Upsetting the Balance

It was not the proper attitude for a scientist, but then again, a proper scientist got enough sleep.

Liu Han’s breasts ached with milk. She’d earned money and food as a wet nurse on her way to Peking, but for the past day and a half she hadn’t found anyone with a baby that needed to nurse. If she didn’t come on one soon, she’d have to squeeze out some milk by hand. She hated to waste it that way, but being so painfully full was no delight, either.

Sometimes, when she was worn and hungry and her feet felt as if they couldn’t take another step, she almost wished she was back in the camp. She’d had plenty to eat there, and not much to do. But she’d also had the little scaly devils spying on everything she did, and finally stealing her baby. Even if it was a girl, it washers.

Getting away from camp hadn’t been easy. Not only did the little devils have cameras mounted inside the hut, they also frequently followed her when she went out and about-and she could hardly walk through the gates in the razor wire. No human walked out through those gates.

If it hadn’t been for the poultry seller who was a Communist, she never would have got out. One day when he was shutting up his stall, he said to her, “Come with me. I’d like you to meet my sister.”

She didn’t think the hut to which he’d taken her was his own; that would have been too dangerous. In it sat a woman who probably was not the poultry seller’s sister. She wore her hair in a short bob, as Liu Han did, and was of about the same age and build.

The poultry seller turned his back on them. The woman said, “Oh, Liu Han, I love your clothes so much. Will you trade them for mine, right down to your sandals and underwear?”

Liu Han had stared down at herself for a moment, wondering if the woman was out of her mind. “These rags?” she said. The “sister” nodded emphatically. Then Liu Han understood. The scaly devils were very good at making small things. They might have put some of those small things in her clothes, even in her drawers, to keep track of where she was.

She undressed without bothering to see whether the poultry seller peeked at her. So many men had seen her body that her modesty had taken a severe beating. And anyhow, so soon after childbirth, her body, she was sure, hadn’t been one to rouse a man’s lust.

When the exchange was complete, the poultry seller had turned around and said to the other woman, “I will take you back to your own home, Liu Han.” He turned to Liu Han. “Sister, you wait here for me. I will be back soon.”

Wait Liu Han did, marveling at his gall. She knew the scaly devils had trouble telling one person from another. If the poultry seller’s “sister” dressed like her, they might think she was Liu Han, at least for a while. And while they were fooled…

As he’d promised, the poultry seller had soon returned. He took Liu Han through deepening twilight to another hut that was bare but for mats on the floor. “Now we wait again,” he said. Twilight had given way to night. The camp fell as nearly silent as it ever did.

She’d expected him to demand her body, lumpy from childbirth though it was. She’d even made up her mind not to protest; he was, after all, risking his life to help her, and deserved such thanks as she could give. But he made no advances; he used the time to talk of the paradise China would become when Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists freed it from the scaly devils, the eastern devils from Japan, the foreign devils, and its native oppressors. If a quarter of what he said was true, no one would recognize the country after a generation of new rule.

At last, he’d unrolled a mat near one wall. It concealed a wooden trapdoor that he’d slid aside. “Go down this tunnel,” he said. “Keep going ahead, no matter what. Someone will be waiting for you at the far end.”

She’d quaked like bamboo stalks when the wind blew through them. Bobby Fiore had gone down a tunnel like this, and he’d never come back; he’d ended up lying in a pool of his own blood on a Shanghai street. But down the wooden ladder she’d climbed, and then on hands and knees through damp and the smell of earth and blackness so perfect and intense, it seemed to close in on her until she wanted to huddle where she was and wait for it to swallow her.

But on and on she’d crawled, and at last she came to a rock barring the way. When she pushed it aside, it fell with a splash into an irrigation ditch and she could see again. “Come on,” a voice hissed to her. “This way.”

Liu Han had done her best to go “this way,” but, like the stone, she fell into the ditch. She stood up, wet and dripping, and staggered in the direction from which the voice had come. A hand reached out to pull her onto dry land. “That’s not so bad,” her rescuer whispered. “The cold water will make it harder for the scaly devils to see your heat.”

At first she’d just nodded. Then, though the night breeze on her dripping clothes left her shivering, she drew herself up very straight.