In the Balance

The explosions moved farther away, on toward the village. Awkwardly, robe clinging to, her arms and legs and hindering her every motion, she swam back to the bank, staggered out onto land once more. No point drying herself now, not when her damp towel was covered with earth. She automatically picked it up and started home, praying again to the Amida Buddha that her home still stood.

Bomb craters pocked the fields. Here and there, men and women lay beside them, torn and twisted in death. The dirt road, Liu saw, was untouched; the bombers had left it intact for the Japanese army to use.

She wished for a cigarette. she’d had a pack of Babies in her pocket, but they were soaked now. Water dripped from her hair into her eyes. When she saw columns of smoke rising into the sky, she, began to run. Her sandals went flap-squelch, flap-squelch against her feet. Ahead, in the direction of the village, she heard shouts and screams, but with her ears still ringing she could not make out words.

People stared as she ran up. Even in the midst of disaster, her first thought was embarrassment at the way the wet cloth of her robe molded itself to her body. Even the small swellings of her nipples were plainly visible. “Paying to see a woman’s body” was a euphemism for visiting a whore. No one so much as had to pay to see Liu’s.

But in the chaos that followed the Japanese air attack, a mere woman’s body proved a small concern. Absurdly, some of the people in the village, instead of being terrified and filled with dread like Liu, capered about as if in celebration. She called, “Has everyone here gone crazy, Old Sun?”

“No, no,” the tailor shouted back. “Do you know what the eastern devils’ bombs did? Can you guess?” An enormous grin showed his almost-toothless gums.

“I would say they missed everything, but…” Liu paused, gestured at the rising smoke. “I see that cannot be so.”

“Almost as good.” Old Sun hugged himself with glee. “No, even better-nearly all their bombs fell right on the yamen.”

“The yamen?” Liu gaped, then started to laugh herself. “Oh, what a pity!” The walled enclosure of the yamen housed the county head’s residence, his audience hail, the jail, the court that sent people there, the treasury, and other government departments. Tang Wen Lan, the county head, was notoriously corrupt, as were most of his clerks, secretaries, and servants.

“Isn’t it sad. I think I’ll go home and put on white for Tang’s funeral,” Old Sun said.

“He’s dead?” Liu exclaimed. “I thought a man as wicked as that would live forever.”

“He’s dead,” Old Sun said positively. “The ghost Life-Is-Transient is taking him to the next world right now-if death’s messenger can find enough pieces to carry. One bomb landed square on the office where he was taking bribes. No one will squeeze us any more. How sad, how terrible!” His elastic features twisted into a mask of mirthful mourning that belonged in a pantomime show.

Yi Min, the local apothecary, was less sanguine than Old Sun. “Wait until the eastern dwarfs come. The Japanese will make stupid dead Tang Wen Lan seem like a prince of generosity. He had to leave us enough rice to get through to next year so he could squeeze us again. The Japanese will keep it all for themselves. They don’t care whether we live or die.”

Too much of China had learned that, to its sorrow. However rapacious and inept the government of Chiang Kai-shek had proved itself, places under Japanese rule suffered worse. For one thing, as Yi Min had said, the invaders took for themselves first and left only what they did not want to the Chinese they con-trolled. For another, while they were rapacious, they were not inept. Like locusts, when they swept a province clean of rice, they swept it clean.

Liu said, “Shall we run away, then?”

“A peasant without his plot is nothing,” Old Sun said. “If I am to starve, I would sooner starve at home than somewhere on the road far from my ancestors’ graves.”

Several other villagers agreed. Yi Min said, “But what if it is a choice between living on the road and dying by the graves of your ancestors? What then, Old Sun?”

While the two men argued, Liu Han walked on into the village. Sure enough, it was as Old Sun had said. The yamen was a smoking ruin, its walls smashed down here and there as if by a giant’s kicks. The flagpole had been broken like a broomstraw; the Kuomintang flag, white star in a blue field on red, lay crumpled in the dirt.

Through a gap in the wrecked wall, Liu Han stared in at Tang Wen Lan’s office. If the county head had been in there when the bomb landed, Old Sun was surely right in thinking him dead. Nothing was left of the building but a hole in the ground and some thatch blown off the roof.