I Am China (20 page)

She hears the rumble of the street outside—her own Islington hutong with its rough market lads, buying and selling, its own particular odours and sounds. As she stretches and gets up to walk around her flat, waiting for the day to end and night to begin, she thinks of Liang and Zhu in
The Butterfly Lovers
, an ancient Chinese legend set two thousand years ago. Two lovers are tragically separated by their elders. After the young man’s death his lover throws herself into his grave and before long their spirits emerge from the grave as two butterflies. Iona feels an urge to leap into the past. To grasp Mu and Jian before they become butterflies and bring them back together. She wants to talk to them, to guide them, to help them to unite.

4
CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012

Most refugees leave the Lausanne asylum centre after two weeks. Some are granted asylum by the authorities; others are rejected. Jian’s fate is suspended in a limbo space between arrival and departure, waiting to hear his destiny.

Jian’s only friend, Mahmud of the Libya Desert, transferred from Berne with him, is finally denied asylum. The reports say he’s an ex-terrorist, and is not entitled to remain in Switzerland. Jian cannot believe it. They claim Mahmud was a mercenary fighting for Gaddafi’s dying regime against the rebelling populace. He also overhears gossip about how his African friend first arrived in Europe—a tale of violence and brutality, and totally different from the story Mahmud told him. The rumours said that Mahmud was a member of a mercenary group, soldiers paid by Gaddafi to fight. The group was armed with guns and grenades. Formed in the desert to the south of Libya, they paraded into rebel cities hoping to scare the people into surrender. The first thing they did when they arrived in a place was to rob the banks, loot shops for food and set fire to public buildings. In each new city they would kill a few men to set an example for the locals. They would carve up the corpses and hang them in public squares, even in places children would regularly pass to and from school. Jian heard that Mahmud had been involved with one of these groups but had not been a willing participant. He hadn’t wanted to be involved in the killings and had escaped. The other mercenaries had pursued him as traitor. He too was to be slain and his body displayed in public as a threat to all those who dared to quit the cause. His only way out was to flee. He had managed to get on a boat from Libya to the coast of southern Italy, and then after interminable days in the back of a windowless truck, hot, exhausted
and thin, he arrived in Switzerland, presenting himself as a refugee fleeing the horrors of war.

There’s the real story, Jian thinks. So he asks, “And did you kill people, like they’re saying?”

“Yes, I did.” Mahmud looks honestly at the Chinese man.

“How many?”

“Many.” There is a brittle silence. “Perhaps around twenty, or thirty, or fifty people.”

Another pause. “What’s it like to kill someone?”

“It’s not a big deal, brother,” Mahmud shrugs. “If you can kill one man, you can kill many. If you had been in my position, you would have done the same.”

Jian nods his head, vaguely. He is thinking about those numbers: twenty, thirty, fifty. Mahmud’s casual indifference to numbers. Each number is a man. And it’s all so very familiar to him. Mao’s famous comment on the mass death was simply: It is just numbers.

“I didn’t want to kill, believe me. But I am a poor man. The only thing I learned how to do was fight. If you grow up learning to shoot a gun and to kill, then you become a mercenary. There are no other options. Of course there is this voice that demands all the time why you do it. I had this voice. But I pushed it away. I did not listen to it. Until one day, I felt I had died. It was like
I
was the ghost. A ghost killer. A ghost with a gun, and I watched the power of my gun waste everything around me. Except at night. At night the ghost killer was haunted by the people he had killed. Then one night my dead brother appeared to me in a dream and said, ‘I will turn away from you, since you have killed me.’ I woke up screaming, with the peaceful bodies of my fellow soldiers around me in the dark. That’s when I began to listen to the voice in my head. I had to stop.”

Jian wonders if this is just another story. It sounds too neat to be true.

*   *   *

Before Mahmud is taken away by two officers, he gives Jian a hug and a big smile.

“Thanks for listening to me, Kublai Khan. You are my last friend, for the road will be short once I leave here.”

Jian sits alone in the canteen where he and Mahmud had been accustomed to sit and read, and wonders gloomily: can someone still be a kind person if he has killed fifty people? Mahmud was not a killer to Jian. Maybe the angry ghost of one of his ancestors made him kill. Or maybe we all have these ghosts in us. The Chinese are as good as any other race when it comes to the subject of killing. Jian chews on these bitter thoughts as the afternoon drags to a close.

5
LONDON, JUNE 2013

It has been a strange day for Iona. In the morning, the sun is shining brightly so she changes into a summer dress and sandals. As she leaves her flat for the British Library, clouds begin to gather and the sky turns dark. With an eerie colour in the atmosphere, as if a great grey pigeon wing had enveloped the earth, hail suddenly hammers on her head. Pearls of ice clatter onto the roofs and the pavement, making the whole world like a teeth-gnashing skeleton. Everyone is running to escape the sheets of icy shards. Iona runs into a greasy spoon near King’s Cross. Inside, sheltering with a few supersized regulars, she shakes the rain out of her hair as she listens to the mad rat-a-tat of the hail, and the billowing demented haze of the storm. The famous British summer strikes again, she thinks. Only a malevolent higher power can explain this weather. She orders a pot of tea and takes out a page at random from a bundle of diary entries.

Beijing, 2 May 2006

I am finished. I am cursed, forever. So is Jian. We couldn’t even speak to each other afterwards or utter a word about this. No. We don’t even have the strength to look into each other’s eyes. This place is a hell now. I should simply pack my bags and go away, disappear to somewhere far away. I don’t think I can bear one more hour of living in this flat, the “home” which is no longer a home for three of us
.

What’s happened? Three? Iona reads these lines in total confusion. This is clearly from Mu’s diary, judging from the handwriting. Outside, the hail subsides, but she has now forgotten what she came out to do. This
is her focus now, this is her day’s work. She doesn’t understand what Mu means when she says she is “cursed, forever.” She stumbles on the “three of us”—this is new, she thinks, this isn’t something she’s said before. Iona goes back through the photocopies of diary entries but there’s nothing to explain what’s just happened. She tries a new tack and goes forward—3 May, 4, 5, 6 May. Nothing. Then she finds an entry for 7 May and grips the page. She lays it down in front of her and starts reading.

Beijing, 7 May 2006

I saw Little Shu, his beautiful small face, small crinkled lips, and his tiny hands, so delicate like soft clasping flowers. His eyes were still, resting on mine. I reached out to hold him. But I couldn’t get to him. I was too tired, I didn’t have the strength to pick him up and hold him to my breast. He kept on receding into a tunnel that lay dark behind him, until he seemed to disappear. Then I woke up. It was the middle of the night. I burst into tears. It’s been like this every night since it happened. The same dream. I can’t get even a few hours’ sleep without slipping down into that tunnel. I sat up and Jian hugged me close. When I couldn’t stop weeping, he got up and went to the balcony. He stood in the cold air on the balcony alone, for nearly an hour … I think he didn’t want to see me crying, or felt powerless. Unable to shift this weight dragging us down
.

The next entry she can find is a couple of weeks later.

Beijing, 20 May 2006

It has already been three weeks. It doesn’t feel possible. I thought perhaps there would be a calmer time beyond the real sorrow, but there’s no respite from this bottomless place. I can no longer think, eat or sleep. I am finished. Our son, Little Shu, is dead. He only lived six and a half months in this world. He had just learned to smile and laugh, and began to garble a few sounds to make his needs clear, he had learned to sit up and already knew how to turn on his back and play with toys. But Little Shu will no longer learn anything. He no longer sees anything or hears the voices of his parents. All the tears and screams since he was born led to a void, a dark grave where his own memory is so brief and blurred
.

We no longer know how to talk. We can no longer love each other like we used to do. We have slept with our backs to each other for the last three weeks. Embracing in the dark is even sadder, I think. That day, when our son died, we came back home from the morgue, and Jian lay down on the bed. His mourning is totally silent. He is buried in depression
.

First we thought Little Shu’s fever had calmed. But then his skin flushed from red to blue, his breathing was shallow, and his hands and feet were cold and shivery. I burst into tears in the ambulance taking us to hospital. Jian was shaking the baby’s body madly and hoping he would wake up to his voice. But the baby was already dead. The doctors said it wasn’t unusual for a new baby to die instantly from meningitis. Why this punishment?

Jian has cancelled the tour. The band have gone silent. What could they possibly say?

Iona urgently turns the page. The following entry is only three lines long.

Beijing, 1 June 2006

Jian and I live in the same space but we don’t talk. We only eat together, but silently, we lie in the same bed together, but facing opposite directions. Is there any point now being together?

Outside the hail has long passed and the sun appears, brightening the world outside—the canal, the run-down Georgian terrace houses, the passing families. Iona feels bewildered in a disorientating geography: her world, their world and the page in front of her. So Jian and Mu had a child, Little Shu, who lived for just six and a half months! Did they separate after their baby died? It’s hard to work out exactly, and there are no entries for several weeks until she finds a page from a month later.

Beijing, 3 July 2006

Waking up alone, making myself some breakfast, taking the bus to the office, having lunch with the colleagues from the magazine but not uttering a word about my baby, then always returning home late, having supper then going straight to bed—this has been my life for the last four weeks. Since our decision that I would move out of the flat, I have not returned. I haven’t called Jian. I haven’t taken his calls either. Yesterday he rang again, and left a message. He wanted to come over and visit me. But I don’t want him around. It is still too painful. My woman’s body still remembers that I was a mother, and I am still a mother even though my little child is no longer in this world. I don’t want to see Jian right now. We have not said for how long this separation would be. But he agreed to my moving out. At the moment, living alone in this newly rented flat suits me. It is almost empty: white walls, no furniture, no books—no memories. This is my way of separating from the past. Perhaps it will be for three months, or for three years, or forever. I can’t know
.

6
CALIFORNIA, MAY 2012

A four-star desert hotel, the Palm Oasis, not mentioned in any Michelin guide. White, hacienda-style buildings like the ones you might see on the cover of an Eagles album. From an upstairs room, the endless highway vanishing sharply on the horizon. It’s thirty-seven degrees and dry. Death Valley is sixty miles south on Highway 64, the Grand Canyon is three hundred miles north-east, and the sun is ninety-three million miles above. A large garden lies behind the hotel building, dotted with newly planted palm trees. A pool, with blue water reflecting the drifting desert clouds. A dark-haired woman floats in the pool on an orange blow-up mattress. The water is still and flat, with the occasional errant ripple blown by the wind.

Mu is half asleep on the mattress. Strands of wet hair cover her face behind her sunglasses. Her bathing suit is a two-piece, satin-black garment. Her mouth moves slightly; from a certain distance she seems to be humming a song. Her hands are folded symmetrically over her belly. She is not aware of anyone around her; she is sinking deep into a dream, beneath the hot sun.

Under a palm tree by the pool, Bruce is on a chair, half naked, watching his current favourite Chinese woman from behind dark sunglasses. Well, at least, his favourite on this trip. The hotel is deserted, no one else is around.

Bruce drinks his Pepsi. But he feels unsettled; something pulls him over to the water. He takes off his sunglasses and steps gingerly into the pool. Moving towards her, he sinks deeper into the water. Bubbles pop on the surface. Somehow, Bruce always feels confident, especially with native Chinese girls. Maybe because of his half-American, half-Chinese background and his Harvard education. With these two assets,
he feels automatically superior to his yellow cousins. And the natives in return look up at him. At least that’s how he feels when he is in China. And even now, in the warmed turquoise water, he has this image of himself in mind, and it sends a little thrill of excitement through his body. He is in no hurry, he knows that he is engaged in a delicate operation.