Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

Their flight was over. Brown tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and placed nooses around their necks, and they started the trek back east.

When they arrived at the mountain, JA paraded the escapees in front of the rest of the workers, their hands still tied behind their backs and nooses around their necks. San looked for Wang, but couldn’t see him. As neither of the brothers had recovered his hearing, they could only guess what JA had to say, perched on the back of his horse. When he had finished talking, he dismounted, and in front of the assembled workers he punched each of the brothers hard in the face. San fell over. For a brief moment he had the feeling that he would never be able to stand up again.

But in the end he did. Once more.

After the failed escape, what San expected to happen did in fact happen. They were not hanged, but every time nitroglycerine was used to blast open reluctant chunks of the mountain, it was San and Guo Si who were hoisted up in the baskets of death, as the Chinese workers called them. Even after a month, the brothers were still mostly deaf. San began to think that he would have to spend the rest of his life with the roaring noise filling his head.

Summer, which was long and hot, had reached them. At enormous physical cost they penetrated further and further into the mountain, carved their way into the mass of stone that yielded not even a single inch without demanding maximum effort. Every morning San felt that he couldn’t possibly last one more day.

San hated JA. A hatred that grew as time passed. It was not the physical brutality, nor even being hoisted up over and over again in the potentially fatal baskets. It was that when they’d been forced to stand in front of the other railway workers with nooses around their necks, they were put on display like animals.

‘I’m going to kill that man,’ said San to Guo Si. ‘I’m not going to leave this mountain without first having killed him. I shall kill him.’

‘That means we will also die,’ said Guo Si.

San was insistent.

‘I shall kill that man when the time is right. Not before. But then.’

The summer seemed to get hotter and hotter. They were working in broiling sunshine from early morning until distant dusk. Their working hours increased as the days became longer. Several of the workers were stricken by sunstroke; others died of exhaustion. But there always seemed to be more Chinese who could take the places of the dead.

They came in endless processions of wagons. Every time a newcomer arrived at the door of their tent, he was bombarded with questions. Where did he come from, what ship had transported him over the ocean? There was an insatiable hunger for news from China.

During these summer months, as the brothers’ hearing returned, JA was struck down by a fever and didn’t appear. One morning Brown came to say that as long as the foreman was indisposed, the two brothers would not be the ones hoisted up in the baskets of death. He made no attempt to explain why he was excusing them from this dangerous work. Perhaps it was because the foreman often treated Brown just as badly as any of the Chinese. San cautiously attempted to get to know Brown better.

San often wondered about the reddish-brown people with long, black hair, which they sometimes adorned with feathers: their facial features reminded him of his own.

One evening he asked Brown, who knew a little Chinese, about them.

‘The Red Indians hate us,’ said Brown. ‘Just as much as you do. That’s the only similarity I can see.’

‘But even so, they are the ones standing guard over us.’

‘We feed them. We give them rifles. We let them be one step above you. And two steps above the niggers. They think they have power. But in fact they are slaves like everybody else.’

‘Everybody?’

Brown shook his head. San was not going to receive an answer to his last question.

They sat in the darkness. Now and then the glow from their pipes lit up their faces. Brown had given San one of his old pipes and also some tobacco. San was constantly on his guard. He still didn’t know what Brown wanted in return. Perhaps he just wanted company, to break the boundless solitariness of the desert, now that the foreman was ill.

Eventually San dared to ask about JA.

Who was this man who never gave up until he had tracked down San and his brother and ruined their hearing? Who was this man who derived pleasure from torturing other people?

‘I’ve heard things,’ said Brown, biting hard on the stem of his pipe. ‘The story is the rich men in San Francisco who invested money in this railway gave him a job as a guard. He was good — chased after escapees and was clever enough to use both dogs and Indians. And so they made him a foreman. But sometimes, as in your case, he reverts to chasing escapees. They say that nobody has ever got away from him, unless you count the ones who died out there in the desert. In such cases he cut off their hands and scalped them, just like the Indians do, to demonstrate that he’d tracked them down despite everything. A lot of people think he’s superhuman. The Indians say he can see in the dark. That’s why they call him Long Beard Who Sees in the Night.’

San thought over what Brown had said.

‘He doesn’t speak like you do. What he says sounds different. Where does he come from?’

‘I don’t know for sure. Somewhere in Europe. From a country in the far north, somebody said, but I’m not sure.’

‘Does he ever say anything about that himself?’

‘Never. That stuff about a country in the far north might not be true.’

‘Is he an Englishman?’

Brown shook his head. ‘That man comes from hell. And that’s where he’ll go back to one of these days.’

San wanted to ask more questions, but Brown was reluctant.

‘No more about him. He’ll soon be back. His fever is dying away, and water doesn’t run straight through his stomach any more. When he’s back here there’s nothing I’ll be able to do to save you from dancing with death in the baskets.’

A few days later JA was back on duty. He was paler and thinner than before, but more brutal. The very first day he knocked out two Chinese who worked alongside San and Guo Si simply because he thought they didn’t greet him politely enough when he came riding up on horseback. He was not pleased with the progress made while he had been sick.

The brothers were sent back up in the baskets again. They could no longer count on any support from Brown.

They burrowed their way deeper into the mountain, blasting and hacking, shifting boulders and moulding hard-packed sand to form the roadbed on which the rails would be laid. With superhuman efforts they conquered the mountain, yard after yard. In the distance they could see the locomotives delivering rails and sleepers and gangs of labourers.

As the nights grew colder and the autumn advanced, Guo Si fell ill. He woke up one morning with bad stomach pains. He ran out of the tent and only just managed to pull down his trousers before his insides exploded.

His fellow workers were afraid that they might all be infected and so left him alone in the tent. San brought him water, and an old black man by the name of Hoss kept moistening his brow and wiping away the watery mess that leaked out of his body. Hoss had spent so much time tending the sick that nothing seemed to threaten him any longer. He had only one arm; he had lost the other in a landslide.

JA was impatient. He looked down in disgust at the man lying in his own faeces.

‘Are you going to die, or aren’t you?’ he asked.

Guo Si tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength.

‘I need this tent,’ said JA. ‘Why do you Chinese always take so long to die?’