Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

chocolate... the
supposition she had drawn still shocked her.
    But as she slipped into her robe and headed for bed she knew there was
still another, even more shocking suspicion that she had consigned to the
periphery of her thoughts, not allowing it entry, stubbornly resisting it
because if she brought it out and looked at it, she would understand Bishop’s
fears for her. Turning out the lights she once again refused it entry and
succeeded in pushing it far enough away to fall asleep at once.

Chapter Four
     
    I n the morning Iris made her appearance in jeans, and after faithfully
escorting her downstairs Mrs. Pollifax could see that emotional support would
no longer be needed: Jenny whistled, Malcolm gave her a second calm glance, and
George Westrum’s eyes rested on her with a glow that Mrs. Pollifax hoped Iris
noticed, but doubted that she did; Joe Forbes murmured, ”Well, now,” and even
Peter Fox looked mildly appreciative. It was true that at breakfast Iris tipped
a plate of peanuts into her lap, with half of them cascading to the floor, but—as
Jenny cheerfully pointed out—peanuts were easier to recover than spilled beer.
Iris, thought Mrs. Pollifax, was in danger of being assigned the role of comic
in the group.
    At breakfast and again at lunch Mrs. Pollifax pursued her responsibility
of listing for Mr. Li what each person particularly wanted to see, and in this
she found no surprises: Joe Forbes wanted to visit a university, Jenny the
second-grade class in a school, and George listed only communes. Malcolm’s
priorities were more numerous and entirely cultural. Young Peter repeated his
request for a side trip to the village where his grandmother was born, while
Iris wanted to see the Chinese Opera but especially the Ban Po Village Museum
in Xian because the artifacts reflected a Neolithic society run by women eight
thousand years ago. Women’s Lib again. For herself, Mrs. Pollifax wrote down
the Drum Tower in Xian and hoped no one would ask
why. After consulting her guidebook she added the Bell Tower for camouflage, and any Buddhist temples.
    But Guangzhou , or Canton , she found, was mainly a waiting game.
She enjoyed their trip to the bank to exchange travelers’ checks for tourist
scrip: she watched in fascination as four clerks hovered over her money,
carefully checking the amount on an abacus. But tourist money, Mr. Li told
them, could not be spent on the streets, at the bazaars, or free markets, only
in the government-run shops.
    Mrs. Pollifax at once rose to this challenge. ”How can I get real
money?” she asked him, thinking ahead to possible exigencies, and was told that
the Friendship Stores would no doubt give real Chinese currency in change,
whereupon she promptly asked for large denominations of tourist scrip,
determined to collect as many of the authentic bills as she could. ”My new hobby,”
she told Malcolm cheerfully.
    Aside from this, the Dr. Sun Yet-sen Memorial charmed her with its
gorgeously intense blue-laquered tiles, but it smelled musty inside,- she
obediently oh-d and ah-d at the pandas in the zoo, but the heat there at midday
nearly felled her, and once again they lunched on the second floor of a
restaurant, with the natives on the street floor below.
    Only once was she fully startled out of her lingering jet-lag apathy.
With an unexpected half hour of time confronting Mr. Tung, he offered them a
pleasant stroll down a suburban road that held a mixture of older buildings
among the brand-new scaffold-laced structures. One building in particular
caught Mrs. Pollifax’s eye, creamy-white against the dull cement facade of its
neighbors, and of an architecture that she could only identify in her mind as
tropical-colonial. Graceful arched windows, each one trimmed in a tender green,
were set like jewels into the smooth creamy walls. Next to an open green door
hung a vertical sign, and Mrs. Pollifax brought out her small camera and took a
picture of the charming vignette: a courtyard, a door, a leafy green tree, a
donkey cart parked next to the door.
    ”What does the sign say?” she called to Mr. Tung, pointing.
    Moving to her side he looked at it. ”People’s Security Bureau,” he said,
and abruptly turned away, his face expressionless.
    People’s Security Bureau... the Sepos, she remembered from her reading,
and she wondered if, since Mao’s death, the Sepos still knocked on doors at
midnight to take people away, or whether the new order had changed this.