Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

He interrupted his train of thought and checked the clock. Nearly midnight. He went to his desk and pressed an intercom button. Mrs Shen answered immediately.

‘I’m expecting a visitor,’ he said, ‘in about ten minutes. Make her wait for half an hour. Then I’ll buzz her in.’

Ya Ru sat down at his desk. It was always bare when he left in the evening. Every new day should be greeted by a clean slate on which new challenges could be spread out.

Lying on it at the moment was a well-thumbed old book whose covers were worn. Ya Ru sometimes thought he ought to engage a skilled craftsman to rebind the book before it fell to pieces. But he had decided to leave it as it was; the contents were still intact after all the years that had passed since it was written.

He placed it carefully to one side, pressed a button under the desk and a computer screen rose up effortlessly. He typed in a few characters, and his family tree appeared on the glowing screen. It had taken him a lot of time and money to put together this chart, or at least the parts he could be certain about. During the violent and bloodstained history of China, it was not only cultural treasures that had been lost; many archives had been destroyed. There were gaps in the tree that Ya Ru was looking at, gaps that he would never be able to fill in.

Even so, the key names were there. Including, most important, that of the man who had written the diary lying on his desk.

Ya Ru had searched for the house where his ancestor had sat writing in the light from a tallow candle. But there was nothing of it left. Where Wang San had lived was now covered in a network of main roads.

San had written in his diary that his words were meant for the wind and his children. Ya Ru had never understood what was meant by the wind reading the book. Presumably San had been a romantic deep down in his heart, despite the brutal life he had been forced to live and the need for revenge that never left him. But the children were there, above all a son named Guo Si. Guo Si was born in 1882. He had been one of the first leaders of the Communist Party and had been killed by the Japanese in their war with China.

Ya Ru often thought that the diary San had written was meant just for him. Although there was more than a century between its creation and the evening when he had sat reading it, it was as if San were speaking to him directly. The hatred his ancestor had felt all that time ago was still alive inside Ya Ru. First San, then Guo Si, and eventually himself.

There was a photograph of San’s son Guo Si from the beginning of the 1930s, posing with several other men in a mountainous landscape. Ya Ru had scanned it into his computer. Whenever he looked at the picture, it seemed to him that he was very close to Guo Si, who was standing just behind the man with a smile on his face and a wart on his cheek. He was so close to absolute power, Ya Ru thought. And I, too, his kinsman, have come that close to power in my life.

There was a soft buzz from the intercom. His first visitor had arrived, but he intended to make her wait. A long time ago he had read about a political leader who had reduced to a fine art the classification of his political friends or enemies according to the length of time they had to wait before getting to see him. They could then compare their times with one another and work out how far they were from the leader’s inner circle.

Ya Ru switched off the computer, and it disappeared under the desktop with the same faint humming noise as when it had appeared. He poured himself a glass of water from a carafe on the desk. The water came from Italy and was produced especially for him by a company partly owned by one of his own enterprises.

Water and oil, he thought. I surround myself with liquids. Today oil, tomorrow perhaps the right to extract water from various rivers and lakes.

He went over to the window again and looked towards the district where the Forbidden City lay. He liked to go there, visiting his friends whose money he looked after and increased for them. Today the emperor’s throne was empty. But power was still concentrated inside the walls of the ancient imperial city. Deng had once said that the old imperial dynasty would have envied the Communist Party its power. There was no other land in the world with a power base to match it. At this moment in time, every fifth person on earth who breathed was dependent on what the party’s emperor-like leader decided.

Ya Ru knew he was a lucky man. He never forgot that. The moment he took it for granted, he would soon lose his influence and his prosperity. He was the éminence grise among this elite in possession of power. He was a member of the Communist Party; he had solid connections in the very centre of the inner circles where all the most important decisions were made. He was also a party adviser, and at all times he felt his way forward with his antennae to avoid the traps, and seek out the safe channels.

Today, on his birthday, he knew that he was in the middle of the most significant period China had been through since the Cultural Revolution. Having been preoccupied with itself for centuries, China was in the process of looking out towards the rest of the world. Even if there was a dramatic struggle taking place in the politburo about which direction to choose, Ya Ru had no doubt about the outcome. It was impossible to change the route that China had already embarked upon. For every day that passed, more of his fellow countrymen found themselves slightly better off than before. Even as the gap between urban dwellers and peasants grew wider, a small portion of the new prosperity trickled out to the most poverty-stricken regions. It would be sheer madness to attempt to divert this development in a way that was reminiscent of the past. And so the hunt for foreign markets and raw materials must become more and more intense.

He caught sight of his face reflected in the big picture window. Wang San might well have looked just like that.

More than 135 years have passed, Ya Ru thought. San could never have imagined the life I lead today. But I can picture to myself the life he led, and I can understand his anger. The whole of China was overshadowed by the injustice of the past.

Ya Ru checked the time again; though half an hour had not yet passed, he was ready to receive the first of his visitors.

A hidden door in the wall slid open, and his sister Hong Qiu came in. A vision, she radiated beauty.

They met in the middle of the room.

‘Now then, my little brother,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit older than you were yesterday. One of these days you’ll catch up with me.’

‘No,’ said Ya Ru, ‘I won’t. But neither of us knows which will bury the other.’

‘Why mention that now? It’s your birthday, after all!’

‘If you have any sense, you always know that death is just around the corner.’

He escorted her to a group of easy chairs at the far end of the room. As she didn’t drink alcohol he served her tea from a gold-plated pot. He continued drinking water.

Hong Qiu smiled at him. Then she suddenly turned serious.

‘I have a present for you. But first, I want to know if the rumour I’ve heard is true.’

Ya Ru flung his arms out wide.

‘I’m constantly surrounded by rumours. Like all other prominent men, not to mention prominent women. Such as you, my dear sister.’

‘I want to know if it’s true that bribery was involved in order to land the Olympics construction contract.’ Hong Qiu slammed her teacup down hard on the table. ‘Do you understand the implications? Bribery and corruption?’

Ya Ru lost his patience. He often found their conversations entertaining, as she was intelligent and caustic in the way she expressed herself. He also welcomed the opportunity to sharpen his own arguments by discussing things with her. She stood for an old-fashioned approach based on ideals that no longer meant anything. Solidarity was a commodity like any other. Classical communism had failed to survive the strains imposed upon it by a reality the old theorists had never really come to grips with. The fact that Karl Marx had been right about many fundamentals concerning an economy for politics, or that Mao had demonstrated that even poor peasants could rise out of their wretchedness, did not mean that the great challenges now confronting China could be overcome by referring back to classical methods.