“Why don’t you go away, then?” the carp seller shrilled. A moment later, she lowered her voice once more: “He says they will soon let the People’s Liberation Army know they are willing to resume talks on all subjects. He is only a clerk, remember; he cannot tell you what ‘all subjects’ means. You will know that for yourself, though, won’t you?”
“Eh? Yes, I think so,” Liu Han answered. If the scaly devils meant what they said, they would return to talking about giving her back her daughter. The girl would be approaching two years old now, by Chinese reckoning: one for the time she’d spent in Liu Han’s womb and the second for the time since her birth. Liu Han wondered what she looked like and how Ttomalss had been treating her. One day before too long, maybe, she’d find out.
“All right, I’ll buy it, even if you are a thief.” As if in anger, Liu Han slapped down coins and stalked away. Behind her angry facade, she was smiling. The carp seller was almost her own personal source of news; she didn’t think the woman knew many others from the People’s Liberation Army. She would get credit for bringing news of impending negotiations to the central committee.
With luck, that would probably be enough to ensure that she got her own seat on the committee. Nieh Ho-T’ing would back her now; she was sure of that. And, once she had her seat, she would support Nieh’s agenda-for a while. One of these days, though, she would have occasion to disagree with him. When she did, she’d have backing of her own.
She wondered how Nieh would take that. Would they be able to go on being lovers after they had political or ideological quarrels? She didn’t know. Of one thing she was sure: she needed a lover less than she had before. She was her own person now, well able to face the world on her own two feet without requiring a man’s support. Before the little scaly devils came, she hadn’t imagined such a thing possible.
She shook her head. Strange that all the suffering the little devils had put her through had led her not only to be independent but to think she ought to be independent. Without them, she would have been one of the uncounted peasant widows in war-torn China, trying to keep herself from starving and probably having to become a prostitute or a rich man’s concubine to manage it.
She passed by a man selling the conical straw hats both men and women wore to keep the sun off their faces. She had one back at the roominghouse. When the little scaly devils first began showing their vile films of her, she’d worn the hat a lot. With its front edge pulled low over her features, she was hardly recognizable.
Now, though, she walked through the streets andhutungs of Peking bareheaded and unashamed. A man leered at her as she left the Small Market. “Beware of revolutionary justice,” she hissed. The fellow fell back in confusion. Liu Han walked on.
The little scaly devils had one of their movie machines playing on a streetcorner. There, bigger than life, Liu Han rode astride Bobby Fiore, her skin and his slick with sweat. The main thing that struck her, looking at her somewhat younger self, was how well fed and well rested she seemed. She shrugged. She hadn’t been committed to the revolutionary cause yet.
A man looked from the three-dimensional image to her. He pointed. Liu Han pointed back at him, as if her finger were the barrel of a gun. He found something else to do-and found it in a hurry.
Liu Han kept walking. The little devils were still doing their best to discredit her, but they were also coming back to the negotiating table, and coming back to talk about all subjects. As far as she was concerned, that represented victory.
The year before, the little scaly devils hadn’t been so willing to talk. The year before that, they hadn’t talked at all, just swept all before them. Life was harder now for them than it had been, and they were starting to see that it might grow harder yet. She smiled. She hoped it would.
New fish came into camp utterly confused, utterly dismayed. That amused David Nussboym, who, having survived his first few weeks, was no longer a new fish but azek amongzeks. He was still reckoned a political rather than a thief, but the guards and the NKVD men had stopped using on him the blandishments they aimed at so many Communists caught in the web of thegulag:
“You’re still eager to help the Party and the Soviet state, aren’t you? Then of course you’ll lie, you’ll spy, you’ll do whatever we say.” The words were subtler, sweeter, but that was what they meant.
To a Polish Jew, the Party and the Soviet state were more attractive than Hitler’sReich, but not much. Nussboym had taken to using broken Russian and Yiddish among his fellow prisoners and answering the guards only in Polish too fast and slangy for them to understand.
“That’s good,” Anton Mikhailov said admiringly after yet another guard went off scratching his head at Nussboym’ s replies. “Keep it up and after a while they’ll quit bothering you because they’ll figure they won’t be able to get any sense out of you anyway.”
“Sense?” Nussboym rolled his eyes. “If you crazy Russians wanted sense, you never would have started these camps in the first place.”
“You think so, do you?” the otherzek answered. “Try building socialism without the coal they get from the camps, and the timber, without the railroadszeks build and without the canals we dig. Why, without camps, the whole damn country would fall apart.” He sounded as if he took a perverse pride in being part of such a vital and socially signflicant enterprise.
“Maybe it should fall apart, then,” Nussboym said. “These NKVD bastards work everybody the way the Nazis work Jews. I’ve seen both now, and there isn’t much to choose between them.” He thought a moment. “No, I take that back. These are just labor camps. You don’t have the kind of assembly-line murder the Nazis had started up just before the Lizards got there.”
“Why murder a man when you can work him to death?” Mikhailov asked. “It’s-what’s the word I want? — it’s inefficient, that’s what it is.”
“This-what we do here-you call this efficient?” Nussboym exclaimed. “You could train chimpanzees to do this.”
The Russian thief shook his head. “Chimpanzees would fall over dead, Nussboym. They couldn’t make ’em stand it. Their hearts would break and they’d die. They call ’em dumb animals, but they’re smart enough to know when things are hopeless-and that’s more than you can say about people.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Nussboym said. “Look what they’ve got us doing now, these barracks we’re making.”
“Don’t you bitch about this work,” Mikhailov said. “Rudzutak was damn lucky to get it for our gang; it’s a hell of a lot easier than going out to the forest and chopping down trees in the snow. This way you go back to your bunk half dead, not all the way.”
“I’m not arguing about that,” Nussboym said impatiently. Sometimes he wondered if he was a one-eyed man in the country of the blind. “Have you paid any attention to what we’re building, though?”
Mikhailov looked around and shrugged. “It’s a barracks. It’s going up according to plan. The guards haven’t said boo. As long as they’re happy, I don’t care. If they wanted me to make herring boats, I wouldn’t complain about that, either. I’d make herring boats.”
Nussboym threw down his hammer in exasperation. “Would you make herring boats that didn’t hold herring?”
“Careful with that,” his partner warned. “You break a tool and the guards will give you a stomping whether they can talk to you or not. They figure everybody understands a boot in the ribs, and they’re mostly right. Would I make herring boats that didn’t hold herring? Sure. If that’s what they told me to do. You think I’m the one to tell ’em they’re wrong? Do I look crazy?”
That sort of keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you’re-told attitude had existed in the Lodz ghetto. It didn’t just exist in thegulags, it dominated. Nussboym felt like yelling, “But the Emperor has no clothes!” Instead, he picked up the hammer and drove a couple of nails into the frame of the bunk bed on which he and Mikhailov were working. He hit the nails as hard as he could, trying to relieve some of his frustration that way.