Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice
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- Название:The Fourth Sacrifice
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- Издательство:Quercus
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- Год:2012
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:4 / 5. Голосов: 1
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Li sat back and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘You know why we are here, Teacher Sun?’
Teacher Sun shrugged. ‘I hear rumours.’
‘Four of your former pupils,’ Li said, ‘have been murdered.’ Teacher Sun nodded. ‘I want to know if you remember them.’ And Li rattled off their names.
As he did so, the old man raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. ‘Very sad,’ he said. ‘I remember Yuan Tao well. He was a brilliant student. By far and away the best in his year. A likeable boy, shy and unassuming.’ His eyes flickered and focused somewhere in the middle distance as he remembered Yuan with clear affection. And then a cloud descended on him, and all the light went out of his black eyes. ‘The others …’ he said, ‘… I only remember for one reason. Dull students, except for Yue Shi. He went on to become a professor of archaeology, I believe. Brighter than the others, but an unpleasant boy, easily led.’ He shuddered at some disagreeable memory. Then he looked very directly at Li. ‘They were all members of a group of Red Guards who called themselves the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade. Part of the Red-Red-Red Faction. Stupid, brutish boys, manipulated by much cleverer people much higher up.’
Li felt his pulse quicken. It was the connection they had been looking for. Red Guards! They had all been Red Guards! He leaned forward. ‘Were they the ones who smashed down the school gate and destroyed the school records?’
Teacher Sun nodded. ‘They had already left the school. Most of them were unemployed and simply used the Cultural Revolution as an excuse not to work. They came back to take revenge on their teachers. They went through the school records, destroying any evidence of their poor exam results. And school reports we had written criticising lack of effort, or lack of discipline, were then used against us. In their eyes we were responsible for all their failures, not them. If they were lazy, or stupid, or incompetent, or badly behaved, it couldn’t be blamed on them. It was our fault.
‘They made us wear dunce hats and parade around in the square out there with signs around our necks. Reactionary Monster Sun Lian , they scrawled on mine. They made us beat gongs and shout, “I am a reactionary teacher. I am a reactionary monster.” And they would kick us and whip us with their belts. They tore my classroom to pieces looking for black material.’
‘Black material?’ Zhao asked, puzzled. ‘What’s that?’ Li glanced at him and saw that he had gone very pale, shocked by what he was hearing.
Teacher Sun said, ‘The Communist Party was symbolised by the colour red. Black, being the opposite of red, was used to represent anything or anyone opposed to it. Chairman Mao declared that the Five Black Categories were the worst enemies of the people — landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, criminals and rightists.
‘Anything foreign was black. I was a teacher of history, and so of course I had many foreign books and magazines, and many more books on world history. The Revolt-to-the-End Brigade declared all that material black , and I was made to drag it out into the square, all my books and papers, and make a big bonfire of them all.’
Li glanced out of the window and saw that a couple of students were playing badminton. He tried to picture what it must have been like out there. Red-faced adolescents screaming at their teachers, abusing and beating them; teachers with tall, pointed dunce hats banging gongs and denouncing themselves; the smoke from burning books drifting across the court where two students now whipped a shuttlecock back and forth. And he remembered how his own primary school teacher had been beaten to death in the lunch hall. To his surprise he realised that Teacher Sun was chuckling now.
‘It started to rain,’ he said. ‘Quite heavily. And it was putting out the bonfire of my books. The Revolt-to-the-End Brigade were getting agitated, and one of them told another to go and get my umbrella from the classroom. Yang-san he called it. And one of the others accused him of spreading the four olds . The boy didn’t understand why. And the other, I think he was their leader — a big, coarse boy that they all called Birdie — he said that yang meant foreign, and so yang-san meant foreign umbrella. He claimed they were called that because before the Liberation umbrellas were imported from abroad. He said that now they were made in China they should no longer be called yang-san and anyone who did was a xenophile.’ The old man shook his head. ‘No doubt he learned the word from the newspapers. Anyway, I burst out laughing and told him he was just an ignorant boy who had not worked hard enough at school. His face went purple with anger and embarrassment. In the first place, I told him, yang meant sun, not foreign. A yang-san was a sun umbrella, or parasol.’
The smile faded from Teacher Sun’s face. ‘The rest of them went very quiet, everyone wondering what he would do. For a moment, I don’t think he knew himself, then suddenly he flew into a terrible rage and grabbed me by the neck and dragged me back into my classroom. The others followed, and he ordered them to smash all the windows in, and then spread the broken glass across the floor. I was the xenophile, he screamed, and I had to be taught a lesson. And he pushed me down to my knees and forced me to cross the classroom on them, from one side to the other. The broken glass splintered beneath the weight of me, cutting through my trousers and into my flesh.’ He leaned over and pulled up his right trouser leg above the knee, and Li and Zhao saw the intricate lace-pattern of tiny scars where the glass had cut into him all those years ago. ‘There are still some splinters of the stuff in there yet,’ he said. ‘Sometimes they work their way out and I start bleeding again.’
He rolled down his trouser leg and looked at the two detectives. ‘So, yes,’ he said, ‘I remember these boys. I am not likely to forget.’
‘They were all in this Revolt-to-the-End Brigade?’ Li asked. And he went through the names again — Tian Jingfu, Bai Qiyu, Yue Shi, Yuan Tao.
Teacher Sun nodded. ‘All except for Yuan Tao, of course. I heard that he got out and went to some university in America just before the Cultural Revolution began. He was one of the lucky ones. One of the very few, very lucky ones.’
III
The air was thick with huge pennants fluttering in the smoke of battle as armoured soldiers rushed forward, swords raised, the thunder of horses hoofs filling the air behind them. Margaret flinched involuntarily as the soldiers surrounded her, rushing past, the sound of bronze blade on bronze blade ringing out above the bloodcurdling cries of anguish. She felt the warmth of Michael’s body pressed against her as she clutched the rail. A soaring orchestral score, like something from a Hollywood musical, reached fever pitch as the battle neared its climax. And then the pennants flew in her face, one by one, as the flags of the conquered states were laid out before the all-powerful first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Michael whispered.
Margaret nodded. It was the first time she had experienced surround cinema. Screens entirely circled the auditorium, the action moving freely from one to the other and continuing on behind. The sense of being in the middle of it all was extraordinary, standing clasping metal rails and listening to a surround soundtrack that completed the illusion. ‘This must have cost a fortune to make,’ she said. ‘There’s an incredible number of extras.’
Michael smiled. ‘If there’s one thing the Chinese have in plentiful supply, it’s people.’ Thousands of coolies carrying baskets of earth on bamboo poles, moved all around them. ‘That’s them starting work on Qin’s tomb,’ Michael said. ‘One hundred and twenty thousand craftsmen, labourers and prisoners. It took them forty years. In those days people believed that when you died your soul lived on underground. That’s why Qin built his Terracotta Army and buried them in three different pits, or chambers, around his mausoleum — to guard his underground empire.’
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