Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station
was Peter, sound asleep in a chair. She felt so infinitely relieved at
seeing him that she could have kissed him but she only tiptoed past and taped
the sheet to the wall.
When she turned, his eyes were open and no longer slanted. ”Busy night?”
she asked with a smile.
He grinned sleepily. ”You don’t miss much. You guessed?”
She nodded. ”Jenny was upset. I thought you could talk to her so I
knocked on your door.” Pointing to the itinerary she said, ”Turfan tomorrow,
the grasslands later.”
That woke him in a hurry. ”Thank God,” he said fervently, and sprang out
of his chair to look. ”Now we’re really in business,” he told her, removing a
memo pad from his pocket and beginning to copy it. ”Look, I’ve got to talk to
you—”
He stopped as Malcolm and then George strolled into the lobby, followed
a moment later by Joe Forbes. The doors to the dining room opened; Iris rushed
in after them, upsetting a chair before she could sit down, and as Mrs.
Pollifax began to attack roasted peanuts again with chopsticks Jenny walked in,
her eyes still pink-rimmed, and across the table Peter winked at her. Another
day had begun.
It was a crowded day. Although Peter remained upright and interested
during the tours, Mrs. Pollifax was amused to notice how he dozed off during
the tea-and-briefings. There were a number of these today because they preceded
each inspection of a factory, and the scene was always the same: a bare
utilitarian room with a photograph of Mao on the wall, a long table lined with
tea cups in which lay dubious brittle twigs over which a young woman would pour
boiling water from a thermos. Following an interval of five or ten minutes the
tea would sink to the bottom of the cup so that the brew could be sipped
without acquiring a mouth full of twigs, and the foreman or cadre would begin
his talk about the factory or the workshop, halting frequently for Mr. Kan or
Mr. Li to translate his words into English. When this had been done, questions
were eagerly awaited. George usually wanted to know about machinery and
methods, Joe Forbes asked for production figures and annoyingly checked them
out on paper looking for flaws, and then Iris would begin. Mrs. Pollifax found
it hilarious to watch the change in Iris when her turn came: her face lost all
of its liveliness and every vestige of humor, as if knowledge was a matter too
sacred for lightness. She turned deeply serious, the Conscientious Student
personified in her pursuit of how women lived, what they ate and earned; her
questions had a rooted intelligence behind them but they came out absurdly
muddled.
Malcolm, with a quizzical twist to his brows, murmured, ”Do you suppose
there’s a masters’ thesis involved here somewhere?” Jenny’s lips thinned
angrily while Peter simply dozed and missed it all.
It was during the visit to the carpet factory that Mrs. Pollifax found
Peter alone at last. George was determined to buy a rug in China and have
it shipped home, and he was not a man to be cheated. While the others stood
around listening and yawning and sprawled across piles of rugs, Mrs. Pollifax
slipped away, her interest in carpets depleted.
Wandering outside she found Peter restlessly pacing up and down the
alley, pausing to run his eyes over a huge chalkboard on which words had been
printed in pink and white chalk. ”Mao’s thoughts for the day,” he said, turning
to her. ”Thanks for getting Turfan fixed up so quickly. I hear that originally
it was to be last, so you’ve really saved the day.”
She waved this aside impatiently. ”Where did you go last night?”
”Let’s sit on the steps,” he suggested. ”I hiked. Walked and walked and
walked. For one thing I found the Army barracks— bless Guo Musu for putting that on the map—and this gave me a bearing on where the labor camp has to be.”
She stared at him, appalled. ”But you must have walked miles!”
”Yes of course—walked, jogged, ran. All of it in total darkness,
naturally, but there was only the one road to follow and I managed to stay on
it. It was a pretty close connection, though, I didn’t get back here until six
this morning. But I also found a river, and it just has to be the one
that flows past and around X’s labor camp—I plan to follow it tonight and see.”
She shivered. ”If you find the camp will you try to make contact with
X?”
”Good Lord no, just get the lay of the land,” he said flatly. ”I won’t try
to reach X
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