Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
nearly reach the sky
when the jeep in front of them tears in half. Pieces of it cartwheel off the side of the road to their left, gun barrels flash to their right, and a figure materializes in front of them waving what looks like an old potato-masher grenade. Blewitt cuts the wheel. There’s a blaze of light, followed by a strange booming, like a steel drum being pounded underwater. Then Zeno feels as though the delicate parts of his inner ears are yanked out of his head all at once.
The Dodge rolls twice and comes to rest on its side on an open slope half-covered with snow. He sprawls against the windshield, something hot trickling out of his forearm, a high whine clogging both ears.
Blewitt is no longer in the driver’s seat. Through the shattered side window Zeno can see soldiers wearing the woolen green uniforms of the Chinese seething down the scree toward him. Multiple sacks of dehydrated eggs, ejected from the back of the truck, have been punctured, and clouds of egg powder hang in the air, and one soldier after another passes through, their bodies and faces streaked yellow.
He thinks: I knew it. All the way to the other side of the globe and I still couldn’t outrun it. They’ll come now, all my deficiencies promenading past: Athena dragging me off the ice, The Mermen of Atlantis shriveling to black. Once, Mr. McCormack, the Ansley machine shop manager, told him his fly was open, and when Zeno, blushing, went to button it, Mr. McCormack said, don’t, he liked it like that.
Fruit, the older men called Mr. McCormack. Sissy. Swish.
Zeno tells himself to locate his M1, climb out of the truck, fight, do what his father would have done, but before he can convince his legs to move, a middle-aged Chinese soldier with small beige teeth drags him out of the passenger’s door and into the snow. In another breath there are twenty men around him. Their mouths move but his hearing registers nothing. Some carry Russian burp guns; some have rifles that look four decades old; some wear only rice bags for shoes. Most are tearing open C rations they’ve taken out of the back of the Dodge. One holds a can printed PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE while another tries to saw it open with a bayonet; another stuffs his mouth with crackers; a fourth bites into a head of cabbage as though it were a giant apple.
Where is the rest of the convoy, where is Blewitt, where is their cover? Strangely, as he is prodded back up the slope, Zeno feels no panic, only a remoteness. The piece of metal sticking out of his forearm, and through the sleeve of his parka, is shaped like a willow leaf, but it does not hurt, not yet, and mostly he is conscious of the striking of his heart and the buzz of nothingness in his ears, as though a pillow is clamped around his head, as though he were back in the little brass bed at Mrs. Boydstun’s house, and all this was an unpleasant dream.
He is directed across the road and through the icebound terraces of what might be a vegetable farm and pushed into an animal pen that already contains Blewitt, who is bleeding from the nose and ear, and who keeps miming that he needs a cigarette.
* * *
They huddle next to each other on frozen ground. All night they wait to be shot. At some point Zeno pulls the metal leaf out of his forearm and ties his sleeve over the injury and puts his field jacket back on.
At dawn they are marched across a jagged landscape, joining a few other rivulets of prisoners heading north: French, Turks, two Brits. Every day fewer aircraft come overhead. One man coughs incessantly, another has two broken arms, another cradles an eyeball still hanging from its socket. Gradually the hearing in Zeno’s left ear returns. Blewitt suffers such intense tobacco withdrawal that, more than once, when a guard throws away a butt, he dives into the snow after it, though he never manages to recover one while it’s still lit.
The water they are given smells of excrement. Once a day the Chinese set a pot of boiled whole-kernel corn down in the snow. A few shy away from eating the carbonized crust burned to the bottom of the pot but Zeno remembers the Armour & Company cans Papa used to heat on the wood stove in the cabin beside the lake and chokes it down.
Every time they stop, he unlaces his boots, peels off one pair of Utah Woolen Mills socks, tucks them inside his coat, up against his armpits, and puts on the warmer, drier pair, and this more than anything is what saves him.
* * *
In April they reach a permanent camp on the south bank of a river the color of creamed coffee. The prisoners are sorted into two companies, and Blewitt and Zeno are put with the healthier group. Past a series of wooden peasant huts stands a galley kitchen and storeroom; beyond that lies a ravine, the river, Manchuria. Spindly, wind-wracked conifers stoop here and there, their branches all sculpted by wind in the same direction. No guard dogs, no alarms, no barbed wire, no watchtowers. “The whole country’s a damn ice-cold prison,” whispers Blewitt, “where are we going to run?”