He arrived in Europe tense and alert, like he’d been as a child when he’d gone crawling into treacherous doghouses in search of bones. Now he was crawling into the enemy’s cave to carry off his most precious and jealously guarded bone – knowledge. This enemy was far worse and more vicious than those he’d known before. In comparison, his old bloated employer seemed like a clumsy leech stuck to his side, ready to be torn off and tossed aside. In China he’d already felt a sharp repugnance, as if his entire epidermis were stuck with thousands of aphids. There was simply no tearing them all off. They trailed endless threads of telegraph wires in long and supple tentacles, circling half the globe and going astray somewhere in the unexplored stone jungles of a foreign continent. After years of childhood dreams, an enchanted seafaring Mer Ce-Des had finally carried him to their secret lair.
Plunging the negative of his consciousness into the reagent of one capital city after another, P’an Tsiang-kuei came to feel like a man vaccinating himself against a disease, feeling the bloated and frenzied bacteria coursing through his arteries, and whose terrified body, like a machine pushed into overdrive, began firing off ready and waiting antitoxins by the thousands.
The achievements of European culture, once so dazzling to his child’s mind, no longer blinded his jaded and naturally squinting eyes, which studied everything carefully and ruthlessly, taking what was essential and material and dismissing everything superfluous with a bat of his eyelashes.
The little boy who had read all the books in the Lazarist Fathers’ library had bequeathed an unquenchable desire to learn about absolutely everything, to know the whole complex apparatus of the foreign culture from the ground up.
He studied with passion, swallowing the books whole, discarding the finished ones like husks. Like a sleepwalker on the scaffolding of a six-story building, he crossed through the shadowy corridors of Europe’s universities without once losing his balance.
In the evenings, he avoided the rumbling boulevards, preferring to roam the workers’ districts on the outskirts, sparsely lit by the occasional fires of lampposts. He would blend into the muddy, threadbare crowd, staring into the emaciated, angular faces, jaundiced from poverty, their bones jutting out over the caverns of their cheeks.
In the ruined, gray face of a coachman he caught a flash of the spokes and the naked heels of a downtrodden rickshaw driver, dashing at the same moment somewhere down the sweltering alleys of Shanghai. Stooped under the crushing weight of a sack, a porter dripped the yellow sweat of a Chinese coolie. The swollen, drooping eyelids of women, staggering under the weight of their infants swathed in rags, narrowed their eyes to oblique slits.
For the first time P’an Tsiang-kuei saw what those books he’d read so thoroughly described: apart from the China of his homeland, with its Yellow Sea façade, there were other Chinas, internationally, everywhere, where backs are crooked, jaws are strained taut, cracks of eyes are narrowed with hatred, and where a fat and majestic employer presides.
In the cities he passed through he appeared as a delegate at meetings of local workers’ organizations, flinging his lasso – the thrilling call of international solidarity – over the rippling sea of heads.
Showers of red sparks flew from the faraway flickering firebrand of Moscow, Lenin’s incendiary words fell like glowing cinders on the oppressed masses and peoples, on layers of class consciousness that had been kicked and trampled under the feet of conquering armies. Explosions from the shifting plates deep down below shook the ground beneath their feet. News from China came choppy and muddled, like a flock of spooked birds from the East, fearful harbingers of a brewing tempest.
And finally it happened. The white-hot cauldron burst with the hysterical shriek of startled parliaments and the dismal lament of telegraph wires. Lava spewed from the cauldron, melting everything in its path, innumerable yellow columns spurted forth, a gathering, unbridled wave washing over the world. The red sun of the Kuomintang with the hammer and sickle and the five-pointed star. A triumphal march to the north. A winged word flew on the telegraph wires, arriving ahead of the bullets: Victory!
The shrapnel from the mighty explosion sprayed all over the world and eventually flew as far as Europe. Puny white people with suitcases. Undigested fear and astonishment in their eyes. They blundered across the whole continent in terror. Along the boulevards the enormous stampeding and shimmering letters of illuminated gazettes, whipped up by a lashing gale of bulletins, formed themselves into one harsh and prickly word: “intervention.”
Upon first hearing of the revolution, P’an Tsiang-kuei shuddered, snapped shut a half-finished book, and wanted to dash off to the train station. He was prohibited. He was ordered to stay at his post, give up his studies, forge closer ties with local workers’ organizations, prepare the European proletariat’s resistance to the imperialists’ armed intervention.
He gave in. He understood: the center of gravity wasn’t there, it was here. In London, in Paris. In the smoke-filled rooms of the Foreign Office, in the salons of the Quai d’Orsay. Thin lines stretched from here to the enemy’s headquarters: francs, pounds, directives, steel buildings floating on the water – battleships. Snap the enemy’s back with a single blow to the spine, a slender telegraph cable stretched between London and Paris, break it with the resistance of their own white working masses, under the flag of defending the Chinese Revolution, in the name of the luminous slogan of worldwide solidarity of the oppressed!
Instead of the crowded libraries and the chill of the laboratories, now it was stuffy and overcrowded halls, meetings, conferences, demonstrations, fiery articles on scraps of paper torn from notebooks, black, swinging railcars, apartments, overnighters, the watchful eye of police surveillance. He was deported from London. In Paris, on the stairs, on the tram, in cafés, searching eyes scrutinized him. He was sick to death of it. The usual hiding spots in the subway, between the exits, the entrances, and the corridors. He gave them the slip. Thus passed the weeks, the months, a year.
Finally vacation. He was allowed to travel to China. Again the ship swayed, hefted upon the muscular shoulders of the waves like an orator on the shoulders of a frenzied crowd. At the Chinese shore his path was blocked by the gloomy towers of battleships observing the banks through the long telescopes of their cannons. A dreary shadow fell upon the sunny March day. But the shores were bathed in sunshine, and on the bank, hoisted high above the pyramid of crowded buildings, flapped the radiant flag of the Kuomintang. P’an’s spirits rose at the sight.
Shanghai greeted him with swelter, the mournful beat of drums, the alcohol of a frothing crowd, the lament of sirens, screams and jabbering. Chucked out of their apartments, fear-crazed, barefoot and in their underwear, people leapt past firebrands like phantoms, only to vanish moments later in the burbling yellow flow of the crowd without so much as a scream. Ceremonially dressed rickshaw drivers triumphantly paraded the heads of yesterday’s passengers impaled on stakes.
He went to a meeting of delegates. Their speeches throbbed with a victory more heady than rice wine. The majority were leftist Kuomintangs and Communists. Arm the workers. Form a leftist provisional government. All power to the delegates! The nationalist delegates objected to arming the workforce. They left in a huff. Forget it! They’ll dance to our tune yet!
After Shanghai came Nanjing. The Shandong armies were retreating in disarray. On the streets, the dense celebrating crowds overflowed, swirled, thrashed. The sun blazed and suddenly the ice cracked open. It seemed that at any minute, snatched up by the swift current of the crowd, the bulky frames of houses, palaces and pagodas would tear free from the ground and float by, rushing forward, colliding and whirling to the open outlet – toward victory. The sun on the spread wings of flags, in pupils joyfully dilated, in the timid spring green of trees, in the warble of drunken birds, on the façades, on faces – a golden sunny soot.