And then…
A hollow rumble. What’s that? The first peal of a spring storm on the horizon? A shell burst with a crack over the heads of the startled crowd. A frantic commotion, screams. A whorl of bodies, a sudden, mad outpouring. The river was dammed and the gathering waves flushed back to strike. In the air, shells flew like smoking rockets. They’re firing at the city! Who? The Shandong soldiers? No, not them.
The first messengers came running in a panic.
“Gunboats! Landing troops! The American and French armies are coming ashore!”
Everything seethed. Shells sailed over the city like meteors. To the left, to the right – the crash of tumbling buildings and red fountains of flames. The defenseless crowd blundered between the collapsing walls like a blind herd of horses in a burning stable.
People came running, disheveled and wheezing:
“Everyone to the arsenals, to the weapons!”
P’an Tsiang-kuei kept his head. Snatching a machine gun from a baffled soldier, he led a few dozen people toward the port. Groups of armed workers and soldiers were already rushing from all sides, firing in the air as they ran. On the shore, a skirmish. Reinforcements came in time. A bramble bush of human bodies. Dough. P’an pressed into the malleable blue mass with all his momentum. A gunshot cracked. A British sailor leveled his bayonet at P’an. P’an wriggled away. A fist to the back of his shaved head. The sailor’s blood-smeared face got hooked onto the catch of his rifle. P’an tore away the weapon. On the catch, red pulp. He grabbed it by the barrel. The butt came down full force onto the starched white caps. He cleared a spacious field around him, like a lumberjack. Reinforcements came. The sailors dispersed along the stone steps of the wharf. But more were coming from behind. On the boulevard, a new skirmish. P’an hurried toward it, leaping through the bodies. Suddenly he stumbled. In his eyes – shards, a red swirl.
He crumpled gently, without a scream, straight and supple, like an acrobat falling from a trapeze onto the stone net of the wharf stretched out below.
He came to three weeks later, in a filthy wartime hospital that stank of iodine and the cloying sweat of soldiers. In his chest was a burning needle.
The doctor consoled him:
“We thought you weren’t going to make it. One inch below the heart.”
P’an asked about the news. It came as a blow. In the Kuomintang: division and treachery. The right was chumming up to the imperialists. The traitor Chiang Kai-shek was starting a bloody liquidation of workers’ organizations in Shanghai and Canton. The slogan: the fight against Communism. Mass shootings and slaughter everywhere. Nanjing was still holding strong for the time being, but in the new Kuomintang there were squabbles. The Kuomintang leftists were in on the anti-communist conspiracy. Just wait, they’d cross over to the counter-revolutionary camp. And so on. A long litany of unhappy incidents, and names and dates of disgrace. His eyes drooped in fatigue. Well, but hadn’t he known in advance that their time would come, too? He hadn’t suspected it would be so soon, though. Maybe it was for the best. He liked it when all the cards were on the table.
He soon checked out of the hospital. Tottering a bit on his feet, he dove into the whirlpool of work. Now for the countryside. New directives. Take charge of the peasant unions. Help the existing peasant organizations develop. Get the young people involved. Break up the Meituan networks. Form an alliance with the Red Spades. Guiding principle – the agrarian revolution. Hubei. Hunan. Mud huts. Levies. Endless waterlogged roads. By the roadside ditches, the dates of bitter and harrowing events cropped up like milestones. Wuhan. Nanjing. The workers’ insurrection crushed in Canton. Shooting. Executions. Sticky, innocent blood.
The one bright spot: the revolutionary ferment of the peasant masses was swelling, gathering like a wave. May it continue! Burrowing under the dams like a patient mole. They would break and wash everything clean. Then time for revenge.
Only one thought sustained him: the gigantic Soviet Union sprawled out to the north, occupying one sixth of the globe. It had survived interventions, blockades, years of starvation and demoralization. Bound by a ring of imperialists, alone, unaided, it had taken root and was growing, floor by floor, upward. It made accusations, reproached, and urged with the irrefutable digits of statistics. “Hold on! Don’t back down! Build! Failure, hardship – it’s all part of the transition! Before us lies victory, a wide expanse! Don't lose hope!”
All the difficulties, discomforts and adversities clouded his mind. An old wound flared up. He was out of commission. Sent to the head office. Then back to the hospital. An old bullet they’d overlooked. He quickly recovered. The day before he left the hospital he received his orders. The Party was drafting him to Europe as a secret agent, as someone who knew the ropes, to expose the counter-revolution on site.
He was reluctant to leave, but he made no protest. He arrived in Paris incognito. He was soon sniffed out. More creeping around at night. Shut up in a tiny room in a hotel on Panthéon Square, P’an Tsiang-kuei pushed forward the clock hands of his daily routine. He slept during the day and went out into the city only late at night, when the telltale color of his skin was obscured by the yellowish glow of electric lamps, and the long slits of his eyes vanished under the wide brim of his hat.
In Paris, the Latin Quarter was swarming with nationalist students. He imperceptibly slipped in among them. He was taciturn and serious. He slowly earned himself acceptance. By spring he was the heart and soul of the whole movement. His facetious nickname: “the dictator.”
He first heard about the outbreak of the plague from a short bellboy. His first impulse was to be pleased at the unexpected ally. It was more fun than any intervention, and would put the kibosh on Europe for a good few months – no battleships, no armies, no suitcases stuffed with money. If only it held out long enough, until his men had managed to settle the score with their own and the others!
The accidental herald of the sinister news raised his eyes and saw to his surprise that the stony face of the Chinese gentleman had for the first time cracked in a smile, like a ripening fruit. It suddenly seemed to P’an Tsiang-kuei, as he bent down over the frightened bellboy, that in the boy’s wide eyes he could make out other eyes, narrow and slanted, and through the contours of his face, as if staring through a veil, another face, the Mongol grin of the plague.
And indeed, the hotel boy died that night. He was one of the plague’s first victims.
In the tiny Chinese restaurant, the grayish man with the goatee was bent over the table and staring at P’an over the tops of his glasses, and reddening in the face, he said in a decisive, somewhat tremulous voice:
“I’m sorry if I’ve startled you. May I have a word…”
P’an Tsiang-kuei raised his eyes from his plate and stared at the stranger in surprise, trying to recall if he’d seen his face somewhere before.
“You don’t remember me, of course,” said the older man without lifting his gaze. “You’re too Chinese to be able to tell European faces apart. All the more so given that, strictly speaking, we are bound by no formal acquaintance. You studied bacteriology and biochemistry with me at the Sorbonne some seven years ago. I was your professor. A relationship which hardly obliges you to remember me. In my case it’s different. I have always observed your people with great interest.