Heavy, p.3
Heavy, page 3
The night is warm and the wind is wet and thick with future rain. Inside the District Workers’ compound the water boiler has stopped working because the fuel was insufficient; most has been taken for steel furnaces.
A joke is made that she should Find some more seditious materials for us to burn, the reference is to the Old Lady; she swallows bile and says, I shall begin with your rooms, and the joke passes along the edge of a sword, so close to cutting too deeply that the intake of breath before her fellow-workers laugh is like the pause before a storm.
She retires early.
The spike rests heavy in the palm of her hand. She has one room, no dependents, few possessions: a perfect worker. Privacy, a luxury obsessed over from one end of the nation to another, is her reward for her diligent service.
The spike’s blunt end unscrews. There is no rust. The hue of the metal suggests it is aluminium. It is light in colour, light in weight, and her finger smears white oxidisation. The metal is not common, and it is by no means to be cheaply had, here.
She tips the content into her palm and sets the expensive spike to one side. There is no easy explanation for the sudden possession of aluminium; it will benefit no one and only draw unwelcome attention to her, to Chengdu District, even if she claims it is found in its present state – even if she disposes of it for someone else to find. No one benefits.
In the room beside hers, two voices sing The Sun Rises with the purity and determination of those who know they cannot be faulted for this action. If she did not hold in her hand at this moment a small scroll of paper whose presence is a burning brand upon her conscience, she would say their enthusiasm itself in these uncommanded hours is suspect.
The paper unfurls between her fingers. It is in total no longer nor wider than her hand.
The uppermost section is simple: it gives words in Chinese, and it puts beside them individual letters in the Western alphabet, occasional words, sometimes numbers. The words, letters, and numbers do not correspond to their natural meanings.
A cold breeze from inside her breast snakes around to clutch the nape of her neck.
All of the words are common ones, though not too common. Words expected of a newspaper; it would be impossible to write much without them.
All of these English words. She again regrets ever learning them. The old lady put a language and a sedition in her head, and called it ‘useful’ and said no one should ever refuse knowledge, as if to know what should never be known could be anything but dangerous; as if learning the language of Western propaganda could bring anything but suspicion and shame upon them.
She might at least have learned Russian, instead. All knowledge did not have the same value.
The lower part of the paper is more confusing. It is a square. Beside the square is a word, in English. The word is, she is not surprised to see, ALUMINIUM; but it is meaningless. There is no other information.
She turns the paper over. Nothing but a date, a date in the format given on the propaganda the old lady had kept, from when the Americans based their strikes out of this very city. From long ago, when she was still unborn, but close to being born.
The date itself is sooner than that, but still long ago; last year, just before she came to Chengdu.
There is also a drawing of a shoe.
* * *
After a night of poor sleep she joins the other District Workers in assembling for the printers a new pamphlet. The pamphlet is on the future of steel, and the imminent visit of Sichuan’s Minister for Steel to Chengdu; he is coming to them directly from the Great Leader, to investigate Chengdu’s production. It is a proud day.
She marks off the list of approved phrases with small blots as each are included among the text of the pamphlet. Comrade Wu has insisted they must not cross through any of the approved phrases on the list: practicality (they shall not waste resources by drawing up a second list in future, and open themselves up to accusations of corruption in this district); and good sense (to cross through the words approved by the Great Leader himself might suggest a disagreement with their content or with the Great Leader, and the district of Chengdu must not be seen to offer criticism of such perspicacious and parental leadership: after all, it is where the Kuomintang last held power and as such is Rightist in many people’s eyes).
In her mind she notes the words in these phrases which correspond to letters, words, and numbers on a piece of paper she has foolishly failed to burn.
The date, she thinks, as an argument breaks out about the thickness of the margin, the date is for last year. Whomever or whatever has made use of this method has not picked it up for a year. We are no longer under observation. There is no call to draw attention to myself.
To arrange the words in Chinese makes a gibberish of their associated English; to arrange the letters and words of the associated English to make any kind of sense makes a gibberish of the Chinese represented, and they would never appear that way on any material. Any intercepted – any intercepted—
Comrade Wu asks her a second time to blot beside PROGRESS IS FUELED BY FIRE.
She blots the phrase carefully. The size of margin appears to be agreed upon.
Any intercepted works which contain nonsense writing of this sort are, without doubt, scrutinised. Nonsense is more likely to be code than sense. Sense is where the clever man hides his sedition.
“A new artwork is necessary,” offers one of the District Workers.
“We have four different publicity photographs to choose from,” says another.
“It must be sent to press tonight,” Comrade Wu warns. “And we cannot include all four. The ink costs are unjustified.”
“Should we look parsimonious at the expense of our dedication, then?” asks the first, Comrade Fan, sarcastically. It is a dangerous tone of voice to employ, but her point is sound. “Better to be certain of our commitment to the Great Leader’s wisdom than to scrimp on the price of ink.”
“Wasting resources is also unpatriotic,” Comrade Wu mutters into the collar of his uniform, but it is clear he has not considered her point before.
She peers at the prototype. It will be carved and set and sent out about the city with such flurries of paper that to quibble over the price of ink seems foolish, until the numbers of pamphlets are taken into account. Including four images will lead to gallons more in use.
Reading the wrong way across the beginning of each column renders the slogans a gibberish.
She considers how they would look in the code.
* * *
The printers typically do not meet the District Workers: the prototype is sent by messenger, and for every man and woman and child in the new SinoSoviet States there is a job, a role, a commitment to progress. No one is idle; all are employed. She is visiting the offices of the printers because overseeing processes is a sign of dedication, Comrade Wu tells her, and because on her route she will be able to compare the works of several District Work teams and report to him if their own is falling behind.
They both know neither of them will tell the truth about this.
The street is filled with early vegetables stacked in baskets: Sichuan is Productive. Some of the vegetables, the ones at the bottom of the stacks, smell rotten. Her bicycle bounces and judders; the sky today is the colour of an old, undyed cloth, and sweat darkens her back, her arms, the brim of her cap.
One of the other District Work teams has alternated banners which read Steel Wins The Eternal War: The Sun Rises, and she is faintly smug, because this is a terrible slogan. The attempt to incorporate the song makes it messy. They have included the year, too: 1969, in Chinese and in Russian. This is wasteful; the banners might otherwise have been reused. Should Comrade Wu need to denounce one of the other District Work teams, she will tell him about this.
The code is past its date.
The printers have opened the front of their building to let in more light now that it is not raining. She places her bicycle against a stack of boxes and greets the head of the shop floor. He returns the greeting warily: no one, she thinks, is happy to see her.
He leads her through the presses: like mountain peaks, like torture devices from old Government films showing what the West did to their prisoners. They are dark and they impose, their shadows long across the floor. Rolls of paper move like rivers through their maws: lakes of ink skulk in their canisters.
The head of the shop floor, Mr Ting, shows her the first of a stack of pamphlets. There are two publicity photographs and a banner reading Steel Wins the Eternal War, and no clumsy allusion to the popular song. The sun may rise, she thinks, but there is no reason to waste ink on it. She nods and rummages for her stamp as he produces a chit for her to confirm the work is acceptable.
An image enters her head of some other worker, some other District official stamping a publication where the column heads read nonsense, and the nonsense in some codex makes sense.
The head of the shop floor thanks her. He offers her something to drink; she refuses. Corruption accusations are like mud: everywhere, and impossible to shake off.
As she leaves, two small children are playing a puzzle game on the street outside. One has a piece of brick that leaves red marks upon dark stone: the other says something about leftovers. What you get leftover.
She climbs onto her bicycle. The Old Lady’s poems, talking about Romans, allusions to the Great Leader that were so transparent as to be barely allusions at all, spring into her mind. Romans, and leftovers. Squares and nonsense.
The car bringing the first wave of officials has arrived by the time she returns to the District Workers’ offices. She cannot stop thinking now of Romans: the Old Lady talking of Caesar’s network of spies, who reported to him what they had learned, in codes. A leftover of the days when she listened to the Old Lady. Caesar, and spies, and leftovers, and codes.
The second wave of officials arrives shortly afterward.
* * *
This Caesar Box Code requires a key word, to push the letters through the alphabet, to begin with the leftovers. She puts the aluminium spike under a floor board and pretends to forget.
* * *
Sichuan’s Minister for Steel is impressed with their output. Comrade Wu is proud of his workers. Comrade Lin understands that they have not produced anything like the amount of steel Sichuan’s Minister for Steel believes they have, and is impressed despite herself at the careful mathematical manoeuvring of Comrade Wu, and of the Steel Production sub-committee, and of the various furnace operators whose smelting must occur alongside learning, teaching, the treatment of illness, and the cooking of food.
As a treat, they are left with a Governmental film about the discovery of steel and the uses to which it can be put. An opera actor stars as a scientist: in the very last scene the Great Leader is shown, smiling. Weng Ho operates the projector, and several of the audience are overcome at the surprise-but-not-surprise of the Great Leader and his smiling approval of their steel production and all of its applications in the future of the SinoSoviet States.
She burns the scrap of paper.
On a fresh scrap of paper she writes nonsense words: if the keyword is correct, they will unravel into sense. If it is not, they are mere gibberish. Nothing can be gleaned from them because there is nothing to glean.
* * *
Weng Ho says that he must investigate a report that someone is selling oranges which have been making people sick in their District. He is to determine if the report is malicious, or if the sale of sickening oranges is malicious. He invites her to accompany him; Comrade Wu, he says, has agreed that it is acceptable for her to watch and evaluate this investigation.
They keep pace with each other on an uneven road. Weng Ho’s bicycle is older than hers.
The oranges do not appear to be sickening. The orange seller is distressed by the complaint.
Her foot tangles in her bicycle pedal on the way home. Weng Ho is some distance in front; she does not call at first, believing, she says later, that she will catch up without difficulty. He does not scold her for this very much, and she explains that her shoe required reaffixing after the entanglement.
They push the bicycles back to the District Workers’ offices.
Behind a hollow brick, within an aluminium spike, gibberish words unravel to the message “STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY. YOU ARE DISCOVERED.”
Comrade Lin is quite sure no one will ever read them.
* * *
True beauty is Steel has been removed. The more unwieldy Let Us Progress Through the Fires of Our Furnaces has replaced it, as seasons give way to seasons. The summer of ‘68 is hot and the only comfortable place is the compound, where a labyrinth of walls creates cool air, or sometimes the offices occupied by Comrade Wu, who has requisitioned an electric fan in the face of cries of bourgeois indulgence. Comrade Wu’s father was a street sweeper: he can weather insistence that he is bourgeois better than others might.
Comrade Wu says that sweat which is not shed in the creation of steel nor the tilling of the land is only wasted water; they do not note down this aphorism but it is bandied about whenever no one else is listening.
Rumours abound that disquiet is mounting on the coast; that the Great Leader is looking to purge undesirable elements from society like impurities from metal. She privately wonders how many undesirable elements can be left; all the purges of her lifetime, all the activities of her time in the Red Guard, all the death of the old failures can hardly leave impurities. Only scars, and scars, as one of the old banners had it, are cleansing.
Weng Ho has upheld the complaint against the malicious orange-seller, so perhaps impurities can be found in the world of agriculture; perhaps something is amiss still in education, where so many purges have taken place. Perhaps the theatre remains unsatisfactory, Rightist, dedicated to sexual irregularities and social improprieties. But she knows, from experience, that these undesirable elements will have to be found everywhere.
She takes delivery of the day’s papers. The People’s Daily says only that another blow has been struck against the forces of capitalism, that more territory is protected from the ravages of individualist selfishness every day, and that soon the Persian-Arab alliance will see the light and stop propping up the old and corrupt Western order.
It also assures her that Kashmir has always been Western territory, and that indications that it was otherwise were the result of malicious interference by undesirables.
She reads across the tops of columns while Comrade Wu surreptitiously angles the bourgeois electric fan up his flannels, billowing them outward. They make an unconscious sentence about nothing, a collection of sounds that mimics the purr of the fan blades. It is possible she is imagining it. It is likely she is imagining it. No interloper would respond to a message in a simple cipher: surely they would change their codes and kill the drop and turn their back on their incursion to this area of Chengdu on being discovered.
The words, turned on their head, make in her mind a jumble of English letters.
Arranged in a square they form another jumble.
The leftovers say:
By whom?
* * *
He had a pass to Guangdong. Mr Shoe and his rueful smile and his playful laugh and his penchant for bad wine had a pass as far as Guangdong, and the beginnings of a limerick in the phrase. “There was once a man from Nanjing,” tripping off his tongue as he stepped onto the boat.
The sky was sour and the scenery dour, and at the smile of a passenger he demonstrated the start of soft-shoe shuffle, never forgotten, never fully forgotten. She hid the next smile behind her hands but he ended as if he’d always meant to stop it there. She looked, perhaps, a little disappointed.
Mr Shoe’s nerves were singing as loudly as he ever had his half-remembered Music Hall turns.
In Nanjing his apartments would shortly be ransacked, if they had not been already. They would find ticket stubs to Malaya, and a pointed copy of a hand-printed, wobbly copy of Xiao Huli’s poetry, and perhaps that would throw them and perhaps it wouldn’t. He was sorry to be leaving the poems, but his memory was good enough.
Waves ate the hull of the ship as it slipped through the East China sea. Somewhere further to the east the radioactive embers of what had once been Japan still, he fancied, glowed in the dark after all these years. Corpses, they’d said, had rotted in the streets when the SinoSoviet Storm of Revenge had swept through the land. In Nanjing there was not much sympathy to spare for their long-dead neighbours. The memorials were eloquent on why.
Mr Shoe plastered on his best easy-going smile on his most troubled interior and turned away from the rail. Chances were she was dead already. Nothing to be done but go home, as instructed, and wait for his brother to join him.
* * *
At Guangdong the exchange was more furtive. A man in a fisherman’s hat with a pirate’s face shoved him onto something that looked about as seaworthy as a slipper and charged him the kind of money that made his pockets wince. At least the crumbling vessel, with its sad sagging sails and forged passenger credentials, didn’t remind him so very much of the HMS Taunton, even if it looked as if it was going to pull exactly the same stinking sinking routine.
Mr Shoe watched the waters in the harbour turn black and then reflect pinpricks of light.
It was too much to hope for that her death was a quick one. If They’d got her it would be slow. If they hadn’t – well, she knew where to find a straight razor – but it didn’t bear thinking about.
* * *
In Hong Kong a harbourmaster stopped him and his heart beat and bounced into his throat, shaking all the Mandarin out of him and leaving him with some clumsy syllables that could have been anything but were mostly idiotic.
At last he understood. His papers were good, but there were other papers required.
Mr Shoe dug out more money and the harbourmaster receded like the Thames at tide turn, and how many years had it been since he thought of the Thames as his reference point?
Aboard the next ship his fellow-passengers included a drunk who appeared to be travelling in the same direction, although God alone knew how he’d found himself here in the first place. Mr Shoe avoided him, feigned ignorance of the English words and chewed peaceably on tobacco he didn’t want.
