Striking the Balance

They haggled, but had trouble coming to an agreement. People watched them for a while, then went back to their own concerns when they didn’t prove very interesting. Lowering her voice, the carp seller said, “I have the word you were looking for, Comrade.”

“I hoped you would,” Liu Han answered eagerly. “Tell me.”

The woman looked around, her face nervous. “How you hear this must never be known,” she warned. “The little scaly devils have no idea my nephew understands their ugly language as well as he does-otherwise they would not talk so freely around him.”

“Yes, yes,” Liu Han said with an impatient gesture. “We have put many like that in among them. We do not betray our sources. Sometimes we have even held off from making a move because the little scaly devils would have been able to figure out where we got the information. So you may tell me and not worry-and if you think I will pay your stinking price for your stinking fish, you are a fool!” She added the last in a loud voice when a man walked by close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Why don’t you go away, then?” the carp seller shrilled. A moment later, she lowered her voice once more: “He says they will soon let the People’s Liberation Army know they are willing to resume talks on all subjects. He is only a clerk, remember; he cannot tell you what ‘all subjects’ means. You will know that for yourself, though, won’t you?”

“Eh? Yes, I think so,” Liu Han answered. If the scaly devils meant what they said, they would return to talking about giving her back her daughter. The girl would be approaching two years old now, by Chinese reckoning: one for the time she’d spent in Liu Han’s womb and the second for the time since her birth. Liu Han wondered what she looked like and how Ttomalss had been treating her. One day before too long, maybe, she’d find out.

“All right, I’ll buy it, even if you are a thief.” As if in anger, Liu Han slapped down coins and stalked away. Behind her angry facade, she was smiling. The carp seller was almost her own personal source of news; she didn’t think the woman knew many others from the People’s Liberation Army. She would get credit for bringing news of impending negotiations to the central committee.

With luck, that would probably be enough to ensure that she got her own seat on the committee. Nieh Ho-T’ing would back her now; she was sure of that. And, once she had her seat, she would support Nieh’s agenda-for a while. One of these days, though, she would have occasion to disagree with him. When she did, she’d have backing of her own.

She wondered how Nieh would take that. Would they be able to go on being lovers after they had political or ideological quarrels? She didn’t know. Of one thing she was sure: she needed a lover less than she had before. She was her own person now, well able to face the world on her own two feet without requiring a man’s support. Before the little scaly devils came, she hadn’t imagined such a thing possible.

She shook her head. Strange that all the suffering the little devils had put her through had led her not only to be independent but to think she ought to be independent. Without them, she would have been one of the uncounted peasant widows in war-torn China, trying to keep herself from starving and probably having to become a prostitute or a rich man’s concubine to manage it.

She passed by a man selling the conical straw hats both men and women wore to keep the sun off their faces. She had one back at the roominghouse. When the little scaly devils first began showing their vile films of her, she’d worn the hat a lot. With its front edge pulled low over her features, she was hardly recognizable.

Now, though, she walked through the streets andhutungs

of Peking bareheaded and unashamed. A man leered at her as she left the Small Market. “Beware of revolutionary justice,” she hissed. The fellow fell back in confusion. Liu Han walked on.

The little scaly devils had one of their movie machines playing on a streetcorner. There, bigger than life, Liu Han rode astride Bobby Fiore, her skin and his slick with sweat. The main thing that struck her, looking at her somewhat younger self, was how well fed and well rested she seemed. She shrugged. She hadn’t been committed to the revolutionary cause yet.

A man looked from the three-dimensional image to her. He pointed. Liu Han pointed back at him, as if her finger were the barrel of a gun. He found something else to do-and found it in a hurry.

Liu Han kept walking. The little devils were still doing their best to discredit her, but they were also coming back to the negotiating table, and coming back to talk about all subjects. As far as she was concerned, that represented victory.