The Man From Beijing (43 page)

Ya Ru nodded. ‘My sister is very cunning.’

‘And don’t forget that I can see in the dark. I sat out on my veranda for a long time last night. Faces light up in the moonlight.’

‘But there wasn’t any moonlight last night?’

‘The stars produce a light that I’m able to intensify. Starlight can become moonlight.’

Ya Ru eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Are you challenging me to a trial of strength? Is that what you’re up to?’

‘Isn’t that what you’re doing?’

‘We must talk. In peace and quiet. Revolutionary things are taking place out here. We have closed in on Africa with a large but friendly armada. Now we are involved in the landings.’

‘Today I watched two men lift a sack containing over a hundred pounds of cement onto a woman’s head. My question to you is very simple. Why have we come here with an armada? Do we want to help that woman to alleviate her burden? Or do we want to join those lifting sacks onto her head?’

‘An important question that I’d be happy to discuss. But not now. The president is waiting.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Spend your evening on your veranda. If I haven’t knocked on your door by midnight, you can go to bed.’

Ya Ru put down his glass and left her with a smile. Hong Qiu noticed that the brief conversation had made her sweat. A voice announced that Hong Qiu’s bus would be leaving in thirty minutes. Hong Qiu filled her plate once more with tiny sandwiches. When she felt she had eaten enough, she made her way to the back of the palace where the bus was waiting. It was very hot, the sun reflecting off the white stone walls of the palace. She put on her sunglasses and a white hat she had brought in her bag. She was about to enter the bus when somebody spoke to her. She turned round.

‘Ma Li? What are you doing here?’

‘I came as a substitute for old Zu. He’s been struck down with thrombosis and couldn’t make it. I was called in to replace him. That’s why I’m not on the list of participants.’

‘I didn’t notice you on the way here this morning.’

‘Somebody pointed out to me rather sternly that I’d sat myself in one of the cars, which protocol forbade me to do. Now I’m where I ought to be.’

Hong Qiu reached out and grasped hold of Ma Li’s wrists. She was exactly what Hong Qiu had been hoping for. Somebody she could talk to. Ma Li had been a friend ever since her student days, after the Cultural Revolution. Hong Qiu recalled an occasion early one morning, in one of the university’s day rooms, when she had found Ma Li asleep on a chair. When she woke up, they started talking.

It seemed to be preordained that they should be friends. Hong Qiu could still remember one of the first conversations they’d had. Ma Li had said that it was now time to stop ‘bombarding headquarters’. That had been one of the things Mao had urged the cultural revolutionaries to do. Not even the very top officials in the Communist Party should be spared the necessary criticism. Ma Li maintained that, instead, it was now necessary for her to ‘bombard the vacuum inside my head, all the lack of knowledge that I have to fight against’.

Ma Li trained to become an economic analyst and was employed by the Ministry of Trade as one of a group of experts whose job it was to keep a constant check on currency variations throughout the world. Hong Qiu had become an adviser to the minister responsible for homeland security, for coordinating the top military leaders’ views on the country’s internal and external defence, especially protection for the political leaders. Hong Qiu had been at Ma Li’s wedding, but after the birth of Ma Li’s two children their meetings had been irregular.

But now they had met once again, on a bus behind Robert Mugabe’s palace. They spoke non-stop during the journey back to the camp. Hong Qiu noticed that Ma Li was at least as pleased as she was at their reunion. When they reached the hotel, they decided to take a walk to the big veranda with the magnificent views over the river. Neither of them had any important engagements until the following day, when Ma Li was due to visit an experimental farm and Hong Qiu was supposed to attend a discussion with a group of Zimbabwean military leaders at Victoria Falls.

The heat was oppressive as they walked down to the river. They could see flashes of lightning in the distance and hear faint rumbles of thunder. There was no sign of animal life. It seemed that the whole place had suddenly been deserted. When Ma Li took hold of Hong Qiu’s arm, she gave a start.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Ma Li, pointing.

Hong Qiu looked but couldn’t see any sign of movement in the thick bushes that lined the riverbank.

‘Behind that tree where the bark has been peeled off by elephants, next to the rock sticking up out of the ground like a spear.’

Now Hong Qiu saw it. The lion’s tail was swinging slowly, whipping against the red earth. Its eyes and mane were occasionally visible through the leaves.

‘You’ve got very good eyes,’ said Hong Qiu.

‘I’ve learned to notice things. Otherwise your surroundings can be dangerous. Even in a city, or a conference room, there can be traps to stumble into, if you’re not careful.’

In silence, almost reverentially, they watched the lion venture down to the river and begin lapping up the water. Out in the middle of the river, a few hippos’ heads bobbed up and down. A kingfisher just as colourful as the one on Hong Qiu’s veranda alighted on the rail, with a dragonfly in its beak.

‘Peace and quiet,’ said Ma Li. ‘I long for it more and more, the older I become. Perhaps it’s the first sign of getting old? Nobody wants to die surrounded by the noise from machines and radios. The progress we make costs us a lot in the way of silence. Can a person really live without the kind of quiet we are experiencing right now?’

‘You’re right,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘But what about the invisible threats to our lives? What do we do about them?’

‘I suppose you are thinking about pollution? Poisons? Plagues that are constantly mutating and changing their appearance?’

‘According to the World Health Organisation, Beijing is currently the dirtiest city in the world. Recent measurements recorded up to one hundred and forty-two micrograms of dirt particles per cubic metre of air. The equivalent figure in New York is twenty-seven, in Paris twenty-two. As we know only too well, the devil is always in the details.’

‘Just think of all the people who discover that for the first time in their lives it’s possible for them to buy a moped. How can you persuade them not to?’

‘By strengthening the party’s control over developments. What is produced by goods, and what is produced by thoughts.’

Ma Li stroked Hong Qiu’s cheek gently.

‘I’m so pleased every time I realise that I’m not alone. I’m not ashamed to maintain that
baoxian yundong
is what can rescue our country from disintegration and decay.’

‘A campaign to preserve the Communist Party’s right to lead,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘I agree with you. But at the same time we both know that the danger threatens to come from within. Once upon a time it was Mao’s wife who was the mole for the new upper class, despite the fact that she waved her red flag more ardently than anybody else. Today there are others hiding within the party who want nothing more than to undermine it and replace the stability we enjoy with a sort of capitalist freedom that nobody will be able to control.’

‘The stability has been lost already,’ said Ma Li. ‘As I’m an analyst who knows the way in which money flows in our country, I know much that neither you nor anybody else is aware of. But, of course, I’m not allowed to say anything.’

‘We are alone. The lion isn’t listening.’

Ma Li eyed her up and down. Hong Qiu knew exactly what she was thinking – can I trust her or can’t I?

‘Don’t say anything if you are in doubt,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘If you make the wrong choice when it comes to people you can rely on, you are both defenceless and helpless. That is insight we were given by Confucius.’

‘I trust you,’ said Ma Li. ‘Nevertheless, you can’t get away from the fact that one’s natural instincts for self-preservation always encourage caution.’

Hong Qiu pointed to the riverbank.

‘The lion has gone now. We didn’t notice when he left.’

Ma Li nodded.

‘This year the government has increased military expenditure by almost fifteen per cent,’ Hong Qiu continued. ‘In view of the fact that China doesn’t have any real enemies close at hand, naturally enough the Pentagon and the Kremlin wonder what is going on. Their analysts can see without too much of an effort that the state and the armed forces are preparing to cope with an inner rebellion. In addition, we are spending almost ten billion yuan on our Internet surveillance systems. These are figures impossible to conceal. But there’s another statistic that very few people know about. How many riots and mass protests do you think took place in our country during the past year?’

Ma Li thought for a moment before answering. ‘Five thousand, perhaps?’

Hong Qiu shook her head. ‘Nearly ninety thousand. Work out how many that is every day. It’s a figure that casts a shadow over everything the politburo undertakes. What Deng did fifteen years ago, when he liberalised the economy, was enough to tamp down most of the unrest in the country. But not any more, it isn’t. Especially when the cities are no longer able to find space and work for the hundreds of millions of peasants who are waiting impatiently for their turn to enjoy the good life we all dream about.’

‘What will happen?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. It makes sense to be worried and on the alert. There’s a power struggle going on in the party that’s more serious than it ever was in Mao’s day. Nobody can foresee what the outcome will be. The military is afraid of chaos that can’t be brought under control. You and I know that the only thing we can do, the one thing we have to do, is restore the basic principles that used to apply.’

‘The only way. Our only way. It’s not possible to take a short cut to the future.’

A herd of elephants was making its way slowly down towards the river to drink. When a party of Western tourists came onto the veranda, the pair returned to the hotel foyer. Hong Qiu had intended to suggest that they eat together, but Ma Li forestalled her by saying that she had an engagement that evening.

‘We’re going to be here for two weeks,’ said Ma Li. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to talk about everything that’s happened.’

‘Everything that’s happened and is going to happen,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘All the things we don’t yet have an answer to.’

Hong Qiu watched Ma Li walk off on the other side of the big swimming pool. I’ll talk to her tomorrow, she thought. Just when I badly needed to talk to somebody, one of my oldest friends turned up out of the blue.

She dined alone that evening. A large party from the Chinese delegation had gathered around two long tables, but Hong Qiu preferred to be on her own.

Moths danced around the lamp over her head.

When she had finished eating she sat for a while at the bar by the swimming pool and drank a cup of tea. Some of the Chinese delegation got drunk and tried to make advances on the beautiful young waitresses moving from table to table. Hong Qiu was annoyed and left. In another China that would never have been allowed, she thought angrily. The security guards would have intervened by now. Anybody who got drunk and started throwing his weight around would never again have been allowed to represent China. They might even have been imprisoned. But these days, nobody pays any attention.

She sat down on her veranda and thought about the arrogance that followed in the wake of the licentious belief that a less regulated capitalist market system would be good for the country’s development. It had been Deng’s aim to make the Chinese wheels roll more quickly. But today the situation was different. We live with the risk of overheating, not only in our industries but also in our own brains, she thought. We don’t see the price we’re paying, in the form of polluted rivers, air that suffocates us, and millions of people desperate to flee from the rural areas.

Once, we came to the country that used to be called Rhodesia to support a liberation struggle. Now, almost thirty years after liberation was achieved, we come back as poorly disguised colonisers. My own brother is one of those selling out all our old ideals. He has none of the honest belief in the power and prosperity of the people that once liberated our own country.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the night. All thoughts of Ma Li and their conversation slowly ebbed away from her weary head.

She had almost fallen asleep when she heard a noise that pierced the song of the cicadas. It was a twig snapping.

She opened her eyes and sat up straight. The cicadas were silent. She knew that there was somebody in the vicinity.

She ran into her bungalow and locked the glass door. She switched off the light.

Her heart was pounding. She was scared.

Somebody was out there in the darkness. He had inadvertently stepped on a twig and snapped it under his foot.

She threw herself onto the bed, afraid that someone would force his way in.

But nobody emerged from the darkness. After waiting for almost an hour, she closed the curtains, sat down at the desk and wrote a letter that had been formulating itself in her head during the course of the day.

29

It took Hong Qiu several hours to write her summary of what had happened recently, with her brother and the strange information from the Swedish judge, Birgitta Roslin, as the starting point. She did it to protect herself. She established once and for all that her brother was corrupt and one of the people well on the way to taking over China. In addition, he and his bodyguard Liu Xan might be involved in several brutal murders far outside the country’s borders. She didn’t switch on the air conditioning so that she would be better able to hear any sounds from outside. The night insects were buzzing around the lamp in the stiflingly hot room, and heavy drops of sweat kept dripping onto the desk. She had every reason to feel worried. She had lived long enough to be able to distinguish between real and imagined dangers.