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Hom took another drag on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. After a long pause he said, “I never created files for those cases.”
His confession left her speechless.
“I’ll tell you what I know about them so that they’ll no longer be questions in your mind,” he continued evenly. “The Wu boy drowned. We may live on the river, but that doesn’t prevent accidents from happening. Still, I have my suspicions about what Wu Huadong was up to. A boy like that does not usually travel up and down the river, but if I pursue it, what will I accomplish? The boy is dead, and whatever his misdeeds might have been died with him. I can tell you, however, that Stuart Miller did not volunteer his hydrofoil on that occasion.”
He glanced at her to see if she had any questions. When she didn’t, he forged ahead. “I don’t know what I can tell you about Yun Re, except that he fell from a ladder and broke his neck. I could blame the Cultural Relics Bureau for having a bad ladder, but again, what would it accomplish?” He hesitated for just a fraction of a second, then said matter-of-factly, “You already know my brother-in-law built the bridge that collapsed.”
She nodded.
“Have you ever had to protect a family member or a friend?” he asked.
In another place this question might have seemed strange, but this was China and who, including herself, had not either protected or turned in a family member sometime in the last fifty years?
“It doesn’t matter what I say or do,” Hom went on. “People in Bashan believe what they want. If it makes them feel better to believe I’m corrupt, so be it. It may be better than the alternative—”
“Going after your brother-in-law—”
“He would deserve his punishment, although I’d feel sorry for my sister and my niece. No, I was thinking of the others—the victims in all of the cases that you’ve asked about. I felt if I didn’t make reports, then the families would never wonder if something wrong had happened. If they had no one to blame, then they wouldn’t seek retribution. I don’t want to see anyone get in trouble. I want to protect the families in case of unrest and a crackdown.” After a pause, he added, “But then that goes for everyone in Bashan.”
All this confirmed her worst fears about the captain, but before she could speak, he asked, “Do you know what my main job is?”
“It’s the same as for any captain in the countryside,” she answered staunchly. “Protect the populace, weed out political troublemakers, arrest those who are corrupt or commit criminal acts.”
“Actually, for the last few years my job has been to supervise the removal of people from our village. Premier Zhu wants a half a million river people moved by next year. All of the Public Security Bureaus along the river will have to enforce the rules to meet the quotas. I’m afraid—and so are my colleagues up and down the river—of the resistance that we are facing. Corruption is terrible and affects all of us. Everyone is taking a cut from the monies allocated for resettlement, so little is left for the people who must move. Meanwhile, people like my brother-in-law are getting rich building roads, apartment towers, and bridges with inferior materials. Peasants are mad and rightly so, but we’re no longer living in the past when the masses do just as the Politburo orders.”
He leaned forward through the smoke that lingered about his face and added for emphasis, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I don’t want anyone to leave Bashan with a black mark in his dangan. So I look the other way and let people do things perhaps they shouldn’t.”
“Like letting them go to All-Patriotic Society meetings. You are aware that this group is against the law and that attending its gatherings is grounds for detention.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The higher-ups would be more concerned with this lapse than your looking the other way for your brother-in-law.”
“I know, and I’ll accept my punishment, but I hope you’ll hear me out first.”
“Go ahead.”
“The All-Patriotic Society is a peaceful group—”
“They don’t seem peaceful to me. They were quite antagonistic toward us last night.”
“I heard you went to a meeting.” He rubbed a nicotine stain on his middle finger. “I think the people saw you and your foreigner as intruders in the one place they’ve considered safe. Instead of showing their fear, they revealed anger. This reaction is common, is it not, whether in our personal relationships or as a community?”
Hom was overtly breaking the law by allowing the cult to operate in Bashan—and confessing his crime to her—for reasons she had yet to comprehend.
“Usually the All-Patriotic Society promotes harmony,” he continued, “which is what I’ll need in the coming months to control the emotions of the masses. You and I have seen the opposite of that, correct? We’re both old enough to have lived through the Cultural Revolution. We both know what can happen when hate is stirred up.”
“You take on a heavy and dangerous responsibility.”
Hom looked away. “I am one generation away from the land. I know what it is to eat bitterness.”
?
??But do you know what it means to be a martyr?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered evenly.
Hulan doubted that he did. It was one thing to have a noble cause and quite another to spend ten years in a labor camp.
