Ha Jin - Ocean of Words

“I want to talk about Liu Fu. Just now I found him in the stable fooling around with the gray mule.” I wouldn’t say, “He screwed the mule,” since I didn’t see him do it. But I was sure of it, and Liu Fu himself had not denied it when I cursed and beat him. I was about to explain to Li what I meant.

“Oh no, you mean he did it again?” Li shook his freckled face.

“Yes. So you knew it already?”

“Ye-yes.” He nodded.

“Why didn’t you inform me of that before? Who gave you the right to hide it from me?” I was angry and would have yelled at him if some of my men had not been sleeping in the adjacent room.

“He promised me never to do it again.” Li looked worried. “I thought I should give him a chance.”

“A chance? Didn’t we give him one when he was caught with Little White Fairy?” I felt outraged. Apparently this thing had been going on in my platoon for quite a while, but I had never got a whiff of it. “Tell me, when did you see him do it and how many times?”

“I saw him with the mule just once. It was last Saturday night. I saw him standing on a bench and hanging on the mule’s hindquarters. I watched for a minute through the back window of the stable, then I coughed. He was scared and immediately fell off. When he saw me come in, he knelt down, begging me to forgive him and not to tell on him. He looked so piteous, a big fellow like that, so I told him I wouldn’t tell. But I did criticize him.”

“What did you say? How did you criticize him, my comrade squad leader?” I felt it strange that he took such pity on the man.

“I asked him why he had to screw the mule.” Li looked rather cheerful.

“What a stupid question. How did he answer it?”

“He said, ‘You know, Squad Leader, only — only mules don’t foal. I promise, I’ll never touch any — any of these mares.” ’ Li started tittering.

“What? It’s absurd. You mean he thought he could get those mares with babies?”

“Yeah, yes!”

“What a silly fellow! So moral, he’s afraid of being a father of horsey bastards.” I couldn’t help laughing, and Li’s tittering turned into loud laughter too.

“Shhh.” I reminded him of the sleepers.

“I told him even the mule must not be ‘touched,’ and he promised not to do it again.” Li winked at me.

“Old Li, you’re an old fox.”

“Don’t be so hard on me, my platoon leader. To be fair, he is a good boy in every way except that he can’t control his lust. I don’t know why. If you say he has too much bourgeois stuff in his head, that won’t fit. He is from a pure poor peasant family, a healthy seedling on a red root —”

“I don’t want you to work out a theory, Old Li. I want to know how we should handle him now. This morning, in a few hours, I will report this to our Company Headquarters. What should we say and how should we say it?”

“Well, do you want to get rid of him or keep him?”

This was indeed the crucial question, but I didn’t have an answer. Liu Fu was my best man, and I would need him in the future. “What’s your opinion then? At least we must not cover it up this time.” I realized that Old Li hadn’t told on Liu Fu because he wanted to keep him in his squad.

“Certainly, he had his chance already. How about —”

The door burst open and somebody rushed in. It was Ma Pingli, our youngest boy, who was to stand the three o’clock shift at the storehouse. “Platoon Leader, Liu Fu is not — not at the post.” He took the fur cover off his nose, panting hard. “All the telephone wires are cut. We can’t call anywhere.”

“Did you go around and look for him?”

“Yes, everywhere.”

“Where’s his gun?”

“The gun is still there, in the post, but he’s gone.”

“Hurry up! Bring over the horses!” I ordered. “We’ll go get him.”

Ma ran away to the stable. I glanced at Old Li. The look on his face showed he understood what was happening. “Take this with you.” I handed him a semiautomatic rifle, which he accepted absentmindedly, and I picked up another one for myself. In uneasy silence, we went out to wait for Ma.

The horses sweated all over, climbing toward the border. I calculated that we would have enough time to stop him before he could get across. He had to climb a long way from the southern side of the mountain to avoid being spotted by our watchtower. But when we reached the Wusuli River, a line of fresh footprints stretched before us, winding across the snow-covered surface of the river, extending itself to the other side, and gradually fading in the bluish whiteness of the vast Russian territory.

“The beast, stronger than a horse,” I said. It was unimaginable that he could run so fast in the deep snow.

“He’s there!” Ma Pingli pointed to a small slope partly covered by gray bushes.

Indeed, I saw a dark dot moving toward the edge of the thicket, which was about five hundred meters away from us. Impossible — surely he was too smart not to put on his camouflage cape. I raised my binoculars and saw him carrying a big stuffed gunnysack on his right shoulder and running desperately for the shelter of the bushes, the white cape secured around his neck flapping behind him like a huge butterfly. I gave the binoculars to Old Li.

Li watched. “He’s taking a sack of Forwards with him!” he said with amazement.

“He stole it from the kitchen. I saw the kitchen door broken,” Ma reported. We all knew our cooks stored Forwards , the newspaper of Shenyang Military Region, in gunnysacks as kindling. We had been told not to toss the paper about, because the Russians tried to get every issue of it in Hong Kong and would pay more than ten dollars for it.

“The Russians may not need those back issues at all,” I said. “They’ve already got them. They only want recent ones. He’s dumb.”

Suddenly a yellow light pierced the sky over the slope. The Russians’ lookout tower must have spotted him; their jeep was coming to pick him up.

Old Li and I looked at each other. We knew what we had to do. No time to waste. “We have no choice,” I muttered, putting a sighting glass onto my rifle. “He has betrayed our country, and he is our enemy now.”

I raised the rifle and aimed at him steadily. A burst of fire fixed him there. He collapsed in the distant snow, and the big sack fell off his shoulder and rolled down the slope.

“You got him!” Ma shouted.

“Yes, I got him. Let’s go back.”

We mounted the saddles; the horses immediately galloped down the mountain. They were eager to get out of the cold wind and return to their stable.

All the way back, none of us said another word.

Zhou Wen’s last year in the People’s Army was not easy. All his comrades pestered him, because in their eyes he was a bookworm, a scholar of sorts. Whenever they played poker, or chatted, or cracked jokes, he would sneak out to a place where he could read alone. This habit annoyed not only his fellow soldiers but also the chief of the Radio-telegram Station, Huang Peng, whose rank was equal to a platoon commander’s. Chief Huang would say to his men, “This is not college. If you want to be a college student, you’d better go home first.” Everybody knew he referred to Zhou.

The only thing they liked about Zhou was that he would work the shift they hated most, from 1:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. During the small hours Zhou read novels and middle school textbooks instead of the writings by Chairman Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Often in the early morning he watched the eastern sky turn gray, pale, pink, and bright. The dawn was driving the night away from Longmen City bit by bit until, all of a sudden, a fresh daybreak descended, shining upon thousands of red roofs.