The Man From Beijing (14 page)

‘Still can’t place it?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

He put the ribbon back into the plastic bag and accompanied her down to reception.

‘If your memory returns, you can call us,’ he said. ‘But if it turns out to be a ribbon round a Christmas present, don’t bother.’

Lars Emanuelsson was standing outside, waiting for her. He was wearing a threadbare fur hat pulled down over his forehead. He was annoyed when he realised she had unmasked him.

‘Why are you following me?’

‘I’m not. I’m circulating, as I said. I just happened to see you going into police HQ, and I thought I’d wait to see what developed. Right now I’m wondering what your very brief visit entailed.’

‘That’s something you’ll never know. Now leave me alone, before I get really annoyed.’

She turned on her heel and walked away, but heard him say behind her: ‘Don’t forget that I can write.’

She turned back angrily.

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I’ve told you why I’m here. There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to embroil me in what’s going on.’

‘The public reads what is written, whether it’s true or not.’

Now it was Lars Emanuelsson who turned on his heel and walked away. She looked on in disgust, and hoped she would never meet him again.

Birgitta Roslin returned to her car. She had only just settled down behind the wheel when the penny dropped, and she remembered where she had seen that red ribbon. It came out of the blue, without warning. Could she be mistaken? No, she could see everything in her mind’s eye, as clear as day.

She waited for two hours as the place she wanted to visit was closed. She killed time by wandering aimlessly around town, impatient because she couldn’t ascertain immediately what she thought she had discovered.

It was eleven o’clock when the Chinese restaurant opened. Birgitta Roslin went in and sat down in the same place as last time. She studied the lamps hanging over the tables. They were made of transparent material, thin plastic designed to give the impression of paper-covered lanterns. They were long and thin, cylinder-shaped. Four red ribbons hung down from the bottom.

After her visit to police HQ she knew that each of the ribbons was exactly seven and a half inches long. They were attached to the lampshade by a little hook that threaded in through a hole at the top of the ribbon.

The young woman who spoke bad Swedish came with the menu. She smiled when she recognised Birgitta Roslin. Roslin chose the buffet, despite the fact that she was not very hungry. The dishes laid out for her to choose from gave her the opportunity to scan the dining room. She soon found what she was looking for over a table for two in a corner at the back. The lamp hanging over the table was missing one of the red ribbons.

She stopped short and held her breath.

Somebody had been sitting there, she thought. At the back in the darkest corner. Then he had stood up, left the premises and made his way to Hesjövallen.

She looked around the restaurant. The young woman smiled. She could hear voices coming from the kitchen, speaking Chinese.

It struck her that neither she nor the police had the slightest idea what had happened. It was all much bigger, deeper and more mysterious than any of them could have imagined.

They knew absolutely nothing.

PART 2

The Railroad (1863)

L
OUSHAN
P
ASS

The westerly wind whines sharp,

wild geese cry in the sky the frosty morning’s moon.

Frosty the morning’s moon,

horses’ hooves clatter hard,

stifled the sound of the trumpet . . .

Mao Zedong, 1935

The Way to Canton

10

It was during the hottest part of the year, 1863. The second day of San’s and his two brothers’ long trek to the coast and the town of Canton. Early in the morning they came to a crossroads where three human heads were mounted on bamboo poles that had been driven into the ground. They couldn’t work out how long the heads had been there. Wu, the youngest of the brothers, thought at least a week because the eyes and parts of the cheeks had already been hacked to pieces by crows. Guo Si, the eldest, maintained the heads had been cut off only a couple of days before. He thought the contorted mouths still retained traces of horror at what was about to happen.

San said nothing. They had fled from a remote village in Guangxi Province. The severed heads were like a warning that their lives would continue to be in danger.

They left what San called Three Heads Crossroads. While Guo Si and Wu argued about whether the heads had belonged to executed bandits or peasants who had displeased a powerful landowner, San thought about the events that had driven them onto the road. Every step they took carried them further away from their former lives. Deep down, his brothers probably hoped that one day they would be able to return to Wei Hei, the village where they had grown up. He wasn’t at all sure what he hoped himself. Perhaps poor peasants such as themselves could never tear themselves away from the misery that tainted their lives. What lay in store for them in Canton, where they were headed? It was said that you could smuggle yourself aboard a ship and be carried eastward over the ocean to a country where there were rivers filled with glittering gold nuggets the size of hens’ eggs. Rumours had even reached as far as the remote village of Wei Hei, telling of a land populated by a strange white people, a land so rich that even simple people from China could work their way up out of squalor to unimaginable power and wealth.

San didn’t know what to think. Poor people always dreamed of a life with no landowner pestering them. He himself had thought along those lines since he was a small boy, having to stand at the roadside with his head bowed while some overlord passed by in his covered sedan chair. He had always wondered how it was possible for people to lead such different lives.

He had once asked his father about it and received a box on the ears in reply. One didn’t ask unnecessary questions. The gods in the trees and the streams and the mountains had created the world we humans lived in. In order for this mysterious universe to attain a divine balance, there must be rich and poor, peasants guiding their ploughs pulled by water buffalo and overlords who hardly ever set foot on the ground that had given birth to them as well.

He had never again asked his parents what they dreamed about as they knelt before their idols. They lived their lives in a state of unrelieved servitude. Were there people who worked harder and received so little in return for their labour? He had never found anybody he could ask, since everybody in the village was just as poor and just as afraid of the invisible landowner whose stewards, armed with whips, forced the peasants to carry out their daily tasks. He had watched people go from cradle to grave, constantly weighed down by the burden that was their daily grind. It was as if children’s backs became hunched even before they learned how to walk. The people in the village slept on mats that were rolled out every evening on the cold earth floors. They rested their heads on bundles of hard bamboo poles. Days followed the monotonous rhythm dictated by the seasons. They ploughed the soil behind their phlegmatic water buffalo, planted their rice. They hoped that the coming year, the coming harvest, would be sufficient to feed them. When the harvest failed, there was almost nothing to live on. When there was no rice left, they were forced to eat leaves.

Or to lie down and die. There was no alternative.

He was roused from his thoughts. Dusk had started to fall. He looked around for a suitable place where they could sleep. There was a clump of trees by the side of the road, next to some boulders that seemed to have been ripped out of the mountain range that loomed on the western horizon. They rolled out their mattresses filled with dried grass and divided up the rice they had left, which would have to last until they reached Canton. San glanced furtively at his brothers. Would they be able to make it? What would he do if one of them fell ill? He himself still felt strong. But he wouldn’t be able to carry one of his brothers unaided, if that became necessary.

They didn’t talk much to one another. San had said they shouldn’t waste what little strength they had left on arguing and quarrelling.

‘Every word you shout robs you of one footstep. It’s not words that are important, but the steps you need to take to get to Canton.’

Neither of his brothers objected. San knew they trusted him. Now that their parents were no longer alive and they had taken flight, they had to believe that San was making the right decisions.

They curled up on their mattresses, adjusted their pigtails down their backs and closed their eyes. San could hear how first Guo Si and then Wu fell asleep. Though both are now twenty, less than a year apart, they are still like little children, he thought. I am all they have.

All around him was a smell of mud and fear. He lay on his back and gazed up at the stars.

His mother had often taken him out after dark and shown him the sky. On such occasions her weary face would break into a smile. The stars provided some consolation for the hard life she led. She normally lived with her face pointed down to the ground, which embraced her rice plants as if it were waiting for her to join them there one of these days. When she gazed up at the stars, just for a brief while, she didn’t need to look at the brown earth beneath her.

He allowed his eyes to wander over the night sky. His mother had named some stars. One especially bright star in a constellation that looked a bit like a dragon she had called San.

‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘That’s where you come from, and that’s where you’ll return to some day.’

The idea of having come from a star had scared him. But he said nothing, as the idea gave his mother so much pleasure.

Then he thought about the violent incidents that had forced him and his brothers to run away. One of the landowner’s new stewards, a man by the name of Fang, with a big gap between his front teeth, had come to complain that his parents had failed to do their day’s work properly. San knew that his father had been suffering severe back pains and was unable to cope with the heavy work. His mother helped out, but they had fallen behind even so. Now Fang was standing outside their mud hut, his tongue gliding in and out of the gap between his teeth like a threatening snake. Fang was young, about the same age as San, but they came from different worlds. Fang glared at San’s parents squatting in front of him, heads bowed and straw hats in their hands; he seemed to think they were insects that he could squash underfoot whenever he pleased. If they didn’t do their work, they would be thrown out of their home and forced to become beggars.

During the night San had heard his parents whispering together. As it was very rare for them not to go to sleep the moment they lay down, he listened – but he’d been unable to grasp what they were saying.

The next morning the woven mat on which his parents slept was empty. His immediate reaction was fear. Everybody in that cramped little hut would rise at the same time. His parents must have sneaked out quietly in order not to wake their sons. He stood up cautiously, put on his ragged trousers and the only shirt he owned.

When he emerged from the hut, the sun still hadn’t risen. The horizon was bathed in pink light. A cockerel crowed from somewhere nearby. The inhabitants of the village were just waking up. Everybody apart from his parents. They were hanging from the tree that provided shade at the hottest part of the year. Their bodies swayed slowly in the morning breeze.

He had only a vague memory of what happened next. He didn’t want his brothers to have to see their parents hanging from a rope with their mouths open. He cut them down with the sickle his father used out in the fields. They fell heavily on top of him, as if they were trying to take him with them into death.

The village elder, old Bao, who was half blind and shook so much that he could barely stand up, was summoned by the neighbours. Bao took San aside and told him it would be best for the brothers to run away. Fang would be bound to take his revenge, throw them into the prison cages by his house. Or he would execute them. There was no judge in the village; the only law that applied was that of the landowner, and Fang spoke and acted in his name.

They had set off immediately after their parents’ funeral. Now he was lying here under the stars, with his brothers asleep by his side. He didn’t know what lay in store for them. Old Bao had said they should head for the coast, to the city of Canton, where they’d be able to look for work. San had tried asking Bao what kind of work might be available, but the old man was unable to say. He simply pointed eastward with his trembling hand.

They had walked until their feet were raw and bleeding, and their mouths parched with thirst. The brothers had wept over the death of their parents, and also in view of the unknown fate that awaited them. San had tried to console them, but also urged them not to walk too slowly. Fang was dangerous. He had horses and men with lances and sharp swords who might still be able to catch up with them.

San continued to gaze up at the stars. He thought about the landowner who lived in an entirely different world, one where the poor were not allowed to set foot. He never appeared in the village, but was merely a threatening shadow, indistinguishable from the darkness.

San eventually fell asleep. In his dreams the three severed heads came racing towards him. He could feel the sharp edge of the sword against his own neck. His brothers were already dead, their heads had rolled away into the sand, blood pouring out of the stumps that had been their necks. Over and over again he woke up to free himself from that dream, but it returned every time he drifted back into sleep.

They set off early in the morning, after drinking what remained of the water in the flask hanging from a strap around Guo Si’s neck. They had to find clean water as soon as possible. They walked fast along the stony road. They occasionally met people making their way to the fields or carrying heavy burdens on their heads and shoulders. San began to wonder if this road would ever end. Perhaps there wasn’t an ocean at the end of it. Perhaps there was no city by the name of Canton. But he said nothing to Guo Si or Wu. That would make it too difficult for them to keep going.