Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

jacket and cap,” she told him. ”Wait till you
see me then!”
    ”You wish such purchases?” asked Miss Bai, overhearing her. ”I will
arrange for a visit to a department store tomorrow.”
    ”Wonderful,” breathed Jenny. ”Thanks!”
    Xian was the color of the mountains they’d flown over, terra-cotta and
dusty, with patches of green only in the long lines of newly planted poplar
trees and in an occasional rice field. New cement apartment houses were being
built, but they were windowless and unfinished, still outnumbered by the old
walled compounds along the road and the tiny mud-and-straw homes glimpsed
behind them. Their bus drove toward the city through pedestrians and
bicyclists, constantly sounding its horn. Entering Xian the landscape changed,
the buildings drew closer together, they met with billboards lining each
intersection where once Mao’s thoughts must have been inscribed but which now
advertised soap and toilet paper and toothpaste.
    This time their hotel sat squarely in the center of town on a busy
street. In Canton there had been lingering traces of the European influence, but here the
architecture was Russian, a massive square hotel built of gray cement with a
wall and a sentry at the gate. The Chinese spirit had asserted itself, however,
with a huge scarlet sign on which gold letters in Chinese and English
proclaimed The
Theoretical Basis Guiding Our Thinking Is Marxism And Leninism. Mao Tse-Tung.
    Iris regarded this in despair. ”I’ve not read Marx,” she cried.
”What was his approach to women?”
    ”Cautious,” said Malcolm.
    ”I’ll bet yours is, too,” Jenny told him.
    ”Naturally,” he said, ”or I’d not be a bachelor.”
    ”Are you really!” Jenny exclaimed happily. ”Not even one very little marriage somewhere?”
    Mrs. Pollifax gave Jenny a sharp glance. On the surface she thought
Jenny insouciant and lively, yet she’d begun to notice a strange bite to her
words. It was present when she mocked Iris’ clumsiness, and it was in the tone
of her voice now, a curious recklessness, a sense of trying too hard. There
is a suggestion of desperation here, she thought, and wondered why.
    Mr. Li interrupted her speculations with an announcement. Dinner, he
said, would be served in twenty minutes, and he pointed to the building where
it would be served, and for the evening, if they wished, they could stroll to
the People’s Park together while he and Miss Bai worked out their schedule for
Xian. Next he explained that there were no keys to the rooms at the People’s
Hotel—there was no need for keys—and he read out their room numbers.
    ”I don’t like there being no keys,” Jenny complained as they climbed the
stairs to the floor above.
    ”I think,” said Mrs. Pollifax, ”one has to bear in mind that the hotel
is run by the government, and there’s a soldier on duty at the entrance, and as
you can see,” she added as they reached the second floor, ”there’s a chap at a
desk to check people.”
    ”But there are so many workers here,” Jenny protested.
    Malcolm fielded that one. ”Plum job, my dear. If it even occurred to one
of them to steal something—doubtful—where would they sell it? Don’t be so
suspicious,” he chided, adding dryly, ”this isn’t America , you know. Who’s for that
stroll after dinner, by the way?”
    After one look at her room Mrs. Pollifax decided very firmly to opt for
the walk to People’s Park. She could not conceive of an evening spent in a room
so small, so unbelievably dark and hot,
with a tiny air-conditioner that made chuckling sounds when she turned it on.
She therefore set out with the others following dinner, and falling into step
beside Iris she asked how things
were going.
    Iris did not fail her. ”Oh isn’t it wonderful!” she cried turning
to face Mrs. Pollifax and very nearly falling over a stone in her path. ”I
asked Miss Bai what her first name is. I have it written down somewhere, but in
English it means Elder
Fragrance, isn’t that beautiful?”
    ”Really lovely, yes,” agreed Mrs. Pollifax, ”but I think you’d better
watch out for the holes in this sidewalk, Iris.”
    ”Okay. But what’s with this Peter Fox?” she asked. ”I sat next to him at
dinner and I don’t know when I’ve met anyone so grumpy—unless it was Stanley before he had his
morning coffee. Is he going to be a real wet blanket?”
    ”He may thaw, given time,” said Mrs. Pollifax generously. ”It seems