Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read online

  The door to the dining hall opened, they walked in to breakfast and Mrs. Pollifax—feeling embarked on a roller-coaster ride whose end she couldn’t foresee—sat down and without enthusiasm attacked a hard-boiled egg.

  Mr. Kan, hurrying in, said, “I have knocked and he doesn’t hear, the manager is to open the door with a key, he may be ill.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” Malcolm asked Mrs. Pollifax from across the table.

  Jenny, seated next to her, turned and stared.

  “Fine,” said Mrs. Pollifax and gave them each a forced bright smile.

  “Oh he’ll turn up,” said Iris cheerfully, earning a bland smile from Joe Forbes and an admiring one from George.

  Mr. Li stuck his head through the door to call to Mr. Kan, “He’s not in his room. He slept there but he’s not there.”

  “Slept there,” murmured Mrs. Pollifax: that meant bed turned down and sheets wrinkled … she was relieved to hear that Peter had thought of this, except of what use was a turned-down bed if Peter didn’t reappear soon?

  “But nobody has seen him,” added Mr. Li, coming in to join them, and he did not laugh merrily; he looked anxious and puzzled.

  “We don’t leave for Turfan without him, do we?” asked Jenny.

  The two guides launched an intense discussion in their own language until Mr. Li shook his head. “We must. The arrangements have been made. At nine we will notify security police, of course.”

  At nine o’clock when they filed out to the waiting bus, still speculating on Peter’s absence, they were met by a sleek gray limousine pulling up in front of the hotel, a “shanghai car” as they were called, bearing white curtains at the windows to conceal its occupants. It looked very official and very menacing: They’ve arrested Peter, thought Mrs. Pollifax with a sinking heart. A gentleman in a soft gray Mao uniform climbed out of the car, followed by a smiling Peter.

  “Hi,” Peter called out cheerfully. “Sorry I’m late, everybody—went for an early morning jog and got lost until Mr. Sun rescued me. Very high official, speaks American!”

  An early jog, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and her gaze moved to his outfit, the pants rolled to his knees, legs bared down to his running shoes, Mao jacket tied around his waist, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words MOZART LIVES.

  Beautiful, she thought, paying tribute to Peter’s resourcefulness. Heaven only knew what he’d had to discard to present such a picture, but if one overlooked the absence of his ubiquitous blue jeans, he was the perfect jogger, face flushed, eyes bright, and even in China they must have heard of the American passion for jogging. She felt a leap of excitement, the very same feeling that overtook her at sight of one of her pelargoniums breaking through the earth: Peter, too, was blooming. He’d carried it off. Somehow. The tension had snapped; Mr. Sun was speaking benevolently to Mr. Li and Mr. Kan, who looked both pleased and honored, and Peter, giving Mrs. Pollifax a broad impish grin, dashed into the hotel to wash his face.

  Several minutes later as he walked up the aisle of the bus he leaned over and whispered in Mrs. Pollifax’s ear. “You what?” she gasped.

  He nodded, grinning his triumph. “The job’s done. Quite a night!”

  “But how—what—”

  “Later,” he said. “Collect food, X will need it when we get back. Collect everything,” he added and looked up as Iris and George walked down the aisle. Glancing at his watch he said, “Now I’ve got four hours to sleep—talk to you later.” He continued to the rear of the bus and promptly stretched out across four seats. Jenny, following, looked affronted and abruptly sat down next to Joe Forbes.

  X found … X already freed, thought Mrs. Pollifax in astonishment. What could have happened, and how could it have happened? What had taken place during this endless night?

  The bus began to move—they were off to Turfan—and Mrs. Pollifax’s thoughts moved with it: backward and then forward but no matter where they went they returned to the fact that Wang had been removed from the camp and hidden. How pleased Carstairs would be, she thought; how pleased she felt for Peter … suddenly it had been done, and she was smiling as she glanced out of the window at the hulk of an old bus they were passing, and then rough adobe houses with pale blue wooden doors.

  “What does that sign say?” she heard George call to Mr. Li, pointing.

  “It says, ‘Protect our Motherland and Heighten Alertness,’ ” he called back.

  As if to illustrate its message Mrs. Pollifax glanced up at a distant hill—they were leaving Urumchi behind now—and saw anti-aircraft guns silhouetted against the sky, and posts strung with barbed wire. Against Russian invasion, she reflected, but it looks as if the Soviets won’t find Wang now. He’s ours.

  Now they were passing fields of yellow rapeseed, with clusters of commune huts in the distance. Off to their right the mountain range they followed had the shape and color of sand dunes, strange and surreal to the eye, and then the road straightened and was lined with poplar trees on either side, closing out the mountains. They began to meet trucks carrying laborers to the fields, but there was smaller traffic, too: handmade carts that hugged each side of the road and were put together out of wood with large old rubber tires for wheels, some pulled by one or two horses, some pulled by a man between the shafts. The poplars thinned and then vanished as they emerged into flat treeless country, and here Mrs. Pollifax became aware of the stone-lined irrigation trenches parallel to the road, with here and there women washing clothes in the water.

  But having purred with satisfaction for a contented interval, Mrs. Pollifax’s thoughts now approached certain new uncertainties, retreated from them, and then returned to face and examine them. It was all very well, she thought, to say that phase two had been triumphantly accomplished, but there was no getting around the fact that the rescue of Wang was to have been phase three, not phase two. X was tucked away now but with a long and dangerous wait ahead of him, and obviously with nothing to eat or Peter wouldn’t have mentioned collecting food; and what if—perish the thought—Peter could never return to rescue him? As soon as I see Peter alone, she decided, he must tell me where the cave is. Both of us should know … and in the meantime we must pray that he’s not discovered by the Sepos.

  Her eyes went back to the land, to a long flat lovely valley they were crossing, the mountains a marvelous pastel blue in the distance. Far away her gaze picked out a walled clay compound, dusty beige against the dusty beige of the earth. The mountains drew closer here to them, incredibly wrinkled like very old faces, and then—suddenly —in the midst of nowhere they came upon a factory with nothing in sight but piles of slag, the sky, the road, and the distant mountains.

  Such space, thought Mrs. Pollifax, such enormous tawny space. But why a factory here, and how does anything arrive or be taken away?

  Her thoughts returned to Peter’s message in the bus. She could collect food for X, yes, lining her purse with that plastic bag she carried and slipping food into it at the table, but this meant that Peter would have to make still another trip out into the night when they returned to Urumchi. This meant no rest for him; how long could he go without a decent night’s sleep, she wondered, and still think clearly for what lay ahead?

  Across the aisle Jenny was growing restive. “Let’s wake him up,” she told Joe Forbes in a loud voice directed at Peter in the rear. “He’s slept long enough, don’t you think? Hey Peter!”

  “He looks very comfortable,” pointed out Joe Forbes, smiling.

  “But he went to bed early last night, right after dinner,” Jenny said, pouting, “and jogging can’t take that much out of anyone!”

  Mrs. Pollifax turned and said politely, “I’m not sure that he went to his room to sleep last evening, he mentioned letters and cards to write.”

  Clearly Jenny didn’t welcome this intrusion; she looked startled, mumbled, “Oh well,” and subsided. It occurred to Mrs. Pollifax that it had been clever of Peter to use Jenny as cover during the early days of the tour, but his choice was showing
signs of boomeranging. Jenny looked ready to cry again; she was not going to take his defection graciously. A strange girl, she thought, and wondered what caused this penchant for overreacting.

  On either side of the road the country was flat and empty, with the consistency of gravel, but there were surprises: a sudden glimpse of rail tracks, of freight cars on the dusty horizon being loaded with crushed stone, and then of workers strolling along the road wearing dust masks, and then—abruptly—a huge body of water in the middle of this arid dead land, fed by runoffs from the mountains and dropped like a shimmering blue jewel into the warm dry panorama.

  In midmorning they stopped beside a shallow irrigation stream and Mr. Li produced Lucky Kolas for them. After this they were off again through the Koko Valley to begin their descent into the Turfan depression, crossing an interminable valley of gray slag, the only signs of civilization the crisscrossing railroad and power lines. At times it gave the illusion of being a gray beach stretching toward a gray sunless sea in the distance.

  “Very prehistoric,” Malcolm said, leaving his seat to join her. “I hope by now you’re a trifle bored with your thoughts, as I am with mine. Feel like talking?”

  She smiled. “Yes there’s a time for thinking and a time for talking.” And a time to stop worrying, she added silently.

  He said easily, “I find I can all too easily succumb to group mentality; it has a nice cozy hypnotic quality, rather sheeplike and very comfortable.”

  “Are you feeling refueled now, after being quiet?”

  “Definitely. I don’t feel that you’re a group person, even if you do function well in one. George Westrum, for instance, is a group person totally, mainly because he lacks any original thoughts to entertain himself while alone.”

  Mrs. Pollifax gave him an amused look. “Rather hard on him, aren’t you?”

  Malcolm said simply, “He has been instructing Iris in the butchering of his steers and how they are sent to market, with side excursions into profit and loss. He sits behind me, I can’t help overhearing. I doubt he’s noticed an inch of the country we’ve been passing through.”

  “And where is Joe Forbes on your scale of ten?” she inquired.

  He smiled. “Not the loner I first thought him to be. There’s that need to please, and to smile all the time, plus that lamentable determination to practice Chinese on the guides and to ingratiate himself. I think in general he might be called an Ingratiator.”

  Mrs. Pollifax, finding his pithy comments almost as interesting as Cyrus’ might have been, asked, “And Iris?”

  He brushed this query aside impatiently. “Iris is simply Iris.”

  “Meaning what?”

  He smiled, his quizzical brows drawing together. “Why, an original, pure and simple. A transformer and a transcender.”

  “You like her then,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “Or appreciate her. Yet give every evidence of avoiding her.”

  He grinned. “I avoid George, to be blunt about it, and since he’s in constant attendance on Iris, well—there it is.”

  “And Jenny?”

  Malcolm stopped smiling. “A rather troubled person, don’t you think? The trip seems to be putting her under enormous pressures. Nice little thing, a pity. I have the feeling—”

  “Psychically or intuitively?” intervened Mrs. Pollifax humorously.

  “Pressure,” he said, ignoring this, “can go either way, it creates diamonds, it also creates explosions. What are your feelings on the matter?”

  “At the moment—given her tears the other night—I think explosions.”

  “Followed, one hopes, by clearing skies,” he said. “At the moment she seems extremely cross about Peter having a nap. Do I see green up ahead?” he asked. “Yes, a rather dusty green but definitely green. Do you think we’re approaching Turfan?”

  This seemed possible because Mr. Kan was unwinding his microphone and presently standing up to explain Turfan to them: a city with a population of 120,000, containing seventy farms and where, for about thirty days of the year, the temperature lingered at 113° F., and in winter descended to twenty below zero … Its irrigation system was unique, consisting of underground tunnels, some of them two thousand years old, through which the runoff from the distant mountains reached this desert city … And this afternoon they would be introduced to this underground system. Whereupon he promptly sat down.

  “Short but to the point,” said Malcolm, “and since the air conditioning’s just been turned on it’s doubtless 113° Fahrenheit right now.”

  “I see we’re back to red clay,” mused Mrs. Pollifax, looking out of the window. “My goodness, I just saw a field of cotton.”

  Soon she was seeing grapevines, too, and mysterious greenery growing behind the walls of compounds, but here there were wooden bars set into the clay windows, and large wooden gates in the walls that showed the Turkish influence Peter had mentioned. On this road it was small tractors that pulled the wooden carts; presently they passed a traffic jam of army trucks, and then a bazaar shaded by squares of canvas and surrounded by parked donkey carts and bicycles. “And here we are,” announced Mr. Li as they swung down a broad dirt road and turned left into a large compound of whitewashed walls. “The Friendship Guesthouse. Lunch in one hour!”

  A square hot room with cement floor and walls; two narrow beds and a window; a huge round fan whirring at top speed on the bureau; a bathroom with a shower tap, a dripping faucet, and no tub or stall … Mrs. Pollifax went to her door and called after the others, “Anyone want to walk to that bazaar down the road before lunch?”

  Iris poked her head out from the door of the room next to hers. “I take it your room’s as hot as mine? Count me in!”

  Jenny said defiantly, “Joe and I are going to sit in that grape arbor and check our cameras.”

  But Peter said, “I’d love a walk!”

  Once in the bazaar Mrs. Pollifax bought recklessly for X: several ripe golden melons, tiny apricots, raisins, nuts, and a string bag in which to carry them, and for herself a pair of cloth shoes and a kerchief. She was about to add some grapes to the collection when she abruptly felt giddy and close to fainting. The heat, she decided, a strange kind of heat because the sun was only moderately bright. She looked at the man from whom she had bought raisins: he sat solidly under a strip of canvas wearing a white skullcap, his face shaded. Something in her eyes must have explained her dilemma because he jumped up, grasped her arm, and sat her down on his box in the shade of the canvas.

  She smiled gratefully. He offered her water but she shook her head, remembering that it wouldn’t be boiled. Across the pathway from her she saw Peter talking to a young native who appeared to be enthusiastically practicing his English; George Westrum was taking a picture of the rows of rubber-tired carts that had been turned into selling stalls with the addition of canopies, boards, and boxes; Iris had crossed the irrigation trench and was trying to approach a water buffalo that had wandered into the scene. Mrs. Pollifax’s sympathetic friend was still offering her water with a mounting insistence. Making no impression upon her he pulled off his skullcap and pantomimed the pouring of water over it and into it.

  “Ah!” she cried, understanding, and brought out the kerchief she’d just purchased. He nodded eagerly and she held it out to him while he poured water over it; she placed it on her head, delighted by its coolness, and thanked the man profusely with gestures.

  “That bad, huh,” said Peter, joining her. “Look, I want you to meet my friend over there, he speaks a little English and I’ve got a deal going with him that includes you. In fact it seems to depend on you.”

  “On me!” she exclaimed, and as the sun struck her again she recoiled. “Peter—”

  But he was already saying to the young man, “Sheng Ti, here is my grandmother.”

  Mrs. Pollifax gave Peter a reproachful glance. “Not another grandmother, Peter?”

  “Ah yes,” cried Sheng Ti, bowing and smiling, and she looked at him with interest.

  H
is face was at variance with his clothes, which were disreputable: neatly patched pants, a sweat-stained dirty undershirt, and sandals repaired with string; his face, however, shone with intelligence, and his eyes were bright and eager.

  “Now that you see my grandmother you will do this for us?” Peter asked him. “To win the bet—the wager?”

  “Bet, yes. For the lady yes, I understand now,” he said, nodding vigorously.

  “Okay, then. Outside the Guesthouse. Wait down the street at the corner, okay? Very secret. Ten o’clock tonight.” Peter counted out change and placed it in the young man’s palm. “Ten o’clock, Sheng Ti,” he added, holding up all of his fingers.

  “Ten,” repeated Sheng Ti.

  As Peter led her away Mrs. Pollifax glanced back and said, “Peter, what on earth—what was all that about?”

  “He wouldn’t do it for me,” Peter told her, “so I tried him out on you and it worked. An authority figure, that’s you,” he said, grinning. “I think he’s what’s called a ‘hooligan’—no visible means of employment so I took a chance on him, he ought to be relatively safe.”

  “Safe for what? Peter, you didn’t speak Chinese to him!”

  “God no,” he said. “I’m just a crazy American tourist wanting to win a bet, a bet that I could drive a donkey cart for a couple of hours without the guides hearing about it. I had a hunch he might be open to something illicit. We’ll need to hide our foodstuff and sheepskins in the desert, and how else could we get them there? Besides, you’re not used to missing all the fun, are you?”

  She laughed.

  “Disguises later, after we leave Sheng Ti behind tonight,” he went on. “A kerchief for you, that quilted jacket you bought in Urumchi—”

  “Very observant of you,” she said dryly.

  “—cotton slacks, and I’ll slant your eyes for you after we’ve left Sheng Ti, in case we’re stopped.” He signaled to an ancient man with a seamed face sitting patiently over his cart and donkey. “Hop on, he’s a cab driver, Turfan style, and you’ve got to get out of this sun.”