This decline of care for time was what most troubled Magapius. His countrymen once were proud of their timing. If a bird was to be netted, the netman would be tossing the net as the bird flew by. It was an appointment to be kept, a pact between netman and bird. A courtesy. What was the joy in a longer life when that tribal respect for time was becoming as rare as the old stylized dream dances?
As much as the race itself, Magapius was looking forward to visiting the People's Republic of revolutionary China. If the dream were to live, reaffirmation must be found there, in that mightiest stronghold of the experiment. Everybody knew there was no juice in Russia any more, no Kunda as the Bantu put it. No baraka, as the Arabs said. And the boatloads hysterical to escape Cuba and Haiti for the capitalistic coasts of Florida did not speak well of Castro's collective. But China… ah, China… surviving Mao's madness as well as Brezhnev's belligerence. Great China. If China could not accomplish it, perhaps it could not be accomplished.
He heard a motor and stood to wave at the approaching headlights. It was not the bus. It was a loaded sisal truck that had encountered the bus miles back, stuck crossways in the middle of the tiny road, front wheels in one ditch, back wheels in the other. The bus had been turning around to return to pick up last week's mail that the driver had again forgotten.
One of the sisal truck's three drivers boosted Magapius's luggage to the top of the load of fiber and invited him to join them for the ride on to the city. He couldn't join them in the cab, however. There was no room. In the nation's battle against rampant unemployment, there were now three drivers required in every vehicle of transport, whether they could drive or not.
Magapius thanked them and climbed the heap of fibers. How particularly Tanzanian – three men in a clean cab in filthy work aprons; one on top in the blowing white fluff in the only suit the family owned, black…
In the cramped kitchen of his uncle's house, Yang was studying mathematics. He had less than a week before the trip to Beijing, and his instructors at school had decided he could best prepare for his absence by staying home and studying on his own. From the adjoining room came the whir of the motorcycle motor as his uncle drilled away at the day's collection of cavities. It was a clever setup. Raised on its kickstand, the rear wheel turned freely against a simple wooden spool that in turn drove the gears that powered the drill cables. The drill speed could be adjusted by the bike's throttle, and the whir of the little two-cycle engine helped blanket the occasional groans his patients made in spite of the bristle of anesthetic needles in their necks and arms.
Yang was seated near the window. If the sun had been out it would have fallen across his high-boned face and bare shoulders, but it was overcast. It had been overcast for weeks. Since before the floods.
His sister came in from the backyard carrying a pan of green leaves and dumped them in a large kettle of cold water, singing as she did. Yang recalled the stanza. It was from a skit his sister's class had performed for National Day a year ago. The girls had learned the song from a play that was mailed out to all the primaries, a short musical dramatization emphasizing the value of early warning and treatment of stomach cancer, China's number-one killer. His sister had stopped attending school after that year, speaking of plans to join the People's Liberation Army. Now she washed cabbage leaves and stacked them beside her aunt's wok – delicately, as though arranging expensive silks – while she sang:
How very fine, Yang agreed without raising his head from the work text; how commendable. But please explain if possible how one uses the principles of Prevention First when dealing with the diseases of the revolution itself? Wouldn't the very cure be dangerously counterrevolutionary?
He closed the big paperback on his finger and turned to watch his sister. She was long past fifteen and rounding out rapidly. In a few months someone would accompany the girl to their communal market for her first binding undergarment. In a few years Yang would not be able to pick her from dozens her same age – the same white shirt, the same black pants, the same pigtails. Perhaps that was why she wanted to join the PLA; if the uniforms were always ill-fitting and baggy they at least were less uniform than what all the other girls her age would be wearing.
Now his sister sang and swayed in unfettered innocence, still flushing with young patriotism. Yang could recall the sensation – a thrill to be part of something vast and exciting. He could remember feeling that his blood was tolling in cadence with every heart in the village, to a great shared rhythm. When he was nine, he remembered, there had come a dreadful plague of flies throughout all the land. To deal with the problem their Great Chairman had done a mighty and yet simple thing. Mao had launched an edict proclaiming that while it was not required it would be a very good thing if all the schoolchildren in the land should bring to their schoolteachers every morning dead flies. Yang had dedicated himself to the chore with all the fervor of a warrior of old serving his emperor.
He spent hours each afternoon stalking the pestiferous foe with a rolled newspaper, slaying scores past ten. Hundreds and hundreds were poured each morning from his paper cone into the teacher's waiting tray. Throughout the land other children were turning in comparable kills. In less than a month the flies were gone, all across China. Each schoolroom was sent an official pennant to hang in the window. The red silk had filled Yang with the sort of pride that made national songs rise to the throat.
Then he learned from his biology teacher that the year preceding the Great Fly Kill had been the year of the Great Sparrow Kill. That year Mao had been advised that there were such-and-so-many wild birds in China and, during its little life, each bird could be calculated to eat at least this-and-that-much grain. Which came to a whole lot. So Mao had edicted that all the kids should go out beneath all the trees where all the birds roosted, and beat clappers all night every night until they roosted no more. After three nights the birds were all dead from exhaustion and irritation. All across China! How very impressive and commendable. Except that, in the season after the birdless year, there were all those flies…
No, the slogan songs no longer brought the old tolling to Yang's blood. He still enjoyed hearing it in his sister's voice but he feared it was gone from him forever, that ring, cold and gone.
But not the wonder, he was glad to say. Not that. For instance, what had all those schoolteachers in all those classrooms all across China done with all those dead flies?