“I do not want to let people know what I am doing,” she answered. As she shut the door behind him, she laughed a little before going on. “I think I would leave it open if you were Hsia Shou-Tao.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Nieh Ho-T’ing asked, a little more sharply than her comment deserved.
“You know why perfectly well, or you should,” Liu Han said, irritated at his obtuseness.Men! she thought. “All he wants to do is see my body”-a euphemism for doing other things with it than merely seeing it.
Nieh said, “That is not all Hsia Shou-Tao wants. He is a committed people’s revolutionary, and has risked much to free the workers and peasants from the oppression first of the upper classes and then of the scaly devils.” He coughed. “He is also fond of women, perhaps too fond. I have spoken to him about this.”
“Have you?” Liu Han said, pleased. That was more action than she’d expected. “Men usually look the other way when their comrades take advantage of women.”
“Er-yes.” Nieh paced around the chamber, which did not have a lot of room for pacing. Liu Han took her spare clothes off the table. Nieh not only knew what she was doing, he had started her on the project He came over and examined what she’d done. “You form your characters more fluidly than you did when you began,” he said. “You may not have the smooth strokes of a calligrapher, but anyone who read this would think you had been writing for years.”
“I have worked hard,” Liu Han said, a truth that applied to her entire life.
“Your labor is rewarded,” he told her.
She didn’t think he had come to her room for no other reason than to compliment her on her handwriting. Usually, though, when he had something to say, he came out and said it. He would have called anything else bourgeois shilly-shallying… most of the time. What, then, was he keeping to himself?
Liu Han started to laugh. The sound made Nieh jump. She laughed harder. “What do you find funny?” he asked, his voice brittle.
“You,” she said, for a moment seeing only the man and not the officer of the People’s Liberation Army. “When I complained about Hsia Shou-Tao, that left you in a complicated place, didn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?” he demanded. But he knew, he knew. She could tell by the way he paced again, harder than ever, and by the way he would not look at her.
She almost did not answer him, not directly. A proper Chinese woman was quiet, submissive, and, if she ever thought about desire between woman and man, did not openly say so. But Liu Han had been through too much to care about propriety-and, in any case, the Communists talked a great deal about equality of all sorts, including that between the sexes.Let’s see if they mean what they say, she thought.
“I’m talking about you-and about me,” she answered. “Or didn’t you come up here now to see if you could get down on the mattress with me?”
Nieh Ho-T’ing stared at her. She laughed again. For all he preached, for all the Communists preached, down deep he was still a man and a Chinese. She’d expected nothing different, and so was not disappointed.
But, unlike most Chinese men, he did have some idea that his prejudices were just prejudices, not laws of nature. The struggle on his face was a visible working out of-what did he call it? — the dialectic, that’s what the word was. The thesis was his old, traditional, not truly questioned belief, the antithesis his Communist ideology, and the synthesis-she watched to see what the synthesis would be.
“What if I did?” he said at last, sounding much less stern than he had moments before.
What if he did? Now she had to think about that. She hadn’t lain with anyone since Bobby Fiore-and Nieh, in a way, had been responsible for Bobby Fiore’s death. But it wasn’t as if he’d murdered him, only that he’d put him in harm’s way, as an officer had a right to do with a soldier he commanded. On the scales, that balanced.
What about the rest? If she let him bed her, she might gain influence over him that way. But if they quarreled afterwards, she would lose not only that influence but also what she’d gained through her own good sense. She’d won solid respect for that; the project for which she was writing her endless slips had been her own idea, after all. There, too, the scales balanced.
Which left her one very basic question: did she want him? He was not a bad-looking man; he had strength and self-confidence aplenty. What did that add up to?Not enough she decided with more than a twinge of regret.
“If I let a man take me to the mattress now,” she said, “it will be because I want him, not because he wants me. That is not enough. Never again will that be enough for me to lie with anyone.” She shuddered, remembering the time with Yi Min, the village apothecary, after the little scaly devils captured them both-and even worse times with men whose names she never knew, up in the little devils’ airplane that never came down. Bobby Fiore had won her heart there simply by being something less than brutal. She never wanted to sink so low again.
She hadn’t directly refused Nieh, not quite. She waited, more than a little anxious, to see if he’d understood what she’d told him. He smiled crookedly. “I will not trouble you any more about this, then,” he said.
“Having a man interested in me is not a trouble,” Liu Han said. She recalled how worried she’d been when her husband-before the Japanese came, before the scaly devils came and turned the world upside down-had wanted nothing to do with her while she was carrying their child. That had been a bleak and lonely time. Even so-“When a man does not listen when you say you do not want him, that is trouble.”
“What you say makes good sense,” Nieh answered. “We can still further the revolution together, even if not in congress.”
She liked him very much then, almost enough to change her mind. She’d never known-truth to tell, she’d never imagined-a man who could joke after she’d turned him down. “Yes, we are still comrades,” she said earnestly. “I want that.”I need that, she did not add, not for him to hear. Aloud she went on, “Now you know the difference between yourself and Hsia Shou-Tao.”
“I knew that difference a long time ago,” he said. “Hsia, too, is still a revolutionary, though. Do not think otherwise. No one is perfect, or even good, in all ways.”
“That is so.” Liu Han clapped her hands. “I have an idea. Listen to me: we should arrange to have our beast-show men give a couple of exhibitions for the little scaly devils where nothing goes wrong-they simply give their shows and leave. That will tell us how well the little devils search their cages and equipment and will also make the scaly devils feel safer about letting beast shows into the buildings they use.”
“I have had pieces of this thought myself,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said slowly, “but you give reasons for doing it more clearly than I had thought of them. I will discuss it with Hsia. You may talk with him about it, too, of course. It may even interest him enough to keep his mind off wanting to see your body.”
His smile said he was joking again, but not altogether. Liu Han nodded; as he’d said, Hsiawas a dedicated revolutionary, and a good enough idea for hurting the scaly devils would draw his attention away from fleshly matters… for a while.
Liu Han said, “If he likes the notion well enough, it will only make him want me more, because he will think someone who comes up with a good idea is desirable just on account of that.”
She laughed. After a moment, so did Nieh Ho-T’ing. He found an excuse to leave very soon after that. Liu Han wondered if he was angry at her in spite of what he’d said. Had he done what she’d said Hsia would do: decided he wanted her not so much because of the woman she was as in admiration of her ideas for the struggle against the little scaly devils?