23
Vasili Yasevich smiled when he walked into the teahouse. “What do you know, Mei Ling?” he said when the pretty serving girl came over to him.
“I know you’re a nuisance,” she answered, but she was smiling, too. “What can I get you this afternoon?”
“Tea and some buckwheat noodles,” he said. The Japanese had introduced those noodles to northeastern China when they ran things here. People kept eating them even though the Japanese were long gone. They were tasty and cheap at the same time: the perfect combo.
She brought them back splashed with soy sauce and garnished with chopped scallions and leeks. Vasili handled chopsticks as if he’d used them all his life-which he had. He held the bowl up to his face and slurped away. He wasn’t always neat, but neither were the Chinese. Neat eating was for aristocrats, the last thing you wanted to look like in Mao’s People’s Republic.
Mei Ling giggled behind her hand. “What’s so funny, toots?” Vasili asked, though he already had a good idea of the answer.
Sure enough, she said, “It’s just strange, watching a round-eye eat like a regular person. I always laugh when I see that.”
“I am a regular person.” Vasili used the same northeastern dialect of Mandarin she did. Why not? Hadn’t he grown up in Harbin himself? After another slurp and a gulp, he went on, “I’m a regular person who has round eyes, that’s all. How many other round-eyes have you watched eating like this?” His right hand shoveled more noodles into his mouth.
“A few,” she said. “There aren’t as many round-eyes here as there used to be. And the ones who come over from Russia, they want knives and forks. Where am I going to get knives and forks?”
“Beats me,” Vasili said. One or two surviving Russian eateries still had some for people who wanted them. A few Russian old-timers might use them at home. Vasili knew how; his mother and father had preferred them. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a fork. He really was a regular person: a fair-skinned, big-nosed regular person with a thick beard and round blue eyes.
People in some countries didn’t all have the same general coloring and cast of features. Some looked like Vasili, some like Chinese; he supposed some were even Negroes (except for a few pictures, he’d never set eyes on one). China, though, wasn’t like that. Everybody here looked Chinese…except for Vasili and a few other relics of bygone days.
Mei Ling said, “Even though you’re a round-eyed barbarian, you talk and you act like a civilized person.”
That was what she meant. What she said was like a man from the Middle Kingdom, which was China’s name for itself. To Chinese, only Chinese could be civilized. Everybody else was a barbarian, somebody unlikely to speak the language (very unlikely to read it) and all too likely to make messes on the floor.
For hundreds of years, China had been the big wheel in the Far East. Japan, Korea, Indochina, Thailand, Burma…They all pretty much followed China’s lead in style and culture. None of them got ahead of China. And the occasional Europeans were oddities when they weren’t nuisances.
Then they turned into dangerous nuisances, nuisances who could do things the Chinese couldn’t. For one of the rare times in history, foreigners ordered Chinese around, and had the strength to make their orders stick. Russians, Englishmen, French…even the Japanese started doing it. That had to be doubly humiliating, as if a wayward son beat up a proud but weak father.
So of course the Chinese distrusted foreigners. Vasili understood it no matter how much trouble it caused him. “I hope I am like a civilized person,” he said. “I hope I am enough like a civilized person to keep you company every now and then.”
Mei Ling giggled some more. “Well, maybe,” she said, and then, tartly, “Took you long enough to get around to asking.”
“Sorry,” Vasili muttered. One of the few things he knew about Negroes was that white people often made rules against getting too friendly with them. Chinese sometimes felt the same way about whites. Knowing that had made him shy-but not too shy.
He left money on the counter and walked out whistling. He was as happy as he had been since the atom bomb fell, maybe as happy as he had been since his parents killed themselves instead of letting the Chekists take them back to the workers’ and peasants’ paradise of the USSR. They’d thought death was better than that. From the stories they’d told, Vasili could see why.
He stayed happy for about ten minutes: the time he took to walk from the teahouse to his own shanty. He rounded the last corner on his little alleyway-and stopped, and drew back. A jeep was parked there, probably one seized from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces during the civil war. He wouldn’t have thought the alley wide enough to let it squeeze through, but there you were-and there it was.
The men who’d come in it would be in the shack now, tearing it to pieces. He didn’t need to see them to know that. They’d be looking for…for opium, of course. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Vasili whispered, aiming the obscenity at the official Wang’s wife had sent his way. He should have known the son of a bitch would want to get even. Dammit, he had known.
Now what am I going to do? he wondered. Here he was, a fair round-eye in a land full of golden-skinned, black-haired people. He was as conspicuous as a snowball in a coal cellar. Running away seemed unlikely to do much good.
But he couldn’t walk up to those policemen or whatever they were and go Here I am! He knew what would happen if he did: the kinds of things that would have happened to his father and mother had they got dragged back to the Soviet Union. Mao’d learned a lot from Stalin. He had native talent, too.
So, while running wasn’t a good choice, plainly it was the best one he had. They might not catch up with him for a while. If he headed north, he’d stay in country that had some idea what Russians were. Maybe he could slip across the border. Being without proper papers in Russia was deadly dangerous. His parents had made that clear. He had Chinese papers. But if all they showed was This man is wanted! that was even worse.
He headed for the abandoned blacksmith’s shop. If they were after him for selling opium, he might as well start doing it for real. They couldn’t kill him much deader for an actual crime than for an invented one. And selling the drug would get him more cash. He’d need that. They’d surely already stolen what he had in the shack.
He would have done better to have got some gold from the commissar with the craving. But Mao was so ferocious with anyone who had anything to do with opium, he hadn’t had the nerve. So here he was, on the run.
As a matter of fact, he strolled along as if he had not a care in the world. Looking scared was the dumbest thing you could do. As long as he acted the way he usually did, people here took him for granted. If he started skulking or sprinting, they’d wonder why. They would till they added two and two and got four, anyhow.
He did glance around-as casually as he could-before slipping into the old blacksmith’s shop through the hole in the side wall. Even after all these years, the place smelled faintly of horse. The odor was in the straw on the floor, and in the dirt. For all he knew, it had soaked into the planks of the walls.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he picked up the broken brick and found the apothecary’s jar still under it. On the chance that other people had also used the place to hide things, he did some more searching after he retrieved it. And he found two tarnished trade dollars-some people called them Mex dollars-that had probably been there longer than he’d been alive. He took them, too. Silver was silver.
Should I rest here for a while? he wondered. The idea of sleeping on horse-smelling dirt didn’t excite him. But neither did the idea of rushing out there and getting nabbed. He lay down. His jacket made a good enough pillow.