“We’ll see if Communists have knees that can bend forward,” Chen said to him.
They lifted his feet and placed a brick under his heels, then another one.
Because his thighs and knees were strapped tight to the bench, the bricks forced his feet and lower legs up and began to bend his knees at an impossible angle. Sweat dripped from his face and forehead, mixed with the blood from his wounds. He tried to squirm along the bench to relieve the stress on his knees but there was nowhere to go. He rubbed his arms, moving them up and down helplessly on the column until he broke the skin on his wrists and arms and blood streaked the whitewash on the column.
They put in another two bricks, and I could hear the bones in his knees crack. He began to moan and shout, but said nothing that we wanted to hear.
“I can’t stop this if you won’t talk,” I said to him.
They brought in a long wooden wedge and pushed the thin end under the brick at the bottom. Then they took turns to strike a hammer against the thick end of the wedge. ??With each strike, the wedge moved in a little under the bricks and lifted his feet higher. He screamed and screamed. They forced a stick into his mouth so he wouldn’t bite down on his tongue.
“Just nod if you are ready to talk.”
He shook his head.
Suddenly, his knees broke at the next hammer strike, and his feet and lower legs jumped up, the broken bones sticking through the flesh and skin. He fainted again.
I was getting nauseous. If the Communists could train and prepare their agents to this degree, how could we possibly hope to win this war?
“This is not going to work,” I said to the Chinese interrogators. “I have an idea. He has a grandson. Do we have him?” ?They nodded.
We brought the doctor in again to bandage his legs. The doctor gave him an injection so that he would stay awake.
“Kill me, please,” he said to me. “Kill me.”
We brought him out to the courtyard and sat him in a chair. Li brought in his grandson. He was a small boy, but seemed very bright. He was scared and tried to run to his grandfather. Li pulled him back, stood him against the wall and pointed a pistol at him.
“We are not going to kill you,” I said. “But if you won’t confess, we will execute your grandson as an accomplice.”
“No, no,” he begged. “Please. He doesn’t know anything. ??We don’t know anything. I’m not a spy. I swear.”
Li stood back and held the pistol with both hands.
“You are making me do this,” I said. “You have given me no choice. I don’t want to kill your grandson, but you are going to make him die.”
“I came here on a boat with four others,” he said. He kept his eyes on the boy, and I could see that I was finally getting to him. “They are all good people. None of us are Communist spies.”
“That’s another lie,” I said. “Tell me who they are.”
Just then the boy jumped and grabbed Li’s hands, and the boy tried to bite him. “Let my grandfather go,” he yelled as he struggled with Li.
There were two gunshots, and the boy fell in a heap. Li dropped his gun and I rushed over. The boy had bitten his finger to the bone, and he was howling with pain. I picked up the gun.
I looked up and saw that the old man had fallen out of his chair. He was crawling to us, to the body of his grandson. He was crying, and I couldn’t tell what language he was crying in.
Chen went to help Li while I watched the man crawl to the boy. He turned his body until he was sitting and lifted the boy’s body into his lap, hugging the dead child to his chest. “Why, why?” he said to me. “He was just a boy. He didn’t know anything. Kill me, please kill me.”
I looked into his eyes: dark, glistening, like mirrors. In them I saw the reflections of my own face, and it was such a strange face, so full of crazed fury that I did not recognize myself.
Many things went through my head at that moment. I thought back to when I was a little boy in Maine, and the mornings when my grandfather would take me hunting. I thought about my sinology professor, and the stories he told of his boyhood in Shanghai and his Chinese friends and servants. I thought about yesterday morning, when David and I taught the class on counterintelligence to the Nationalist agents. I thought about Lilly, who is about the boy’s age. ??What does she know about Communism and freedom? Somewhere, the world had gone horribly wrong.
“Please kill me, please kill me.”
I pointed the pistol at the man and squeezed the trigger. I kept on squeezing the trigger, again and again, after the gun was empty.
“He was resisting,” Chen said, later. “Trying to escape.” It wasn’t a question.
I nodded anyway.
? ? ?
“You had no choice,” Mrs. Dyer said. “He forced you to do it. Freedom isn’t without its price. You were trying to do the right thing.”
He did not respond to this. After a while, he drained the glass again.
“You’ve told me how hardened these Communist agents are, and we’ve all heard the tales from Korea. But only now do I really understand. They must have really brainwashed him and made him without human feeling, without remorse. The blood of his grandson is on him. Just think what he could have done to Lilly.”
He did not respond to this either. He looked across the table at her, and it seemed that there was a gulf between them, as wide as the Taiwan Strait.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t really know anything anymore.”
? ? ?
Dad walked with Lilly next to the river, their feet sinking into the soft mud. Both stopped and took off their shoes, continuing barefoot. They did not speak to each other. Ah Huang followed behind them, and every once in a while Lilly stopped to pet him on the nose as he snorted into her palm.
“Lilly.” Dad broke the silence. “Mom and I have decided to move back to Texas. I’ve gotten a transfer for work.”
Lilly nodded without speaking. Autumn had settled over her heart. The trees along the river waved at their own reflections in the moving, rippling water, and Lilly wished she still had Mr. Kan’s magic mirror.
“We have to find a new home for your water buffalo. We can’t take him back to Texas.”
Lilly stopped. She refused to look at him.
“It’s too dry back there,” Dad tried. “He won’t be happy. He won’t have a river to bathe in and rice paddies to wallow in. He won’t be free.”
Lilly wanted to tell him that she was no longer a little girl, and he did not need to speak to her that way. But instead she just stroked Ah Huang some more.
“Sometimes, Lilly, adults have to do things that they don’t want to do, because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes we do things that seem wrong, but are really right.”
Lilly thought about Mr. Kan’s arms, and the way he held her the first time they met. She thought about the way his voice had sounded when he scared the boys away. She thought about the way the tip of his brush moved on paper, writing the character for “beautiful.” She wished that she knew how to write his name. She wished she knew more about the magic of words and characters.
Even though it was a pleasant autumn afternoon, Lilly felt cold. She imagined the fields around her covered in white, a frost of terror that had come to freeze over the subtropical island.
The word “freeze” seemed to call for her attention. She closed her eyes and pictured the word in her head, examining it carefully the way she thought Mr. Kan would have. The letters jiggled and nudged against each other. The z took on the shape of a kneeling, supplicating man, the e the fetal curl of a dead child. And then the z and e disappeared, leaving free in its place.
It’s okay, Lilly. Teddy and I are free now. Lilly tried to concentrate, to hold on to the fading smile and warm voice of Mr. Kan in her mind. You are a very smart girl. ?You are destined to become a literomancer too, in America.
Lilly squeezed her eyes tight so that no tears would fall out.
“Lilly, are you all right?” Dad’s voice brought her back.