Extract
from
SOMETHING LIKE A HOUSE
CHAPTER ONE
He was the only round-eye on board, but nobody noticed. Hugging his
ankles like a peasant, he sat alone on the dented metal deck. He avoided faces,
as always, watching the river from behind the funnel, quiet in the diesel stink
where no one else would come.
First the concrete
dock slipped away, then the steep valley sides came close, squeezing the great
river. It began to grumble, hurrying them more swiftly out of the mountains.
Flat-footed as a Chinaman, he sat on the good canvas rucksack that always
reminded him of years before, when he’d been the only round-eye in the Red
Guards.
The Guards had wanted
to kill him, then disagreed. So they delayed their choice, marching away with
the white man who walked like a peasant. On the second day they saw an old man
in a field by the road. They poured down into the field and separated into
three groups – the swordfish, the dragon and the swallow – competing for who
could dig the deepest. Soon the old man was sinking to his knees as the leader
slapped his face. They didn’t finish their digging. Where they had worked, the
soil was buried under gritty subsoil, the field ruined for a thousand years.
Then he was sent to
a Red Guard indoctrination camp. He met an old artilleryman who talked about
his time firing ten shells a day across the Taiwan Straits. The Guards had
chalked anti-capitalist slogans on the shells, but wrote them on the
shell-cases so that the insults were spat at their feet. They had white-washed
the murals in local temples and inoculated whole villages in an afternoon,
their needles growing blunt on hundreds of arms and spreading Swine Tick Fever.
His rucksack came
from a dead peasant. The Guards had changed a shrine into a pigsty, and then
discovered that this was a countryside without pigs. With joyful revolutionary
songs they dragged a sow from the railhead. Six weeks later they returned to the
village. There was a ham in the storehouse roof and pig bones hidden under
straw, ready to be burned for fertiliser. That afternoon, resting on a
hillside, he watched the executions across the valley. He knew that in the
hills there were no scraps for pigs: pigs were a rich man’s beast. But the
peasants had only said ‘Please, please,’ as they were led away. He saw the men
falling in silence and then the sound like doors closing.
Now he stood up,
watching the other passengers from under his cap. He felt trapped again:
sometimes there were police on the river boats. He went ashore at the next town
and found it crowded with Westerners. They argued in front of tourist hotels,
watched from cafes, loitered by racks of postcards – the first whites he had
seen in thirty-five years.
‘Not like the
brochures,’ someone said in English. It was a grey-haired man, about his own
age, talking to a large woman in a floral dress.
‘The marvels of an
ageless civilisation,’ said the woman.
‘And toilets to go
with it.’
They drifted away as
he watched from an alley. He was whispering to their retreating backs. ‘My name
is Jim,’ he murmured, as they vanished round a corner. ‘Jim Fraser. Hello. Call
me Jim. I have seen amazing things.’
Fraser had been eighteen when he first came east. ‘Hand grenades have
these little squares on them,’ the sergeant had said, that night in Korea.
‘It’s like they make bars of chocolate, so that every bugger gets a bit.’
Fraser saw the flash
of his first grenade. He forgot to duck and a pine tree lit up for a moment
like a green army tent. Surely they would ignore him, the Chinese, if they
overran the camp. All through the freezing night he was scared and incredulous:
whatever he did the Communists would notice even him.
But nobody was
killed, just a Chinese, and they tramped through the snow to search the body.
It was frozen solid, with bits of blood in its clothes like stained glass, but
they raised it with enormous effort and left it sitting on a tree stump, one
eye open and a hand cupped by its ear like someone deaf.
They evacuated the
camp, part of the general UN collapse, and fled south through the terrible
Chinese ambush around Kunu-ri and on to a great Allied regrouping. The ice
turned to mud, the rivers flooded and everyone thought they were going home.
Instead a dozen of
them climbed into Bren carriers and went back to the war, or ‘back to front’ as
they all said. Two units, one American and one Turkish, had been left behind in
the general rout. They were never found. At least, not before Fraser deserted.
They were parked
close to an empty village. The Chinese were coming, and the officer smoked hard
as he studied their route back. Fraser was no longer the youngest, but still
had to clean the sergeant’s boots. He had to lend money, too, which somehow he
could never ask for, and before every meal he was sent with a jerrycan to the
nearest stream, because there were reports of wells being poisoned.
Here it meant a long
hike across a ploughed field. They had been issued with woollen cap-comforters
against the bitter winds, but the sergeant insisted they wore them straight,
which left their ears exposed: Fraser pulled his cap right down the moment he
entered the woods where the Chinese had camped.
There were cigarette
packets, a latrine stink, and what looked like a Chinese army newspaper. Its
flimsy pages were melting to paste, but Fraser had a favourite picture. An ant
raced across the page as he gazed at the broad face of a peasant girl, leaning
on a shovel and gazing into the sun. This is what they’re fighting for, he
thought.
He remembered a
story that one of the veterans had told him. It had happened to a friend who
was driving a tank in North Africa. Their CO was a bastard. He gave every crew
a tarpaulin and made them paint the outline of all the tools they carried. On
inspections they laid out this tarpaulin with each tool in its outline, and
they’d twice had their pay docked for losing things.
Then the tank was on
patrol and shed one of its tracks. This always took hours to fix, especially on
sand, and when they got back they’d be nailed for not keeping it tensioned.
They were packing up when they realized they’d lost a brass key the size of a
thumb. They searched everywhere, blaming each other, but of course it was sunk
somewhere under the sand. They couldn’t waste any more time so they set fire to
the tank and walked back. It was only four or five miles, and quite pleasant in
the evening cool. They had time to sort out a story about running over some
kind of mine or unexploded shell.
Fraser tried to pick up
the Chinese newspaper, but it fell to bits in his fingers. He threw the
jerrycan into the bushes and walked into the woods, directly away from his
unit.
He spent two nights amongst ravenous fleas in the deserted village and
two days lying flat in the middle of the ploughed field, watching the road. It
was very cold.
At last the Chinese
came. He wouldn’t surrender to front-line troops, waiting instead for cooks and
wagon drivers. Then a jeep pulled up. The driver unloaded camp stools, and two
officers climbed out and sat drinking tea, a map on the ground between them.
Fraser stood up. He
raised his hands and waited for a long minute until the officers grew still.
For three days he
sat only on the floor: in guard rooms, outside in the cold, and wedged between
the benches on a troop train. Then he was ill. He remembered being picked up by
two soldiers and soiling himself and them. For a time he lay in a hospital tent
that was crowded but silent.
He was getting better
when they put him in an ambulance. He bounced over rough roads, guarded by a
soldier in an antiseptic mask. Twice the ambulance stopped and his chamber pot
was carried to the roadside. Fraser watched from the window as diesel was
poured in and set alight.
At a large prison
they took his army clothes and dressed him in thin cotton. He shivered for a
week while a sneering young man wrote down everything he said about Korea.
After that there was a kind of progress.
He rode a train for
four days until it was warm like Hong Kong. In police vans or converted buses
he followed a river upstream as the roads got worse and the air cooler. It was
obvious when he reached the end of his journey.
///////ENDS///////
Whitbread First Novel Award, 2001: ‘This is
a gripping page-turner that takes the reader into another world containing both
beautifully observed detail of the texture of the lives of Chinese peasants,
and a range of big ideas about eugenics, biological warfare, politics and the
nature of loneliness. As young Tao says in the course of the book, "Every
pleasure equals its rarity". It's a rare pleasure to read such an
extraordinary first novel’
James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 2001
‘I haven’t read a good novel about China by a Westerner since Andre Malraux’s masterpiece, Man’s Estate, written in 1928. Apart, that is, from Sid Smith’s wonderful Something Like a House. This book will be compared with Robinson Crusoe (the outsider building his own abode) and Lord of the Flies (the long-term effects of context on individual mortality). It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction’ The Observer
‘This amazing, authoritative tale of a
deserter in China - the only round-eye in the Red Guards - stains the mind
indelibly, like a beautiful, harrowing dream’ Books of the Year, Daily
Telegraph
‘Smith is a mercurial stylist, his prose by
turns confounding and comforting, earth-bound and star-gazing... Phrase-making
of breathtaking beauty jostles with stunted English, poetic finesse with
language of purely functional use. And all the time you are spell-bound,
mesmerised by a disturbing arrhythmia, the most enduringly unsettling aspect of
this haunting and original novel’ The Independent
‘An impressively well-researched and
sensitively imagined picture of an almost unknown society as it comes up
against state politics, told in haunting, piercingly spare prose which never
fails to make an impact’ The Times
‘Smith's real achievement is to have
created a work that is dense with politics, history and science, but which has
a ring of absolute truth about it. It reads not so much as a novel about an
experience but as one that renders the experience itself - startling, strange,
unmediated’ The Daily Telegraph
‘Smith's parable is haunting in its simplicity,
and arrestingly told’ Scotland on Sunday
‘This story of a foreigner's long sojourn
in an alien culture, under-scored with a sub-plot involving the development of
germ warfare science, is truly extraordinary’ The Herald [Glasgow]
‘The beauty of the author's approach is the
way in which he subverts our sensibilities through stealth, using language to
tease wisps of mist across meaning, forcing us to look more carefully, forcing
us to consider nuances that may ordinarily have passed us by. The result is a
book that simultaneously eats away at your heart whilst challenging our very
understanding of what a novel should be. It is an extraordinary debut’ The
Birmingham Post
‘Smith's narrative is beautifully spare and
lean without a trace of sententiousness; his unemotional tone contrasts
pognantly with the sometimes lurid and horrific events that engulf Fraser and
the 'medieval' villagers. Once you start reading this book, put everything else
on hold. Definitely the bee's knees. Buy it’ Time Out
Unnerving yet strangely beautiful, it is
the most interesting, carefully worded, and provocative novel featuring the
Chinese world I've read for a very long time. Unusual, disturbing and
absorbing, if you read only one book about China this year, make certain that
it's this one’ Taipei Times
Observer review of ‘Something Like a
House’