“Many generals will abandon Chiang Kai-shek if they know he’s in danger of being assassinated,” said Pei. “There is faith only among us.”
“Yes,” said Suan, “the sons of torture-victims make good terrorists.”
They both were.
“And as for the generals who remain,” added Pei, “even if they build up a China that is opposed to us, they will make a great nation, because they will have built it with their blood.”
“No!” said Ch’en and Suan, both at once. Neither of them ignored how great the number of nationalists among the Communists had grown, especially among the intellectuals.
Pei wrote, for periodicals that were quickly suppressed, stories that revealed a painfully self-satisfied bitterness, and articles-the last of which began in this fashion: “Imperialism being sorely pressed, China plans to solicit its benevolence once more and ask it to substitute a nickel ring for the gold ring that it has fastened to her nose. ” He was also preparing an ideology of terrorism. For him Communism was merely the one true way to bring about the revival of China.
“I don’t want to create China,” said Suan, “I want to create my people, with or without her. The poor. It’s for them that I’m willing to die, to kill. For them only. ”
It was Ch’en who answered:
“As long as we try to throw the bomb we’ll have bad luck. Too many chances of failure. And we must get it over with today.”
“There’s no other way that’s any easier,” said Pei.
“There is a way.”
The low, heavy clouds were advancing in the same direction as they, with the uncertain yet lordly movement of destinies. Ch’en had shut his eyes to meditate, but continued to walk, close to the walls as usual; his comrades were waiting for to speak, watching his curved profile.
“There is a way. And I believe there is only one: we must not throw the bomb; we must throw ourselves under the car with it.”
Lost in thought, they continued their walk through the torn-up courts where children no longer played.
They arrived. The clerk led them into the back room of the shop. They remained standing amid the lamps, their brief-cases under their arms; finally they put them down, cautiously. Suan and Pei squatted on the floor, Chinese fashion.
“Why are you laughing, Ch’en?” asked Pei, with anxiety.
He was not laughing, he was smiling, worlds removed from irony. To his amazement, he found himself possessed by a radiant exaltation. Everything became simple. His anguish had vanished. He knew the uneasiness to which his comrades were prey, in spite of their courage: throwing bombs, even in the most dangerous way, was adventure; the resolution to die was something else — he opposite, perhaps. He began to pace back and forth. In the back room there was only the light which came through the shop-now livid, as before a storm. In the difused half-light the bellies of the storm lamps glowed with a curious effect-rows of inverted question-
marks. Ch’en’s shadow, too indistinct to be a silhouette, was moving above the anxious eyes of the other two.
“Kyo is right: what we lack most is the sense of hara- kiri. But the Japanese who kills himself risks becoming a god, and that’s the beginning of filth and corruption. No: the blood must fall back upon men-and remain." Whenever Ch’en expressed a passionate conviction in Chinese, his voice took on an extraordinary intensity.
“I would rather try to succeed," said Suan, “-to suc- ceed-in several attempts than to make up my mind to die in one attempt."
Yet Suan felt beneath Ch’en’s words a current towards which he was being drawn. Where it led he did not know. He was sitting in rapt attention, vibrating to the sound of Ch’en’s words rather than to their meaning.
“I must throw myself under the car," answered Ch’en.
They followed him with their eyes, as he came and went, without turning their necks; he no longer looked at them. He stumbled on one of the lamps standing on the floor, caught his balance by putting his hands out to the waU. The lamp feU and broke with a tinkle. But there was no room for laughter. His righted shadow stood out indistinctly against the last rows of lamps. Suan was beginning to understand what Ch’en expected of him. Nevertheless, either through mistrust of himself or to put off what he foresaw, he said:
“What do you want?"
Ch’en suddenly realized that he did not know. He felt himself struggling, not against Suan, but against his idea, which was escaping him. At last:
“That this should not be lost."
“You want Pei and me to make a pledge to imitate you? Is that it?"
“It’s not a promise that I expect. I expect you to feel — a need.”
The reflections on the lamps were disappearing. It was growing darker in the windowless room-no doubt the clouds were piling up outside. Ch’en remembered Gisors: “Close to death, such a passion aspires to be passed on. ” Suddenly he understood. Suan also was beginning to understand:
“You want to make a kind of religion of terrorism?” Ch’en’s exaltation was growing. All words were hollow, absurd, too feeble to express what he wanted of them.
“Not a religion. The meaning of life. The. ”
His hand made the convulsive gesture of molding something, and his idea seemed to pulsate.
“. the complete possession of oneself. Total. Absolute. To know. Not to be looking, looking, always, for ideas, for duties. In the last hour I have felt nothing of what used to weigh on me. Do you hear? Nothing.” He was so completely carried away by his exaltation that he was no longer trying to convince them otherwise than by speaking about himself:
“I possess myself. But I don’t feel a menace, an anguish, as always before. Possessed, held tight, tight, as this hand holds the other. (he was pressing it with all his might). it’s not enough-like. ”
He picked up one of the pieces of glass from the broken lamp. A large triangular fragment full of reflections. With one stroke he drove it into his thigh. His tense voice was charged with a savage certainty, but he seemed much more to possess his exaltation than to be possessed by it. Not at all mad. Now the other two could barely see him, and yet he filed the room. Suan began to be afraid:
“I am less intelligent than you, Ch'en, but for me … for me, no. I saw my father hung by his hands, beaten on the belly with a rattan-stick to make him tell where his master had hidden the money which he didn’t have. It's for those to whom we belong that I’m fighting, not for myself.”
“For them, you can’t do better than to make up your mind to die. No other man can be so effective as the man who has chosen that. If we had made up our minds to it, we should not have missed Chiang Kai-shek a while back. You know it.”
“You-perhaps you need that. I don’t know. ” He was struggling with himself. “If I agreed, you see, it would seem to me that I was not dying for all the others, but. ”
“But?”
Almost completely obliterated, the feeble afternoon light lingered without completely disappearing.
“For you.”
A strong smell of kerosene recalled to Ch’en the oil cans for the burning of the station, the first day. of the insurrection. But everything was plunging into the past, even Suan, since he would not follow him. Yet the only thing which his present state of mind did not transform into nothingness was the idea of creating those doomed Executioners, that race of avengers. This birth was taking place in him, like all births, with agony and exalta- tion-he was not master of it. He could no longer endure any presence. He got up.