The Blue Mountains of China by Rudy Wiebe

Author:Rudy Wiebe [Wiebe, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-602-8
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

crossing that river loosened so much so much we never knew we had to tie tied

kid’ …”

“Greta,” he said, “you couldn’t know, how could you, and he was afraid. We were all, and God only knows how close – we knew it would be —”

She was standing before him, gray face upturned to his. “Were you? Were you?”

“What?”

“Afraid. Were you?”

“I – we were all afraid, what else —”

“You, you were afraid, you?”

“I was afraid.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Why?” Here too? His mind retreated by instinct. “We all agreed, why.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

“It’s the ans —”

“My sister and her man live in Number Four, my brother there too, and what chance have they now, or how’ll they be now? They’ll never get —”

“We talked that all through,” he had to cut in, “a hundred times. Dan was there. It was the only way it would work, for us, you know that. We all agreed every man raised his hand, and it’s worse than bad but we can’t help —”

She said, hard as if she had not heard a word. “Why do you come here for Dan?”

“I – I didn’t come for him. We – Erna wondered if you – could you come a minu …”

He hung helpless; she was staring up at him, but her face fuzzed in the darkness through his glasses and he could not see her eyes; that was what had made it possible, he realized, to voice even as much as he had.

And perhaps for her also. For sudden as a hawk stooping she seized his right hand and thrust it into her warm, hard bosom. “Who doesn’t know what you want, Mr. Committee Chairman! Your little David, your precious little living David,” she was almost spitting in his face, pulling it down to hers with the pressure on his hand, he paralyzed. “And my Jonka in that shallow hole being clawed right now out of that shallow hole by Manchurian wolves, wolves like these bloodsuckers here of Chinese, of Mennonites that just want the last bit of whatever it is you -”

“Greta. Greta.” His eyes clenched cold and hot he could not endure what he felt from her; he had to raise his other hand against her face, her eyes, and hold it against her also, against his cold paralyzed hands her body shuddering like a wound.

“Ah God, ah-h, listen, Greta listen to me! It was accident, it almost happened to three other mothers, it was God’s will, you cannot blame yourself and your friends, it is God’s will little Jonka is with the Lord now, free from pain – can’t you see how some of these – he is free now, happy, and there will be more children for you, this was your first but when in some far land we are free then —”

She had thrust him away and was down in the dark of the ledge again. Behind him the Rogalski children played, oblivious, and the room rustled, whimpered on in its desolate slur.

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