Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Page 9

  And then there was Peter himself … She still marveled at his being the agent sent in with her, and she was not at all displeased, but she wished that he’d not forgotten that drinking glass. It was a trivial omission, but it reminded her of his youth and the fact that this was probably his first job, and if so, a massive one. He was certainly a good actor, and he was intelligent. From her impressions of him she guessed there was a natural exuberance in him about what lay ahead, and that this would have been the quality that captured Carstairs’ attention, for if she trembled for Peter, she was absolutely certain that Peter did not tremble for himself. Behind the impassive face that had softened only slightly last night she had glimpsed that sort of loner who had to climb mountains because they were there, as the saying went, and for whom danger was addicting, and ordinary life puzzling. It was the stuff of which the T. E. Lawrences and Richard Halliburtons were made, she mused, embryonic now in a cool twenty-two-year-old, and obviously invaluable for this particular job.

  But as an agent, she thought, he should never have forgotten that water glass.

  And this, she mused, was perhaps another reason why she’d been chosen to accompany Peter: to keep an eye on him and to steady him. It amused her to remember that this was precisely what she’d done by instinct last evening when he’d looked so alarmed about her suitcase being searched: she had reassured and distracted him, hiding her own alarm. Carstairs, she thought, must have done some rare chuckling when he tossed the two of them into this maelstrom—he was no fool about people—but at the moment she wished she might have a few indignant words with him. Obviously, her job in China was not to end in Xian, after all. It might even be just beginning.

  She glanced toward the front of the minibus at Peter, who was seated next to Malcolm this morning, as if he’d decided to divest himself of Jenny for the day, and she wondered idly what they were talking about. The two guides sat in front of them, with Miss Bai occasionally interrupting her conversation with Mr. Li to pick up the microphone and point out a field of workers, a commune, or a factory. And then—abruptly—they were pulling into the parking lot of the archaeological site, and ahead lay a broad courtyard framed by low-lying buildings, the largest of which resembled an airplane hangar.

  “No cameras allowed,” called out Mr. Li.

  “No—no pictures,” echoed Miss Bai. “We meet here again in one hour, the Friendship Store on the left, a film theater next it showing history of this remarkable discovery, and soda pop to be found in souvenir building.”

  It was Joe Forbes with whom Mrs. Pollifax strolled toward the hangarlike building that had been erected over the remarkable discoveries. “But this isn’t the tomb itself?” he asked pleasantly.

  “I don’t believe they’ve even started on the tomb yet,” she told him. “These are the burial figures found on the periphery. He took an entire army to the grave with him, but mercifully not a live one, which I do think was kind of him, and very enlightened.”

  “Another discovery,” he quipped, “when a factory was planned?”

  “According to the guidebook, this time it was commune workers digging a well.” Pleasantries from behind plexiglass, she thought, darting a glance at his pleasant, smiling, never-changing face, but knowing now that he wasn’t Carstairs’ man she felt little need to probe the mystery behind his lack of personality; there probably was no mystery at all, she decided; some people were simply born bland.

  They walked together into the building, where Mrs. Pollifax promptly moved to the railing that separated them from the digging site, and here she caught her breath. She had been certain that she knew what to expect; she had studiously looked up photographs but now she realized that they’d been taken out of context, mere pictures in a magazine lacking environment and reality. The sheer impact of what she saw stunned her: hundreds of life-sized men standing below her in the broad trenches that honeycombed the earth floor, men like gray ghosts waiting patiently at attention, hundreds of them in battle formation lined up in rows as far as the eye could see, each face different and individual with here and there a hand lifted or a head turned slightly as if to listen. Silent and waiting they filled the hall, so alive in gesture and stance that surely, she thought, they must be breathing as they stood there, liberated from the earth that had held them for nearly two thousand years.

  Malcolm, coming to stand beside her, said simply, “My God.”

  She smiled, liking Malcolm. “It’s a mighty emperor who goes to his grave with—how many?” she asked.

  “The latest count is five hundred terra-cotta warriors, six war chariots, and twenty-four horses, with thousands more expected.”

  Iris, joining them, whistled, and the three of them stood there, staring down into the trenches, absorbed and awed until Mrs. Pollifax, recovering, began to be aware of a very odd sensation of tension flowing between Malcolm and Iris. Strange, she thought, standing between them. She glanced curiously at Malcolm, but he was staring at the figures below; she looked at Iris, but she too was staring straight ahead, her lips still pursed in a whistle, and then George Westrum came up to claim Iris and the tension snapped. But for just a moment Mrs. Pollifax felt that she’d stumbled into a kind of energy-force field, and since she was not accustomed to picking up vibrations so strongly it left her puzzled. Perhaps this place is a little haunted, she thought, and wondered what had happened to her.

  Iris and George walked away together and Malcolm wandered on, his sketchbook in hand. When Mrs. Pollifax resumed strolling it was Peter who fell in with her.

  “Seems a good time to get friendlier,” he said with his wry half-smile. “We leave for Urumchi late this afternoon and I’ve been doing my homework.”

  “Productive?” she asked, trying not to look eager in case anyone was watching.

  “Definitely.” His voice was crisp, with an undercurrent of excitement. “It looks good—ideas begin to blossom. Nothing’s jelled yet but I’m absolutely certain now that the thing can be pulled off, all of it.” With a nod toward the excavations he added, “What do you think?”

  “Incredible. Spooky, even, they feel so alive.”

  “He was a bit of a bastard, that first emperor,” Peter said pleasantly. “Burned books. Executed his friends. Made some pretty severe laws. But,” he added, “the laws he made were the first the country ever had, and one of them was to banish feudalism, even if it did pop back after his death. He pulled a lot of warring states together and gave the country shape and unity, and without all that China might never have tamed the Xiong nu during the next dynasty.”

  “Tamed who?”

  “Hsiung-nu—the horse people, the nomads from the steppes who swarmed through the passes of the Altai and Tian Shan ranges to attack … Mongols and Turkic people. That’s where we’re heading later today, you know, into frontier country. Urumchi, Turfan, the Tarim Basin, the Tian Shans, the Taklamakan desert. Back in 221 B.C. it was China’s wild west, the far frontier.”

  “Genghis Khan, perhaps?”

  “Yes, eventually. What riders they must have been, sweeping down from the mountains into the desert, with towns changing hands at the drop of a crossbow!”

  “And has it been tamed now?” she asked, picturing what he spoke of in her mind.

  “It’s not been made an Autonomous Region for nothing,” he told her. “I gather the central government still has its problems there and has had to make a few compromises. Not easy trying to organize nomads into communes, and Moslems into good Communists. A great number of ethnic groups live there—it was the Silk Road, after all!—the Uyghurs being in the majority.”

  “Weegurs?” she repeated.

  “Yes, but spelled U-y-g-h-u-r, which may give you an idea of the language you’ll meet there, most of the words being pronounced with strange gargling sounds. For instance the word for good-bye is hox, which you pronounce horrssh, and aromat is thank you, but comes out rock-met, slightly gargled. In any case, Mao tried to solve the Uyghur majority by sending thousands of Chinese int
o the province to settle among them, but basically it’s Moslem country and they’ve had their share of incidents, so-called.”

  “Uprisings?” asked Mrs. Pollifax in surprise.

  “Passive resistance would probably describe it better. In fact, something like sixty thousand Kazakhs simply left China in 1962, going over the border into Soviet Kazakhstan.”

  “How absolutely fascinating,” she said. “I wish Mr. Li could be this informative.”

  Peter shook his head. “You can’t blame Mr. Li,” he said soberly. “From his age I’d guess he was brought up during the Cultural Revolution, when education went into an ice age. You probably know more about his country and its history than he does, though he’s learning fast.” He shook his head again. “These abrupt changes must have been psychological hell for people, at one point raiding monasteries, closing schools, and sending intellectuals into the fields or to prison; the next decade opening the schools, retrieving teachers and scientists from the rice fields, and restoring the same buildings that were mutilated. It has a certain Alice-In-Wonderland quality, you know? Mao may have been a brilliant revolutionary, but he sure as hell lacked consistency for the long run. Oops, here comes Jenny,” he said. “I’d better mend my political fences and talk to her. See you later,” he added quickly, and strolled back toward Jenny, his face emptied of expression again.

  In the afternoon they visited Huaching Hot Springs Guesthouse, from which Chiang Kai-shek had escaped capture by the Communists, leaving his teeth behind. It was a very charming place, with ponds and arched bridges, but Mrs. Pollifax only felt uncomfortably hot; her feet were tired and she sat down as often as possible and as close to the water as possible. Besides, she thought crossly, Chiang Kai-shek might have escaped from a window to climb the mountain behind his room, but he’d only been captured and eventually released again. Of much more interest to her was the young Communist who had hurried to Xian to negotiate with Chiang once he was captured. The young man’s name had been Chou En-lai, and Mrs. Pollifax had long since succumbed to Chou’s personality from seeing him on television. She completely understood the reaction to his death in 1976 when the people defied Mao and the police to pour into Beijing’s Tian An Men Square and mourn Chou in their own way. It had been a spontaneous outpouring of national grief and love and worry that had been conspicuously missing when Mao died eight months later.

  She was seated on a bench thinking about this when Peter strolled up the path and sat down beside her. His face impassive he said, “Jenny’s gone to find a ladies’ room so I’ve got to talk fast. Quick—have you pencil and paper?” She was amused to see that he was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, just like a film gangster.

  She nodded and dug into her purse, bringing out her memo pad.

  “I’ve been talking to Mr. Li about what we see in Urumchi, and it sounds good, as if we’ll be visiting all the right places, but when he confers with you—and he will, because you’re leader, remember?—make sure we visit the Kazakhs up in the grasslands after our overnight stay in Turfan. You can’t possibly know what I mean, and there’s no time to explain so just write it down, okay?”

  Mrs. Pollifax wrote TURFAN, SEE FIRST. “Is there a name for the grasslands?”

  “Yes, take a look at your Markham Tour brochure if you brought it—”

  “Didn’t.”

  “The grasslands have always been a part of their regular tours here, and we’ve got to insist on them, but after visiting Turfan. If I remember correctly the brochure reads”—he closed his eyes and quoted—“ ‘See the colorful Kazakh Minority Peoples demonstrate their superb horsemanship. A nomadic people, they live in summer in yurts on the grasslands of the Tian Shan mountains.’ And,” he added, “we simply must go there last.”

  “I wonder what reason I could possibly give Mr. Li for this,” she asked pensively.

  “Tell him something. Tell him you’ve heard how hot Turfan is … Well, it is,” he said. “It’s five hundred feet below sea level.”

  “Below!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes you’ll find it listed on maps as the Turfan Depression. It’s also an oasis in the desert, and hot. You can tell Mr. Li you’re feeling the heat, or someone is, and it would be lovely to cool off in the mountains after Turfan.” He smiled faintly. “You seem to manage okay. As leader you’ve got clout—use it. And if it’s any help,” he added, “Jenny seems to be getting tourist tummy, or Montezuma’s Revenge, or dysentery, whatever the current word is.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “Yes.” He nodded and as Jenny appeared from between two ancient buildings he added flatly, “But it’s absolutely necessary we go to Turfan first. Totally. I’ll explain why when we get to Urumchi.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” she told him dryly, with the distinct feeling it would be much kinder if she avoided hearing that explanation.

  It was a six-hour flight to Urumchi. The two-engine prop plane fairly bulged with passengers, a few even seated on their luggage in the aisles. A hostess occasionally negotiated her way among them, passing out candies or cups of tea, but for dinner they landed at Lanzhou and dined in an echoing hall of the air terminal, handed warm moist wash cloths as they entered, and warm moist cloths at the meal’s end. The paper napkins, noticed Mrs. Pollifax, were steadily shrinking in size; they had not been large in Canton, but they were now approaching the shape of her memo pad, and were slippery as well. Following dinner they returned to the plane and in the hours before darkness Mrs. Pollifax looked down at stark, barren mountain ranges, golden-brown in color like dark honey illuminated by the sun’s gold. Occasionally—surprising her—she saw terraces carved out of a mountainside, forming patterns like ripples in a pond but with no sign of villages or of human life anywhere in the incredibly empty landscape.

  China, she decided, looking down at it, was all terra-cotta and dusty jade. Everywhere. Only the shapes changed, and the shades of beige and brown, and the presence or absence of any green at all.

  It was night when they landed in Urumchi, and well past ten o’clock. Having said good-bye to Miss Bai at the Xian air terminal there was now a Mr. Kan waiting for them here, and while still in the air terminal Mrs. Pollifax placed herself squarely in front of Mr. Li and reminded him that she was group leader. “When do we discuss plans for Urumchi?” she asked.

  If Mr. Li was surprised by this sudden aggressiveness, he concealed it. “In the morning perhaps?” he suggested. “Mr. Kan will tell us what he’s arranged.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Pollifax firmly. “Tell him tonight, please, that we all want to visit Turfan before we go to the Kazakh grasslands. I hear that Turfan is very hot, and we’d prefer the mountains later, to cool off.”

  “Cool off!” he repeated, and laughed merrily at the phrase.

  “Yes—do please insist on it before any plans are made final.”

  “You wish Turfan soon,” he said, assimilating this.

  “Yes. Oh yes—definitely.” From the blank look that came and went on Mr. Li’s face she received the distinct impression that while he spoke English well he did not understand it with equal ease. “Turfan first,” she repeated, and was made more comfortable by a confirming flash of comprehension in his gaze. He saves face, she thought as she climbed into the waiting minibus. How much has he understood of our prattlings? How much would I understand if people spoke rapidly, injecting slang words, and in different accents?

  Once again the hotel was nearly an hour’s drive out of town, but this time there were no complaints: there was an intimacy about the Yannan that had been missing in the Canton hotel’s oversized Art Deco vulgarity, and in the Xian hotel’s stark Russian frugality. For one thing there was only a very modest fishpond in the lobby, and through an opened french door a smaller, brighter dining hall could be seen. The guest rooms were at ground level, elevated a few steps above the lobby; Mrs. Pollifax found her own room spacious and cool-looking. Its walls were white, and on one of them hung a very charming watercolor, an origin
al, with a subtly Turkish flavor to it. Obviously new and interesting influences had entered Xinjiang Province.

  But although it was nearly eleven o’clock Mrs. Pollifax felt restless, and while she waited for her suitcase to arrive at her door she gravitated toward the lobby, passing the small gift counter on the way. It had been opened for their arrival—a young woman presided over it—and Iris and George were leaning over the counter examining its treasures. In the lobby she found Malcolm sitting on the edge of the goldfish pond. “Real fish,” he told her, pointing. “How are you doing?”

  “Surprisingly well so far,” she told him.

  “Jenny has a touch of traveler’s tummy. I’ve given her two of my pills,” he said. “Anyone else, do you know?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” she told him, “but doubtless there’ll be more. It’s my theory that somewhere along the line there’s usually one rebellious new employee in a kitchen who just can’t understand why the water has to be boiled for foreigners, and so they don’t. One has to count on that, it’s human nature.”

  He looked amused. “Very experienced of you—about human nature, I mean. And since Jenny’s been drinking nothing but boiled water—”

  “So-called.”

  “—it’s a very rational explanation. If somewhat alarming,” he added, his glance moving to Iris, who was walking toward them looking excited, with George following behind her, smiling.

  “Look,” she cried, holding out a hand, “just see what George insisted on buying for me!” In her palm lay a disc of antique white jade, intricately carved by hand. She was radiant as she displayed it.

  “How exquisite,” breathed Mrs. Pollifax, bending over it.

  “Lovely,” said Malcolm, giving it a brief glance and then looking at Iris.

  Iris turned pink. “It’s very old,” she said almost defiantly.