The Man from Beijing

10

It was during the hottest part of the year, 1863. The second day of San’s and his two brothers’ long trek to the coast and the town of Canton. Early in the morning they came to a crossroads where three human heads were mounted on bamboo poles that had been driven into the ground. They couldn’t work out how long the heads had been there. Wu, the youngest of the brothers, thought at least a week because the eyes and parts of the cheeks had already been hacked to pieces by crows. Guo Si, the eldest, maintained the heads had been cut off only a couple of days before. He thought the contorted mouths still retained traces of horror at what was about to happen.

San said nothing. They had fled from a remote village in Guangxi Province. The severed heads were like a warning that their lives would continue to be in danger.

They left what San called Three Heads Crossroads. While Guo Si and Wu argued about whether the heads had belonged to executed bandits or peasants who had displeased a powerful landowner, San thought about the events that had driven them onto the road. Every step they took carried them further away from their former lives. Deep down, his brothers probably hoped that one day they would be able to return to Wei Hei, the village where they had grown up. He wasn’t at all sure what he hoped himself. Perhaps poor peasants such as themselves could never tear themselves away from the misery that tainted their lives. What lay in store for them in Canton, where they were headed? It was said that you could smuggle yourself aboard a ship and be carried eastward over the ocean to a country where there were rivers filled with glittering gold nuggets the size of hens’ eggs. Rumours had even reached as far as the remote village of Wei Hei, telling of a land populated by a strange white people, a land so rich that even simple people from China could work their way up out of squalor to unimaginable power and wealth.

San didn’t know what to think. Poor people always dreamed of a life with no landowner pestering them. He himself had thought along those lines since he was a small boy, having to stand at the roadside with his head bowed while some overlord passed by in his covered sedan chair. He had always wondered how it was possible for people to lead such different lives.

He had once asked his father about it and received a box on the ears in reply. One didn’t ask unnecessary questions. The gods in the trees and the streams and the mountains had created the world we humans lived in. In order for this mysterious universe to attain a divine balance, there must be rich and poor, peasants guiding their ploughs pulled by water buffalo and overlords who hardly ever set foot on the ground that had given birth to them as well.

He had never again asked his parents what they dreamed about as they knelt before their idols. They lived their lives in a state of unrelieved servitude. Were there people who worked harder and received so little in return for their labour? He had never found anybody he could ask, since everybody in the village was just as poor and just as afraid of the invisible landowner whose stewards, armed with whips, forced the peasants to carry out their daily tasks. He had watched people go from cradle to grave, constantly weighed down by the burden that was their daily grind. It was as if children’s backs became hunched even before they learned how to walk. The people in the village slept on mats that were rolled out every evening on the cold earth floors. They rested their heads on bundles of hard bamboo poles. Days followed the monotonous rhythm dictated by the seasons. They ploughed the soil behind their phlegmatic water buffalo, planted their rice. They hoped that the coming year, the coming harvest, would be sufficient to feed them. When the harvest failed, there was almost nothing to live on. When there was no rice left, they were forced to eat leaves.

Or to lie down and die. There was no alternative.

He was roused from his thoughts. Dusk had started to fall. He looked around for a suitable place where they could sleep. There was a clump of trees by the side of the road, next to some boulders that seemed to have been ripped out of the mountain range that loomed on the western horizon. They rolled out their mattresses filled with dried grass and divided up the rice they had left, which would have to last until they reached Canton. San glanced furtively at his brothers. Would they be able to make it? What would he do if one of them fell ill? He himself still felt strong. But he wouldn’t be able to carry one of his brothers unaided, if that became necessary.

They didn’t talk much to one another. San had said they shouldn’t waste what little strength they had left on arguing and quarrelling.

‘Every word you shout robs you of one footstep. It’s not words that are important, but the steps you need to take to get to Canton.’

Neither of his brothers objected. San knew they trusted him. Now that their parents were no longer alive and they had taken flight, they had to believe that San was making the right decisions.

They curled up on their mattresses, adjusted their pigtails down their backs and closed their eyes. San could hear how first Guo Si and then Wu fell asleep. Though both are now twenty, less than a year apart, they are still like little children, he thought. I am all they have.

All around him was a smell of mud and fear. He lay on his back and gazed up at the stars.

His mother had often taken him out after dark and shown him the sky. On such occasions her weary face would break into a smile. The stars provided some consolation for the hard life she led. She normally lived with her face pointed down to the ground, which embraced her rice plants as if it were waiting for her to join them there one of these days. When she gazed up at the stars, just for a brief while, she didn’t need to look at the brown earth beneath her.

He allowed his eyes to wander over the night sky. His mother had named some stars. One especially bright star in a constellation that looked a bit like a dragon she had called San.

‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘That’s where you come from, and that’s where you’ll return to some day.’

The idea of having come from a star had scared him. But he said nothing, as the idea gave his mother so much pleasure.

Then he thought about the violent incidents that had forced him and his brothers to run away. One of the landowner’s new stewards, a man by the name of Fang, with a big gap between his front teeth, had come to complain that his parents had failed to do their day’s work properly. San knew that his father had been suffering severe back pains and was unable to cope with the heavy work. His mother helped out, but they had fallen behind even so. Now Fang was standing outside their mud hut, his tongue gliding in and out of the gap between his teeth like a threatening snake. Fang was young, about the same age as San, but they came from different worlds. Fang glared at San’s parents squatting in front of him, heads bowed and straw hats in their hands; he seemed to think they were insects that he could squash underfoot whenever he pleased. If they didn’t do their work, they would be thrown out of their home and forced to become beggars.

During the night San had heard his parents whispering together. As it was very rare for them not to go to sleep the moment they lay down, he listened — but he’d been unable to grasp what they were saying.

The next morning the woven mat on which his parents slept was empty. His immediate reaction was fear. Everybody in that cramped little hut would rise at the same time. His parents must have sneaked out quietly in order not to wake their sons. He stood up cautiously, put on his ragged trousers and the only shirt he owned.

When he emerged from the hut, the sun still hadn’t risen. The horizon was bathed in pink light. A cockerel crowed from somewhere nearby. The inhabitants of the village were just waking up. Everybody apart from his parents. They were hanging from the tree that provided shade at the hottest part of the year. Their bodies swayed slowly in the morning breeze.

He had only a vague memory of what happened next. He didn’t want his brothers to have to see their parents hanging from a rope with their mouths open. He cut them down with the sickle his father used out in the fields. They fell heavily on top of him, as if they were trying to take him with them into death.

The village elder, old Bao, who was half blind and shook so much that he could barely stand up, was summoned by the neighbours. Bao took San aside and told him it would be best for the brothers to run away. Fang would be bound to take his revenge, throw them into the prison cages by his house. Or he would execute them. There was no judge in the village; the only law that applied was that of the landowner, and Fang spoke and acted in his name.

They had set off immediately after their parents’ funeral. Now he was lying here under the stars, with his brothers asleep by his side. He didn’t know what lay in store for them. Old Bao had said they should head for the coast, to the city of Canton, where they’d be able to look for work. San had tried asking Bao what kind of work might be available, but the old man was unable to say. He simply pointed eastward with his trembling hand.

They had walked until their feet were raw and bleeding, and their mouths parched with thirst. The brothers had wept over the death of their parents, and also in view of the unknown fate that awaited them. San had tried to console them, but also urged them not to walk too slowly. Fang was dangerous. He had horses and men with lances and sharp swords who might still be able to catch up with them.

San continued to gaze up at the stars. He thought about the landowner who lived in an entirely different world, one where the poor were not allowed to set foot. He never appeared in the village, but was merely a threatening shadow, indistinguishable from the darkness.

San eventually fell asleep. In his dreams the three severed heads came racing towards him. He could feel the sharp edge of the sword against his own neck. His brothers were already dead, their heads had rolled away into the sand, blood pouring out of the stumps that had been their necks. Over and over again he woke up to free himself from that dream, but it returned every time he drifted back into sleep.

They set off early in the morning, after drinking what remained of the water in the flask hanging from a strap around Guo Si’s neck. They had to find clean water as soon as possible. They walked fast along the stony road. They occasionally met people making their way to the fields or carrying heavy burdens on their heads and shoulders. San began to wonder if this road would ever end. Perhaps there wasn’t an ocean at the end of it. Perhaps there was no city by the name of Canton. But he said nothing to Guo Si or Wu. That would make it too difficult for them to keep going.

A little black dog with a white patch on its chest joined the trio. San had no idea where it came from; it simply appeared out of the blue. He tried to shoo it away, but it kept coming back. They tried throwing stones at it. But still it persisted in following them.

‘Let’s name the dog Dayang Bi An De Dachengshi,“the big city on the other side of the ocean”,’ said San. ‘We can call it Dayang for short.’

At noon, when the heat was most unbearable, they rested under a tree in a little village. They were given water by the villagers and were able to fill their flask. The dog lay at San’s feet, panting.

He observed it carefully. There was something special about the dog. Could it have been sent by his mother as a messenger from the kingdom of the dead? San didn’t know. He’d always found it difficult to believe in all the gods his parents and the other villagers believed in. How could one pray to a tree that was unable to answer, that had no ears and no mouth? Or to a dog without an owner? But if the gods did exist, now was the time he and his brothers needed their help.

They continued their trek in the afternoon. The road meandered ahead of them, seemingly without end.

After another three days they started coming across more and more people. Carts would clatter past laden with reeds and sacks of corn, while empty carts headed in the opposite direction. San plucked up his courage and shouted to a man sitting in one of the empty carts.

‘How far is it to the sea?’

‘Two days. No more. Tomorrow you’ll start to smell Canton. You won’t be able to miss it.’

He laughed and drove on. San watched him dwindling into the distance. What had he meant, suggesting that they would be able to smell the city?

That same afternoon they suddenly hit upon a dense cloud of butterflies. The insects were transparent and yellow, and their flapping wings sounded like rustling paper. San paused in the middle of the swarm, entranced. It felt like he’d entered a house with walls made of wings. I’d love to stay here, he thought. I wish this house didn’t have any doors. I could stay here, listening to the butterflies’ wings until the day I fall down dead.

But his brothers were out there. He couldn’t abandon them. He used his hands to create an opening in the wall of butterflies and smiled at his brothers. He wouldn’t let them down.

They spent another night under a tree after eating a little of the rice they had left. They were all hungry when they curled up for the night.

The following day they came to Canton. The dog was still with them. San was becoming more and more convinced that his mother had sent it from the kingdom of death to keep an eye on them and protect them. He had never been able to believe in all that nonsense. But now, as he stood outside the city gates, he began to wonder if that was really the way things were.

They entered the teeming city that had announced its imminent presence with no end of unpleasant smells, as they had been warned it would. San was afraid he might lose contact with his brothers in the mass of unknown people thronging the streets. He tied a long rope around his waist and attached it in similar fashion to his brothers. Now they couldn’t possibly get lost, unless somebody cut through the rope. They slowly made their way forward through the mass of people, amazed by all the enormous houses, temples and goods offered for sale.

The rope linking them together suddenly tightened. Wu pointed. San saw what had brought his brother to a halt.

A man was sitting in a sedan chair. Curtains usually hid whoever was being carried, but in this case they were open. Nobody could doubt that the man was dying. He was white, as if somebody had drenched his cheeks in a white powder. Or perhaps he was evil? The devil always sent demons with white faces to terrorise the earth. Besides, he didn’t have a pigtail and had a long, ugly face with a big, crooked nose.

Wu and Guo Si elbowed their way closer to San and asked if it was a man or a devil. San didn’t know. He’d never seen anything like it, not even in his worst nightmares.

Suddenly the curtains were drawn, and the sedan chair was carried away. A man standing next to San spat after the chair.

‘Who was that?’ San asked.

The man looked disparagingly at him and asked him to repeat the question. San could hear that their dialects were very different.

‘The man in the sedan chair. Who is he?’

‘A white man who owns many of the ships that visit our harbour.’

‘Is he ill?’

The man laughed.

‘They all look like that. As white as corpses that ought to have been buried ages ago.’

The brothers continued through the dirty, foul-smelling city. San observed the people all around him. Many were well dressed. They weren’t wearing ragged clothes like he was. He began to suspect that the world was not quite what he had imagined.

After wandering through the city for many hours, they glimpsed water at the end of the alleys. Wu broke loose and raced towards it. He plunged in and started drinking — but stopped and spat it all out when he realised that it was brine. The bloated body of a cat floated past. San observed all the filth, not just the dead body but also both human and animal faeces. He felt sick. Back home they had used their faeces to fertilise the small patches of land where they grew their vegetables. Here, it seemed that people simply emptied their shit into the water, despite the fact that nothing grew there.

He gazed out over the water without being able to see the other side. What they call the sea or the ocean must be a very wide river indeed, he thought.

They sat down on a see-sawing wooden jetty surrounded by so many boats that it wasn’t possible to count them all. Everywhere they could hear people shouting and screaming. That was another thing that distinguished life in the city from life in the village. Here people seemed unable to shut up, always having something to say or complain about. Nowhere could San detect the silence he had been so used to.

They ate the very last of the rice and shared the remains of the water in the flask. Wu and Guo Si eyed him hopefully. He would have to live up to their expectations. But how would he find work for them in this deafening, chaotic maelstrom of humanity? Where would they find food? Where would they sleep? He looked at the dog, which was lying with one paw over its nose. What do I do now?

He could feel that he needed to be alone in order to assess their situation. He stood up and asked his brothers to wait where they were, together with the dog. In order to put their minds at rest, and convince them that he wasn’t going to disappear into the mass of people and never return, he said, ‘Just think about that invisible rope that binds us together. I’ll be back soon. If anybody speaks to you while I’m away, answer them politely, but don’t go away from here. If you do, I’ll never be able to find you again.’

He explored all the alleys, but kept turning back in order to remember the way he’d come from. One of the narrow streets suddenly opened out into a square with a temple. People were genuflecting and walking with bowed heads towards an altar laden with offerings and incense.

My mother would have run forward to the altar and bowed down there, he thought. My father would also have approached the altar, but somewhat more hesitantly. I can’t remember him ever setting one foot before the other without hesitating.

But now he was the one who had to make up his mind what to do.

There were a few stones scattered around that had fallen from the temple wall. He sat down on one, feeling somewhat confused, thanks to the heat, the mass of people and the hunger he had tried to ignore for as long as possible.

When he had rested sufficiently, he returned to the Pearl River and all the quays that lined its banks. Men bowed down by heavy burdens were staggering along rickety-looking gangways. Further upriver he could see big ships with lowered masts being towed by tugs under bridges.

He paused and scrutinised all these men carrying burdens, each one bigger than the last. Foremen stood by the gangways, ticking off all the loads being carried aboard or ashore. They slipped a few coins to the porters, who then vanished into the alleys.

An idea hit him. In order to survive, they would have to carry. We can do that, he thought. My brothers and I, we are porters. There are no meadows here, no paddies. But we can carry things. We’re strong.

He returned to Wu and Guo Si, who were huddled up on the jetty. He stood there for a while, observing how they were clinging to each other.

We are like dogs, he thought. Everybody kicks us, we have to live on what others throw away.

The dog noticed his arrival and ran up to greet him.

San didn’t kick it.

11

They spent the night on the jetty as San couldn’t think of anywhere better to go. The dog watched over them, growling at any silent, tiptoeing feet that came too close. But when they woke up the next morning they found that somebody had succeeded in stealing their water flask. San was furious as he looked around. The poor steal from the poor, he thought. Even an empty water flask is desirable to somebody who has nothing.

‘He’s a nice dog, but he’s not much good as a watchdog,’ said San.

‘What shall we do now?’ asked Wu.

‘We shall try to find work,’ said San.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Guo Si.

San shook his head. Guo Si knew just as well as he did that they didn’t have any food.

‘We can’t steal,’ said San. ‘If we did, we might end up like the trio whose heads are on those poles at the crossroads. We must find work, and then we’ll be able to buy something to eat.’

He led his brothers to the place where men were running back and forth carrying their burdens. The dog was still with them. San stood there for a long time, watching the men on the ships’ gangways giving the orders. He eventually decided to approach a short, stocky man who didn’t beat the porters, even if they were moving slowly.

‘We are three brothers,’ he said. ‘We’re good at carrying.’

The man glanced angrily at him but continued checking the porters emerging from the hold with heavy loads on their shoulders.

‘What are all these yokels doing in Canton?’ he shouted. ‘Why do you come here? There are thousands of peasants looking for work. I already have more than enough. Go away. Stop bothering me.’

They continued asking at wharf after wharf, but the response was always the same. Nobody wanted them. They were of no use to anybody here in Canton.

That day they ate nothing apart from the filthy remains of vegetables trampled underfoot in a street next to a market. They drank water from a pump surrounded by starving people. They spent another night curled up on the jetty. San couldn’t sleep. He pressed his fists hard against his stomach in an attempt to suppress the pangs of hunger. He thought of the swarm of butterflies he’d entered. It was as if all the butterflies had entered his body and were scratching against his intestines with their sharp wings.

Two more days passed without their finding anybody on any of the wharves who nodded and said that their backs would be useful. As the second day drew towards its close, San knew that they wouldn’t be able to last much longer. They hadn’t eaten anything at all since they’d found the trampled vegetables. Now they were living on water alone. Wu had a fever, and was lying in the shadow of a pile of barrels, shaking.

San made up his mind as the sun began to set. They must have food, or they would die. He took his brothers and the dog to an open square where poor people were sitting around fires, eating whatever they had managed to find.

Now he understood why his mother had sent the dog to them. He picked up a rock and smashed the dog’s skull. People from one of the nearby fires came to investigate, their skin was stretched tightly over their emaciated faces. San borrowed a knife off one of the men, butchered the dog and placed the pieces in a pot. They were so hungry that they couldn’t wait until the meat was properly cooked. San cut up the pieces so that everybody around the fire had the same amount.

After the meal they all lay down on the ground and closed their eyes. San was the only one still sitting, staring at the flames. The next day they wouldn’t even have a dog to eat.

He could see his parents in his mind’s eye, hanging from the tree that awful morning. How far away from his own neck were the branch and the rope now? He didn’t know.

He suddenly had the feeling that he was being watched. He squinted out into the night. There really was somebody there, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the darkness. The man approached the fire. He was older than San, but not especially old. He smiled. San thought he must be one of those lucky people who didn’t always have to walk around feeling hungry.

‘I’m Zi. I saw you eating a dog.’

San didn’t answer. He waited to see what would come next. Something about this stranger made him feel insecure.

‘I’m Zi Quan Zhao. Who are you?’

San looked around uneasily.

‘Have I trespassed on your territory?’

Zi laughed.

‘Not at all. I just wonder who you are. Curiosity is a human virtue. Anybody who doesn’t have an enquiring mind is unlikely to live a satisfying life.’

‘My name’s Wang San.’

‘Where do you come from?’

San was not used to being asked questions. He started to be suspicious. Perhaps the man calling himself Zi was one of the chosen few who had the right to interrogate and punish? Perhaps he and his brothers had transgressed one of those invisible laws and regulations that surround the poverty-stricken?

San gestured vaguely into the darkness.

‘From over there. My brothers and I have been walking for many days. We crossed two big rivers.’

‘It’s great to have brothers. What are you doing here?’

‘We’re looking for work, but we can’t find any.’

‘It’s hard. Very hard. Lots of people are drawn to the city like flies to a honeypot. It’s not easy to make a living.’

San had a question on the tip of his tongue, but decided to swallow it. Zi seemed to be able to see through him.

‘Do you wonder what I do for a living, as I’m not dressed in rags?’

‘I don’t want to be inquisitive about my superiors.’

‘That doesn’t bother me in the least,’ said Zi, sitting down. ‘My father used to own sampans, and he would sail his little merchant fleet up and down the river here. When he died, my brother and I took over the business. My third and fourth brothers emigrated to the land on the far side of the ocean, to America. They have made their fortune by washing the dirty clothes of white men. America is a very strange land. Where else can you get rich from other men’s dirt?’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ said San. ‘Going to that country.’

Zi looked him up and down.

‘You need money for that. Nobody sails over a great ocean for nothing. Anyway, I wish you goodnight. I hope you manage to find work.’

Zi stood up, bowed and disappeared into the darkness. San lay down and wondered if he had imagined that short conversation. Perhaps he had been talking to his own shadow? Dreaming of being somebody else?

The brothers continued their vain search for work and food, walking for hours on end through the teeming city. San had decided to rope himself to his two brothers, and it struck him that he was like an animal with two youngsters that kept pressing up against him within the large flock. They looked for work on the wharfs and in the alleys overflowing with people. San urged his brothers to stand up straight when they stood in front of some authoritative person who might be able to offer them work.

‘We must look strong,’ he said. ‘Nobody gives work to men with no strength in their arms and legs. Even if you are tired and hungry, you must give the impression of being very strong.’

Any food they ate was what other people had thrown away. When they found themselves fighting with dogs over a discarded bone, it struck San that they were on their way to becoming animals. His mother had told him a story about a man who turned into an animal, with a tail and four legs but no arms, because he was lazy and didn’t want to work. But the reason that they were not working was not that they were lazy.

They continued to sleep on the jetty in the damp heat. Sometimes heavy rainfall would drift over the city from the sea during the night. They sheltered underneath the jetty, creeping in among the wet timbers, but they were soaked through even so. San noticed that Guo Si and Wu were beginning to lose heart. Their lust for life shrank with every day that passed, every day of hunger, torrential rain, and the feeling that nobody noticed them and nobody needed them.

One evening San noticed Wu hunched up, mumbling confused prayers to gods his parents used to pray to. That worried him for a moment. His parents’ gods had never been of any help. But then, if Wu found consolation in his prayers, San had no right to rob him of that feeling.

San was increasingly convinced that Canton was a city of horror. Every morning, when they set out on their endless search for work, they noticed more and more people lying dead in the gutters. Sometimes the rats or dogs had been chewing the faces of the corpses. Every morning he had the nasty feeling that he would end his life in the gutter of one of Canton’s many alleys.

After yet another day in the damp heat, San also found himself losing hope. He was so hungry, he felt dizzy and was incapable of thinking straight. As he lay on the jetty alongside his sleeping brothers, he thought for the first time that perhaps he might just as well fall asleep and never wake up.

There was nothing to wake up for.

During the night he dreamed yet again of the three severed heads. They suddenly started talking to him, but he couldn’t understand what they said.

When he woke up as dawn was beginning to break, he saw Zi sitting on a post, smoking a pipe. He smiled when he saw that San was awake.

‘You were not sleeping soundly,’ he said. ‘I could see that you were dreaming about something you wanted to get away from.’

‘I was dreaming about severed heads,’ said San. ‘Maybe one of them was mine.’

Zi eyed him pensively before responding.

‘Those who have a choice choose. Neither you nor your brothers look especially strong. It’s obvious that you are starving. Nobody who needs workers to carry or drag or pull chooses anybody who’s starving. At least, not as long as there are newcomers who still have some strength left and food in their rucksacks.’

Zi emptied his pipe before continuing.

‘Every morning there are dead bodies floating down the river. People who don’t have the strength to try any more. People who can’t see the point of living any longer. They fill their shirts with stones or tie sinkers to their legs. Canton has become a city full of restless ghosts, the souls of people who have taken their own lives.’

‘Why are you telling me this? I have enough pain to bear already.’

Zi raised his hand dismissively.

‘I’m not saying it to worry you. I wouldn’t have said anything if I didn’t have something else to add. My cousin owns a factory, and many of his workers are ill just now. I might be able to help you and your brothers.’

San had difficulty believing what he had just heard. But Zi said it again. He didn’t want to make any promises, but he might be able to find them work.

‘Why are you singling us out?’

Zi shrugged.

‘Why does anybody do anything? Or not do anything? Perhaps I just thought that you deserved help.’

Zi stood up.

‘I’ll come back when I know,’ he said.

He placed a few fruits on the ground in front of San, then walked away. San watched him walk along the jetty and disappear into the crowds of people.

True to his word, Zi returned that evening.

‘Wake your brothers,’ said Zi. ‘We have to go. I have work for you.’

‘Wu is ill. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

‘Somebody else will have taken the work by then. Either we go now, or we don’t go at all.’

San hastened to wake up Guo Si and Wu.

‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll have work at last.’

Zi led them through the dark alleys. San noticed that he was trampling on people sleeping on the pavements. San was holding Guo Si’s hand, and in turn he had his arm around Wu.

Soon San noticed from the smell that they were close to the water. Everything seemed easier now.

Then everything happened very fast. Strangers emerged from the shadows, grabbed them by the arms and started to pull sacks over their heads. San caught a punch that felled him, but he continued to struggle. When he was pressed down to the ground again, he bit an arm as hard as he could and managed to wriggle free. But he was caught again immediately.

San heard Wu screaming in terror not far away. In the light from a dangling lantern he could see his brother lying on his back. A man pulled a knife out of his chest, then threw the body into the water. Wu was carried slowly away by the current.

The shattering truth struck home: Wu was dead, and San had failed to protect him.

Then he received a heavy blow on the back of his head. He was unconscious when he and Guo Si were carried onto a rowing boat that took them to a ship anchored offshore.

All this happened in the summer of 1863. A year when thousands of Chinese peasants were abducted and taken across the seas to America, which gobbled them up into its insatiable jaws. What was in store for them was the same drudgery they had once dreamed of escaping.

They were transported over a wide ocean. But poverty accompanied them all the way.

12

On 9 March 1864, Guo Si and San started hacking away the mountain blocking the railway line that would eventually span the whole American continent.

It was one of the severest winters in living memory in Nevada, with days so cold each breath felt like ice crystals rather than air.

Previous to this, San and Guo Si had been working further west, where it was easier to prepare the ground and lay the rails. They had been taken there at the end of October, directly from the ship. Together with many of the others who had been transported in chains from Canton, they had been received by Chinese men who had cut off their pigtails, wore Western clothes and had watch chains across their chests. The brothers had been met by a man with the same surname as their own, Wang. To San’s horror, Guo Si — who normally said nothing at all — had begun to protest.

‘We were attacked, tied up and bundled on board. We didn’t ask to come here.’

San thought this would be the end of their long journey. The man in front of them would never accept being spoken to in such a way. He would draw the pistol he had stuck into his belt and shoot them.

But San was wrong. Wang burst out laughing, as if Guo Si had just told him a joke.

‘You are no more than dogs,’ said Wang. ‘Zi has sent me some talking dogs. I own you until you have paid me for the crossing, and your food, and the journey here from San Francisco. You will pay me by working for me. Three years from now, you can do whatever you like, but until then you belong to me. Out here in the desert you can’t run away. There are wolves, bears and Indians who will slit your throats, smash your skulls and eat your brains as if they were eggs. If you try to escape even so, i have dogs that will track you down. Then my whip will perform a merry dance, and you will have to work an extra year for me. So, now you know the score.’

San eyed the men standing behind Wang. They had dogs on leads and rifles in their hands. San was surprised that these white men with long beards were prepared to obey orders given them by a Chinaman. They had come to a country that was very different from China.

They were placed in a tented camp at the bottom of a deep ravine, with a stream running through it. On one side of the creek were the Chinese labourers, and on the other side a mixture of Irishmen, Germans and other Europeans. There was high tension between the two camps. The stream was a border that none of the Chinese passed unnecessarily. The Irishmen, who were often drunk, would yell abuse and throw stones at the Chinese side. San and Guo Si couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the stones flying through the air were hard; there was no reason to suppose that the words were any softer.

They found themselves living alongside twelve other Chinese. None of the others had been with them on the ship. San assumed Wang preferred to mix the newly arrived labourers with those who had been working on the railway for some time and would be able to tell the newcomers about the rules and routines. The single tent was small; when everyone had gone to bed they were squashed up against one another. That helped them to keep warm, but it also created a distressing feeling of not being able to move, of being tied up.

The man in charge of the tent was Xu. He was thin and had bad teeth but was regarded with great respect. Xu showed San and Guo Si where they could sleep. He asked where they came from, which ship they had sailed on, but he said nothing about himself. Sleeping next to San was Hao, who told him that Xu had been involved in building the railway from the very start. He had come to America at the beginning of the 1850s and started working in gold mines. According to rumour he had failed to pan gold in the rivers, but he had bought a decrepit old wooden hut where several successful gold prospectors had lived. Nobody could understand how Xu could be so stupid as to pay twenty-five dollars for a shack that nobody could live in now. But Xu carefully swept up all the dirt lying on the floor; then he removed the rotten floorboards and swept up all the dust and dirt underneath. In the end he filtered out so much gold dust that he was able to return to San Francisco with a small fortune. He decided to go back to Canton and even bought a ticket for the journey. But while he was waiting for his ship to sail, he visited one of the gambling dens where the Chinese spent so much of their time. He gambled and lost. He even ended up gambling away his ticket. That was when he contacted Central Pacific and became one of the first Chinese to be employed.

How Hao had found out all this without Xu himself ever having said anything about his past, San could never work out. But Hao insisted that every word was true.

Xu could speak English. Through him the brothers discovered what was being shouted over the stream separating the two camps. Xu spoke contemptuously of the men on the other side.

‘They call us Chinks,’ he said. ‘That is a very disparaging term for us. When the Irishmen are drunk, they sometimes call us pigs, which means that we are gau.’

‘Why don’t they like us?’ wondered San.

‘We are better workers,’ said Xu. ‘We work harder, we don’t drink, we don’t dodge and shirk. And we look different — our skin and eyes. They don’t like people who don’t look like they do.’

Every morning San and Guo Si clambered up the steep path leading out of the ravine, each carrying a lantern. It sometimes happened that one of the gang would slip on the icy surface and tumble all the way down to the bottom. Two men whose legs had been broken helped to prepare the food the brothers ate when they came back after their long working day. The Chinese and the labourers living on the other side of the stream worked a long way apart. Each group had its own path up to the top of the ravine and its own workplace. Foremen were constantly on the lookout to make sure they didn’t come too close. Sometimes fights would break out in the middle of the stream between Chinese with cudgels and Irishmen with knives. When that happened, the bearded guards would come racing up on horseback and separate them. Occasionally somebody would be so badly injured that he died. A Chinese who smashed the skull of an Irishman was shot; an Irishman who stabbed a Chinese was dragged away in chains. Xu urged everybody in his tent not to become involved in fights or stone throwing. He kept reminding them that they were guests in this foreign country.

‘We must wait,’ said Xu. ‘One of these days they’ll realise that there will never be a railway if we Chinese don’t build it. One day everything will change.’

Later that evening, when they were lying in the tent, Guo Si whispered to his brother and asked what Xu had meant, but San had no satisfactory answer to give him.

They had travelled from the coast inland towards the desert where the sun became colder and colder. When they were woken up by Xu’s loud shouts, they had to hurry in order to make sure the foremen wouldn’t be annoyed and force them to work longer than the usual twelve hours. The cold was bitter. It snowed almost every day.

They occasionally caught sight of the feared Wang, who had said that he owned them. He would suddenly appear out of nowhere, then vanish again just as quickly.

The brothers’ job was to prepare the embankment on which the rails and sleepers would be fastened down. There were fires burning everywhere, partly to enable them to see what they were doing but also to thaw out the frozen ground. They were constantly watched over by foremen on horseback, white men carrying rifles and wearing wolf-skin coats with scarves tied over their hats to keep the cold at bay. Xu had taught them always to say ‘Yes, boss’ when they were spoken to, even if they didn’t understand what had been said.

Fires could be seen burning several miles away. That was where the Irish were fixing sleepers and rails. They could sometimes hear the hooting of locomotives releasing steam. San and Guo Si regarded these enormous black beasts of burden as dragons. Even if the fire-breathing monsters their mother had told them about were colourful, these black, glittering monsters must have been what she was referring to.

Their toil was never-ending. When the long days were over they had barely enough strength left to drag themselves back to the bottom of the ravine, eat their food and then collapse in their tent. Over and over again San tried to make Guo Si wash in the cold water. San felt disgusted by his own body when he was dirty. To his surprise he was almost always on his own by the stream, half naked and shivering. The only others who washed regularly were the new arrivals. The will to keep himself clean was worn down by the heavy work. The day eventually came when he too collapsed into bed without washing. San lay in the tent amid the stench from their filthy bodies. It was as if he were slowly being transformed into a being without dignity, without dreams or longings. He could picture his mother and father as he dozed off, and he had the feeling that he had swapped the hell that had been his home for a hell that was different but even worse. They were now forced to work as slaves, in conditions worse than anything their mother and father had endured. Was this what they had hoped to achieve when they had run away and headed for Canton? Was there no way out for the poverty-stricken?

That evening, just before he fell asleep, San made up his mind that their only chance of surviving was to escape. Every day he saw one of the undernourished workers collapse and be carried away.

The following day he discussed his plans with Hao, who lay beside him listening attentively to what San had to say.

‘America is a big country,’ said Hao, ‘but not so big that a Chinese like you or your brother could simply disappear. If you really mean what you say, you must flee all the way back to China. Otherwise they’ll catch up with you sooner or later. I don’t need to tell you what will happen then.’

San thought long and hard about what Hao said. The time was not yet ripe for running away, nor even for telling Guo Si about his plan.

Late in March a violent snowstorm covered the Nevada desert. More than three feet of snow fell in less than twelve hours. When the storm had passed over, the temperature dropped. The next morning, they had to dig themselves out of their tent. The Irishmen on the other side of the frozen stream had fared better, as their tent had been on the lee side of the storm. Now they stood there laughing at the Chinese as they struggled to dig away the snow from the tents and paths leading up to the top of the ravine.

We get nothing for free, San thought. Not even the snow is shared fairly.

He could see that Guo Si was very tired. At times he barely had the strength to lift his spade. But San had made up his mind. Until the white man’s New Year came around again, they would keep each other alive.

At the end of March the first black men arrived in the railway village in the ravine. They pitched their tents on the same side of the stream as the Chinese. Neither of the brothers had ever seen a black man before. They were wearing ragged clothes and were suffering from the cold worse than San had ever seen a person suffer. Many of them died during their first few days in the ravine and on the railway. They were so weak that they would fall down in the darkness and not be discovered until much later, when the snow had started to melt in the spring. The black men were treated even worse than the Chinese, and ‘niggers’ was pronounced with an intonation that was even worse than that used for ‘Chinks’. Even Xu, who always preached that one should be restrained when talking about other people working on the railway, made no secret of his contempt for the blacks.

‘The whites call them fallen angels,’ said Xu. ‘Niggers are animals with no soul, and nobody misses them when they die. Instead of brains they have lumps of rotting flesh.’

The unusually severe cold lay over the ravine and the building site like a blanket of iron. One evening, when they were sitting with their evening meal around a small, ineffectual fire, Xu announced that the following day they would be moving to a new camp and a new workplace next to the mountain they would now start digging and blasting their way through.

They set off early. San couldn’t remember ever having experienced anything as cold at it was that day. He told Guo Si to go in front of him, as he wanted to make sure his brother didn’t fall down and get left behind. They followed the railway track until they came to the point where the rails ended and then, a few hundred yards further on, the roadbed itself. But Xu urged them to keep going. The flickering light from the lanterns ate into the darkness. San knew they were now very close to the mountains the whites called the Sierra Nevada. That was where they would have to start making cuttings and tunnels so that the railway could continue.

Xu stopped when they came to the lowest ridge. There were tents pitched and fires burning. The men who had walked all the way from the ravine flopped down beside the warm flames. San knelt down and held out his frozen hands, which were wrapped up in rags. At that very moment he heard a voice behind him. He turned round and saw a white man standing there, with shoulder-length hair and a scarf wrapped around his face, making him look like a masked bandit. He was holding a rifle. He was wearing a fur coat and had a fox’s tail hanging from his hat, which was fur-lined. His eyes reminded San of those Zi had focused on them that time in the past.

The white man suddenly raised his rifle and fired a shot into the darkness. The men warming themselves in front of the fire curled into the faetal position.

‘Stand up!’ yelled Xu. ‘Take off whatever you have on your heads!’

San stared at him in surprise. Were they expected to take off the hats they’d stuffed full of dry grass and bits of cloth?

‘Off with ’em,’ yelled Xu, who seemed scared of the man with the rifle. ‘No head wear.’

San took off his hat and gestured to Guo Si to do the same. The man with the rifle pulled down the scarf to reveal his face. He had a bristling moustache. Although he was standing several yards away, San could smell strong drink. He was on his guard immediately. White men smelling of spirits were always more unpredictable than sober ones.

The man started speaking in a shrill voice. San thought he sounded like an angry woman. Xu made a big effort to translate what the man said.

‘You had to take off your hats so that you could hear better,’ he said.

His voice was almost as shrill as the voice of the man with the rifle.

‘Your ears are so full of shit that you wouldn’t be able to hear me if you didn’t,’ was Xu’s version of what the man said. ‘I’m known as JA, but you must simply call me Boss. When I speak to you, you take off your hats. You answer my questions, but you never ask any of your own. Understood?’

San mumbled along with the others. It was obvious that the man in front of them didn’t like Chinese.

The man known as JA continued yelling and shouting.

‘You have in front of you a wall of stone. Your job is to cleave this mountain in two, wide enough for the railway to get through. You’ve been chosen because you’ve shown that you can work hard. We don’t want any of those fucking niggers or those drunken Irishmen. This is a mountain fit for Chinamen. That’s why you’re here. And I’m here to make sure you do what you’re supposed to do. Anybody who doesn’t use every last bit of strength he has, who shows me that he’s lazy, will wish he’d never been born. Understood? I want a response from every single one of you. Then you can put your hats on again. You can collect your pickaxes from Brown — he’s mad as a hatter every full moon. He likes to eat Chinamen raw. At other times he’s meek as a lamb.’

They all responded, each of them mumbling.

The sky was beginning to lighten when they found themselves standing with pickaxes in their hands in front of the cliff that loomed almost perpendicular in front of them. Steam was coming from their mouths. JA handed his rifle over to Brown for a moment, grabbed hold of a pickaxe, and hacked two markers into the bottom part of the rock. San could see that the width of the hole they were expected to create was more than eight yards.

There was no sign of any fallen blocks of stone, no piles of gravel. The mountain was going to offer extremely hard resistance. Every fragment of stone they levered loose would need exertions of a kind that couldn’t possibly be compared with anything they had done so far.

Somehow or other they had challenged the gods, who had sent them the tests they were now faced with. They would have to cut their way through the mountain in order to become free men, no longer the despised ‘Chinks’ in the American wilderness.

San was overcome by a feeling of utter despair. The only thing that kept him going was the thought that one day he and Guo Si would run away.

He tried to imagine that the mountain in front of him was in fact a wall separating him from China. Only a couple of yards in, the cold would vanish; plum trees would be in blossom.

That morning they started work on the rock face. Their new foreman kept watch over them like a hawk. Even when he turned his back on them, he seemed to be able to see if anybody lowered their pickaxe just for a moment. He had wrapped strips of leather around his fists that peeled away the skin on the faces of any poor soul who offended. It was not long before everybody hated this man with a rifle. They dreamed of killing him. San wondered about the relationship between JA and Wang. Was it Wang who owned JA, or vice versa?

JA seemed to be in league with the mountain, which was extremely reluctant to let go the tiniest splinter of granite, not even a tear or a strand of hair. It took them almost a month to hack out an opening of the required size. By then, one of them had already died. During the night he had crept silently out of bed and crawled out through the tent door. He had stripped off his clothes and lain down in the snow in order to die. When JA discovered the dead Chinese, he was furious.

‘You have no reason to mourn the suicide,’ he screeched in his shrill voice. ‘What you should regret is that now it’s you who have to hack away the stone that he ought to have shifted.’

When they came back from the mountain, the body had disappeared.

When they started to attack the mountain with nitroglycerine, men began to die, and San realised it was time to run. No matter what would be in store for them in the wilderness, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what they were going through just now. They would run away, and not stop until they were back in China.

They fled four weeks later. They left the tent silently in the middle of the night, followed the railway track, stole two horses from a rail depot and then headed west. Only when they felt they had travelled far enough away from the Sierra Nevada did they pause and rest by a fire; and then they resumed their flight. They came to a river and rode through the shallows in order to mask their tracks.

They frequently stopped and looked around. But there was nothing to be seen; nobody was following them.

San gradually began to think that they might manage to find their way back home after all. But his hopes were fragile.

13

San dreamed that every sleeper lying on the roadbed under the rails was a human rib, perhaps his own. He could feel his chest deflating and was unable to breathe air into his lungs. He tried to kick himself free from the weight pressing down and squashing his body, but failed.

San opened his eyes. Guo Si had rolled over on top of him in order to keep warm. San pushed him gently to one side and covered his body with the blanket. He sat up, rubbed his stiff joints, then put more wood on the fire burning inside a circle of stones they had gathered.

He held his hands out towards the flames. It was now the third night since they had fled the mountain. San had not forgotten what Wang said would happen to anybody silly enough to run away. They would be condemned to work on the mountain for so long that it would barely be possible to survive.

They still hadn’t spotted anybody chasing them. San suspected the foremen would assume the brothers were too stupid to use horses when they escaped. It sometimes happened that wandering bands of robbers stole horses from the depot, and if they were lucky the search would still be concentrated in the vicinity of the camp.

But then one of the horses died. San’s little Indian pony seemed to be just as strong as the dappled horse Guo Si was clinging to. But suddenly it stumbled and fell over. It was dead by the time it hit the ground. San knew nothing about horses and assumed the horse’s heart had simply stopped beating, the way human hearts sometimes do.

They had left the horse after first cutting a large lump of meat from its back. To confuse any possible pursuers they had changed direction rather more to the south than before. For several hundred yards San had walked behind Guo Si, dragging some branches behind him to cover their trail.

He was woken up by a bang that almost made his head explode. When he opened his eyes, his left ear throbbing with pain, he found himself looking into the face he feared most. It was still dark, even if a faint pink glow could be seen over the distant Sierra Nevada. JA was standing there, with a smoking rifle in his hand. He had fired it next to San’s ear.

JA was not alone. At his side were Brown and several Indians with bloodhounds on leads. JA handed his rifle to Brown and drew his revolver. He pointed it at San’s head. Then he aimed it sideways and fired a shot next to San’s right ear. When San stood up, he could see that JA was yelling something, but he couldn’t hear a word the foreman said. His head was filled with a thunderous roar. JA then pointed his revolver at Guo Si’s head. San could see the terror in his brother’s face, but could do nothing to help. JA fired two shots, one next to each ear. San could see the tears in Guo Si’s eyes caused by the pain.

Their flight was over. Brown tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and placed nooses around their necks, and they started the trek back east.

When they arrived at the mountain, JA paraded the escapees in front of the rest of the workers, their hands still tied behind their backs and nooses around their necks. San looked for Wang, but couldn’t see him. As neither of the brothers had recovered his hearing, they could only guess what JA had to say, perched on the back of his horse. When he had finished talking, he dismounted, and in front of the assembled workers he punched each of the brothers hard in the face. San fell over. For a brief moment he had the feeling that he would never be able to stand up again.

But in the end he did. Once more.

After the failed escape, what San expected to happen did in fact happen. They were not hanged, but every time nitroglycerine was used to blast open reluctant chunks of the mountain, it was San and Guo Si who were hoisted up in the baskets of death, as the Chinese workers called them. Even after a month, the brothers were still mostly deaf. San began to think that he would have to spend the rest of his life with the roaring noise filling his head.

Summer, which was long and hot, had reached them. At enormous physical cost they penetrated further and further into the mountain, carved their way into the mass of stone that yielded not even a single inch without demanding maximum effort. Every morning San felt that he couldn’t possibly last one more day.

San hated JA. A hatred that grew as time passed. It was not the physical brutality, nor even being hoisted up over and over again in the potentially fatal baskets. It was that when they’d been forced to stand in front of the other railway workers with nooses around their necks, they were put on display like animals.

‘I’m going to kill that man,’ said San to Guo Si. ‘I’m not going to leave this mountain without first having killed him. I shall kill him.’

‘That means we will also die,’ said Guo Si.

San was insistent.

‘I shall kill that man when the time is right. Not before. But then.’

The summer seemed to get hotter and hotter. They were working in broiling sunshine from early morning until distant dusk. Their working hours increased as the days became longer. Several of the workers were stricken by sunstroke; others died of exhaustion. But there always seemed to be more Chinese who could take the places of the dead.

They came in endless processions of wagons. Every time a newcomer arrived at the door of their tent, he was bombarded with questions. Where did he come from, what ship had transported him over the ocean? There was an insatiable hunger for news from China.

During these summer months, as the brothers’ hearing returned, JA was struck down by a fever and didn’t appear. One morning Brown came to say that as long as the foreman was indisposed, the two brothers would not be the ones hoisted up in the baskets of death. He made no attempt to explain why he was excusing them from this dangerous work. Perhaps it was because the foreman often treated Brown just as badly as any of the Chinese. San cautiously attempted to get to know Brown better.

San often wondered about the reddish-brown people with long, black hair, which they sometimes adorned with feathers: their facial features reminded him of his own.

One evening he asked Brown, who knew a little Chinese, about them.

‘The Red Indians hate us,’ said Brown. ‘Just as much as you do. That’s the only similarity I can see.’

‘But even so, they are the ones standing guard over us.’

‘We feed them. We give them rifles. We let them be one step above you. And two steps above the niggers. They think they have power. But in fact they are slaves like everybody else.’

‘Everybody?’

Brown shook his head. San was not going to receive an answer to his last question.

They sat in the darkness. Now and then the glow from their pipes lit up their faces. Brown had given San one of his old pipes and also some tobacco. San was constantly on his guard. He still didn’t know what Brown wanted in return. Perhaps he just wanted company, to break the boundless solitariness of the desert, now that the foreman was ill.

Eventually San dared to ask about JA.

Who was this man who never gave up until he had tracked down San and his brother and ruined their hearing? Who was this man who derived pleasure from torturing other people?

‘I’ve heard things,’ said Brown, biting hard on the stem of his pipe. ‘The story is the rich men in San Francisco who invested money in this railway gave him a job as a guard. He was good — chased after escapees and was clever enough to use both dogs and Indians. And so they made him a foreman. But sometimes, as in your case, he reverts to chasing escapees. They say that nobody has ever got away from him, unless you count the ones who died out there in the desert. In such cases he cut off their hands and scalped them, just like the Indians do, to demonstrate that he’d tracked them down despite everything. A lot of people think he’s superhuman. The Indians say he can see in the dark. That’s why they call him Long Beard Who Sees in the Night.’

San thought over what Brown had said.

‘He doesn’t speak like you do. What he says sounds different. Where does he come from?’

‘I don’t know for sure. Somewhere in Europe. From a country in the far north, somebody said, but I’m not sure.’

‘Does he ever say anything about that himself?’

‘Never. That stuff about a country in the far north might not be true.’

‘Is he an Englishman?’

Brown shook his head. ‘That man comes from hell. And that’s where he’ll go back to one of these days.’

San wanted to ask more questions, but Brown was reluctant.

‘No more about him. He’ll soon be back. His fever is dying away, and water doesn’t run straight through his stomach any more. When he’s back here there’s nothing I’ll be able to do to save you from dancing with death in the baskets.’

A few days later JA was back on duty. He was paler and thinner than before, but more brutal. The very first day he knocked out two Chinese who worked alongside San and Guo Si simply because he thought they didn’t greet him politely enough when he came riding up on horseback. He was not pleased with the progress made while he had been sick.

The brothers were sent back up in the baskets again. They could no longer count on any support from Brown.

They burrowed their way deeper into the mountain, blasting and hacking, shifting boulders and moulding hard-packed sand to form the roadbed on which the rails would be laid. With superhuman efforts they conquered the mountain, yard after yard. In the distance they could see the locomotives delivering rails and sleepers and gangs of labourers.

As the nights grew colder and the autumn advanced, Guo Si fell ill. He woke up one morning with bad stomach pains. He ran out of the tent and only just managed to pull down his trousers before his insides exploded.

His fellow workers were afraid that they might all be infected and so left him alone in the tent. San brought him water, and an old black man by the name of Hoss kept moistening his brow and wiping away the watery mess that leaked out of his body. Hoss had spent so much time tending the sick that nothing seemed to threaten him any longer. He had only one arm; he had lost the other in a landslide.

JA was impatient. He looked down in disgust at the man lying in his own faeces.

‘Are you going to die, or aren’t you?’ he asked.

Guo Si tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength.

‘I need this tent,’ said JA. ‘Why do you Chinese always take so long to die?’

The days grew shorter, and as autumn gave way to winter, miraculously, Guo Si began to get better.

After four years, they had served their time and could leave the railway as free men. San heard about a white man named Samuel Acheson who was planning to lead a wagon trek eastward. He needed somebody to prepare his food and wash his clothes and promised to pay for the work. He had made a fortune panning for gold in the Yukon River. Now he was going to traverse the continent in order to visit his sister, his only living relative, who lived in New York.

Acheson agreed to employ both San and Guo Si. Neither of them would regret joining his trek. Samuel Acheson treated people well, irrespective of the colour of their skin.

Crossing the whole continent, the endless plains, took much longer than San could ever have predicted. On two occasions Acheson fell ill and was confined to bed for several months. He didn’t seem to be plagued by physical illness; it was his mind that descended into gloom so murky that he hid himself away in his tent and didn’t emerge until the depression had passed. Twice every day San would serve him food and see Acheson lying at the back of his tent, his face averted from the world.

But both times he recovered, his depression faded away and they could continue their long journey. He could have afforded to travel by rail, but Acheson preferred his phlegmatic oxen and the uncomfortable covered wagons.

Out in the vast prairies, San would often lie awake in the evenings, gazing up at the endless skies. He was looking for his mother and father and Wu, but never found them.

They eventually reached New York, Acheson was reunited with his sister, San and Guo Si were paid and they began looking for a ship that would take them to England. San knew that was the only possible route for them to take, since there were no ships sailing directly to Canton or Shanghai from New York. They managed to find places on deck on a ship bound for Liverpool.

That was in March 1867. The morning they left New York, the harbour was shrouded in thick fog. Eerie foghorns wailed on all sides. San and Guo Si were standing by the rail.

‘We’re going home,’ said Guo Si.

‘Yes,’ said San. ‘We’re on our way home now.’

14

On 5 July 1867, the two brothers left Liverpool on a ship called Nellie.

San soon discovered that he and Guo Si were the only Chinese on board. They had been allocated sleeping places at the very front of the bow in the old ship that smelled of rot. On board the Nellie the same kind of rules applied as in Canton: there were no walls, but every passenger recognised his own or others’ private space.

Even before the ship left port San had noticed two unobtrusive passengers with fair hair who frequently knelt down on deck to pray. They seemed unaffected by everything going on around them — sailors pushing and pulling, officers urging them on and barking orders. The two men were totally immersed in their prayers until they quietly stood up again.

The two men turned to face San and bowed. San took a step back, as if he had been threatened. A white man had never bowed to him before. White men didn’t bow to Chinese; they kicked them. He hurried back to the place where he and Guo Si were going to sleep and wondered who these two men could be.

Late in the afternoon the moorings were cast off, the ship was towed out of the harbour and the sails were hoisted. A fresh northerly breeze was blowing. The ship set off in an easterly direction at a brisk pace.

San held on to the rail and let the cool wind blow in his face. The two brothers were now on their way home at last, to complete their voyage around the world. It was essential to stay healthy on the voyage. San had no idea what would happen when they arrived back in China, but he was determined that they would not sink into poverty once more.

A few days after they had left port and reached the open sea, the two fair-haired men came up to San. They had with them an elderly member of the crew who spoke Chinese. San was afraid that he and Guo Si had done something wrong, but the crewman, Mr Mott, explained that the two men were Swedish missionaries on their way to China. He introduced them as Mr Elgstrand and Mr Lodin.

Mr Mott’s Chinese pronunciation was difficult to understand, but San and Guo Si understood enough to discover that the two young men were priests who had dedicated their lives to work in the Christian mission to China. Now they were on their way to Fuzhou in order to build up a community in which they could begin to convert the Chinese to the true religion. They would fight against paganism and show the way to God’s kingdom, which was the ultimate destination for all human beings.

Would San and Guo Si consider helping these gentlemen to improve their fluency in Chinese, which was such a difficult language? They had a smattering already but wanted to work hard during the voyage so that they would be well prepared when they disembarked on the Chinese coast.

San thought for a moment. He saw no reason that they should not accept the remuneration the fair-haired men were prepared to pay. It would make their own return to China easier.

He bowed.

‘It will give Guo Si and me great pleasure to help these gentlemen become better acquainted with the Chinese language.’

They started work the very next day. Elgstrand and Lodin wanted to invite San and Guo Si to their part of the ship, but San said no. He preferred to remain in the bow.

It was San who became the missionaries’ teacher. Guo Si spent most of the time sitting to one side, listening.

The two Swedish missionaries treated the brothers like equals. San was surprised that they were not undertaking this voyage in order to find work, or because they had been forced to leave. What drove these young men was a genuine desire and determination to save souls from eternal damnation. Elgstrand and Lodin were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their faith. Elgstrand came from a simple farming family, while Lodin’s father had been a rural minister. They pointed out on a map where they came from. They spoke openly, making no attempt to hide their simple origins.

When San saw the map of the world, he realised the full extent of their journey.

Elgstrand and Lodin were keen students. They worked hard and learned quickly. By the time the ship passed through the Bay of Biscay, they had established a routine involving lessons in the morning and in the late afternoon. San started asking questions about their faith and their God. He wanted to understand things about his mother that had been beyond his comprehension. She had known nothing about the Christian God, but she had prayed to other invisible higher powers. How could a person be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to make other people believe in the God that person worshipped himself?

Elgstrand spoke more often, reinforcing the message that all men are sinners but could be saved and after death could enter paradise.

San thought about the hatred he felt for Zi, for Wang (who was probably dead) and for JA. Elgstrand maintained that the Christian God taught that the worst crime a man could commit was to kill a fellow human being.

San didn’t like that idea at all; his common sense told him that Elgstrand and Lodin couldn’t be right. All the time they talked about what was in store after death, but never about how a human life could be changed while it was being lived.

Elgstrand often came back to the idea that all human beings were equal. In the eyes of God everybody was a poor sinner. But San could not understand how, when the Day of Judgement dawned, he and Zi and JA could be assessed equally.

He was extremely doubtful. But at the same time he was pleasantly surprised by the kindness and apparently boundless patience the two young men from Sweden displayed towards him and Guo Si. He could also see that his brother, who often had private conversations with Lodin, seemed to be impressed by what he heard. As a result, San never initiated any discussions with Guo Si about his opinion of the white God.

Elgstrand and Lodin shared their food with San and Guo Si. San couldn’t know what was true and what wasn’t true when it came to their God, but he had no doubt that the two men lived in accordance with what they preached.

After thirty-two days at sea the Nellie called at Cape Town to replenish stores and rode at anchor in the shadow of Table Mountain before continuing southward. As they came to the Cape of Good Hope, they were hit by a severe southerly storm. The Nellie drifted for four days with sails taken in, riding the waves. San was terrified by the thought that the ship might sink, and he could see that the crew was scared as well. The only people on board who were completely calm were Elgstrand and Lodin. Or perhaps they concealed their fear well.

If San was scared, his brother was panic-stricken. Lodin sat with Guo Si throughout the whole of the raging storm. When it was over, Guo Si went down on bended knee and said he wanted to declare his belief in the God the white men were going to introduce to his Chinese brothers.

San was filled with even more admiration for the missionaries who had been so calm while the storm raged. But he couldn’t bring himself to do what Guo Si had done and kneel down to pray to a God that for him was still too mysterious and evasive.

They rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and favourable winds assisted their passage over the Indian Ocean. The weather became warmer, easier to cope with. San continued with his teaching, and every day Guo Si would go off with Lodin for their intimate, mumbled conversations.

But San knew nothing of what the future held. One day Guo Si suddenly fell ill. He woke San up during the night and whispered that he had started to cough up blood. Guo Si was deathly pale and shivering. San asked one of the sailors on night watch to fetch the missionaries. The man, who came from America and had a black mother but a white father, looked down at Guo Si.

‘Are you suggesting that I should wake up one of the gentlemen just because a coolie is lying here and bleeding?’

‘If you don’t, they will punish you tomorrow.’

The sailor frowned. He fetched Elgstrand and Lodin. They carried Guo Si to their cabin and laid him on one of the bunks. Lodin seemed to be the one who knew more about patient care and gave him several different medicines. San squatted back against the wall in the cramped cabin. The flickering light from the lantern cast shadows onto the walls. The ship progressed slowly through the swell.

The end came very quickly. Guo Si died as dawn broke. Before he breathed his last, Elgstrand and Lodin promised that he would be delivered unto God if he confessed his sins and affirmed his belief. They held his hands and prayed together. San sat by himself in the corner of the room. There was nothing he could do. His second brother had left him. But he couldn’t help but notice that the missionaries gave Guo Si a feeling of peace and assurance that he had never experienced before in his life.

San had difficulty understanding the last words Guo Si said to him. But he had the feeling Guo Si wasn’t afraid of death.

‘I’m leaving you now,’ said Guo Si. ‘I’m walking on water, like the man they call Jesus. I’m on my way to a different and a better world. Wu is waiting for me there. And you will come to join us one day.’

When Guo Si died, San sat with his head on his knees and his hands over his ears. He shook his head when Elgstrand tried to talk to him. Nobody could help him with the feeling of solitary impotence that overwhelmed him.

He returned to his place at the very front of the ship. Two members of the crew sewed Guo Si’s body into an old sail, together with some rusty iron nails as weights.

Elgstrand told San that the captain would conduct a sea burial two hours later.

‘I want to be together with my brother,’ said San. ‘I don’t want him to lie out there on deck before they drop him into the sea.’

Elgstrand and Lodin carried the body in its shroud of sailcloth into their cabin and left San alone with his brother. Guo Si would never return to China, but traditional beliefs made it essential for a part of his body to be buried there. San took a knife from the little table and carefully opened up the bottom of the package. He cut off Guo Si’s left foot. He was careful to make sure that no blood dripped onto the floor, tied a piece of cloth around the stump, then tied another piece of cloth around the foot, and put it inside his shirt. Then he repaired the hole in the sail. Nobody would be able to tell that it had been opened.

The captain and crew assembled by the ship’s rail. The sailcloth containing Guo Si’s body was placed on a plank resting on trestles. The captain took off his cap. He read from the Bible, then launched into a hymn. Elgstrand and Lodin joined in with powerful voices. Just as the captain was about to give the signal for the sailors to tip the body overboard, Elgstrand lifted his hand.

‘This simple Chinese man, Wang Guo Si, saw the light before he died. Even if his body will soon be on its way to the bottom of the ocean, his soul is free and already soaring over our heads. Let us pray to the God who looks after the dead and liberates their souls. Amen.’

When the captain gave the signal, San closed his eyes. He heard a distant splash as the body hit the water.

San returned to the place he and his brother had occupied during the voyage. He still couldn’t register that Guo Si was dead. Just when he’d thought that his brother’s will to live had been boosted, not least by the meeting with the two missionaries, Guo Si had been whisked away by an unknown illness.

The night after the sea burial San began the unpleasant task of cutting away skin and sinews and muscles from Guo Si’s foot. The only tool he had was an iron screw he’d found on deck. He threw the bits of flesh overboard. When the bones were clean, he rubbed them with a rag to dry them and hid them in his kitbag.

He spent the following week in solitary mourning. There were times when he thought the best thing he could do was to climb silently over the rail under cover of darkness and sink into the sea. But he had to take the bones of his dead brother back home.

When he started his lessons with the missionaries again, he could never stop thinking about how much they had meant to Guo Si. He hadn’t screamed his way into death; he had been calm. Elgstrand and Lodin had given Guo Si the most elusive thing of all: the courage to die.

During the rest of the voyage, first to Java where the ship replenished stores again, and then the final stretch to Canton, San asked a lot of questions about the God who could bring comfort to the dying, and who offered paradise to all, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor.

But the key question was why this God had allowed Guo Si to die just when he and San were on their way back home after all the hardship they had undergone. Neither Elgstrand nor Lodin could give him a satisfactory answer. The ways of the Christian God were inscrutable, Elgstrand said. What did that mean? That life was nothing more than waiting for what came next? That faith was in fact a riddle?

San was brooding as the ship approached Canton. He would never forget any of what he had been through. Now he wanted to learn to write, so that he could record what had happened in his life alongside his dead brothers, from the morning when he’d discovered his parents hanging from a tree.

A few days before they expected to see the Chinese coast, Elgstrand and Lodin came to sit down beside him on deck, wishing to know of his plans on arriving in Canton.

He had no answer.

‘We don’t want to lose touch with you,’ said Elgstrand. ‘We’ve become close during this voyage. Without you, our knowledge of Chinese would have been even more sketchy than it is. We’d like you to join us. We shall pay you a wage, and you will help us to build up the big Christian community we dream about.’

San sat in silence for quite a while before responding. When he’d made up his mind, he stood up and bowed twice to the missionaries.

He would go with them. Perhaps one day he would achieve the insight that had gilded Guo Si’s final days.

On 12 September 1867, San stepped ashore in Canton. In his kitbag were the bones from his dead brother’s foot. That was all he had to show for his long journey.

He looked around the quay. Was he searching for Zi or Wu? He didn’t know.

A few days later San accompanied the two Swedish missionaries on a riverboat to the town of Fuzhou. He contemplated the countryside drifting slowly by. He was looking for somewhere to bury the remains of Guo Si.

It was something he wanted to do alone. It was a matter between him, his parents and the spirits of his ancestors.

The riverboat sailed slowly northward. Frogs were singing on the banks.

San had come home.

15

In the autumn of 1868, San began with considerable effort to chronicle his story and that of his two dead brothers. Five years had passed since he and Guo Si had been abducted by Zi, and it was now a year since San had returned to Canton with Guo Si’s foot in a bag. During that year he had accompanied Elgstrand and Lodin to Fuzhou, had been in attendance as their personal servant and, thanks to a teacher arranged for him by Lodin, had learned to write.

The night San sat down and began writing his life story, a strong wind was rattling the windows of the house in which he had a room. He sat with his pencil in his hand, listening to the sounds and imagining himself back at sea.

It was only now that he was starting to grasp the significance of everything he’d been through. He made up his mind to recall and record every detail, skipping nothing.

Though who would read his story?

He had nobody to write for. And yet he wanted to do it. If there really was a Creator who ruled over the living and the dead, he would no doubt see to it that whatever San wrote would end up in the hands of somebody who wanted to read it.

San started writing, slowly and labouriously, while the winds made the walls creak. He swayed slowly back and forth on the stool he was sitting on. The room had soon turned into a ship, and the floor was moving under his feet.

He had placed several piles of paper on the table in front of him. Just like crayfish in the riverbed, he intended to work his way backward, to the point where he had seen his parents dangling on the end of ropes, swaying in the wind. But he wanted to start with the journey to the place where he was right now. That was the one most vivid in his memory.

Elgstrand and Lodin had been both exhilarated and nervous when they disembarked in Canton. The chaotic mass of people, strange smells and their inability to understand the special Hakka dialect spoken in the city made them insecure. They were expected — a Swedish missionary by the name of Tomas Hamberg was there to greet them: he worked for a German Bible society devoted to spreading Chinese translations of biblical texts. Hamberg was very hospitable and let them stay in the house in the German legation where he had his office and his flat. San played the role of the silent servant he had decided to assume. He took charge of the Chinese delegated to carry the missionaries’ baggage, washed his employers’ clothes, and saw to their needs at all hours of the day and night. Although he said nothing and kept in the background, he listened carefully to everything that was said. Hamberg spoke better Chinese than Elgstrand and Lodin and often spoke with them in order to help improve their fluency. Through a door standing ajar, San heard Hamberg asking Lodin about how they had come into contact with him. San was surprised to hear that Hamberg warned Lodin not to place too much trust in a Chinese servant.

It was the first time San had heard any of the missionaries say anything negative about a Chinese. But he was confident that neither Elgstrand nor Lodin would think the way Hamberg did.

After a few days of intensive preparation they left Canton and sailed along the coast and then up the Min Jiang River to Fuzhou, the City of the Black and White Pagodas. Hamberg had arranged for them to receive a letter of introduction to the chief mandarin of the city, who had previously shown himself to be well disposed to Christian missionaries. To his astonishment, San watched as Elgstrand and Lodin didn’t hesitate to kneel down and touch the ground with their foreheads before the mandarin. He gave them permission to work in the town, and after a thorough search they found a base suitable for their purposes. It was a gated compound containing several houses.

The day they moved in Elgstrand and Lodin knelt down and blessed the compound, which would be their future home. San also bent his knee, but uttered no benediction. It occurred to him that he still hadn’t found a suitable place in which to bury Guo Si’s foot.

It was several months before he found a place near the river where the evening sun shone over the treetops until the ground was slowly swallowed up by shade. San visited the spot many times and always felt very much at peace as he sat there, his back leaning against a boulder. The river flowed slowly past at the bottom of the gentle slope before him. Even now, although autumn had already set in, there were flowers blooming on the riverbank.

Here he would be able to sit and talk to his brothers. This was where they could come to be with him. They could be together. The dividing line between life and death would disappear.

He dug a deep hole in the ground and buried his brother’s foot bones. He filled in the hole meticulously, removed all traces, and on the spot placed a stone that he had brought back from the American desert.

San thought that perhaps he ought to recite one of the prayers he had learned from the missionaries; but since Wu, who was also there in a way, had not become acquainted with the God to whom the prayers would be addressed, he merely mentioned their names. He attached wings to their souls and empowered them to fly away.

Elgstrand and Lodin generated amazing energy. San had more and more respect for their unrelenting efforts to lower all barriers and persuade people to help them build up their mission. They also had money, of course. They needed money to carry out their work. Elgstrand had an arrangement with an English shipping company that regularly visited Fuzhou and brought deliveries of money from Sweden. San was surprised to note that the missionaries never seemed to worry about the possibility of thieves, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill them in order to gain access to their riches. Elgstrand kept the money and bills of exchange under his pillow. When neither he nor Lodin was around, San was responsible.

On one occasion San secretly counted the money, which was kept in a little leather bag. He was surprised by how much there was. For a brief moment he was tempted to take the money and run away. There was enough for him to travel to Beijing and live as a rich man on the interest his fortune earned.

But the temptation was overcome when he thought about Guo Si and the kindness and care the missionaries had shown him during his final days on this earth.

San was leading a life he could never have imagined. He had a room of his own with a bed, clean clothes, plenty of food. From being at the very bottom of the ladder, he was now in charge of all the servants in the house. He was strict and decisive, but never resorted to physical punishment when anybody made a mistake.

Only a couple of weeks after they arrived in Fuzhou, Elgstrand and Lodin opened their doors to one and all. The courtyard was crammed full. San remained in the background and listened to Elgstrand explaining, in his faltering Chinese, about the remarkable God who had sent His only Begotten Son to be crucified. Lodin handed out coloured pictures, which the congregation passed around to one another.

When Elgstrand had finished, the courtyard emptied rapidly. But the following day the same thing happened, and people came again, some of them bringing friends and acquaintances. The whole town began talking about these remarkable white men who had come to live among them. The most difficult thing for the Chinese to understand was that Elgstrand and Lodin were not running a business. They had nothing to sell, and there was nothing they wanted to buy. They simply stood there and spoke in bad Chinese about a God who treated all human beings as equals.

In these early days there was no limit to the missionaries’ efforts. They nailed Chinese characters to the arch over the entrance to the courtyard, declaring that this was the Temple of the One True God. The two men never seemed to sleep but were constantly active. San sometimes heard them using a Chinese expression meaning ‘degrading idolatry’, declaring that it must be resisted. He wondered how the missionaries dared to believe that they could persuade ordinary Chinese people to abandon ideas and beliefs they had lived with for generations. How could a God who allowed His only son to be nailed to a cross be able to give a Chinese peasant spiritual comfort or the will to live?

A few weeks after they’d arrived in Fuzhou, early in the morning San drew the bolts and opened the heavy wooden front door to be confronted by a young woman who bowed her head and announced that her name was Lou Qi. She came from a little village up the Min River, not far from Shuikou. Her parents were poor peasants, and she had fled her village when her father decreed that she should be sold as a concubine to a seventy-year-old man in Nanchang. She had begged her father to release her from that obligation, since rumour had it that several of the man’s previous concubines had been killed when he had grown tired of them. But her father had refused to listen to her protests, and so she had run away. A German missionary based in the outpost of Gou Sihan had told her that there was a mission in Fuzhou where Christian charity was available to anybody who sought it.

San looked her up and down when she had finished her story. He asked a few questions about what she was capable of doing, then let her in. She would be allowed to see if she could assist the women and the chef who were responsible for feeding the residents of the mission. If things turned out well, he might be able to offer her a job on the household staff.

He was touched by the joy that lit up her face.

Qi did a good job, and San extended her contract. She lived with the other female servants and was liked because she was always unruffled and never tried to avoid tasks allocated to her. San used to watch her as she worked in the kitchen or hurried across the courtyard on some errand or other. Their eyes occasionally met, but he never treated her any differently from the other servants.

One day shortly before Christmas, Elgstrand asked him to hire a boat and appoint some oarsmen. They were going to travel downriver to visit an English ship that had just arrived from London. The British consul in Fuzhou had informed Elgstrand that there was a parcel for the mission station.

‘You’d better come with us,’ said Elgstrand with a smile. ‘I need my best man when I’m going to collect a bagful of money.’

San found a team of oarsmen in the harbour who accepted the assignment. The following day Elgstrand and San clambered down into the boat. Just before, San had whispered to his boss that it was probably best not to say anything about the contents of the parcel they were collecting from the English ship.

Elgstrand smiled.

‘I’m no doubt gullible,’ he said, ‘but not quite as naive as you think.’

It took the oarsmen three hours to reach the ship and pull up alongside. Elgstrand climbed the ladder with San. A bald captain by the name of John Dunn received them. He eyed the oarsmen with extreme mistrust. Then he gave San a similar look and made a comment that San didn’t understand. Elgstrand shook his head and explained to San that Captain Dunn didn’t have much time for Chinamen.

‘He thinks you are all thieves and confidence tricksters,’ said Elgstrand with a laugh. ‘One of these days he’ll realise how wrong he is.’

Dunn and Elgstrand disappeared into the captain’s cabin. After a short while Elgstrand emerged with a leather briefcase, which he ostentatiously handed to San.

‘Captain Dunn thinks I’m crazy for trusting you. Sad to say, Captain Dunn is an extremely vulgar person who doubtless knows a lot about ships and winds and oceans, but nothing at all about people.’

They climbed back down to the rowing boat and returned to the mission station. It was dark by the time they arrived. San paid the leader of the oarsmen. As they walked through the dark alleys, San began to feel uneasy. He couldn’t help thinking about that evening in Canton when Zi had lured him and his brothers into the trap. But nothing happened this time. Elgstrand went to his office with the case while San bolted the door and woke up the nightwatchman, who had fallen asleep with his back to the outside wall.

‘You get paid for being on guard,’ said San, ‘not for sleeping.’

He said it in a friendly tone of voice even though he knew the watchman was lazy and would soon drop off to sleep again. But the man had a lot of children to look after, and a wife who had been badly scalded by boiling water and had been confined to bed for many years, often screaming out in pain.

I’m a foreman with both feet on the ground, San thought. I don’t sit on horseback like JA. And I sleep like a guard dog, with one eye open.

He went to his room. On the way he noticed that there was a light in the room where the female servants slept. He frowned. It was forbidden to have candles burning at night, as the risk of starting a fire was too great. He went to the window and peeped cautiously through a gap in the thin curtains. There were three women in the room. One of them, the oldest of the servants, was asleep, but Qi and another young woman called Na were sitting up in the bed they shared, talking. There was a lantern on their bedside table. As it was a warm night, Qi had unbuttoned the top of her nightdress, exposing her breasts. San stared spellbound at her body. He couldn’t hear their voices and guessed they were whispering so as not to wake up the older woman.

Qi suddenly turned and looked at the window. San shrank back. Had she seen him? He withdrew into the shadows and waited. But Qi didn’t adjust the curtains. San returned to the window and stood watching until Na blew out the candle, leaving the room in darkness.

San didn’t move. One of the dogs that ran loose in the compound during the night to frighten away thieves came and sniffed at his hands.

‘I’m not a thief,’ whispered San. ‘I’m an ordinary man lusting after a woman who might one day be mine.’

From that moment on, San set his heart on Qi. He was careful about it, not wanting to scare her. Nor did he want his interest to be too obvious to the other servants. Jealousy was always liable to spread quickly.

It was a long time before Qi understood the cautious signals he kept sending her. They started meeting in the dark outside her room, after Na had promised not to gossip about it. In return for that Na received a pair of new shoes. In the end, after almost half a year, Qi started to spend part of every night in San’s room. When they made love San experienced a feeling of joy that banished all the painful shadows and memories that usually surrounded him.

San and Qi had no doubt that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

San decided to speak to Elgstrand and Lodin and ask their permission to get married. San went to visit the two missionaries one morning after they had finished breakfast but before they turned their attention to the tasks that filled their days. He explained what he wanted. Lodin said nothing; Elgstrand did the talking.

‘Why do you want to marry her?’

‘She is nice and considerate. She works hard.’

‘She’s a very simple woman who can’t do nearly as much as you’ve learned. And she shows no interest in our Christian message.’

‘She’s still very young.’

‘There are those who say she was a thief.’

‘The servants are always gossiping. Nobody escapes their attention. Everybody accuses everybody else of anything at all. I know what’s true and what isn’t. Qi has never been a thief.’

Elgstrand turned to Lodin. San had no idea what they said in a language he didn’t understand.

‘We think you should wait,’said Elgstrand. ‘If you are going to get married, we want it to be a Christian wedding. The first one we’ve performed here at the mission station. But neither of you is mature enough yet. We want you to wait.’

San bowed and left the room. He was extremely disappointed. But Elgstrand had not given him a definite no. One day he and Qi would become a couple.

A few months later Qi told San that she was pregnant. San was overjoyed and decided immediately that if it was a boy, he would be called Guo Si. But at the same time he realised this news would cause problems — the Christian religion insisted that couples had to be married before they had children. Having sexual intercourse before marriage was considered a major sin. San couldn’t think of a solution. The growing stomach could be concealed for some time yet, but San would be forced to say something before the truth was revealed.

One day San was informed that Lodin would need a team of oarsmen for a journey several miles upriver to a German-run mission station. As always with these boat trips, San would go as well. The evening before the journey he said goodbye to Qi and promised that he would solve everything upon his return.

When he and Lodin returned four days later, San was summoned to Elgstrand, who wanted to speak to him. The missionary was sitting at his desk in his office. He usually invited San to sit down, but this time he didn’t. San suspected that something had happened.

Elgstrand’s voice was milder than usual when he spoke.

‘How did the trip go?’

‘Everything went as expected.’

Elgstrand nodded thoughtfully and gave San a searching look.

‘I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I hoped till the very last that the rumour that had reached my ears was not true. But in the end I was forced to act. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

San knew, but said no even so.

‘That makes me even more disappointed,’ said Elgstrand. ‘When a person tells a lie, the devil has found its way into the man’s mind. I’m referring, of course, to the fact that the woman you wanted to marry is pregnant. I’ll give you another opportunity to tell me the truth.’

San bowed his head but said nothing. He could feel his heart racing.

‘For the first time since we met on the ship bringing us here, you have disappointed me,’ Elgstrand went on. ‘You have been one of the people who have given me and Brother Lodin the feeling that even the Chinese can be raised up to a higher spiritual level. The last few days have been very difficult. I have prayed for you and decided that I can allow you to stay. But you must devote even more time and effort to progress to the moment when you can declare your allegiance to the God we share.’

San stood there, head bowed, waiting for what came next. Nothing did.

‘That’s all,’ said Elgstrand. ‘Go back to your duties.’

As he reached the door, he heard Elgstrand’s voice behind his back.

‘You understand, of course, that Qi couldn’t possibly stay on here. She has left us.’

San was devastated when he emerged into the courtyard. He felt the same as he did when his brother died. Now he was floored once again. He found Na, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of the kitchen. It was the first time San had ever been violent to one of the servants. Na screamed and threw herself onto the ground. San soon realised that she was not the one who had gossiped, but that the old woman had heard Qi confessing the situation to Na. San managed to prevent himself from attacking her as well. That would have meant he would have to leave the mission station. He took Na to his room and sat her down on a stool.

‘Where is Qi?’

‘She left two days ago.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘I don’t know. She was very upset. She ran.’

‘She must have said something about where she was going.’

‘I don’t think she knew. But she might have gone to the river to wait for you there.’

San stood up like a shot, raced out of the room, through the main gate and down to the harbour. But he couldn’t find her. He spent most of the day looking for her, asking everybody he came across, but nobody had seen her. He spoke to the oarsmen, and they promised to let him know if Qi showed up.

When he got back to the mission station and met Elgstrand again, it was as if the Swede had already forgotten about what had happened. He was preparing for the service that was to be held the following day.

‘Don’t you think the courtyard ought to be swept?’ Elgstrand asked in a friendly tone.

‘I’ll make sure that’s done first thing tomorrow morning, before the visitors arrive.’

Elgstrand nodded, and San bowed. Elgstrand obviously considered Qi’s sin so serious that there was no redemption possible for her.

San simply could not understand that there were people who could never be granted the grace of God because they had committed the sin of loving another human being.

He watched Elgstrand and Lodin talking on the veranda outside the mission station’s office.

It was as if he were seeing them for the first time in their true light.

Two days later San received a message from one of his friends at the harbour. He hurried there. He had to elbow his way through a large crowd. Qi was lying on a plank. Despite the heavy iron chain around her waist, she had risen from the depths. The chain had become entangled with a rudder that raised the body to the surface. Her skin was bluish white, her eyes closed. San was the only one able to make out that her stomach contained a child.

Once again San was alone.

San gave money to the man who had sent the message to inform him of what had happened. It would be sufficient to have the body cremated. Two days later he buried the ashes in the same place Guo Si was already resting.

So this is what I’ve achieved in my life, he thought. I create and then fill my own cemetery. The spirits of four people are resting here already, one of whom was never even born.

He knelt down and hit his head over and over again on the ground. Sorrow swelled up inside him. He was unable to resist it. He howled like an animal. He had never felt as helpless as he did at this moment. He once felt capable of looking after his brothers: now he was a mere shadow of a man, crumbling away.

When he returned to the mission station late that evening he was told by the nightwatchman that Elgstrand had been looking for him. San knocked on the door of Elgstrand’s office, where the missionary was sitting at his desk, writing by lamplight.

‘I’ve missed you,’ said Elgstrand. ‘You’ve been away all day. I prayed to God and hoped that nothing had happened to you.’

‘Nothing has happened,’ said San, bowing. ‘It’s just that I had a bit of a toothache, which I cured with the aid of some herbs.’

‘That’s good. We can’t manage without you. Go and get some sleep.’

San never told Elgstrand or Lodin that Qi had taken her own life. A new girl was appointed. San buttoned up the pain inside himself and continued for many months to be the missionaries’ irreplaceable servant. He never said anything about what he was thinking, nor how he now listened to the sermons with a different attitude than before.

It was around this time that San felt he had mastered writing well enough to begin the story of himself and his brothers. He still didn’t know for whom he was writing it. Perhaps just for the wind. But if that was the case, he would force the wind to listen.

He wrote late at night, slept less and less but without letting that affect his duties. He was always friendly, ready to help, make decisions, manage the servants, and make it easier for Elgstrand and Lodin to convert the Chinese.

Nearly a year had passed since he had arrived in Fuzhou. San was well aware that it would take a very long time to create the kingdom of God that the missionaries dreamed about. After twelve months, nineteen people had converted and accepted the Christian faith.

He kept writing all the time, thinking back to the reasons that he left his home village in the first place.

One of San’s duties was to tidy up in Elgstrand’s office. Nobody else was allowed in there. One day when San was carefully dusting the desk and straightening the papers on it, he noticed a letter Elgstrand had written in Chinese. It was written to one of his missionary friends in Canton — they tried to practise their language skills together.

Elgstrand confided in his friend as follows: ‘As you know, the Chinese are incredibly hard-working and can endure poverty the same way that mules and asses can endure being kicked and whipped. But one mustn’t forget that the Chinese are also base and cunning liars and swindlers; they are arrogant and greedy and have a bestial sensuality that sometimes disgusts me. On the whole, they are worthless people. One can only hope that one day, the love of God will be able to penetrate their horrific harshness and cruelty.’

San read the letter a second time. Then he finished cleaning and left the room.

He continued working as if nothing had happened, wrote every night and listened to the missionaries’ sermons during the day.

One evening in the autumn of 1868 he left the missionary station without anybody noticing. He had packed all his belongings in a simple cloth bag. It was windy and raining when he left. The nightwatchman was asleep by the gate and didn’t hear San climbing over it. As he perched on top, he wrenched off the sign announcing that this was the gateway to the Temple of the One True God. He threw it down into the mud.

The street was deserted. It was pouring down.

San was swallowed up by the darkness, and vanished.

16

Ya Ru liked to sit alone in his office in the evenings. The skyscraper in central Beijing, where he occupied the entire penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, was almost empty by then. Only the security guards on the ground floor and the cleaning crew were still around. His secretary, Mrs Shen, was on call in an anteroom: she always stayed for as long as he thought he might need her — sometimes until dawn.

This day in December 2005 was Ya Ru’s thirty-eighth birthday. He agreed with the Western philosopher who had once written that at that age a man was in the middle of his life. He had a lot of friends who, as they approached their forties, felt old age like a faint but cold breeze on the back of their necks. Ya Ru had no such worries; he had made up his mind as a student never to waste time and energy worrying about things he couldn’t do anything about. The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end. The only resistance a man could offer was to make the most of time, exploit it without trying to prevent its progress.

Ya Ru pressed his nose up against the cold windowpane. He always kept the temperature low in his vast suite of offices, in which all the furniture was in tasteful shades of black and blood red. The temperature was a constant seventeen degrees Celsius, both during the cold season and in the summer when sandstorms and hot winds blew over Beijing. It suited him. He had always been in favour of cold reflection. Doing business and making political decisions were a sort of warfare, and all that mattered was cool, rational calculation. Not for nothing was he known as Tou Nao Leng-‘the Cool One’.

No doubt there were some who thought he was dangerous. It was true that several times, earlier in his life, he had lost his temper and physically harmed people, but that no longer happened. He didn’t mind that many were frightened of him. More important was not to lose control over the anger that sometimes surged through him.

Occasionally, very early in the morning, Ya Ru would leave his flat through a secret back door. He would go to a nearby park and perform the concentrated gymnastic exercises known as t’ai chi. It made him feel like a small, insignificant part of the great, anonymous mass of Chinese people. Nobody knew who he was or what he was called. He sometimes thought it was like giving himself a thorough wash. When he returned to his flat afterwards and resumed his identity, he always felt stronger.

Midnight was approaching. He was expecting two visits that night. It amused him to hold meetings in the middle of the night or as dawn was breaking. Having control of the time gave him an advantage: in a cold room in the pale light of dawn, it was easier for him to get what he wanted.

He gazed out over the city. In 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was stormier than ever, he had been born in a hospital somewhere down there among those glittering lights. His father had not been present; as a university professor, he had been caught up in the frenzied purges of the Red Guard and banished to the country to tend peasants’ pigs. Ya Ru had never met him. He had vanished and was never heard from again. Later in life Ya Ru had sent some of his closest colleagues to the place where it was thought his father had been exiled, but without success. Nobody remembered his father. Nor was there any trace in the chaotic archives of that period. Ya Ru’s father had drowned in the big political tidal wave that Mao had set in motion.

It had been a difficult time for his mother, alone with her son and her older daughter, Hong Qiu. His first memory was of his mother crying. It was rather blurred, but he had never forgotten it. Later, at the beginning of the 1980s, when their situation had improved and his mother had got her job back as a lecturer in theoretical physics at one of the universities in Beijing, he had a better understanding of the chaos that had reigned when he was born. Mao had tried to create a new universe. In the same way as the universe had been created, a new China would emerge from the mass tumult Mao had brought about.

Ya Ru realised early on that the only guarantee to success was to learn where the centre of power was at any given time. An appreciation of the various trends in political and economic life was essential to climb to the level at which he now found himself.

When the markets loosened up here in China, I was ready, Ya Ru thought. I was one of those cats Deng spoke about — the ones that didn’t need to be black or grey as long as they hunted mice. Now I’m one of the richest men of my generation. I have secured my position thanks to contacts deep in the new age’s Forbidden City, where the innermost power circles of the Communist Party rule. I pay for their foreign trips; I fly in dress designers for their wives. I arrange places at top US universities for their children and build houses for their parents. In return, I have my freedom.

He interrupted his train of thought and checked the clock. Nearly midnight. He went to his desk and pressed an intercom button. Mrs Shen answered immediately.

‘I’m expecting a visitor,’ he said, ‘in about ten minutes. Make her wait for half an hour. Then I’ll buzz her in.’

Ya Ru sat down at his desk. It was always bare when he left in the evening. Every new day should be greeted by a clean slate on which new challenges could be spread out.

Lying on it at the moment was a well-thumbed old book whose covers were worn. Ya Ru sometimes thought he ought to engage a skilled craftsman to rebind the book before it fell to pieces. But he had decided to leave it as it was; the contents were still intact after all the years that had passed since it was written.

He placed it carefully to one side, pressed a button under the desk and a computer screen rose up effortlessly. He typed in a few characters, and his family tree appeared on the glowing screen. It had taken him a lot of time and money to put together this chart, or at least the parts he could be certain about. During the violent and bloodstained history of China, it was not only cultural treasures that had been lost; many archives had been destroyed. There were gaps in the tree that Ya Ru was looking at, gaps that he would never be able to fill in.

Even so, the key names were there. Including, most important, that of the man who had written the diary lying on his desk.

Ya Ru had searched for the house where his ancestor had sat writing in the light from a tallow candle. But there was nothing of it left. Where Wang San had lived was now covered in a network of main roads.

San had written in his diary that his words were meant for the wind and his children. Ya Ru had never understood what was meant by the wind reading the book. Presumably San had been a romantic deep down in his heart, despite the brutal life he had been forced to live and the need for revenge that never left him. But the children were there, above all a son named Guo Si. Guo Si was born in 1882. He had been one of the first leaders of the Communist Party and had been killed by the Japanese in their war with China.

Ya Ru often thought that the diary San had written was meant just for him. Although there was more than a century between its creation and the evening when he had sat reading it, it was as if San were speaking to him directly. The hatred his ancestor had felt all that time ago was still alive inside Ya Ru. First San, then Guo Si, and eventually himself.

There was a photograph of San’s son Guo Si from the beginning of the 1930s, posing with several other men in a mountainous landscape. Ya Ru had scanned it into his computer. Whenever he looked at the picture, it seemed to him that he was very close to Guo Si, who was standing just behind the man with a smile on his face and a wart on his cheek. He was so close to absolute power, Ya Ru thought. And I, too, his kinsman, have come that close to power in my life.

There was a soft buzz from the intercom. His first visitor had arrived, but he intended to make her wait. A long time ago he had read about a political leader who had reduced to a fine art the classification of his political friends or enemies according to the length of time they had to wait before getting to see him. They could then compare their times with one another and work out how far they were from the leader’s inner circle.

Ya Ru switched off the computer, and it disappeared under the desktop with the same faint humming noise as when it had appeared. He poured himself a glass of water from a carafe on the desk. The water came from Italy and was produced especially for him by a company partly owned by one of his own enterprises.

Water and oil, he thought. I surround myself with liquids. Today oil, tomorrow perhaps the right to extract water from various rivers and lakes.

He went over to the window again and looked towards the district where the Forbidden City lay. He liked to go there, visiting his friends whose money he looked after and increased for them. Today the emperor’s throne was empty. But power was still concentrated inside the walls of the ancient imperial city. Deng had once said that the old imperial dynasty would have envied the Communist Party its power. There was no other land in the world with a power base to match it. At this moment in time, every fifth person on earth who breathed was dependent on what the party’s emperor-like leader decided.

Ya Ru knew he was a lucky man. He never forgot that. The moment he took it for granted, he would soon lose his influence and his prosperity. He was the éminence grise among this elite in possession of power. He was a member of the Communist Party; he had solid connections in the very centre of the inner circles where all the most important decisions were made. He was also a party adviser, and at all times he felt his way forward with his antennae to avoid the traps, and seek out the safe channels.

Today, on his birthday, he knew that he was in the middle of the most significant period China had been through since the Cultural Revolution. Having been preoccupied with itself for centuries, China was in the process of looking out towards the rest of the world. Even if there was a dramatic struggle taking place in the politburo about which direction to choose, Ya Ru had no doubt about the outcome. It was impossible to change the route that China had already embarked upon. For every day that passed, more of his fellow countrymen found themselves slightly better off than before. Even as the gap between urban dwellers and peasants grew wider, a small portion of the new prosperity trickled out to the most poverty-stricken regions. It would be sheer madness to attempt to divert this development in a way that was reminiscent of the past. And so the hunt for foreign markets and raw materials must become more and more intense.

He caught sight of his face reflected in the big picture window. Wang San might well have looked just like that.

More than 135 years have passed, Ya Ru thought. San could never have imagined the life I lead today. But I can picture to myself the life he led, and I can understand his anger. The whole of China was overshadowed by the injustice of the past.

Ya Ru checked the time again; though half an hour had not yet passed, he was ready to receive the first of his visitors.

A hidden door in the wall slid open, and his sister Hong Qiu came in. A vision, she radiated beauty.

They met in the middle of the room.

‘Now then, my little brother,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit older than you were yesterday. One of these days you’ll catch up with me.’

‘No,’ said Ya Ru, ‘I won’t. But neither of us knows which will bury the other.’

‘Why mention that now? It’s your birthday, after all!’

‘If you have any sense, you always know that death is just around the corner.’

He escorted her to a group of easy chairs at the far end of the room. As she didn’t drink alcohol he served her tea from a gold-plated pot. He continued drinking water.

Hong Qiu smiled at him. Then she suddenly turned serious.

‘I have a present for you. But first, I want to know if the rumour I’ve heard is true.’

Ya Ru flung his arms out wide.

‘I’m constantly surrounded by rumours. Like all other prominent men, not to mention prominent women. Such as you, my dear sister.’

‘I want to know if it’s true that bribery was involved in order to land the Olympics construction contract.’ Hong Qiu slammed her teacup down hard on the table. ‘Do you understand the implications? Bribery and corruption?’

Ya Ru lost his patience. He often found their conversations entertaining, as she was intelligent and caustic in the way she expressed herself. He also welcomed the opportunity to sharpen his own arguments by discussing things with her. She stood for an old-fashioned approach based on ideals that no longer meant anything. Solidarity was a commodity like any other. Classical communism had failed to survive the strains imposed upon it by a reality the old theorists had never really come to grips with. The fact that Karl Marx had been right about many fundamentals concerning an economy for politics, or that Mao had demonstrated that even poor peasants could rise out of their wretchedness, did not mean that the great challenges now confronting China could be overcome by referring back to classical methods.

Hong Qiu was sitting backwards on her horse as it trotted into the future. Ya Ru knew that she would fail.

‘We will never become enemies,’ he said. ‘The members of our family were pioneers when they first set out to escape decadence and decay. It’s just that we have different views on the methods that should be used. But of course I don’t bribe anyone, just as I don’t allow anyone to buy favours from me.’

‘All you think about is yourself. Nobody else. I find it hard to believe that you’re telling me the truth.’

Ya Ru was angry. ‘What were you thinking sixteen years ago when you applauded the old men leading the party who ordered the tanks to crush the protesters in Tiananmen Square? What were your thoughts then? Did it occur to you that I might well have been one of them? I was twenty-two at the time.’

‘It was necessary to take action. The stability of the whole country was threatened.’

‘By a thousand students? Come off it, Hong Qiu. You were afraid of something quite different.’

‘What?’

Ya Ru leaned forward and whispered to his sister. ‘The peasants. You were afraid they would turn out in favour of the students. Instead of starting to think about new ways forward for our country, you turned to weapons. Instead of solving a problem, you tried to conceal it.’

Hong Qiu didn’t answer. She looked her brother unblinkingly in the eye. It occurred to Ya Ru that they both came from a family that only a couple of generations ago would never have dared to look a mandarin in the eye.

‘You should never smile at a wolf,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘If you do, the wolf thinks you mean to attack.’

She stood up and placed a parcel tied with a red ribbon on the table.

‘I’m worried about where you’re headed, my little brother. I shall do all I can to make sure our country is not transformed in a way that will shame us. The big class struggle will return. Whose side are you on? Your own, not the people’s.’

‘What I’m wondering at the moment is which of us is the wolf,’ said Ya Ru.

He started towards his sister, but she turned away and left. She stopped in front of the blank wall. Ya Ru walked over to his desk and pressed the button that opened the hidden door.

He returned to the table and unwrapped the parcel Hong Qiu had given him. It contained a little box made of jade. Inside the box was a white feather and a stone.

It was not unusual for him and Hong Qiu to exchange gifts incorporating private riddles or messages. He understood instantly what her gift meant. It referred to a poem by Mao. The feather symbolised a life thrown away, the stone a life — and a death — that had significance.

My sister is warning me, Ya Ru thought. Or perhaps challenging me. Which path shall I choose to follow for the rest of my life?

He smiled at her present and decided that for her next birthday he would commission a handsome wolf carved from ivory.

He respected her stubbornness. She really was his sister, as far as strength of character and willpower were concerned. She would continue to oppose him and those in the government who followed the same path. But she was wrong to condemn the developments he supported, which would once again transform China into the most powerful country in the world.

Ya Ru sat down at his desk and switched on the lamp. He slid a pair of white cotton gloves onto his hands very carefully. Then he began once more leafing through the book Wang San had written and that had been passed down through the family from generation to generation. Hong Qiu had also read it, but had not been gripped by it in the same way as her brother.

Ya Ru turned to the final page of the diary. Wang San was eighty-three years old by then, very ill, and he would soon die. His last words expressed his worry about dying without having done all the things he had promised his brothers.

I’m dying too soon. But even if I lived to be a thousand, I would still die too soon as I would not have succeeded in restoring our family’s honour. I did what I could, but it was not enough.

Ya Ru closed the diary and put it away in a drawer, which he locked. He took off the gloves. He opened another desk drawer and produced a thick envelope. Then he pressed the intercom button. Mrs Shen answered immediately.

‘Has my guest arrived?’

‘Yes, he’s here.’

‘Ask him to come in.’

The door in the wall slid open. The man who entered the room was tall and thin. He moved smoothly and nimbly over the thick carpet. He bowed to Ya Ru.

‘It’s time for you to leave, Liu Xin,’ said Ya Ru. ‘The beginning of the Western New Year is the most appropriate time for you to carry out your task. All you need is in this envelope. I want you back here in February, for our New Year.’

Ya Ru handed over the envelope. The man took it and bowed.

‘Liu Xin,’ said Ya Ru. ‘The task I have given you is more important than anything I’ve ever asked you to do. It has to do with my own life, my own family.’

‘I shall do what you ask.’

‘I know you will. But if you fail, I beg you not to return here. If you did, I would have to kill you.’

‘I shall not fail.’

Ya Ru nodded. The conversation was over. Liu Xin left, and the door closed silently. For the last time that evening Ya Ru spoke to Mrs Shen.

‘A man has just left my office,’ said Ya Ru.

‘He was very taciturn but friendly.’

‘But he has not been here to see me this evening.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Only my sister, Hong Qiu has been here.’

‘I haven’t seen anyone else. Nor have I noted down any name other than Hong Qiu in the diary.’

‘You may go home now. I’ll stay for a few more hours.’

The conversation was over. Ya Ru knew that Mrs Shen would stay until he had left. She had no family, no life apart from the work she carried out for him. She was his demon guarding his door.

Ya Ru returned to the window and gazed out over the sleeping city. It was now well past midnight. He felt exhilarated. It had been a good birthday, even if his conversation with Hong Qiu had not turned out as he’d expected. She no longer understood what was happening in the world. She refused to acknowledge that times were changing. He felt sad at the realisation that they would drift further and further apart. But it was necessary. For the sake of his country. She might understand one day, despite everything.

However, most important, this evening, was the end of all the preparations, all the complicated searches and planning. It had taken Ya Ru ten years to establish exactly what had happened in the past and draw up his plan. He had almost given up on many occasions. But whenever he read Wang San’s diary, he had been able to find the necessary strength once again. He had the power to do what San could never have achieved.

There were a few empty pages at the end of the diary. That is where Ya Ru would write the final chapter when everything was over. He had chosen his birthday as the time to send Liu Xin out into the world to do what had to be done. He now felt relieved.

Ya Ru stood motionless by the window for a long time. Then he switched off the lights and left through a back door leading to his private lift.

When he got in his car, which was waiting in the underground car park, he asked the chauffeur to stop at Tiananmen. Through the tinted glass he could see the square, deserted but for the permanent presence of soldiers in their green uniforms.

This is where Mao had proclaimed the birth of the new People’s Republic. Ya Ru had not even been born then.

The great events that would soon take place would not be proclaimed in this square in the Middle Kingdom.

The new world order would develop in deepest silence. Until it was no longer possible to prevent what was going to happen.