Chinese Whispers

II

Taiyuan lay six hundred and twenty kilometres south-west of Beijing. It was the provincial capital of Shanxi, in whose central plain the city nestled on the banks of the Feng river, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The change in the countryside had been gradual. It was lusher here, more temperate, and sheltered by the snowy peaks that rose up into the clearest of blue autumn skies. Every slope had been terraced to grow crops, the plain irrigated to grow rice, a slightly sweet, delicious snow-white rice.

It was early afternoon when Li arrived in the city. The station concourse was jammed with travellers, and hawkers selling everything from maps to tiny toffee apples on sticks. It was warmer here than it had been in Beijing. The sun felt soft on his face. He bought a street map of the city from one of the hawkers, and turned east into Yingze Street, away from the old south gate of the ancient city wall, and kept walking. The provincial government administration buildings were somewhere along here before the bridge. He passed a street stall selling the local Yingze beer for three yuan, and crossed through Wuyi Square. Yingze Park, opposite the towering Telecom headquarters, was crowded with people enjoying the late fall sunshine, strolling at leisure around the lake where in three or four weeks from now they would probably be skating. The square was lined with hotels and government buildings. The Hubin Grand Hall, the history museum, the Taiyuan Customs House, and the headquarters of the local Public Security Bureau. Li was tempted to make himself known to them. Their help would have saved him a great deal of time. But he was suspended from duty. He no longer had his Public Security ID. He was just another citizen with no special rights or privileges.

The shops all along Yingze Street were doing brisk business, and Li had to bump and jostle his way through the crowds to make progress east. No one else seemed to be in a hurry. The pace of life here was much slower than he was used to in Beijing. He passed the crowded Tianlong shopping mall and the Shanxi Chinese Communist Party headquarters, before reaching the government buildings on the east side of the Yingze bridge. The area had been completely redeveloped, modern buildings rising all around from the rubble of the old. There was a vast open space in front of the main building, much of which was taken up by a parking lot. He climbed the steps into the main hall.

It took about an hour, being passed from desk to desk, department to department, before he was finally directed to the citizens’ registry office at Taiyuan City Hall on Xingjian Road. Here Li found another formidable group of buildings, older, built in the European style, and fronted by a huge courtyard. This time he tracked down the registry office quite quickly, and found himself opposite an elderly lady with short, silvered hair on the other side of the counter. She was like a throwback from another era, in her blue cotton Mao suit and black slippers encasing tiny feet. But she smiled at him welcomingly enough, and asked what she could do to help. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said when he told her, ‘the Wutaishan Orphanage. It was on the south side of the city, within sight of the Yongzuo Temple.’

‘You mean the Double-pagoda Temple?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You said, was. Does that mean it’s moved?’

‘Oh, no,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s still there. What’s left of it. The place burned to the ground about thirty years ago. They never rebuilt on the site, and the remains of it are still visible. Although it’s pretty much overgrown now.’ She tilted her head and looked at him curiously. ‘I’ve had quite a few enquiries about the place over the years. Mainly from people who grew up in it, wondering what happened. Not so many now, though.’

‘What did happen?’ Li asked.

‘No one knows. It just went up in flames one night. They got all the children out safely, but by the time the fire fighters got there it was too late to save it. An old building, you see. Mostly built of wood. It was all over in an hour.’

Li said, ‘What about the records? All the kids who passed through the orphanage over the years. Presumably you still have that information on file here?’

The old lady shook her head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘In those days all the records were kept at the orphanage itself. Everything was hand-written then. I know, because I was working here all those years ago when the place went up in flames. All our records were hand-written, too. We still have them in the basement. Unfortunately, the records at Wutaishan were destroyed along with everything else. The only thing that burns faster than wood is paper.’ She scratched her head. ‘A great shame. Generations of kids, their history lost forever. And the orphanage was the only family they ever had.’

Li felt himself slipping into a trough of despair. If the orphanage was gone, its records destroyed, there was no way to prove that Cao Xu was not who he said he was. Clearly he had covered his tracks well.

‘What’s your interest?’ the old lady asked, scrutinising him shrewdly.

Li decided to take a chance. ‘I’m a police officer from Beijing,’ he said. ‘We’re investigating the history of someone who grew up in the orphanage.’

The old lady smiled. ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘I can always tell a policeman. You’re too big to be anything else. And too confident.’ She paused to think. ‘When did this person leave the orphanage?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Approximately, then.’

‘I should think he would have been around sixteen or seventeen. Maybe even eighteen. He was born in 1948, which would mean somewhere between 1967 and 1969.’

The old lady thought for a long time. ‘Old Mister Meng would have been there around that time.’

‘Mister Meng?’ Li asked.

She came out of her reverie. ‘Yes. He cleans the hall, and the public record office when it shuts at five. He worked as an odd-job man at the orphanage from the mid-fifties until it burned down in the early seventies. There was some speculation at the time about whether he might have been responsible for the fire. But I don’t think so. It was just idle chatter. He’s worked as a cleaner for the municipality ever since. Retired now, of course. But still doing an hour a day for the extra cash.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘If you come back in a couple of hours, you’ll be able to talk to him if you want.’

* * *

It was a short taxi ride to the south-east corner of Taiyuan City, but the twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple were visible almost as soon as they left the city centre. The taxi driver was a chatty type, engaging Li in reluctant conversation. Was this his first trip to Taiyuan City? What did he think of it? Where was he from? Did he want to take a detour to the Yongzuo Temple? Li declined the offer, to the driver’s obvious disappointment. He began to tell Li its history. ‘The towers were built in the Ming dynasty,’ he said. ‘Under the Emperor Waili. They are fifty-three metres high. Thirteen storeys of brick and stone.’

Li looked at the towers as they circled them on the ring road. They were awe-inspiring this close to, octagonal structures, tapering to a point at the top, aiming straight up to the heavens. It was little wonder that they had been chosen as the visual symbol of the city. In past centuries, when the buildings of the town were no more than one storey high, it must have been possible to see them for miles.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to stop?’ the driver said. ‘You can see the tablets of the famous calligraphers, Wang Xizhi, Yan Zhenqing and Su Dongpo.’

‘Sounds like something I really shouldn’t miss,’ Li said. ‘Next time.’

The driver shrugged. ‘As you like.’

The Wutaishan Orphanage was on the old road heading south out of town towards the great expanse of paddy fields on the Shanxi plain. There were rows of brick-built workers’ houses in amongst groves of bamboo and eucalyptus, great bundles of dried corn stalks stacked at the roadside. The original wall still stood around a large area of garden, now overgrown and gone to seed. Rusted wrought-iron gates hung open on buckled hinges. Li asked the driver to wait for him and wandered into the grounds. It had obviously become a dumping ground for overspill refuse from the surrounding houses, filled with the carcasses of long dead cars and bicycles. Amongst the tangling overgrowth, you could still make out the foundations of the original complex of single-storey buildings which had made up the orphanage. The thorns of wild roses caught on Li’s trousers as he tramped down the growth and made his way to the heart of the site where the main building had stood. Some charred stumps of wooden uprights could still be found poking through the undergrowth. Blackened bricks scattered around where they had fallen when the walls collapsed. He tried to imagine how it must have been, flames reaching into the night sky, the crackle of burning wood, the screams of the children as they were ushered out into the dark to stand at a safe distance and watch the only home they had known vanish in the smoke.

He kicked an old tin can and sent it rattling across the dried ground, and looked up to see the twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple dominating the skyline. It would have been impossible to have lived here and not recognise them.

But there was nothing here for Li. Nothing but ghosts and memories. Other people’s memories.

The taxi took him back to the city in about twenty minutes, and he killed the next hour sitting in Yingze Park, drinking a three-yuan can of beer and watching small boys sailing tiny boats in the wind that ruffled the surface of the lake. He let the world pass him by and tried to think of nothing, to keep his mind empty, free to be full only of things that mattered. But despair kept leaking in.

He made his way back to the public records office and got there a little after five. The woman from the citizens’ registry was waiting for him at the top of the steps, wrapped up in a large padded jacket and carrying a deep denim bag. She nodded through glass doors to the large reception hall. ‘That’s him. I told him you’d be looking for him.’

Li saw a wizened old man in faded blue overalls, with a bucket and mop, cleaning the marble tiles on the vast expanse of floor inside. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and pushed open the door into the lobby.

As Li approached him, the old man glanced up and then returned his gaze to the sweep of his mop across the shiny surface of the tiles.

‘Mister Meng?’ Li said.

‘You’ll be the cop from Beijing,’ old Meng said, and Li glanced towards the glass entrance to see the lady from the citizens’ registry watching them with unabashed curiosity.

‘That’s right.’

‘I had nothing to do with that fire.’ Still the old man did not look up.

‘I don’t think for a minute that you had,’ Li said.

The old man gave him a long, appraising look, decayed stumps of teeth gnawing on a piece of his cheek. ‘What do you want, then?’

‘The lady from the citizens’ registry told me that you worked at the orphanage from the mid-fifties.’

‘Nosy old bitch!’ old Meng complained. ‘None of her bloody business.’

‘Did you?’ Li asked.

The old man nodded. ‘I loved that place,’ he said. ‘Knew every one of those kids as if they were my own. Poor little bastards. The place was run by women. There was hardly a man about the place. No father figure, only matriarchs. Broke my heart when it burned down.’

Li said hesitantly, ‘Would you remember one of the kids from back then? I know it’s a long time ago, and all I’ve got’s a name …’

‘Try me.’ Old Meng sloshed water from his bucket on to the floor, and Li smelled the bleach in it.

‘Cao Xu.’

The old man stopped in mid wipe and looked at Li, a strange light in his eyes. ‘Why do you want to know about little Xu?’

‘You remember him, then?’

‘Of course I do. He was a great kid. One of the favourites at the orphanage. Everyone loved him. He used to call me papa.’ Li tried to keep from getting excited. His hopes had been dashed too many times in recent days. ‘Always had a twinkle in his eye and a quip on his lips.’

It certainly didn’t sound like the Cao Xu that Li knew.

‘Have you come to visit him?’

Li was aware of stopping breathing, and it took a conscious effort for him to draw breath again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Of course.’ Old Meng glanced at the big clock on the wall. ‘But you’ll need to wait until I finish at six. And then I’ll take you to him.’

* * *

Li had never known an hour to pass so slowly. He sat on a low wall in the courtyard outside the municipal building smoking cigarette after cigarette. More for something to do than anything else, he had crossed the road to a small general store on the corner and bought a pack. Now he was nearly halfway through it, and his mouth felt dry and kippered. It was ten past six and almost dark before the old man pushed open the door of the main building and came down the steps towards him, dwarfed by his big coat and wearing a thermal ski cap. He made Li think of his father, and his heart lurched with the memory of the old man abandoned in Lao Dai’s apartment. He must be wondering what had happened to his son.

‘You got a car?’ old Meng said. Li shook his head. ‘We’ll need a taxi then.’

The taxi ride took less than fifteen minutes. Li sat in the back, while the old man sat up front with the driver arguing about the best route to take, a constant dialogue. Li watched the city slip by him as darkness fell. It was darker than Beijing. Here there were fewer lights. They did not have as much power to waste. Li had no idea where they were, or where they were going. He heard the name Taigang mentioned several times, but it meant nothing to him. And then through the windscreen he saw a huge floodlit tower like a cut-down Washington Monument reaching into the blackness. The taxi drew up on the side of a small square dominated by the stone needle and old Meng climbed stiffly out. Li followed him and looked around. This was no residential area. An area of parkland brooded darkly behind a high fence. The gates to it stood opposite the tower.

‘We’d better hurry,’ the old man said. ‘They’ll be closing up shortly.’

Li followed him across the cobbles and through the gates. There seemed to be one long, treelined avenue washed by the light of ornamental street lamps, and small paths led off at right-angles to left and right. ‘Where the hell are we?’ Li asked.

‘Tomb park,’ said old Meng. And he pointed ahead to a large, floodlit monument. As they approached it Li saw that it was a memorial tomb to the soldiers who died fighting to liberate Taiyuan from the grip of the Nationalists in 1948. It was inscribed, Niutuozai Soldiers’ Tomb.

Li turned away from the glare of the floodlights and looked around him. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom of the poorly lit pathways that criss-crossed the park, he suddenly realised where he was. ‘It’s a cemetery,’ he said. In the cities no one buried their dead any more. Land was at a premium. Cremation was the only permitted form of disposal.

‘This way,’ old Meng said. And he headed off to the left down a long pathway strewn with leaves. Small posts with built-in lights every few metres cast feeble illumination across their route. Li could see the mounds on either side, and the stone tablets raised in the memory of the dead. He had seen graves in the countryside, where the peasants still buried their dead on the land. He had attended many cremations. But he had never been in a city cemetery like this before, hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies interred all around him. He pulled his coat tight to keep out the cold, damp sorrow of the place. Old Meng stopped and took out a small flashlight from a bag slung across his shoulder and flashed its beam from one headstone to another. ‘Somewhere around here,’ he mumbled. Then, ‘Ah, here he is.’

Li’s mouth was dry, and he felt the blood pulsing in his throat, as he knelt down beside a small, plain headstone lying crookedly at one end of a short mound. The municipal authorities clearly made some attempt at keeping the cemetery from falling into total ruin, but still the grass grew up around the tablet, almost obscuring it. He pulled it aside, and by the light of Meng’s lamp rubbed away the layer of moss that concealed the inscription.

‘Scarlet fever,’ Meng said. ‘Took him in a matter of days.’

Li took the flashlight from him and peered through its light at the faded characters carved in the stone. It said simply, Cao Xu. 1948–1962. He had been only fourteen years old when he died.