Peter May - The Runner

They drove in silence from the station to Zhengyi Road. Li turned right and made a U-turn opposite the gates of the Beijing Municipal Government, crossing the island of park-land that split the road in two, and driving down past the Cuan Fu Shanghai restaurant where he and his father would probably take most of their meals. The armed guard at the back entrance to the Ministry of State and Public Security glanced in the window, saw Li, and waved them through.

Li pulled up outside his apartment block on their right, and he and his father rode up in the elevator together to the fourth floor. Still they had not spoken since getting into the Jeep.

The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a long, narrow hallway. Li would have to sleep on the settee while his father was there. He had borrowed blankets and extra pillows. He showed the old man to his room and left him there to unpack. He went to the refrigerator and took out a cold beer, popped the cap and moved through to the living room which opened on to a large, glassed terrace with views out over the tree-lined street below, and beyond the Ministry compound to the Supreme Court and the headquarters of the Beijing Municipal Police. He drained nearly half the bottle in one, long pull. He was not sure why his father had come for the wedding. Of course, it had been necessary to invite him, but such was the state of their relationship he had been surprised when the old man had written to say he would be there. Now he wished he had just stayed away.

Li turned at the sound of the door opening behind him. Divested of his coat and hat, his father seemed even smaller. His hair was very thin, wisps of it swept back over his shiny, speckled skull. He looked at the bottle in his son’s hand. ‘Are you not going to offer me a drink? I have come a long way.’

‘Of course,’ Li said. ‘I’ll show you where I keep the beer. You can help yourself any time.’ He got another bottle from the refrigerator and opened it for his father, pouring the contents into a long glass.

They went back through to the living room, their awkwardness like a third presence. They sat down and drank in further silence until finally the old man said, ‘So when do I get to meet her?’

‘The day after tomorrow. At the betrothal meeting.’

‘You will bring her here?’

‘No, we’re having the betrothal at a private room in a restaurant.’

His father looked at him, disapproval clear in his eyes. ‘It is not traditional.’

‘We’re trying to make everything as traditional as we can, Dad. But my apartment is hardly big enough for everyone. Xiao Ling wanted to be there, and of course Xinxin.’ Xiao Ling was Li’s sister, Xinxin her daughter. Since her divorce from a farmer in Sichuan, Xiao Ling had taken Xinxin to live in an apartment in the south-east of Beijing, near where she had a job at the joint-venture factory which built the Beijing Jeep. Xiao Ling had always been closer to her father than Li, and maintained regular contact with him.

His father stared at him for a long time before slowly shaking his head. ‘Why an American?’ he asked. ‘Are Chinese girls not good enough?’

‘Of course,’ Li said, restraining an impulse to tell his father that he was just being an old racist. ‘But I never fell in love with one.’

‘Love!’ His father was dismissive, almost contemptuous.

‘Didn’t you love my mother?’ Li asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Then you know how it feels to be in love with someone, to feel about them the way you’ve never felt about anyone else, to know them as well as you know yourself, and know that they know you that way, too.’

‘I know how it feels to lose someone you feel that way about.’ And the old man’s eyes were lost in reflected light as they filled with tears.

‘I lost her, too,’ Li said.

And suddenly there was fire in his father’s voice. ‘You didn’t know your mother. You were too young.’

‘I needed my mother.’

‘And I needed a son!’ And there it was, the accusation that he had never put into words before. That he had been abandoned by his son, left to his fate while Li selfishly pursued a career in Beijing. In the traditional Chinese family, the son would have remained at the home of his parents and brought his new wife to live there too. There would always have been someone to look after the parents as they grew old. But Li had left home, and his sister had gone shortly after to live with the parents of her husband. Their father had been left on his own to brood upon the death, at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, of the woman he loved. And Li suspected he resented the fact that Li had shared an apartment in Beijing with Yifu, that Li had always been closer to his uncle than to his father. He fought against conflicting feelings of anger and guilt.

‘You never lost your son,’ Li said.

‘Maybe I wish I’d never had one,’ his father fired back, and Li felt his words like a physical blow. ‘Your mother only incurred the wrath of the Red Guards because she wanted to protect you from their indoctrination, because she tried to take you out of that school where they were filling your head with their poison.’ And now, finally, he had given voice to his deepest resentment of all. That if it wasn’t for Li his mother might still be alive. That they would not have taken her away for “re-education”, subjected her to the brutal and bloody struggle sessions where her stubborn resistance had led her persecutors finally to beat her to death. Just teenagers. ‘And maybe my brother would still have been alive today if it hadn’t been for the carelessness of my son !’

Li’s tears were blinding him now. He had always known that some twisted logic had led his father to blame him for his mother’s death. Although he had never felt any guilt for that. How could he? He had only been a child. His father’s blame, he knew, had been cast in the white heat of the horrors he had himself faced in that terrible time, marched around the streets in a dunce’s hat, pilloried, ridiculed and abused. Imprisoned, finally, and brutalised, both physically and mentally. Was it any wonder it had changed him, left him bitter, searching for reasons and finding only blame?

But to blame him for the death of his uncle? This was new and much more painful. He still saw the old man’s eyes wide with fear and disbelief, frozen in the moment of death. And his father blaming him for it hurt more than anything else he might ever have blamed him for, because in his heart Li also blamed himself.

He stood up, determined that his father should not see his tears. But it was too late. They were already streaming down his face.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I have a murder inquiry.’ And as he turned towards the door, he saw the bewildered look on his father’s face, as if for the first time in his life it might have occurred to the old man that blame could not be dispensed with impunity, that other people hurt, too.

‘Li Yan,’ his father called after him, and Li heard the catch in his voice, but he didn’t stop until he had closed the apartment door behind him, and he stood shaking and fighting to contain the howl of anguish that was struggling to escape from within.

Margaret had waited up as long as she could. On TV she had watched a drama set in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was beautifully shot, and although she had not been able to understand a word of it, the misery it conveyed was still powerful. It had depressed her, and now her eyes were heavy and she knew she could stay up no longer.

As she undressed for bed, washed in the moonlight that poured in through her window, she saw her silhouette on the wall, bizarre with its great swelling beneath her breasts, and she ran her hands over the taut skin of it and wondered what kind of child she and Li were going to have. Would it look Chinese, would it be dark or fair, have brown eyes or blue? Would it have her fiery temper or Li’s infuriating calm? She smiled to herself, and knew that however their genes had combined, it would be their child and she would love it.