Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

They knew absolutely nothing.

LOUSHAN PASS

The westerly wind whines sharp,

wild geese cry in the sky the frosty morning’s moon.

Frosty the morning’s moon,

horses’ hooves clatter hard,

stifled the sound of the trumpet...

Mao Zedong, 1935

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.