But as the days went by, as she tramped through the Chinese countryside, one of uncounted thousands of people going along the dirt tracks, she did begin to feel safe, or at least safe from the little scaly devils. She still saw them now and again: soldiers in their vehicles, or sometimes marching on foot and looking no more happy about it than human troops. Every so often, one would turn an eye turret her way, but only idly, or perhaps warily, to make sure she was not a danger to him. But to them, she was just another Big Ugly, not a subject for study. What a relief that was!
And now Peking. Peiping-Northern Peace-it had been renamed, but no one paid much attention to that. Peking it had been, Peking it was, and Peking it would remain.
Liu Han had never seen a walled city before; the closest to such a thing she’d known was the razor wire around the camp in which the little devils had confined her while waiting for her to give birth. But Peking’s walls, in the shape of a square perched atop a broader rectangle, ran for almost forty-fiveli around the perimeter of the city; further internal walls separated the square-the Tartar City-from the rectangle-the Chinese City.
Broad streets ran north and south, east and west, paralleling the walls. The little scaly devils controlled those streets, at least to the point of being able to travel on them by day or night. Between the avenues, there twisted innumerablehutungs — lanes-where the bulk of the city lived its life. The little scaly devils took their lives in their little clawed hands when they went along thehutungs. They knew it, too, so they seldom went there.
Ironically, prison camp had been Liu Han’s best preparation for life in bustling, crowded Peking. Had she come straight from her village, she would have been altogether at sea. But the camp had been a fair-sized city in its own right, and readied her to deal with a great one.
She quickly had to learn how to get around in the Chinese City, for the Communists kept shifting her from one dingy lodging house to another, to throw off any possible pursuit from the little devils. One day they took her to a place not far from the Ch’ien Men, the Western Gate. As she came in, one of the men sitting around and talking over rice spoke a few syllables that were not Chinese. Liu Han recognized them anyway.
She broke away from her escort and walked up to the man. He was a few years older than she, compact, clever-looking. “Excuse me,” she said, politely lowering her eyes, “but did I hear you speak the name of a foreign devil called Bobby Fiore?”
“What if you did, woman?” the man answered. “How do you know this foreign devil’s name?”
“I-knew him in the scaly devils’ prison camp west of Shanghai,” Liu Han said hesitantly. She did not go on to explain that she had borne Bobby Fiore’s child; now that she was fully among her own people once more, having lain with a foreign devil seemed shameful to her.
“You know him?” The man’s eyes raked her. “Are you then the woman he had at that camp? Your name would be-” He looked up to the ceiling for a moment, riffling through papers in his mind. “Liu Han, that was it.”
“Yes, I am Liu Han,” she said. “You must have known him well, if he spoke to you of me.” That Bobby Fiore had spoken of her left her touched. He’d treated her well, but she’d always wondered if she was anything more than an enjoyable convenience to him. With a foreign devil, who could say?
“I was there when he died-you know he is dead?” the man said. When Liu Han nodded, the man went on, “I am Nieh Ho-T’ing. I tell you this, and tell you truly: he died well, fighting against the little scaly devils. He was brave; by doing what he did, he helped me and several others escape them.”
Tears came into Liu Han’s eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. “They brought his picture-his picture dead-to me in the camp. I knew he died in Shanghai, but not how. He hated the little devils. I am glad he had revenge.” Her hands curled into fists. “I wish I could.”
Nieh Ho-T’ing studied her. He was an alert, thoughtful-looking man, with the controlled movements and watchful eyes that said he was probably a soldier. He said, “Do I remember right? You were going to have a child.”
“I had it-a girl,” she answered. If Nieh thought she was a slut for bedding Bobby Fiore, he didn’t show it. That by itself was enough to earn her gratitude. She continued, “You may know the little scaly devils do things to try to understand how real people work. They took my baby from me when it was just three days old, and they keep it for themselves.”
“This is a great wickedness,” Nieh said seriously. He looked up at the ceiling again. “Liu Han, Liu Han…” When they swung back to her, his eyes had brightened. “You are the woman who learned the scaly devils had machines that could see heat.”
“Yes-they used one of those machines on me, to help see inside my womb before the baby was born,” Liu Han said. “I thought they would use it for other things as well.”
“And you were right,” Nieh Ho-T’ing told her, his voice full of enthusiasm. “We have used this to give us a tactical advantage several times already.” Hewas a soldier, then. He went back from tactics to her. “But if you want revenge against the little scaly devils for their heartless oppression and exploitation of you, you shall have your chance to get it.”
Not just a soldier, a Communist. She easily recognized the rhetoric now. It came as no surprise: the poultry seller, after all, had been a Communist, and passed on her information to his comrades. If the Communists were best at resisting the scaly devils, then she didn’t see anything wrong with them. And she owed those little devils so much. If Nieh Ho-T’ing would help her get her own back… “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.
Nieh smiled.
Razor wire. Huts. Cots. Cabbage. Beets. Potatoes. Black bread. The Lizards no doubt intended it to be a prison camp to break a man’s spirit. After the privations of the Warsaw ghetto, it felt more like a holiday resort to Mordechai Anielewicz. As gaolers, the Lizards were amateurs. The food, for instance, was plain and boring, but the Lizards didn’t seem to have thought of cutting back the quantity.
Mordechai felt on holiday for another reason as well. He’d been a leader of fighting men for a long time: of Jews against Nazis, of Jews for the Lizards. Then he’d been a fugitive, and then a simple partisan. Now the other shoe had dropped: he was a prisoner, and didn’t need to worry about getting captured.
In their own way, the Lizards were humane. When the Germans captured partisans, they shot them without further ado-or sometimes with further ado, if they felt like trying to squeeze out information before granting the grace of a bullet. But the Lizards had taken him and Jerzy and Friedrich across Poland to a POW camp outside Piotrkow, south of Lodz.
No one here had the slightest idea who he was. He answered to Shmuel, not to his own name. As far as Friedrich and Jerzy knew, he was just a Jew who’d fought in their band. Nobody asked a would-be partisan probing questions about his past. Even in the camp, the freedom of anonymity was exhilarating.
One morning after roll call, a Lizard guard official read from a list: “The following Tosevites will fall out for interrogation-” His Polish was bad, and what he did to the pronunciation of Anielewicz’s alias a caution.
Nonetheless, Mordechai fell out without a qualm. They’d already interrogated him two or three times. To them, interrogation meant nothing worse than asking questions. They knew about torture, but the idea appalled them. There were times when Anielewicz savored the irony of that. They hadn’t even questioned him particularly hard. To them, he was just another Big Ugly caught with a rifle in his hands.
He started to sweat as soon as he went into the wooden shed the Lizards used for their camp headquarters. That had nothing to do with fear; the Lizards heated their buildings to their own comfort level, which felt to him like the Sahara.