Fortunately, she was able to board the aircraft without stirring up a commotion. That could have been dangerous, especially if the flight crew had males in it. But her fellow passengers paid her no special heed. She settled down for the long, dull flight to Cairo, where she would board another aircraft for the return to Marseille.
Not so bad, she thought. She wished the holiday had been longer. That would have let her taste more. But she’d made up for a lot of lost time even so. Maybe she really was ready to get back to work.
Liu Han and Liu Mei sat side by side in an insanely crowded second-class car as the train of which it was a part rattled north. Children squealed. Babies screamed. Chickens squawked. Ducks quacked. Dogs-likelier headed for the stew pot than for the easy life of a pet-yelped. Several young porkers made noises even more appalling than those that came from the human infants. The smells were as bad as the racket.
“Can we get any fresh air?” Liu Mei asked her mother.
“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “I’ll try.” She was sitting by the window. She had to use all her strength to get it to rise even a little. When it did, she wasn’t sure she was glad it had. The engine was an ancient coal-burner, and soot started pouring in as the stinks poured out.
Liu Mei got a cinder in the eye, and rubbed frantically. Once she’d managed to get rid of it, she said, “Maybe you ought to close that again.”
“I’ll try,” Liu Han repeated. She had no luck this time. What had gone up refused to come down. She sighed. “We knew this trip wouldn’t be any fun when we set out on it.”
“We were right, too.” Liu Mei coughed. Several people had lit up cigarettes and pipes so they wouldn’t have to pay quite so much attention to the pungent atmosphere they were breathing. Their smoke made the air that much thicker for everyone else.
One of the babies in the carn-or possibly one of the dogs-had an unfortunate accident. Liu Han sighed. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed walking back to Peking, but I’m not enjoying this, either. You, at least, you’re going home.”
Liu Mei leaned toward Liu Han so she could speak into her ear: “We’re going back to begin the revolutionary struggle again. The struggle is our home.”
“Well, so it is.” Liu Han glanced over at her daughter. Liu Mei could think of the struggle as home. She was young. Liu Han was getting close to fifty. Trapped in this hot, smelly, packed car, she felt every one of her years. There were times when she wished she could settle down somewhere quiet and forget about the revolution. She generally got over that once she’d had a chance to rest for a while, but she found it happening more and more often these days.
The dialectic said the proletarian revolution would succeed. For many years, that had kept Liu Han and her comrades working to overthrow the imperialist little scaly devils despite all the defeats they’d suffered. It had kept them confident of victory, too. But now the dialectic made Liu Han thoughtful in a different way. If the revolution would inevitably succeed, wouldn’t it succeed just as inevitably without her?
She didn’t say anything like that to Liu Mei. She knew it would have horrified her daughter. And she supposed that, once she got to Peking, the fire of revolutionary fervor would begin to burn in her own bosom once more. It always had. Still, there were times when she felt very tired.
I’m getting old, she thought. Her skin was still firm and her hair had only a few threads of silver in it, but Chinese showed their age less readily than round-eyed devils did. She’d seen that on her visit to the United States. But whether she showed her age or not, she felt it. This miserable car made everyone feel her age, and twenty years older besides.
Brakes squealing, the train stopped in a small town. A few people left her car. More tried to crowd on. Nobody wanted to make room for anybody else. Men and women pushed and shouted and cursed. Liu Han had ridden enough trains to know things were always like that.
Hawkers elbowed their ways through the cars, selling rice and vegetables and fruit juice and tea. They didn’t do a whole lot of business; most people had the sense to bring their own supplies with them. Liu Han and Liu Mei certainly had. Only the naive few riding a train for the first time gave the hawkers any trade.
A conductor came through, too, screaming for the hawkers to get off or buy a ticket-they were going to get moving. The hawkers laughed and jeered; they knew to the second when the train would really set out, and they also knew the conductors always tried to get rid of them early. The last one leaped off just as the train started to roll. He stuck out his tongue in derision.
“That’ll cost him extra squeeze the next time this train crew comes through here,” Liu Han predicted.
“You’re probably right,” her daughter replied. “But he assented his freedom even so. In his small way, he is a revolutionary.”
He was more likely to be a bad-tempered fool, but Liu Han didn’t argue with Liu Mei. Instead, she wrestled with the window again. She had no luck; it was stuck, and looked as if it would stay stuck. The smoke that poured in was thick and black, because the train wasn’t going fast enough to dissipate it. Liu Han coughed and cursed. People nearby were coughing, too, and cursing her.
Things got better as the train picked up speed, but they never got very good. As far as Liu Han could tell, not very good was about as good as rail travel ever got in China.
And then, less then half an hour later, the train slowed to a stop again, not at a station but in the middle of the countryside. “Now what?” a woman behind Liu Han demanded indignantly.
“Have we broken down?” Three or four people asked the same question at the same time.
“Of course we’ve broken down,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “The little scaly devils don’t care whether trains work well, or even if they work at all, so they don’t bother keeping them up.”
But, for once, this wasn’t something she could blame on the scaly devils. A conductor poked his head into the car and shouted, “We can’t go on because bandits have blown up the tracks ahead of us. We are going to be here for a while. We may have to go back and find a way around the damage.”
That set people yelling and screaming at him and at one another. He just kept repeating what he’d said the first time. Most of the unhappy passengers cursed the bandits up one side and down the other. People would curse anything that made them late.
Liu Mei asked, “Do you suppose the People’s Liberation Army sabotaged the track?”
“It could be,” Liu Han said. “Not everyone will have known we were on this train. But it could have been the Kuomintang, too. No way to tell.”
The sun beat down on the car. Because it was standing still, it got hotter and hotter. People started opening more windows. Some wouldn’t open at all. People started breaking them. That brought in an angry conductor, but he had to flee in the face of the passengers’ wrath.
“Whoever it was probably wanted to make the train derail,” Liu Han said. “That would really have done damage.”
It would have done damage to us, she thought. Derailing trains was a favorite game of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Kuomintang as well. It taught people that the rule of the little scaly devils remained insecure. It also caused a lot of casualties. She and Liu Mei could have been among them as easily as not.
And, of course, a machine-gun crew might have been waiting to shoot up the train once it derailed, Liu Han thought. That was another game both the People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang played. So did independent bandit outfits, who kept themselves in business by robbery. But no one started shooting here.