Moses’s work table was strewn with xeroxed pages from Solomon’s journals, tantalizing segments mailed to him when least expected from Moscow, Antibes, Saigon, Santa Barbara, Yellowknife, and Rio de Janeiro. The pages sent from Rio de Janeiro began with a description of the dragon’s chair:
“The accused was obliged to sit in a chair, like one in a barber shop, to which he was tied with straps covered over with foam rubber, while other foam rubber strips covered his body; they tied his fingers with electric wires, and his toes also, and began administering a series of electric shocks; at the same time, another torturer with an electric stick gave him shocks between the legs and on the penis.”
An earlier volume was introduced with lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:
The margins of each page of the journals were crammed with notes and queries and cross-references in Moses’s untidy scrawl. See Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–39. Check Li Chuang on Snowy Mountains and Marshy Grasslands. Smedley and Snow contradict each other here. Consult Liu Po-cheng, Recalling the Long March, Eyewitness Accounts.
Solomon’s Chinese journals luxuriated in detailed descriptions of barbarism. A Twenty-fifth Army scout, captured by the KMT, suffers the death of a thousand cuts. A weeping KMT spy is buried alive in the sand. A landlord’s head is lopped off in Hadapu, his last words, Tiu na xinq. There were acid portraits of Braun, the womanizer; Manfred Stern, later celebrated as General Kleber in Spain; Steve Nelson and Earl Browder in Shanghai; Richard Sorge’s arrival. There was also an unflattering sketch of a forty-year-old Mao, long before he took charge. Gaunt, eyes burning, suffering from malaria.
Other pages dealt with the crossing of the Great Grasslands, that treacherous plateau, eleven thousand feet high, between the watersheds of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Late August 1935 that was, and the journey, which took six days and many lives, was undoubtedly the worst ordeal of the Long March. There were no signposts, no trails, no food, no yaks, no herdsmen. Solomon, who claimed that he was with the Fourth Regiment of the First Army Corps, calculating that they were the first human beings in three thousand years to pass through the tall, sometimes poisonous grass.
Rain, sleet, hail, wind, fog, and frost. For the most part the men chewed raw unmilled wheat. It ripped their intestines, bloodied their bowels. Some died of dysentery, others of diarrhoea. The Tibetan muck, Solomon wrote, reminded him of Vimy Ridge. Men being sucked into the bog, disappearing. Unfortunately there were no fat corpse rats to roast. When they did find sufficient twigs for a fire, the men boiled leather belts and harnesses. The starving and feverish soldiers of the rear guard were driven to searching through the feces of fallen comrades for undigested grains of corn or wheat. Then, on the fifth day, Solomon’s bunch was lost in fog and frost. What appeared to be a trail made by the advance guard led them to a ditch filled with stagnant water. Late the next morning, a fierce wind blew the fog away. Then a raven appeared out of nowhere, soaring and swooping, and the men followed it to the banks of the Hou River. On the far bank, where there was dry ground and some wood to be found, they built a camp-fire and roasted their few remaining grains of unmilled wheat.
Chang-feng Chen, Moses had scribbled in a margin, mentioned the raven. So did Hi Hsin, who wrote that just before the appearance of the big black bird Solomon had tramped up and down, searching the skies, some sort of sad clacking noise, an inhuman call, coming from the back of his throat.
Ten
Bert Smith had been living in Montreal for ten years now, since 1963, renting a room with kitchen privileges from a Mrs. Jenkins. He was used to being laughed at. Striding back from the meeting in the church basement in his scout master’s uniform, a scrawny seventy-year-old, his snaggle teeth still in place, he had to endure the oily Greeks nudging each other on their stoops, setting down their cans of Molson to belch. He was obliged to tolerate the whistles of French-Canadian factory girls with curlers in their hair. Street urchins with scraped knees were sent out to torment him, buzzing him on their skateboards. “Hey, sir, you want to ‘be prepared’, wear a safe.”
Their ridicule, far from being humiliating, was fortifying. His crown of thorns. Rome was laid waste by the vandals and Canada, corrupt beyond salvation, would fall to the mongrels. The native-born young of the once True North, Strong and Free undone by jungle music, rampaging sex and the sloth licensed by a Judas state.
Case in point.
Last summer there had been two able-bodied men sharing the room next to his own in Mrs. Jenkins’s house. Both white, both Christian. They slept in until noon, then caught the latest porn movie at The Pussycat, subsisting on welfare, leaving instructions for their cheques to be forwarded to Fort Lauderdale during the winter. One day an indignant Smith invited them into his room and showed them a faded photograph of his parents taken in front of their sod hut in Gloriana. His father pale and wasted, his mother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, looking more washed out than her calico dress. “Theirs was the indomitable spirit that tamed the wilderness,” Smith said. “Look at Saskatoon now. Or Regina.”
“I been there, Smitty, and they’re so far behind the times there’s still dinosaur shit on the sidewalks.”
“Where would this country be today had it been left to your sort to pioneer the west?”
One of the men asked if he could borrow a ten spot until Monday.
“No way,” Smith said.
Mrs. Jenkins, a good sort, was blessed with a lively sense of humour.
Question: What is a nigger carpenter’s favourite tool?
Answer: A jigsaw.
He did not have to worry about Jews on the street that he lived on in lowest Westmount, just this side of the railroad tracks. The street of peeling rooming houses with rotting, lopsided porches was altogether too poor for that lot. Even so, there was no shortage of trash. Noisy Greek immigrants cultivating tomato plants in rock-hard back yards. Swarthy, fart-filled Italians. Forlorn French-Canadian factory girls spilling over $4.99 plastic chairs from Miracle Mart, yammering each to each. West Indians with that arrogant stride that made you want to belt them one. Polacks, Portuguese. “Happily,” he once said to Mrs. Jenkins, “we will not live long enough to see Canada become a mongrelized country.”
The concern, deeply felt, came naturally to Smith, an Anglo-Saxon westerner, born and bred.
Back in 1907, the legendary Canadian journalist John Dafoe wrote an article aimed at enticing American immigrants to the prairie, assuring them there was no chance of a mongrel race or civilization taking hold in western Canada. Yes, there had been an influx of land-hungry foreigners, but most of them were of Teutonic and Scandinavian stock. The only alien race present in numbers in the west, the Slavs, were being rapidly Anglicized. Mind you, among more fastidious westerners there was also considerable concern about the quality of British immigrants. J.S. Woodsworth, who would become a saint in the Canadian socialist pantheon, a founder of the CCF party, worried in Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians, published in 1909, about the immigration of Dr. Barnardo’s urchins with their inherited tendencies to evil. He liked to tell the story of how an English magistrate had chastised a young offender: “You have broken your mother’s heart, you have brought down your father’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. You are a disgrace to your country. Why don’t you go to Canada?”