I Am China (38 page)

The sea there is the bluest and purest. And this is the last blue I can see
.

Then she changes the tense. Since Chinese has no tense indication with verbs it can be hard to determine the meaning.

The sea there was the bluest and purest. It was the last blue I have ever seen
.

And finally, she plays with the tense one last time.

There, that sea, the bluest and purest sea. It will be the last blue I shall ever see
.

Iona stares at the original Chinese characters, those two sprawling lines, for a long while. After a few minutes suddenly a sensation of cold, a shivering, takes hold of her, welling up from somewhere. She feels anxious. Standing up from her chair, she moves to the window. Did he? Is he? Was he? Will he?

What does that mean exactly,
the last blue
? She scrolls back on her screen to the page before that she’s just translated, and stares at one of the lines:
“I no longer care about this blue on this foreign ship with a foreign language I have never encountered before.”
So he is, or was, on a ship somewhere in the middle of the sea, surrounded by a language he doesn’t understand. Surely not English or French? Iona thinks hard. It could be Italian, Spanish, even Greek! She feels herself straining to find any thread, any clue from all the lines, all the words she has translated, that might elucidate such a cryptic fragment. Suddenly she
remembers a diary entry early on, somewhere Jian and Mu mentioned the name of an island they might go to. She scrolls up on her computer and finds the page she translated several months ago.

13 October 1993

I met that girl again from the volleyball match …

Iona scans down the screen until she finds the right place. The cursor blinks at her impatiently as she reads.

“I’m looking at these small islands in the middle of the sea.” She pointed at an expanse of turquoise blue in the centre of the world map. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if one day we could visit these islands?”

Her slightly bent index finger pointed out a few yellow dots in the blue sea. She pronounced their names haltingly as she placed her finger on each island. “Easter Island, Pitcairn, Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete.”

“Where would you go, if you could choose just one island?” she asked me
.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “How are we to know anything if we have never been outside of China?”

“Come on … just imagine. Imagine that one day you wake up and find yourself on a quiet and beautiful island in the middle of a very blue sea. Where would it be?” She nudged me
.

Then she covered my eyes with her palms, lifted my hand and let my finger land at random on the map. Then she removed her palms from my eyes and in an excited voice said: “Here it is, Crete.” A Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean. That’s where my finger had found its place
.

2
LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

Iona calls Jonathan’s mobile, but it goes straight to voicemail. She tries a second time. The same seductive, offhand tone. Then she digs out his office number. The receptionist asks her if she’ll hold. A few seconds later, she hears the voice of the Applegate secretary with her indifferent tone, which now seems entirely offensive. “I’m sorry, Jonathan is in a meeting, do you want to leave a message for him?” Iona leaves her number and asks that he return her call.

She comes back again to the lines:
“ ‘Here it is, Crete.’ A Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean. That’s where my finger had found its place.”
Is she making too great a leap, too big an assumption, that over the space of twenty years, he might still have that same wish? This isn’t the convenient plot of a novel, after all. But there is something in the naive urgency of Jian’s voice as a young man, and the melancholy of his words now, that convince Iona she isn’t going crazy. And then the ambiguous scribbles on Jian’s last diary page, like a lift shaft through which she has fallen. The two lines are translated on her computer with four different tenses. The right version for this translation depends on which timeline Iona puts into Kublai Jian’s story in her narrative; and perhaps it finally depends on what is a true Kublai Jian story, when exactly this story begins—and when it ends!

Restlessly, Iona tries Jonathan’s mobile again. This time it’s not the recorded baritone she knows so well, but another voice, Jonathan’s brisk “Hello,” which now seems strange.

“It’s me, Iona.”

“Hi, Iona. Sorry, not great timing. I can only talk briefly. I’m just about to go into another meeting.”

Although resonant, his voice is nevertheless reserved and distant. He is in office mood.

“Of course. I’ve got just one question actually: Do you know where Kublai Jian is now?” Iona asks bluntly.

“Where? If I knew where he was, things would be a lot easier, wouldn’t they, and we wouldn’t have to go around digging up random pieces of information from cautious embassy clerks. What’s your point, Iona?”

“Do you think he’s still alive?” Iona is growing a little desperate.

“Alive? God, Iona, I don’t know—I haven’t thought about it. I imagine he might still be detained somewhere … perhaps …”

“Do you think I could find him? I mean, a Greek island is small enough surely for a lone Chinese man to stick out?”

“A Greek island? Sorry, Iona, I think you’ve lost me there. Surely he was last in France—why would he suddenly be on a Greek island?”

“In the final section of the diary, there’s a hint of where he might be headed. He was on a ship somewhere.”

“Right, OK … but … Really, Iona, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And, I mean, how could you possibly find him?” Jonathan pauses, thinking. Then he asks: “So does this mean you have finished the translation?”

“Nearly …” Then she hears him telling his secretary or assistant that he will skip the beginning of the next meeting. “Listen, Iona, we’ve just managed to find out Mu’s address in London. It seems she’s now working for a UK branch of some sort of Chinese shipping company, based in east London.”

“Really?” Iona is instantly excited. “So she is in London after all. Can you send over her address? Why didn’t you tell me earlier—this is such great news!”

There is silence at the other end of the phone and Iona starts to say something, but Jonathan interrupts.

“Yes it is, but—well the reason we stopped our background research is because … Well, I don’t know if I should tell you this.” Jonathan slows down and it feels to her that he is choosing his words with great
care. “I got a phone call from China last week—from the office of the Ministry of State Security. The man on the phone told me that I shouldn’t publish anything linked to Kublai Jian, and in fact that I mustn’t use his diaries or letters in translation form or even just as reference material in any way whatsoever, and must certainly never release any of the material to the public.”

“Mustn’t?” Iona repeats, exasperated. She pulls at her hair in frustration.

“Yes, mustn’t. Mustn’t translate. Mustn’t publish. Practically mustn’t even talk about Kublai Jian. Hang on, let me read you what he sent me. I received an email from the Minister after our phone conversation, and—um, here it is, yes,
‘Our Chinese politician’s son should not become the subject of media attention. We demand a mutual respect between Western media and domestic Chinese politics. If you insist on publishing these documents, we are afraid you will face certain consequences. We cannot guarantee that any future business plans you may have in China will not be adversely affected if you fail to comply with our wishes.’
That’s it.”

There’s a pause. Iona tries to get her head around this new piece of information. Then Jonathan’s voice becomes weary.

“As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking this over for a while. When you get phone calls from the Chinese government you have to take them seriously. Clearly, they don’t want news about Kublai Jian’s exile to become public knowledge, nor his relationship with his father. And then again last week, we received another phone call, this time from the Chinese Embassy here. They seem to know all about it and were very adamant about warning me.”

Iona hears Jonathan breathing. She says nothing.

“And that was far from being the end of the story. Yesterday we found that someone has hacked into our archives and had gone through all our electronic files … All your emails have been deleted and the files with your translation corrupted or deleted, too. It’s a good thing you have your own copy!”

Jonathan’s voice becomes subdued, as if he is not particularly keen to discuss this on the phone.

“I might be paranoid. But you never know. It’s scary, Iona, I can’t be too careful. If the Chinese government is watching what I’m doing … maybe even what you’re doing—well … I’ve got to take this call really seriously. I’ve kept quiet about the book with everyone, except you.”

Iona waits. “So what does this mean? What are you going to do with my translation?”

Jonathan speaks slowly, with an uncertain tone. “I am thinking of shelving the project. At least for now.”

“Shelving it?” Iona is devastated.

“At least for a little while. Let the heat of their interest in us blow over. In a couple of years they’ll have forgotten all about it. I need to be careful, Iona. I’m responsible for the future of my company, the job security of my employees,” Jonathan says in a resigned voice. “And then, just to top it all off, this morning my assistant tried to get me a visa to go to China, thinking it might be a good idea to find out a bit more on the ground, as it were. I was planning on telling you about it. But the Embassy have refused my visa application outright. No explanation, just a few words from an official source:
‘We have been informed that for political reasons we are not able to issue you the visa until we receive further instruction.’
So that’s it, the door to China closed for me.”

“But …” is all Iona can say. Her urgency and energy seem to have dwindled to nothing. Outside, the pale winter sun has made its exit, leaving only layers of dull British clouds hanging in bloated forms. The Atlantic wind sweeps the streets, carrying dead sycamore leaves, ushering them into drains and front gardens. People on bikes and in cars rush onward, to homes, to warmly lit pubs, or to what might be oblivion, anywhere to escape the forecast storm.

3
LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

Iona gets off at Shoreditch High Street station, galvanised by a single purpose and turns up Bethnal Green Road. She feels thirsty, in her throat, but also in her mind. On this busy and crowded street in the east end of London, she is forced to slow down and join the stream of jostling bodies. The haphazard stalls lining the side of the road brim with clothes and people buying and selling. There are cheap home products, pots and pans, trinkets and toys. The bargain hunters are veiled Bangladeshi or Indian women. It feels for a moment as if she has been transported to some Dhaka side street, and that she herself is a local wife, searching for ingredients for tonight’s curry among the tindoras and gongura leaves spread out on metal platters. Iona keeps walking and turns into one of the side streets, until she arrives at a four-floor brown-brick council block, one of London’s 1970s monuments to immigrant workers.

Iona checks the sign on the front of the building. The fenced gardens and public corridors, the balconies with their newly-washed laundry strung on clothes lines, dark red-brick festooned with sari fabric and windows clogged with potted plants and domestic relics. In the courtyard, a group of black kids are kicking a football around with boisterous yelps. As she climbs up and up the concrete stairs she feels a panic rising. Number 35. Iona watches her hand knock on the green door. Her knock is timid, awkward and she even has a strange feeling of criminality. She waits, it’s quiet inside. She waits patiently, secretly hoping no one will ever open this door. What is she supposed to say if a Chinese woman were to open it? How would she introduce herself? Would she ask her if she still writes poetry, if she still thinks of a Beijing dissident and their life together in the subterranean bars of the
Chao Yang district? Or would that be too intrusive, too like a ghost knocking from the past? Perhaps she might find a surprising scene: inside the door, both Jian and Mu there, living together. Would Mu even ask her in? But of course Iona knows that she’s totally unknown to them, she does not exist in their lives, in the way that they do in hers. She is at best a voyeur. She has fed on their life’s meaning, but it has left her feeling empty, famished, and now, here, standing alone in a corner of London in which she is an interloper, a trespasser.

Iona knocks again. She listens inside and holds her breath. She finally hears footsteps, and a cat miaows in some corner of the flat on the other side of the door. A middle-aged man with a moustache opens the door, accompanying the pungent odour of Middle Eastern food. He looks Turkish or Lebanese, like many of the locals here.

“Yes?” He stares at her, leaning on the half-opened door.

“Hi … I am … I am looking for a Chinese woman at this address,” Iona says nervously. “Her name is Mu, Deng Mu.”

“A Chinese woman?” The man’s voice softens a little; he lets the door open a little wider. “Who are you?”

Who am I? Iona mutters the same question at the back of her throat.

“I am … her friend. My name is Iona.”

“She has just gone back to China. Didn’t she tell you?” The man puts his full weight against the open door and it makes an ominous creak.