Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

‘That’s good. We can’t manage without you. Go and get some sleep.’

San never told Elgstrand or Lodin that Qi had taken her own life. A new girl was appointed. San buttoned up the pain inside himself and continued for many months to be the missionaries’ irreplaceable servant. He never said anything about what he was thinking, nor how he now listened to the sermons with a different attitude than before.

It was around this time that San felt he had mastered writing well enough to begin the story of himself and his brothers. He still didn’t know for whom he was writing it. Perhaps just for the wind. But if that was the case, he would force the wind to listen.

He wrote late at night, slept less and less but without letting that affect his duties. He was always friendly, ready to help, make decisions, manage the servants, and make it easier for Elgstrand and Lodin to convert the Chinese.

Nearly a year had passed since he had arrived in Fuzhou. San was well aware that it would take a very long time to create the kingdom of God that the missionaries dreamed about. After twelve months, nineteen people had converted and accepted the Christian faith.

He kept writing all the time, thinking back to the reasons that he left his home village in the first place.

One of San’s duties was to tidy up in Elgstrand’s office. Nobody else was allowed in there. One day when San was carefully dusting the desk and straightening the papers on it, he noticed a letter Elgstrand had written in Chinese. It was written to one of his missionary friends in Canton — they tried to practise their language skills together.

Elgstrand confided in his friend as follows: ‘As you know, the Chinese are incredibly hard-working and can endure poverty the same way that mules and asses can endure being kicked and whipped. But one mustn’t forget that the Chinese are also base and cunning liars and swindlers; they are arrogant and greedy and have a bestial sensuality that sometimes disgusts me. On the whole, they are worthless people. One can only hope that one day, the love of God will be able to penetrate their horrific harshness and cruelty.’

San read the letter a second time. Then he finished cleaning and left the room.

He continued working as if nothing had happened, wrote every night and listened to the missionaries’ sermons during the day.

One evening in the autumn of 1868 he left the missionary station without anybody noticing. He had packed all his belongings in a simple cloth bag. It was windy and raining when he left. The nightwatchman was asleep by the gate and didn’t hear San climbing over it. As he perched on top, he wrenched off the sign announcing that this was the gateway to the Temple of the One True God. He threw it down into the mud.

The street was deserted. It was pouring down.

San was swallowed up by the darkness, and vanished.

Ya Ru liked to sit alone in his office in the evenings. The skyscraper in central Beijing, where he occupied the entire penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, was almost empty by then. Only the security guards on the ground floor and the cleaning crew were still around. His secretary, Mrs Shen, was on call in an anteroom: she always stayed for as long as he thought he might need her — sometimes until dawn.

This day in December 2005 was Ya Ru’s thirty-eighth birthday. He agreed with the Western philosopher who had once written that at that age a man was in the middle of his life. He had a lot of friends who, as they approached their forties, felt old age like a faint but cold breeze on the back of their necks. Ya Ru had no such worries; he had made up his mind as a student never to waste time and energy worrying about things he couldn’t do anything about. The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end. The only resistance a man could offer was to make the most of time, exploit it without trying to prevent its progress.

Ya Ru pressed his nose up against the cold windowpane. He always kept the temperature low in his vast suite of offices, in which all the furniture was in tasteful shades of black and blood red. The temperature was a constant seventeen degrees Celsius, both during the cold season and in the summer when sandstorms and hot winds blew over Beijing. It suited him. He had always been in favour of cold reflection. Doing business and making political decisions were a sort of warfare, and all that mattered was cool, rational calculation. Not for nothing was he known as Tou Nao Leng-‘the Cool One’.

No doubt there were some who thought he was dangerous. It was true that several times, earlier in his life, he had lost his temper and physically harmed people, but that no longer happened. He didn’t mind that many were frightened of him. More important was not to lose control over the anger that sometimes surged through him.

Occasionally, very early in the morning, Ya Ru would leave his flat through a secret back door. He would go to a nearby park and perform the concentrated gymnastic exercises known as t’ai chi. It made him feel like a small, insignificant part of the great, anonymous mass of Chinese people. Nobody knew who he was or what he was called. He sometimes thought it was like giving himself a thorough wash. When he returned to his flat afterwards and resumed his identity, he always felt stronger.

Midnight was approaching. He was expecting two visits that night. It amused him to hold meetings in the middle of the night or as dawn was breaking. Having control of the time gave him an advantage: in a cold room in the pale light of dawn, it was easier for him to get what he wanted.

He gazed out over the city. In 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was stormier than ever, he had been born in a hospital somewhere down there among those glittering lights. His father had not been present; as a university professor, he had been caught up in the frenzied purges of the Red Guard and banished to the country to tend peasants’ pigs. Ya Ru had never met him. He had vanished and was never heard from again. Later in life Ya Ru had sent some of his closest colleagues to the place where it was thought his father had been exiled, but without success. Nobody remembered his father. Nor was there any trace in the chaotic archives of that period. Ya Ru’s father had drowned in the big political tidal wave that Mao had set in motion.

It had been a difficult time for his mother, alone with her son and her older daughter, Hong Qiu. His first memory was of his mother crying. It was rather blurred, but he had never forgotten it. Later, at the beginning of the 1980s, when their situation had improved and his mother had got her job back as a lecturer in theoretical physics at one of the universities in Beijing, he had a better understanding of the chaos that had reigned when he was born. Mao had tried to create a new universe. In the same way as the universe had been created, a new China would emerge from the mass tumult Mao had brought about.

Ya Ru realised early on that the only guarantee to success was to learn where the centre of power was at any given time. An appreciation of the various trends in political and economic life was essential to climb to the level at which he now found himself.

When the markets loosened up here in China, I was ready, Ya Ru thought. I was one of those cats Deng spoke about — the ones that didn’t need to be black or grey as long as they hunted mice. Now I’m one of the richest men of my generation. I have secured my position thanks to contacts deep in the new age’s Forbidden City, where the innermost power circles of the Communist Party rule. I pay for their foreign trips; I fly in dress designers for their wives. I arrange places at top US universities for their children and build houses for their parents. In return, I have my freedom.