The Man From Beijing (17 page)

‘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.