Our pilot was an unflappable American named Roy Leonard. He was tall and blond and corn-fed looking in his tan flight suit, as comfortable behind the controls here in war-torn China, it seemed to me, as he might be driving a tractor in the middle of Indiana. The plane was owned by both the Chinese government and Pan Am. He flew this route regularly, he said, mostly in the dark and at an elevation that put him out of range of Japanese antiaircraft guns.
I tried to scribble these and other observations in my notebook in the dim cabin, but it wasn’t long before we were locked in the middle of a hailstorm. The plane bounced and rocked. Ice pelted the windows, sounding like penny nails in a jar. When the airspeed dial froze, I watched Roy open his window to see if he could gauge it for himself by eyeing the ground. I felt sick and terrified, my clammy palms gripping my seat—and this is how it went all the way to Chungking, over seven hundred miles away.
Five hours later, we dropped out of thick, wet cloud cover to land on a crude airstrip on the middle of an island in the Yangtze River. The river itself seemed carved by hand, with high yellow cliffs rising to each side, flocked with vegetation like a mossy crown.
While the plane was refueled, we ate a breakfast of sticky rice and fried egg, with bowls of foul-smelling tea.
“How’d you come to have this job?” I asked Roy, who was nose deep in his tea bowl.
He shrugged. “I’m never bored.”
I had to smile at that. “No, I don’t imagine you are. Do you think there’s more dangerous flying anywhere in the world?”
He grinned back. “I’d probably have found it if there were.”
Before long we were back on board with a new handful of passengers, climbing out of the rough-hewn dramatic valley and into a sky now starkly, deliriously blue.
“Isn’t it safer to be socked in clouds as before?” I shouted up to Roy.
“I’m watching for them,” he shouted, meaning the Japanese antiaircraft encampments and enemy planes, I guessed.
Good grief, I thought, and tried to focus on the scenery instead, far-off rice paddies, shining in the sun like silver foil, steeply terraced mountainsides and river valleys and rich wet farmland. We flew all day, landing at Kunming just as dusk fell, staining everything purple. More fuel, more rice and tea, and then onto the final leg, over high mountain passes I had to imagine, since we tunneled over them in inky darkness again, the plane vibrating with effort.
Lashio was essentially nowhere, and yet all of China depended upon its existence if it was going to keep on fending off Japan. The snaking, vertiginous Burma Road began and ended here, a modern ouroboros spiraling into the Himalayas and back while the Japanese dropped their bombs in regular raids. As soon as the skies cleared, the Chinese road builders flew into action, making the repairs that would be destroyed again with the next attack. And so it went, on and on. Japan had might, and that was undeniable. But China had determination and an ancient bottomless patience. My money was on them.
I spent most of that night scrawling notes for the story I would post, and then finally crawled onto the cold wooden platform that was my bed, shutting my eyes and thinking of Ernest. Perhaps he was sleeping in our posh hotel with the fans sweeping overhead. More likely he was still in his tufted leather chair in the lobby swilling whiskey and trading true-life stories, utterly dug in. That was who he was and how he was happiest. Tomorrow he would do more of the same, while I saw what there was to see in Lashio, and then boarded a late flight back to Kunming, reversing my journey through the treacherous combination of high altitude, weather, and war hazard. I was exhausted and frightened, but also felt stronger and more capable than I’d been in a year. Without Ernest nearby, it was easier to trust myself, and I liked that.
As demanding as these days had been, they were also exhilarating, flaring with life. Ernest was holding court, and I was on the move. We were both exactly where we needed to be.
55
I found a guide willing to take me anywhere in Hong Kong, into the steaming, dripping squalor of cement bunkers where whole families slept in cell-like conditions on the bare ground, into cold and badly lit factories and mah-jongg houses and brothels where many of the prostitutes didn’t look much older than fourteen. I went into several opium dens, too, where you could buy two loaded pipes for what amounted to pennies, and disappear that way into platform bunks arranged in stacks, with filthy woolen blankets and not much more. Still, I thought, who wouldn’t prefer an opium dream to the actual conditions in these areas? On one of the platforms, two ravaged-looking men slept. But no, I had to remind myself. It wasn’t really sleep, they were stunned and vacant, propped against each other, their mouths open. On another bare slab, an old woman in rags leaned against the wall, which was rotting away from moisture and general decay.
No one seemed to be in charge, unless it was the girl who was tamping black tarry-looking wads of opium into pipes with her fingers. She may have been fourteen or a hundred to look at her face. Her shoulders were stick thin, jutting from a dirty shift, but she was also almost painfully efficient in her movements, heating lamps, tidying the heaps of filth. Everywhere, thick smoke hung with the smell of sweet decay.
“How much is she paid for this work?” I asked my guide.
“Maybe twenty cents a day, maybe less?”
“Less? How can she feed herself on that?”
He shrugged and mentioned she might have a family.
Might, I repeated mentally while my fingertips grew clammy around my pencil. I was tempted to give her everything I had, starting with the clothes on my back. But she was only one girl. There were thousands like her all over the city, and many hundreds of cities in China, I guessed, where this particular scenario repeated over and over, and might never stop.
Before we left, the girl motioned us over to a narrow slit in the wall where she wanted to show us something in a white bucket. Bending closer, I saw it was a small leathery box turtle she was keeping as a pet. She lifted the bucket and it scrambled against the side, its claws sounding desperate to me, and trapped. But she looked pleased somehow, and watched my face, obviously wanting me to be pleased as well.
“It’s wonderful,” I said through the translator, my heart crumbling to pieces—not for the first time that day, or the last.
“I don’t think you should let me leave the hotel again,” I said to Ernest when I returned.
He was reading on top of the made bed, and took off his wire-rimmed glasses and looked at me for a moment. “You want to save everyone.”
I poured two fingers of scotch. “That or scream myself hoarse.”
“That’s the problem with going into the world, isn’t it? You actually have to face things you find you don’t want to know.”
“I do want to know. Only it makes me feel terribly helpless. You should have seen this young girl in an opium den. I nearly died to see how she lived.”
“At least consider that she might not be as miserable as you imagine. It’s what she knows. It’s her life, not yours.”
“Maybe so. But if I wrote her story, something might change.”
“You’re awfully naïve if you think so. And she might not even accept change if it came. People like what they know. It’s human nature.”
“I can’t agree.” The scotch hit the back of my throat with a burning sensation that felt right. “At the very least, I’m going to try.”
“Suit yourself,” he said as I huffed off to have a bath, letting the door close after me a little too hard.
* * *
—
As it turned out, we’d only begun to disagree about China. Ernest surrendered to every local delicacy and custom, drinking spring wine seasoned with pickled snakes, not caring about the heat or the lice, the rats or the bedbugs or the ghastly smells in the street. I took to bathing three times a day and was rewarded with dysentery and a dire case of China rot, my han
ds peeling and yellow with a maddening leprous fungus.
“I’m going to lose my mind,” I told him, trying not to scratch or retch or sob.
“Who wanted to come to China?” he asked cheerfully, and then sauntered off to buy more fireworks.
He was rubbing my nose in something, but what exactly? That here was one trip that wasn’t his idea? That he was thriving while I struggled?
Even though I didn’t understand his position or like it, “Who wanted to come to China?” became Ernest’s favorite refrain as we headed into the interior, first by air, then on bedraggled ponies that weighed not much more than I did, through torrential, unceasing monsoon rains. At one point we traveled by sampan along the North River, past villages flying the black flags that meant cholera epidemic, then by transport truck. Eleven days of slogging in all to reach the Canton front in Free China. The road was more rubber cement than mud, and then there was no road at all.
The actual front looked to me like a mountain. Like two mountains, rather, with the Japanese holding one and the Chinese holding the other and all quiet between. We saw one Japanese bomber soaring over and likely meaning to attack Shaokwan, a hundred miles or more to the north of us, but mostly what we encountered during our time inland was propaganda. In every village we came to, posters in English proclaimed WELCOME TO REPRESENTATIVES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE. When we met General Wong, who’d been holding this particular line for years now, he welcomed us with rancid-tasting rice wine and a single message. If America would only send planes, weapons, and money, China could finish off Japan very quickly.
“And if we don’t?” I ventured.
“You see how it is,” he said, gesturing out and out, meaning, I supposed, that everything that had already happened would go on happening, possibly forever. The Japanese had all the planes, and the Chinese had all the bodies, and an endless capacity to bear hardships. What the Japanese destroyed, the Chinese would rebuild, with their lives, if need be. What was four years in such an ancient and long-suffering country?
* * *
—
“This is the damnedest war I’ve ever seen,” I told Ernest when we reached Chungking.
He had arranged a meeting with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the democratic leader in China, through his numerous contacts in Hong Kong, and was champing at the bit. This was just the kind of thing he’d hoped for in coming to China. A story no one else had, and a chance to report back something of consequence to Washington when we returned home. I was less excited. In fact, I’d decided I already despised General Chiang and his wife before I met them. It seemed poignantly clear to me they cared nothing for their people. Millions were starving. The orphaned and the dying begged in the street, while they themselves and all those graced with wealth and power lived like kings on the backs of those beneath them.
Madame Chiang was a famous beauty and femme fatale who spoke of working slavishly as the savior of her people. She spent most of her time trying to charm Ernest and effectively ignored me. When I asked why her country didn’t care for its lepers, she smiled witheringly and told me, “China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in the trees.”
I glared at her, taken aback, while Ernest suppressed a laugh. The next instant, she shape-shifted, rearranging her smile and offering me a jade brooch set in silver. I didn’t know what else to do but accept it and thank her. Meanwhile, the lunch went on—the main dish being propaganda. General Chiang presented himself as the democratic hero of the people, a tireless leader in the struggle with Japan, when his real enemy was in fact the Chinese Communists who might lead the people to revolt, breaking their chains of misery and servitude. Chiang’s only goal was to stay in power. He was an overlord, and Madame Chiang was a jewel-encrusted viper, and I couldn’t write any of this for Collier’s. China was our ally.
“What happened to objectivity?” I wailed to Ernest, wanting to throw the jade brooch against the wall.
“It went out with the dodo. Is that even a real question?”
“I thought it was. Oh, hell.”
* * *
—
Later I would be ashamed of the pieces I turned into Collier’s. Nowhere were my actual opinions and fears voiced. I called Madame Chiang “entrancing,” as glamorously put together as “the newest and brightest movie star,” because that’s what everyone needed to hear. We had to keep China on our side and occupying Japan’s resources in the Far East lest they come breathing down our necks instead.
Everywhere I looked there was ugliness and hypocrisy, and I had let myself become part of it. But I couldn’t fall into cynicism about reporting, believing that journalism had no power to right wrongs, or even elucidate them, as Ernest insisted. That would mean I had no power either, and I couldn’t even bear the thought. I would simply have to do better, fight harder, and stand my ground.
56
With royalties from For Whom the Bell Tolls continuing to roll in wavelike, Ernest decided to use some of them to buy the Finca outright. We’d been renting since I found the place, and making repairs out of our own pockets, but by the time we returned from China, it was ours, every last stitch of it, right down to the cluster of mauve orchids on the ceiba tree and the locusts rattling in the palms. We celebrated with a raucous party, inviting our Basques and everyone else we knew from town, and somehow the mood of celebration just kept rolling forward for the rest of the summer. The house was never empty, and the liquor never stopped flowing.
I was missing the boys, but Ernest and Pauline were in a custodial tug-of-war at the moment, and it looked like we wouldn’t see them until the fall. So we continued to drift through our days. We woke when we wanted to, took our meals whenever it struck us, had our first drink before noon, most days, and then slept in the sun. Ernest had stopped watching what he ate and also stopped recording his weight, or caring, it seemed. And though there were tennis games and shooting matches to help sweat out the rich food and toxins, I found myself feeling blue at odd moments.
I had sent Max Perkins my finished stories, and he’d accepted them as a collection I was titling The Heart of Another, after something I’d read in a Willa Cather story. The proofs would be arriving any day now, and I felt a harrowing mixture of excitement and dread. The disappointing reception of my last book was still with me, and knowing that, though I hadn’t asked, Ernest was doing everything possible to make sure this one was done right. He had suggestions for the promotional copy and wanted to help choose the dust jacket. My last author photo hadn’t shown me in my best light. He offered to take one himself, so I’d appear as natural as possible.
“Does all of this really make a difference?” I asked him.
“It can’t hurt,” he offered. Then, “You should think of using your married name. That’s something you haven’t tried.”
“You mean capitalize on your reputation?” I was instantly on guard. “That’s what everyone’s expecting, isn’t it? You read those reviews.”
“It is your name. Why shouldn’t you use it if you want?”
I felt heat climb my neck like a ladder. “ ‘Gellhorn’ is my professional name. It’s the only thing I’ve ever published under.”
“Would you rather have your pride or good sales?”
“You don’t think I can get there on my own.” I heard the stridency coming through in my voice and forced myself to breathe. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That I ride your coattails or perish?”
“You’re being overdramatic. I only mean to help.”
“Maybe so, but it’s my work. I have to give it my name.”
As he studied me, it was clear he thought I was making a mistake, but he only said, “Do what you like, of course,” and then walked off to read his mail while I fumed alone.
It wasn’t a matter of doing what I liked. He was missing my point completely. There was nothing slight or prideful in this choice
. I was Gellhorn and a writer before I knew him. I had to be that now before I was his wife, or anything else for that matter.
* * *
—
More and more I was beginning to understand just what a creature of habit Ernest was. He shifted with the calendar, following a migratory path like some order of butterfly, returning to the same places at the same time, year to year. It didn’t matter that we’d only recently returned home from months away in the Orient. Fall meant Sun Valley, and that was where he meant us to go.
“What about Arizona or Mexico instead,” I suggested one evening, trying to see if I could stretch him a little, and do something that would interest me more. “The boys would love the desert.”
“But everything’s all arranged. It’s been arranged for months. What’s this about?”
“Sun Valley is beautiful, but haven’t we already seen everything it has to offer and then some?”
There was a furrow between Ernest’s brows. I watched it deepen, realizing I’d hurt as well as surprised him. Just as essential as his migratory pattern was his needing to believe I felt the same about everything; that we would forever point in the same direction. “Are you suggesting I go alone?” he asked warily.
“No, no. But maybe I could trail you there, if there really is no way to change our plans. I could stop in St. Louis to see Mother and then come out to meet you when the boys turn up.”
“In October, then? The middle of October?” He was looking at me with an intensity I recognized. He hated to be alone. He couldn’t keep his head right without me nearby—that’s what he always said—and I understood that about him. It was his nature. But I was also realizing that my adapting to his needs came with a challenge to keep watch on my own head, too. My own nature.
“October sounds just right,” I said as cheerfully as I could muster. “All the colors will be out then, too.”