Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“I’m finished,” she said.

“Well, I’m not,” I said and reached out to grab her. She stepped back nimbly. I sat up, furious. My groin was beginning to ache. “I can rape you,” I said.

“I’d kick you first. You’d never forget it.”

She stood there sweating like an Olympic gymnast and I believed her. I leaned back on the sofa. I’d had a lot of practice at sexual frustration—at Isabel’s and at the Pierre afterward—and for a moment I gave up. “Suit yourself, White Heron,” I said.

“I have suited myself,” she said. She bent elegantly to the table by the pouf and took a cigarette. Her back was to me.

I was off the couch and had her around the waist before she could straighten up. I was careful not to hurt her or break a bone; but I had her on the floor in ten seconds. I looked down at her face. It was flushed but composed.

“If you rape me,” she said, “I’ll put you in prison.”

“Mourning Dove Soong likes me,” I said, breathing hard. “If you try that, she’ll have you in front of the Central Committee.” That was mostly bluffing, but it seemed to work. Her face for the first time lost some of its composure. “Then enjoy yourself, Mr. Kwoo.”

“I’m Ben Belson,” I said, “and I’m not going to rape you.” And I wasn’t. My member had finally bowed out of the fray.

Jane stayed out of my cabin for the rest of the trip. I didn’t see her again until a cold morning when I passed her on deck after coffee and then looked through mists over the port bow to see the coast of China. Right over there. Despite apprehensions and uncertainties, the thrill was exquisite; to sail the Pacific and then see China distant in the mist is an experience that goes right to the marrow of your bones and tingles the back of your skull like a morphine rush. I stared for a moment and then started doing side-straddle hops by the gunwale, wearing my red spaceman’s pantaloons, barefoot on the slippery metal deck. Jumping jacks, some people call them. I slapped my hands together over my head and hopped my legs out and in, saying hello to China. The ship’s whistle blew. I stopped and held my breath. We were turning starboard and I felt a heartrending throb as the screws adjusted to a new course. We steamed straight toward the China Coast.

The Keir Hardie docked at a long gray pier late that afternoon. The rain had changed to sleet and it was freezing cold. I had no coat. The dock city looked like Cleveland in the nineteenth century—dark satanic mills and grit in the air. Coolie longshoremen lounged on barrels at dockside, in Ghengis Khan hats and overcoats, smoking what might have been opium. The ship was docked by computer, and when it was done a huge red display suddenly lit up on the side of a plastic warehouse, spelling out in neon-like letters: WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA. My teeth chattered. I had thrown a blanket over my shoulders and was wearing my electronic running shoes, but I had no socks, having lost them sometime before in the Reagan Stir, and my toes were freezing.

One of the female crew members found me like this, swigging from my decanter. She approached me warily, as one might examine a sick grizzly.

“If you don’t watch out,” she said, pronouncing the word “oot,” “you’ll have pneumonia in the lungs.”

“Honey,” I said, “I have no coat or socks. This is it.”

“I’ll bring you something against it,” she said. “Hold on now.”

She jogged back to a stairway and down. A minute later she came back with a jacket, two pairs of socks, a pair of mittens and a tam. “The mate had these put by,” she said, handing them to me. The coat looked pretty small, but I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, went into my cabin again, and managed to get it all on—although my wrists stuck out of the sleeves of the mackinaw and it wouldn’t button over my chest. But the mittens were stretchy enough and the tam fit. It had a damn-fool red pom-pom on the top, which I managed to bite off and stuff in my pocket. I looked at myself in a closet mirror before going back out again. It was terrible, with the red silk pants and the rest of it. But what the hell; I stepped back out on deck, head high.

Jane was waiting for me, wearing an army uniform this time with the long gray overcoat and epaulets. A major’s insignia and a gray garrison cap. She looked like the Empress of Austria, or a Chinese Greta Garbo in Ninotchka .

“Well,” I said, holding my composure pretty well, considering my outfit and hers. “So you’re a soldier. I had no idea.”

“You look a fool,” she said, not without some pleasure.

“White Heron,” I said, “use your sadism on the troops. I’m not afraid of you.”

She lit a cigarette and said nothing. A moment later the gangway went down and the First Officer left the ship. There were four male noncoms with rifles standing at dockside. They must have marched up while I was changing clothes. One signed a paper the officer handed them, returned it, shouted something to the others and then led them up the gangway to where we stood. The leader saluted Jane, who returned it casually, her cigarette between the fingers of the saluting hand.

We marched down the gangway and onto the ancient soil of China. I didn’t exactly march, but stumped along because of the two pairs of wool socks stuffed into my running shoes. I was arriving in China even more clownishly than I’d arrived at Aynsley Field by spaceship. Well. Dignity was never my object in life.

They had a staff limousine—an actual nineteen-nineties black Cadillac with power windows and a glass partition; as far as I knew, the only one like it in America was under glass at the Smithsonian. Two flags of the People’s Army flew from fenders. A sergeant opened the door and I got in. It was a billionaire’s car if there ever was one; I felt immediately at home.

Two soldiers got in back with Jane and me, and sat on the jump seats. We drove in silence away from dockside. The coolie loafers puffed their long pipes and stared at us through the sleet. I relaxed against glove-leather upholstery and lit a cigar. Willynilly, I had my dignity back.

We drove about five miles past industrial buildings before hitting open country. The sleet had lessened; it was getting late in the day. There were houses surrounded by perfectly groomed fields. Pink tile roofs glistened wetly. I saw children playing in front of a barn; they stopped to wave as we drove by. I waved back. Old men drove gray steam tractors or red nuclear jeeps; there were vehicles everywhere. We passed a house with a table in its front yard where four old women sat at tea, their heads together in gossip. Pigs rooted at the edge of the house. An old man sat on the porch in an overcoat, reading a newspaper. Everybody was Chinese. A whole country full of Chinese!

A few miles later we drove by a four-story factory building painted bright blue. The sun was setting behind it. There were hundreds of electric cars in a lot near the gate, a sight America hadn’t seen for sixty years.

“What do they make there?” I asked Jane.

“Toy airplanes,” she said. “For export.” My God , I thought, Myra has one of those. I bought it at F.A.O. Schwartz.

Our destination turned out to be another airport. In a grim, institutional waiting room I changed into a fresh stratosphere suit—yellow this time—and was taken without ceremony to a Confucius 433 jet. Jane was my fellow passenger again. She stubbed out her cigarette while the pilot zipped down the runway; she covered her bangs with her helmet as we shot up for altitude like an arrow of Apollo, leaving behind us a plain that stretched twenty miles from the sea and ended in a vast range of blue mountains, now glowing in the setting sun.