Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“Jesus Christ!” I said. Inwardly I had a sense of my life—my tired and crazy life—coming full circle, with a kind of preordained click. Okay , I thought, I can follow this out to the end .

They made me a down-filled gray jacket and one of those Ghengis Khan caps, with the earflaps. It all fit well and looked good. They were far better clothes than you could buy in New York. The truth of it is there’s nothing first-class made in America except television and French fries. Television equipment , that is; the shows are for cretins.

Outside, it was bitter cold and I tucked my head down and started toward the hotel. One of the guards grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. “We go elsewhere,” he said in English.

“That’s a good thing,” I said.

They walked me four blocks through streets crowded with Chinese. Men, women and children, and they all stared at me politely. Most of them looked well-dressed and well-fed. Some carried gold-headed walking canes. There were occasional groups of Japanese among them, in business suits and double-breasted Chicago overcoats, with lapel cameras. I got snapped a half-dozen times, standing out because of my height and my clothes and my rifle-carrying escort. The street we walked along was full of black passenger cars and red taxis. Vendors sold dim sum and tea at street corners. There were bookstores and newsstands on every block. Some people walked along reading. The bustle enlivened me, brought back my love of cities. I strode with bounce in my feet and made my escorts scurry to keep up with me in their heavy overcoats and rifles and short legs. The sun was out fully now and the streets were clean, lined with trees, and busy. I began to whistle. Così fan tutte. We passed a park with grandmothers and children and swings. Trees everywhere—so unlike New York. Bright theater posters adorned a fence. A big one for Macbeth caught my eye, but I didn’t stop to read it. The architecture was dreary Old Stalinist, but the feel of Peking was lively—far more so than I’d remembered it. There were soldiers and sailors of both sexes, pretty girls, old Arabella Kim types with shopping bags full of celery and tomatoes, lovers. From time to time electric limousines passed in the street with red flags, carrying Party members. We walked by a shu mai vendor with a stack of books on his little wheeled stand. Looking closely I saw The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy and The Novels of James M. Cain next to the dumplings. I still had a few American dollars in my billfold; I bought a copy of Mildred Pierce in Chinese and stuck it in my shopping bag.

After that, we turned a corner by a construction site and came upon an enormous white marble building, set back in a park where a dozen armed soldiers were patrolling. The building was about thirty stories high, with an entrance like a Turkish mausoleum. Over the doorway hung a huge silk banner with black ideograms: THE DEFENSE OF THE PEOPLE IS THE DUTY OF THE PARTY. Ten-foot-high statues of Mao and a dozen of his successors stood on the grass, surrounding an ICBM of the kind that carries a dozen R-bombs. My God , I thought, this is the Chinese Pentagon . The headquarters of the most powerful military force in history.

The fence was of wrought iron and twenty feet tall. We stopped at a guard box where four dour matrons in army uniform checked out the papers of my guards and then, steely-eyed, let us pass. They looked at me as though I had been found in a slag heap somewhere. I took a cigar from my pocket and started to light it. One of the women snatched it from my hand. “No smoking,” she said, in a bullfrog voice, in Chinese.

“Let me have that back,” I said. “I won’t light it.” My voice sounded hostile as hell; I’d have slugged her if I hadn’t been surrounded by rifle butts.

“When you leave,” she bullfrogged back, and put the cigar on a metal table in the guard box.

Shit , I thought. I had only one more left, and the Chinese didn’t trade with Cuban deviationists.

We crunched our way down a gravel path bordered in peonies, blooming crazily here in winter. I bent down and felt the ground. Warm. My God, they must use electric wires to heat it. I’d never seen such profligate use of power in my life. The path was about five hundred yards long, and not a candy wrapper in sight. Bright-green grass all around in the compound too, and no pigeons on the statues. They gleamed in the sun.

Two workmen were polishing the brass on the doorway when we came up. They stood aside, nodding deferentially to my guards, and we went into an enormous Romanesque anteroom with groined arches. This led into a still larger room, a foyer with a ceiling eight stories high, and narrow windows that let light slant in and glow on pink marble columns that seemed to be everywhere, like a forest. It was as vulgar as hell, but impressive. A kind of junk cathedral with pink marble floors and crystal chandeliers and the echoing sounds of officers striding around in military boots. A crew of men was polishing the floor over at one side, while men and women officers, natty in uniform, strode from hallway to hallway like Prussian officers under Frederick Wilhelm. About six corridors fed into this grand room and the traffic was heavy.

We took a left and entered a long hall, only three stories high this time but still lit by crystal chandeliers. We walked down it, past posters celebrating victories: the Urals Campaign of 2007, where the Chinese had routed half the Russian Army in a week; the Japanese Peace Mission of 2037, where the Great Fleet of the People had sailed into Tokyo Bay to explain to the Diet that Japan must stop rearming. At the end of this hall was something that stopped me in my tracks. A simple old realistic painting of young Mao, almost slim, squatting by a hut with a pitifully small bowl of rice in his hand and his eyes dark with fatigue. Near him sat Lin Piao. The caption read “The Long March.” I could have cried. What men—what men they were!

My guards took me by the arms and led me to an elevator. “You sons of bitches,” I said, “don’t you have any respect?” But I said it in English and nobody tried to answer me.

The elevator was an express; it shot us right to the top of the building; we stepped out onto a red-carpeted hallway where two female guards checked us out again before taking me from my male ones. The men who brought me were awed by their surroundings. They were told to go back and return to their base. I would be watched over from here. The two new guards took me down the red carpet to a simple teakwood doorway and knocked. A male orderly let me in.

I looked around. I was in some kind of outer office, something like a doctor’s waiting room, with Scandinavian-style chairs and magazines on coffee tables. The orderly took me across the room to a teakwood door and knocked softly. We waited a minute until it opened. A middle-aged woman, with a general’s star on her collar, stared at me. “My God,” she said, in English, “it’s Belson.”

Thus began one of the strangest episodes of my bewildered life: my five weeks as a Chinese whore. There was a certain fascination to it. They weren’t monsters; they were hardworking and competent army officers—the Underchiefs of Staff of the Army of the People’s Republic. Several were very attractive. There was a bedroom down the hall from one of their conference rooms; it was decorated in a Chinese idea of Western Macho. There was a giant fieldstone fireplace at one end with a moose head over it and crossed dummy rifles by the hearth. A huge brass bed sat in the middle of the room. The place was ludicrous, but a lot more pleasant than the House of Comradely Love, and the steaks sent up from the senior officers’ mess were splendid. As long as I behaved myself with these ladies I could stay there and be left alone at night. Nobody asked me about uranium, the Isabel , or endolin. We had little conversation; all they told me was that White Heron had recommended me to their attention.