Ha Jin - Ocean of Words

“Dragon Head, how are you doing?” I walked up to him, holding out my hand.

“Not bad, still alive,” he muttered. We shook hands. His large face was expressionless, and his eyes were ringed with yellow.

I felt somewhat uneasy and managed to ask, “When will I drink your wedding wine? You’re going to get married soon, aren’t you?”

“Not soon.” He shook his head. “Maybe at the Spring Festival. I don’t know.”

“Don’t forget to invite me, and we’ll have a few.”

“Sure, I’ll have you over.” He smiled, his large eyes glittering a little.

“Anything I can do for you, please let me know, all right?”

“Sure. Thank you for saying that, Commander Gao.”

Although I had said that, I had no idea how I could help him. In fact, I could not, because what he really needed was nothing but weapons, without which he could not be the former Dragon Head again. Since the disarmament, the militia company had been literally disbanded. Now Dragon Head’s men would be carrying hoes and spades to the fields instead of riding with arms to the river.

Fall came. We were busy getting in crops, felling trees for fuel, and digging vegetable cellars. For a month the three batteries had not taken the canvas covers off their cannons. Everybody worked hard; even the cooks could not go to bed until midnight, because they had to pickle a lot of vegetables — cabbages, turnips, eggplants, green peppers, garlic, and the like. By the end of September, we had finished most of the preparations for the winter. Now we could spare some men and sent them to help the villagers in Guanmen with their harvest and their threshing and winnowing.

On the evening of October 1, National Day, right after the holiday feast, the leader of the mess squad, Mu Lin, burst into the Battalion Headquarters. At the sight of Diao and me, he cried, “Our guns are stolen!”

“What?” I jumped to my feet. “What guns? How many?”

“Two semiautomatic rifles,” he said, panting hard. “They just disappeared this afternoon, when we were busy cooking the dinner.”

“Damn it, it must be Dragon Head again. Let’s go.” I put on my pistol and went out with Mu. Commissar Diao and Scribe Niu came along with us, but they didn’t wear their pistols.

No trace of the crime could be found at the mess squad. Two guns, which the cooks had seen on the rack at noon, were missing. No doubt it was the work of Dragon Head’s men. But without any evidence in our hands, what could we do? I couldn’t help swearing.

“Commander Gao,” Scribe Niu interrupted me, “I saw Ma Ding fooling around in the bushes this afternoon. He must have pretended to cut firewood there.”

I turned to Diao. “We must send a squad to Guanmen and bring Ma Ding here.”

“Why the hurry?” Diao asked.

“This time it’s not transceivers but guns, my commissar.”

“They won’t shoot us with the stolen guns, will they?” Without waiting for my answer, he continued, “Let them keep the guns warm in their hands for a little while. It won’t hurt us. Dragon Head has done enough now, and he won’t get away with it this time. I’m going to report this to the Regimental Political Department. For sure, they will start an investigation immediately.”

What he said made sense, for Dragon Head was not our enemy and would never fire at us. There was no point in acting rashly. Besides, we did not have any evidence yet. That night Diao called the Regimental Political Department, and he was told that an investigating group would be sent over soon. At the same time he received an order that required either Diao or me to check in, within a week, at the Divisional Headquarters in Longmen City for a two-month program of studying Engels’s Anti-Dühring . We were told that the study was designed for officers with a rank above battalion leader.

We talked, and neither of us wanted to leave the battalion at this moment. Diao tried hard to persuade me. “Old Gao, it’s a good bargain. The board expenses are one and a half yuan a day; there will be six dishes at lunch. Longmen is a big city, where you can go to sports games, movies, and operas. In addition” — he smiled and blinked his eyes — “girls there are pretty, with long braids.”

“Old Diao, I appreciate your letting me have such an opportunity, but it’s no fun to study there. I can’t understand a book like that, no matter how hard I rack my brains. It will be torture. I don’t want to make a fool of myself at the Divisional Headquarters. Besides, so many things have to be done here at home. The garages are not roofed yet, and the winter drill will start soon. No, I won’t leave at this historic juncture. Old Diao, it’s your duty to sharpen your mind. You’re the brain of our entire battalion. You’re the very person who should go.”

We could not persuade each other. Strange to say, next morning a call came from the Regimental Headquarters which ordered me to leave for the study. All right, I didn’t complain, because to obey orders is the first principle for an army man. Niu Hsi helped me pack up, and that Saturday I set off for Longmen. Before leaving, I talked to Commissar Diao about Dragon Head’s case. “This time,” I said, “we must not let him go. We must teach him a lesson so that he will think ten times before doing this sort of thing again. I don’t mind if they put him in jail for three months. It seems he should postpone his wedding for a short while. The Dragon’s whiskers have to be plucked.”

“Old Gao, trust me. I’ll handle everything well. Now it’s not a matter of hair and skin but a matter of eyes and teeth.”

4

Longmen was a good city indeed, very clean. Except that not many girls wore long braids there, everything appeared as Commissar Diao had described. There was fish and meat at lunch every day, and we could even have beer on Saturday evenings. Staying indoors and being fed well, I gained twenty jin in those two months. But Engels’s book wore us down. The two professors from Longmen City College lectured well and tried hard to make every point plain to us. Still, we couldn’t penetrate the book. Shameful as it was, we had to admit that we were too old to become pupils of Marx and Engels.

As soon as the study was over, I returned to Hutou with two other officers in a jeep. At the Regimental Headquarters, I found the chief of the Officer Section, Liu Mingyi, my fellow townsman, and talked to him about Scribe Niu Hsi, for I had heard in Longmen that our regiment was going to send a junior officer to the Second Military Foreign Language Institute to study Russian for three years. Niu Hsi was a good lad and deserved to go to college. He had cut my hair every month for over two years; I was grateful, though I had never mentioned it. Chief Liu seemed to be convinced that Niu Hsi was a proper choice.

“We’ll look into his file and make sure that his family background is clean,” Liu said.

“Of course it’s clean; otherwise how could he be the scribe of my battalion?”

“Old Gao, I know that. This is merely a procedure.” He chuckled. “You’ll never change a bit and always have a temper like a firecracker.”

I took a carton of Peony cigarettes out of my bag and handed it to him. “Here, it’s for you, Old Liu.”

“Good stuff.” He took it with a smile, smelling the end of the carton. “Want to have a drink tonight?”

“No, I have to go back this afternoon.”

He narrowed his small eyes and waved his hairy hand, signaling me to come closer. I moved my chair a little forward and rested my elbows on his desk. A young officer was filing something on top of a metal chest five meters away.

“By the way,” he said mysteriously, “how do you get along with Diao Shu?”