your age?

  Twenty-one. And you?

  Twenty-two. Love your hand.

  Why?

  It is good.

  Why? Not love me?

  Yes, I do.

  !

  Love me?

  Maybe.

  ……

  Kang wanted to cry, but he controlled himself. He saw Shi’s face turn pale and sweat break out on his smooth forehead. Meanwhile Shun bit his lower lip, trying hard not to laugh.

  “Now, what do you want to say?” Jiang asked.

  Shi lowered his eyes and remained silent. The chief announced that the Communication Company had decided to suspend Shi Wei from his work during the wait for the final punishment. From now on, Shi had to go to the study room during the day and write out his confession and self-criticism.

  Though he was working two more hours a day to cover for Shi, Kang no longer expected to meet Lili, whose family name was not revealed in the bulletin. Obviously she was also suspended from her work and must have been doing the same thing as Shi did every day in the company’s study room. But the tune created by her fingers and her charming voice were still with him; actually they hurt him more than before. He tried cursing her and imagining all the bad things that could be attributed to a woman in order to pull her out of himself. He thought of her as a “broken shoe” which was worn by everyone, a bitch that raised her tail to any male dog, a hag who was shunned by all decent men, a White Bone Demon living on innocent blood. Still, he could not get rid of her. Whenever he was receiving a telegram, her voice would break in to catch him. “Sorry, don’t take it to heart. I was teasing you.…” It was miserable. The misery went so deep that when he spoke to his comrades he often heard himself moaning. He hated his own listless voice.

  Shi’s punishment was administered a week later. Both Shi Wei and Wang Lili were expelled from the army. This time the woman’s full name was given. To Kang’s surprise, Shi did not cry and seemed to take it with ease. He ate well and slept well, and went on smoking expensive cigarettes. Kang figured there must have been two reasons why Shi did not care. First, with the help of his father, he would have no problem finding a good job at home; second, the expulsion gave him an opportunity to continue his love affair with Wang Lili, since they were now two grasshoppers tied together by one thread. Lucky for Shi, he didn’t lose his military status for nothing. It seemed he would go to Shenyang soon and have a happy time with her.

  The station planned to hold a farewell party for Shi Wei. Though it was not an honorable discharge, they had worked with Shi for almost a year and had some good feelings about him. For days Kang had been thinking what souvenir he should give Shi Wei. He finally chose a pair of pillow towels, which cost him four yuan, half his monthly pay. In the meantime his scalp remained numb, and he still could not come to himself. Not only did the task of receiving a telegram frighten him, but any telegraphic signal would give him the creeps. He had developed another habit — cursing himself relentlessly for his daydreaming and for having allowed himself to degenerate into a walking corpse for that fickle woman, whose name he would now murmur many times every night.

  Four older soldiers from the Wireless Platoon were invited to the farewell party. Chief Jiang presented an album to Shi, and Shun gave him a pair of nylon socks. When Kang’s pillow towels were displayed, everybody burst out laughing, for on each towel was embroidered a pair of lovely mandarin ducks and a line of red characters. One said: “Happy Life,” and the other: “Sweet Dreams.” Peanut shells and pear cores fell on the floor because of the commotion the garish towels caused.

  “You must be joking, Big Kang,” Shi said, measuring one of the towels against his chest. “You think I’m going home to get married?”

  “Why not?” Kang smiled. “Won’t you go to Shenyang?”

  “For what? I don’t know anyone there.”

  Kang stood up. The floor seemed to be swaying beneath his feet. Tears welled up in his eyes. He picked up a mug and gulped the beer inside, his left hand holding the corner of the desk. He put down the mug, then turned to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Chief Jiang asked.

  Without replying, Kang went out into the open air. He wanted to bolt into the snow and run for hours, until his legs could no longer support him. But he paused. On the drill ground, a dozen soldiers from the Line Construction Platoon were practicing climbing telephone poles without wearing spikes. Behind the brick houses stood the thirty-meter-tall aerial, made of three poles connected to one another, which had been raised for their station by these fellow men. In the northeast, the Wusuli River displayed a series of green, steaming holes along its snow-covered course. On the fields and the slopes of the hills, a curtain of golden sparks, cast by the setting sun, was glittering. The gray forests stretched along the undulating mountain ridges toward the receding horizon. The sky was so high and the land so vast. Kang took a deep breath; a fresh contraction lingered in his chest. For the first time he felt a person was so small.
/>
  That evening he wrote a letter to the company’s Party branch, imploring the leaders to transfer him to the Line Construction Platoon. He did not give an explicit reason, and merely said that somehow his mind was deteriorating and that he could not operate the telegraphic apparatus anymore. The letter ended as follows:

  If I can no longer serve the Revolutionary Cause and our Motherland with my brain, I can at least work with my hands, which are still young and strong. Please relieve me from the Wireless Platoon.

  After writing the letter, he wept, filling his hands with tears. He used to believe that when he was demobilized he could make a decent living by working as a telegrapher at a post office or a train station, but now he had ruined his future. How painful it was to love and then give it up. If only he could forget that woman’s voice and her telegraphic style. Whether he could or not, he had to try.

  DRAGON HEAD

  I met Dragon Head on our first evening in Guanmen Village, which is twenty li north of Hutou. After the Battalion Headquarters settled in a small adobe house, whose owner of the landlord class had been exiled inland because of the tense situation at the border, the commander of the First Battery, Lin Hu, brought over a militiaman. They stepped in and whisked the snow off their clothes with their fur hats. The militiaman unbuttoned his blue overcoat, and a pair of large Mauser pistols, probably captured from the Japanese, were revealed at his flanks. He was tall and broad shouldered. The room grew darker as the flickering flame on the kerosene lamp cast his huge wavering shadow on the white wall.

  “This is Militia Company Commander Long Yun,” Lin Hu said. Then he turned to the militiaman. “This is our battalion commander, Gao Ping.”

  “How do you do?” I held out my hand.

  “Happy to meet you,” Long Yun said and put his mittens on the table. We shook hands. His palms and fingers felt like an emery wheel. “You can call me Dragon Head, Commander Gao. All my soldiers call me that, because my surname is Long — dragon, you know. Ha-ha-ha!” He laughed heartily, ruffling up his hair with his hand. Two rows of tea-stained square teeth were displayed under his straight nose and moistened mustache. His bulging black eyes glittered with the unrestrained candor that marks the men on the Northern Frontier. I smiled, amused by this young man who took the militia as the regular army.

  “Commander Gao,” Lin Hu said, “my battery has been lodged entirely, all together in seventeen homes. Our cannons and trucks are stationed at the threshing ground of the Third Production Team. If not for Dragon Head’s help, some of us would have to sleep outside tonight and turn into frozen meat tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t be so polite, Commander Lin,” Dragon Head said. “You fellas are the people’s army, our own army. You came to defend our country and protect our homes and land. How can we let you sleep in the snow? Our houses are your houses, and our beds your beds too.”

  “Well said, Comrade Militiaman,” Commissar Diao Shu said loudly as he came in from the next room. He stretched out his hand to Dragon Head and continued, “Chairman Mao instructs us: ‘The army and his people have united as one man; see who can be our match under Heaven!” ’

  I moved forward a little, intending to introduce them, but Diao made a gesture to stop me. “We met two hours ago,” he said to me, and then he turned to Dragon Head. “I’m glad to meet you again, Comrade Long. Ah, how could I forget ‘Dragon Head’! What a thunderous name! From now on, we are friends and comrades-in-arms, am I right?”

  “Right. We certainly are.” Dragon Head looked pleased, his mouth spreading sideways with a broad smile. He inserted his hands behind the holsters of his pistols.

  After they left, Commissar Diao and I went out to see how well the three batteries had been settled. He was to inspect the western half of the village; I would go through the eastern half. It was snowing lightly. A large flock of noisy crows flew by and merged into the indigo air. Stars, scrubbed by snowflakes, were dangling in the murky sky while kerosene lamps burst forth one after another at the windows of the dwarf houses. A whiff of fresh corn cake mingled with the smell of cow dung.

  There were some two hundred and thirty homes in Guanmen Village, and our battalion, three hundred and four men, was quartered in ninety of them. We were a newly formed unit, whose three batteries came from three different armies in Liaoning Province. With brand-new weapons and equipment we arrived at the frontier to reinforce the anti-tank firepower of the Fifth Regiment. It looked like a war was about to break out. We were prepared to fight the Russians, and every one of the soldiers had written an oath in his own blood to show his determination to defend the Motherland. Before coming to Hutou, I had sent a letter home, telling Guihua, my wife, that she should marry another man if I could not return, but that she must take good care of our two children. The soldiers never complained about the hardship we had to undergo — no barracks, not enough nutritious food, the severe cold of Siberia. As the head of the battalion, it was my duty to make sure that every one of them had a warm place to sleep for the night. That evening I ended up having dinner with the Fifth Squad of the Third Battery at the eastern end of the village. We ate sorghum and stewed frozen radishes.

  To express our gratitude to the villagers, we had a movie shown the following evening. People assembled at the marketplace in the center of the village, waiting excitedly to see The Guerrillas on the Railroad. A small electric generator was whining away, and two bulbs were shining on the poles holding the white screen. Pulling on long pipes, old men and old women sat on small stools, muffled up in fur overcoats. Young mothers held babies wrapped in cotton quilts, and the large gauze masks that shielded the women’s noses and mouths exuded warm breath. Children were running around and through the crowds; some of them perched on naked trees, waiting for the movie to start.

  As soon as our three batteries sat down, Dragon Head’s men arrived. They were singing “Carry the Revolutionary Guns” and marching in good order directly to the front ground below the screen. All together about seventy of them passed by, and every one shouldered a weapon — Russian 1938 rifles, American carbines seized from Chiang Kaishek’s troops, three light machine guns of Japanese make, a small sixty-millimeter mortar also captured from the Japanese, a pair of antitank mines, and — most advanced of all — one Russian bazooka. A few soldiers rose to their knees to have a better view of the militia. Having noticed our attention, Dragon Head kept his men marching in place at the front for a good minute. Then he ordered loudly: “Si-t down!” In a unified hop they sat down on the ground. To my surprise, most of the militiamen, including Dragon Head, wore army uniforms, though without collar badges or hat insignia. It seemed they had really got it into their heads to emulate the regular army unit.

  Hardly had they sat down than they started a song, “Down with the New Czar of Russian Revisionists.” In their tuneless chanting, there was a deep, booming voice directing all other voices, as though dragging them to an uncertain end. I could tell it was Dragon Head.

  When they finished, Dragon Head jumped up and shouted: “People’s Army — ”

  “Sing us a song!” His men followed in one voice.

  “People’s Army — ”

  “Sing us a song!”

  The Second Battery began to sing a song composed for Chairman Mao’s quotation: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. To ensure we will succeed in our revolution, we must unite with our real friends in order to attack our real enemies.”

  When our men finished singing, without a request from the army side, the militia started another song, which was also a quotation from Chairman Mao: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” So they sang. But this time Dragon Head stood in front of his men, beating time with his big fists. T
he Mauser pistols were fluttering at his sides like a pair of hawks.

  We had no time to sing another song back because the movie suddenly started. Soon, laughter and applause rose and fell in the hush of the night.

  Both Commissar Diao and I were very busy. During the day he spent most of his time in the three batteries organizing the studies of Chairman Mao’s works and the documents issued by the Central Committee, while I was engaged in training the soldiers to operate the cannons more efficiently in the severe weather. We had to be well practiced. Guanmen Village was fifteen li from the Wusuli River, and the Russians’ tanks could cross the frozen river and arrive here within half an hour, so we had to be able to get ready in a very short time. My men were the best soldiers I had ever commanded; after three weeks’ drill, we could go into battle in twenty minutes.

  One morning after breakfast I was about to set out with my orderly, Liu Bing, for the Second Battery for a training inspection. Suddenly Ma Yibiao, the battery’s commander, burst into the Battalion Headquarters. “Damn it, Commander Gao. Screw Dragon Head and his mother, damn it!” he shouted, panting hard.

  “What’s wrong, Old Ma?” I asked.

  “Six of my men lost their hats!”

  “Calm down, and explain it slowly. What exactly happened?” As I was speaking, Commissar Diao came in from the adjacent room.

  “Early this morning, after the running exercises,” Ma said, his face red, “some of my men went into the latrine to relieve themselves. Six of them were squatting there. Then a hooligan wearing a large gauze mask came in, picked up their hats one by one, and ran away.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Six men were robbed like that?”

  “Yes, it’s damned shameful. They thought it was a joke and merely shouted, ‘A good man doesn’t jump at a squatting man.’ Once they realized it was serious business, it was too late and the hooligan had disappeared.”