Narcopolis

Chapter Five ‘Light me a cigarette’

He told Dimple he had been thirty-eight when his life changed in a way he could never have foreseen. That year, at a banquet in Peking, he found himself seated beside a slender woman whose hair was curled in the new style. She wore a plum-coloured suit with white lapels and she accompanied a navy commissar who chain-smoked unfiltered foreign cigarettes. Early in the evening the commissar switched to brandy and soon he became silent and unexpectedly agile for such a heavy man. He told the waiters to replenish the teapot and the wine and water glasses. He spoke only when giving orders; he didn’t converse with his dinner companions. Then, his elbow slipped off the table and he spilled the slender woman’s wine. A deep stain spread across the tablecloth and the commissar watched in fascination, as if it were the stain of communism itself, the unstoppable stain that had spread across the world and dyed it the colour of blood. The woman — or girl, since he thought she couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one — picked up the glass and placed it beside her untouched plate. She refilled it with a little wine and took a sip. Then she asked Lee to help her with the commissar. They took the man to a room above the banqueting hall, where the girl put him to bed and took off his shoes. He was already asleep. The girl smoothed her skirt over her hips as she regarded the man on the bed. She sighed in an exaggerated way and put her hands on her waist and didn’t look at Lee. She said: The first Ming, Tai Zong, drew up a list of capital offences for government officials that included such things as the formation of cliques and flattery. Public drunkenness too was a capital offence. Do you know what the punishment was? The official was flayed and his skin was stuffed with straw and installed in a government building to serve as a warning to other officials. She sighed once more in a slow, theatrical way and it must have felt good, because she did it again. She said: Light me a cigarette if you’re going to stare like that. Lee did as he was told. She stood in the middle of the room and blew smoke at the ceiling. He thought: Even her silence is expressive, even the inhaling and blowing out of smoke. See how animated she is. Is she an actress? Is it too bold a question to ask? Before he could say anything, she led the way back to the banqueting hall, then, some time afterwards, she left the table and didn’t return. A few days later he saw her wheeling her bicycle into the commissariat compound. She had her hair up in a bun and she was wearing work pyjamas. She looked very different from the girl with the cigarette whose image had taken up residence in his head. He went to her and blurted the truth, that he had brought something for her. She seemed so disoriented that he wondered if she knew who he was. He gave her a carton of cigarettes, half a cooked chicken and some stalks of sugar cane. She looked towards the compound and hesitated for a moment before putting the gifts into a carrier bag on her bicycle. She said, I am twenty-three years of age. I’m not interested in being a kept woman. Thank you for the gifts, she added, speaking so solemnly that he wondered if he had displeased her in some way. He watched as she pushed her bicycle towards the commissariat. Was she telling him to leave her alone? Did she think he wanted to pay her for sex? The idea put a ball of fear in his stomach. Then it occurred to him that she was saying something very different. She didn’t want to be a kept woman: she wanted to be his wife. This idea also filled him with fear. She was a kind of classical Chinese heroine, a prototypical leader, and she wanted to be his wife. It was hard to believe. He had to talk to someone, someone senior whose advice he could trust. The next morning, unrested, he went to the administrative governor of the region, his boss, Wei Kuo-ching. Wei wasn’t alone and Lee asked permission to marry in the presence of his boss’s colleagues. What is the woman’s name? asked his boss. Lee didn’t know. He described her and how they had met. Oh, said the administrative governor, you mean Pang Mei, Commissar Hu’s assistant. The older man clapped Lee on the shoulder and told him to go ahead if that was what he wanted. Then he said, I hope you know there’s no need for such a drastic step.

*