Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

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.

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.